With the current lull in new television content thanks to the writer’s strike, I’ve found myself turning to my DVD player – but not necessarily just to watch movies, but rather to catch up on some television shows I never watched while they were on the air. Naturally I’ve been going for many of the shows I hear are the best – and many of those are on HBO (Deadwood, The Wire, etc…).

Unfortunately when watching TV shows on DVD I also find myself wanting to watch them all in a row, and have a hard time stopping until I’m done or one of us is dead. But seeing as I’m not going to rent 6 discs at a time from some place like Blockbuster (what would that cost, $30-40?), I often am forced to wait days to complete my journey. I figured I could alleviate by utilizing either the iTunes Store or Amazon’s Unbox, except guess what? HBO is found on neither. And so I’m extremely happy today to see The Wall Street Journal reporting that HBO is starting to test a new online service that would not only allow subscribers to download their shows, but put them on devices to take on the road as well (update: see NYT update below, this feature is not available just yet).

This new service which is only being trialed in of all places Green Bay, Wisconsin (home of this afternoon’s NFC Championship game), will supposedly only be available through cable television providers as a supplement to your current HBO package. Presumably you would now have the option to get HBO, HBO On-Demand, and HBO Online (or whatever they choose to call it).

While this is a nice first step, I think it’s important that HBO not try to go it alone and eventually add their content to iTunes, Unbox, and the like. Hopefully HBO won’t have to learn the hard way that customers like having all of their options in one place, rather than going all over the Internet to find various shows – something which it now appears NBC is going to avoid learning the hard way as well by going back to iTunes.

[UPDATE]: The New York Times has a much more in-depth look at the service, which will apparently also include movies and allow for up to 400 hours of content to be viewed each month. Unfortunately the service will be – surprise – only available through Windows. Fail.

[UPDATE 2]: USA Today is reporting that they service will be unveiled tomorrow and will be called ‘HBO On Broadband‘ – again, you’ll only be able to get it in the Milwaukee/Green Bay area. This is also interesting:

“Usually, about six episodes will be offered at any one time, but for one series every month, every episode ever produced will be available.”

That’s hardly what I would call an “on demand” service. That’s more like on demand when HBO says you can demand it.