HBOGO.com works on Surface RT

HBOGO.com is one of my preferred sites to catch up with all those good series from this premium channel. The site uses flash and for some reason, I believe it was a firmware update, it was not working anymore in my Surface RT. HBO still have not jumped in the boat of WinRT and we still do not have an App. So I decided today to spend sometime trying to get it back working and the good news is that I got it.

Here is what I learned. To sign in HBOGO.com this site sends you to your TV provider where you have to sign in. This process was failing for me. To troubleshoot the whole process I used Fiddler a tool to track your internet web traffic. This application is for x86 but thanks to the tools posted at xdadevelopers I was able to use it in the Surface RT. With this tool I was able to find few things, one of them is that HBO uses a cookie with the information from, in my case, Comcast to grant you access to its site. In my Surface I had Cookies disabled and I thought it was a good idea to keep it in this way. So I went to in the Internet Options from IE10 in Desktop mode and allow cookies for both sites, HBOGO and Comcast. Summarizing, after adding the involved sites to the Trusted Sites List and allowing Cookies for both sites, the HBOGO.com site allowed me to stream video in my Surface RT. And no just in Desktop mode but using IE10 Metro.

This is one of the reasons why I love WinRT, it carries a full version of the IE which allows you to enjoy sites that in other platforms, specifically iOS (translate this as iPad), are impossible to access unless you have an App for that. In another words, some or most of the Apps available for iPad are the result of this device impossibility of using the original websites which these applications substitute.