During Sunday night's Emmy Awards, host Andy Samberg did something no host, or celebrity for that matter, has ever done before: shared his personal HBO Now login information for the world to use. With HBO shows winning a crazy amount of awards, from "Veep" to "Game of Thrones," viewers excitedly jumped at the opportunity to catch up on these favorites for free, thanks to Samberg.
"HBO has the most nominations tonight, and I just realized a lot of you watching at home right now might not have an HBO subscription. Luckily for you, the CEO of HBO recently said he doesn't think password-sharing for their streaming services is a problem," the 37-year-old "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star told the audience. "So, here's my HBO Now login: the username is KhaleesiFan3@EmmyHost.com; the password is, of course, password1 — got to have a number in there to throw them off scent."
The login and password remained on the screen for several seconds, and people quickly took to HBO Now to see if the information was real or not after Samberg said, "This is 100 percent real. So, to all of our millions of viewers, everyone out there, go to town! Check out 'Game of Thrones,' watch a buttload of 'Arliss.' HBO doesn't care — they said so on the record!"
HBO was happy to go along with it and quickly set up the account — and it did actually work for a short period of time until it hit login limitations and was deactivated, according to Variety. While HBO was aware that some sort of joke about password sharing was going to be made during the Emmy telecast, they had no idea exactly what it would entail, so they had to act fast. Lucky for Samberg, they went along with it.
"Lucky for you, @AndySamberg is a very generous #Emmys host," tweeted the official HBO Now account, then giving the login information one more time for everyone to see.
When people realized the account was legitimate, they started to wonder if HBO had teamed up with Samberg as a way to get people to pay for their product, but nothing about it was planned, a source told E! News. HBO was given a heads up, but they really did have nothing to do with what was going on.
