It was a big move for Netflix, not so long ago, when Epix announced that they’d be working with the current movie rental king (and let’s face it, they pretty much are) to get Epix’s content streaming into Netflix. But now, there’s a bit of bad news for the king of movie rentals as we find that HBO won’t play ball.

HBO has always been…protective…of its content, with allegations of “poisoning” BitTorrent downloads and threatening to sue Slingbox.  And of course there’s the idea that HBO is looking to protect its proprietary HBO Go streaming service. But the key point here is that HBO will not stream its content on Netflix. Quoth HBO:

“There is value in exclusivity,” Kessler said in an interview. Consumers “are willing to pay a premium for high quality, exclusive content….”

Of course, this is only limited bad news. As awesome as HBO television is, there’s just not much of it–just over a dozen series so far. And with the sheer amount of stuff on Netflix, I don’t think anyone will really miss old Oz episodes that much.

True Blood, however, is another story.

via