After All That Bullshit, HBO Dreams Of Being HBO Again
from the everything-to-everybody dept
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.
The merger disaster was particularly hard on HBO, once the pinnacle of prestige television. AT&T executives were obsessed with distancing themselves from the popular brand, and their decisions (like demanding Game Of Thrones be shot in short-form verticality so it would be easier to watch on phones) showed they really didn’t understand what made HBO popular in the first place.
So they engaged in a long series of pointless name changes, they eliminated a lot of the programming people liked, they threatened new restrictions on password sharing, they generally lowered overall quality in the mindless pursuit of scale, and they began hiking streaming video prices three times in the last three years. This, unsurprisingly drove subscribers to the exits.
HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys seems to have realized that all of that pointless deal-making by the extraction class wasn’t great for the brand or for quality television. Being everything to everyone in a bid to obtain impossible scale (by producing a lot of low quality mass market appeal bullshit) wasn’t what HBO was all about:
“The result was that HBO, the most premium of premium TV companies, became absorbed into something that was meant to be a Netflix-killer.
As HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys told reporters Nov. 20 in the company’s Hudson Yards offices, that ended up being a fool’s errand: “To Netflix’s credit, as the first mover, they have become a utility for consumers,” Bloys said. “In retrospect, we can all see that the streaming industry’s race for volume, years ago, found many brands losing their identity.”
So HBO is hoping to focus on being the kind of company that made it originally popular in the first place, nine years after AT&T originally signaled its intention to acquire Time Warner. Nine years for these guys to figure out that they should stick to what they’re good at: quality television.
Unfortunately, there’s some bad news for Bloys.
Warner Brothers is about to be purchased by the Ellisons, who are on a massive acquisition spree (TikTok, CBS, the exclusive rights to MMA). All of these deals are going to saddle HBO’s new parent company with mountains of debt. And just like AT&T, Time Warner, and Discovery, that’s going to result in an entirely new wave of layoffs, quality erosion, and price hikes to recoup the investment.
And this is all going to happen before the damage from all the past pointless consolidation deals (including ongoing layoffs from Paramount’s acquisition of CBS) have even fully formed.
It’s also going to result in an entirely new wave of trust fund brats, out of their depths and obsessed with scale, trying to “tweak” the HBO formula so they can obtain impossible scale by being everything to everyone. They’re going to look at the hard lessons HBO experienced over the last nine years and… completely ignore them and repeat all the same mistakes. Write it down.
Filed Under: cable, casey bloys, competition, consolidation, media, streaming, tv
Companies: hbo, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “After All That Bullshit, HBO Dreams Of Being HBO Again”
This happens again and again a tv company is bought loaded with debt 1000s of employees sacked leaving it unable to make new quality programs .Also America is going to be left with 4 conservative billionaires owning most of the tv film company’s .
These people don’t understand or care about making quality tv programs and also seem to lay off most black minority employees leaving mostly white employees.
There will be more mediocre reality tv and cop tv shows made .cbs news and CNN will be turned into outlets for conservative leaning news
. The concept of diversity and independent tv news is at risk .
We are going back to the 70s where most journalists will be white middle class
See, the problem is the previous cows weren’t perfectly spherical!
The writing is on the wall. There are only three gens that watch TV, Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y. Most people don’t watch TV anymore, despite their gaslighting data.
I’ll say it again – MOST people don’t watch TV anymore, despite what they tell you.
Think about that for a second – TV will be dead in a few decades. This is what the panic is all about. They won’t say it – but they feel it coming.
Re:
Do you have any evidence of this? There are still TV shows aimed at children and young adults, still Black Friday sales in which huge numbers of people buy TVs, and so on. Sure, most viewers are probably watching via on-demand streaming now (and apparently YouTube and TikTok), but that’s true probably up to about age 70 now.
But I don’t really know how to get good data on this. I suppose credit card companies know the ages of their customers and which streaming services they subscribe to, and could gather the data if they wanted. I certainly wouldn’t trust the likes of Neilsen, and I see very few youth-targeted shows on their list of most popular ones.
Re:
From my perspective you are spot on. Personally, I only watch TV for sports, which I view with the SOUND TURNED OFF. The main reason is my loathing for commercials, which make up roughly one sixth of what you see when you tune in. I turn the sound off when I watch sports to avoid not only the obnoxious blare of the ads, but also the mostly useless babbling of the blatherskites “calling” the game.
We deserve better. That’s why sites like Netflix are making so much money right now.
seppuku vs hari-kiri
HBO not being a samurai cannot commit seppuku. The proper term in this case is hari-kiri, a death without honor, which is appropriate for HBO.
Where are all the people who proclaimed it was imperative that HBO not be associated with the rest of the garbage on Max? That calling it Max was going to save The HBO brand for only the truly premium shows. I think they must have left themselves on mute.
Sorry, but no matter what they start calling themselves now, they’re turning into Zik Zak with its Blipverts (since their M&A goal is obviously to take over the world and ruin it for everyone else).
We need more stupid lab-grown adults with jobs, stat!
Unfortunately, only one of those criteria comes in endless supply, and one isn’t a thing at all.