Part industry analysis and part interview, this Fast Company profile is a well crafted and extremely entertaining read.
On the risks associated with yesterday’s rollout of HBO Now:
What if people dump their regular HBO subscriptions? What if the cable providers, who generate virtually all of HBO’s $5.4 billion in revenue, remain displeased by this run around them? What if Now, which may feature content never before seen on HBO, is less consistently excellent than the existing HBO service? And what if this pushes Netflix to become even more aggressive?
Plepler is not nervous. He’s done his homework. Great read.
“There was a massive focus on short-term [earnings per share] growth,” says one source, “and for [CEO Jeff] Bewkes to generate the maximum amount of revenue in the shortest time.”
Typical herd-investor mentality. Never mind about doing something real and tangible as long as you can make quick buck off the hides of true pioneers.
Good read, if not long-winded.
Another step towards a la carte, which is good.
But as much as I’d like to see entities like Comcast (who would charge me ridiculous monthly fees for too much crappy content I’ll never want) reduced to the dumb pipes they deserve to be treated as…
It annoys me a great deal to hear smart people like Plepler say foolish, predatory things like “kill the enemy,” in a market where variety gives the rest of us better choices. There’s room in the market for the likes of HBO and Netflix, not to mention any other tv production groups that are capable of stepping up to the requirements of a direct-subscription model… or willing to make deals with a new kind of distributor.
I don’t want HBO to kill Netflix, or vice-versa. I want both of them to create new and very different work that makes me want to see what both of them are doing.
That Highlander mentality has only one end-game: one company controlling everything we’d be allowed to choose from, and that’s when all television just ends up looking like Les Moonves’ hairy asshole.
My personal fave, “[t]he company had lost faith in Berkes’s ambitious gambit to build its own Netflix”
Shocking that the guy who “cocreated the Xbox and developed tablet-device prototypes years before the iPad” would fail to execute a marketable product. The guys at HBO must not have known that Xbox lost billions for years (Red Ring of Death, anyone?), and Microsoft’s Tablet story is the biggest missed opportunity in tech since their Phone strategy.
What I think we’re moving to is a variety of $5-$20/month media services that provide various genres and formats of content. Instead of writing at $150 check to a big cable company we’ll have subscriptions to a bunch of smaller services that provide more tailored programming.
The great thing will be that entertainment won’t have to be least-common-denominator don’t-do-anything-to-piss-off-a-sponsor shows. Can you imagine a Daily Show type program that didn’t have to worry about the political needs of its mega-corporate parent? Or the niche channels that don’t have to worry about appealing to enough people to justify its presence in a cable-package? Such an environment will be amazing for creatives who will no longer need a huge production company to fund a pilot or runs that long enough for syndication to make a profit.
One hopes.