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AT&T Wants To Overhaul HBO, Says It Isn't Profitable Enough (arstechnica.com)
AT&T recently acquired HBO, as part of the Time Warner acquisition, "and it is already considering an overhaul that would see HBO produce more video that can compete for the attention of smartphone users," reports Ars Technica. "AT&T wants to boost revenue both in advertising and subscriptions, even if that means upending HBO's longtime strategy of producing a relatively small number of high-quality shows."
At a recent corporate town hall meeting, John Stankey, the longtime AT&T executive and new head of Warner Media, laid out the challenges and opportunities he saw for the network to around 150 employees. He said, in part: "It's going to be a tough year. It's going to be a lot of work to alter and change direction a little bit. [...] You will work very hard, and this next year will -- my wife hates it when I say this -- feel like childbirth... You'll look back on it and be very fond of it, but it's not going to feel great while you're in the middle of it. She says, 'What do you know about this?' I just observe, 'Honey. We love our kids.'" Audio of the meeting was obtained by The New York Times. From the report: The talk, held at HBO headquarters in New York City, was hosted by HBO CEO Richard Plepler. HBO must compete with smartphones for people's attention, Stankey said in this exchange with Plepler: "We need hours a day," Mr. Stankey said, referring to the time viewers spend watching HBO programs. "It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes." Continuing the theme, he added: "I want more hours of engagement. Why are more hours of engagement important? Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow's world."
At a recent corporate town hall meeting, John Stankey, the longtime AT&T executive and new head of Warner Media, laid out the challenges and opportunities he saw for the network to around 150 employees. He said, in part: "It's going to be a tough year. It's going to be a lot of work to alter and change direction a little bit. [...] You will work very hard, and this next year will -- my wife hates it when I say this -- feel like childbirth... You'll look back on it and be very fond of it, but it's not going to feel great while you're in the middle of it. She says, 'What do you know about this?' I just observe, 'Honey. We love our kids.'" Audio of the meeting was obtained by The New York Times. From the report: The talk, held at HBO headquarters in New York City, was hosted by HBO CEO Richard Plepler. HBO must compete with smartphones for people's attention, Stankey said in this exchange with Plepler: "We need hours a day," Mr. Stankey said, referring to the time viewers spend watching HBO programs. "It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes." Continuing the theme, he added: "I want more hours of engagement. Why are more hours of engagement important? Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow's world."
sigh!
"OW! MY BALLS!" will premier on AT&T's HBO.
Overhaul your fucking network first. How come you can't provide more than 1 megabit of upload bandwidth even in the middle of the most densely-populated and theoretically profitable areas in the US? South Korea has 100 megabit synchronous fiber connections running to houses with dirt fucking floors! What the fuck is wrong with you assholes?
You will work very hard, and this next year will -- my wife hates it when I say this -- feel like childbirth... - you will work 80+ hour weeks for at least the next year with no additional bonuses for anyone lower than VP level, so good luck keeping your personal life intact!
You'll look back on it and be very fond of it, but it's not going to feel great while you're in the middle of it. - if you don't get fired or quit, you get a gold star for making it through!
She says, 'What do you know about this?' I just observe, 'Honey. We love our kids. - The kids are going to feel pain and stress to toughen them up and be ready for anything in the real world!
(I wish the existing employees luck. Things were already insanely busy at HBO.)
which you get with each and every merger. This is why we should stop allowing mega mergers. Big mergers are expensive and what's the first thing you do when you spend a bunch of money on a business expense? Try to make it back. Mergers destroy jobs.
This was another good reason to oppose the Trump tax cuts. The mega-corps already said the money was all going to mergers and stock buybacks. The sort of thing that doesn't create jobs, it destroys them. Heck, it's easy to see why supply side economics fail. Businesses spend money to meet demand. Giving businesses more money does just that, gives them more money. Unless there's more demand they're just going to keep it. And if there's more demand they'll spend the money anyway. Yeah, there's a point where kleptocracy can kick in and choke a business, but you'd be surprised how far up that goes. Meanwhile the working class is choked with low wages and demand for everything is flat. Flat demand, flat job and wage growth.
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"We need hours a day," Mr. Stankey said, referring to the time viewers spend watching HBO programs.
So long, The Wire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Deadwood ... you know, stuff that actually took time, care, and focus to produce. On the other hand, I still have to catch up on most of these series anyway.
AT&T have decided to ruin one of the most successful brands in entertainment.
Right now, HBO competes and holds its own against Netflix and Amazon, both of which continue to invest and profit st their expense. Rather than compete, HBO plans to cede this ground, kill the goose laying the golden eggs, and bet it all on a strategy that takes them out if a market they excel at and run head first into one they donâ(TM)t understand and are ill equipped to compete in.
Thereâ(TM)s not a âoeplan Bâ here - once todayâ(TM)s creators abandon the HBO platform (which theyâ(TM)ll do in a heartbeat), thereâ(TM)s no going back if they change their minds later.
There shall be infinite number of eyeball hours to see everything everyone can produce?
There is more to life.
Remember those sweet, warm New England summers? Remember sipping lemonade underneath a shady tree? Remember when if your company turned a profit you had a big Christmas party at the office?
If your company makes money, you've won the game, good job. If it's not enough money, then you suffer from a mental disorder. Best thing to do is commit yourself. Second best thing is to start a second business and combine the profits from both.
this is why Roe V Wade is so essential,
John Stankey needs to be aborted.
Wow, talk about corporate idiocy. This is burning platform memo level logic. These people are paid with hundreds of millions to come up with this shit. And when they blow, they get more hundreds of millions to bow out.
I'm so glad I don't pay for TV in any way, and I'm also glad that I'm considering dumping them for phone service too, what a bunch of worthless bastards.
AT&T saving people $10-15 a month as they cancel subscriptions for the once great network.
Sometimes the marketing models of these companies is a lot like those anti-drug ads from the 1980's.
I want to surveil more customers, so I can learn more about them, so I can make them watch more, so I can surveil them and learn more about them.
This business model is overwhelmingly dead, and yet, people keep coming back to it.
I guess this is what happens when a communications executive takes over a bunch of creatives. I live near NYC and it's nothing like LA, but the entertainment work scene here is pretty much the opposite of AT&T. It's not quite Don Draper 3-martini lunches but former colleagues of mine who now work in that business say it's pretty close. People are creative and used to having a fair amount of freedom around the way they get the job done.
When a creative company gets acquired by someone who just wants to squeeze it for all it's worth, they'll probably lose some of their better creative talent...those folks have options. AT&T is used to providing a cheap-to-deploy, incredibly high margin service. Once they start cracking the whip, the content quality is going to drop. I imagine the first thing they'll do is offshore every business process that isn't outsourced already. When that doesn't produce the savings, they're going to start cutting into the creatives' budget. No more personal assistants, free car service, free food, expense account dinners, etc.
it'll be interesting to see if more video is consumed on smartphones or not...who watches this stuff anyhow?
nothing to see here - move along
> "and it is already considering an overhaul that would see HBO produce more video that can compete for the attention of smartphone users, even if that means upending HBO's longtime strategy of producing a relatively small number of high-quality shows."
Well, I guess you can kiss HBO goodbye, then. Because that is the ONLY thing that makes it worth having; things like Westworld, Sopranos, Oz, Game of Thrones, Room 104, and such. PLENTY of other networks for the type of lower quality, high quantity stuff.
If you want to get rid of something, please make it Bill Maher.
In the HBO Go app (the one you can use to subscribe to HBO a month at a time), they just dropped the whole "late night" (read: Soft Porn) section. But it's hardly a loss as for some time now they had let updates to that area languish to almost nothing. I have to imagine that subscribers are falling off in part because of that...
What happened to the HBO of old that had sex positive and fun programming like "Real Sex"? Seems like everyone wants to be Netflix now with hot original dramatic shows, while abandoning aspects that make each service unique and provide extra value.
The funny thing is that personally I only just started subscribing to HBO, for Game of Thrones, then Silicon Valley, then Westworld. But once I finish up those new seasons I'll probably let the subscription go again as not much of the other content really grabs me. Some more high-end adult content produced with some regularity might help convince me to stay...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Did anyone not expect this? A cellular company bought HBO and their first thought is episodes are too long and everyone wants to watch them on their phone. Oh and they want to add advertising, forgetting of course that most of HBO's subscribers do so because it DOESN'T have advertising.
They'll kill HBO with these plans before they ever evolve them to compete with Netflix. AT&T will slaughter the goose.
Seems like ATT wants to monetize HBO viewers and introduce Ads on HBO and produce more content, that could be a good thing, however, their is a reason why HBO is so successful in consistently producing high quality content. If you are beholden to advertisers, then the quality of content will suffer, no more adult themed shows, as every fucking advertiser will try to push HBO to be politically correct and viewers will loose a genuine uncensored media outlet. It will be a sad day!
May I ask just how and when a population already struggling just to stay afloat will find those hours and the money to pay for them while they're working multiple jobs?
forget about retooling hbo. if you need the legitimacy of the brand that desperately, create a parallel channel, something like hbo light, and call it if you must hbolitening. there's your product for the smartphone obsessed! cat vids, car cams, czech councilmen throwing chairs...in the meantime leave the parent channel alone. shiela nevins bailed like rasputin.
I'm more used to corporations doing a more subtle bait and switch game where they grow their popularity with quality products and then try and cut costs as subtly as possible. Outsourcing to China, using cheaper meat, getting rid of what their warranty covers.
Having a CEO just come out and say "We're going to send this channel straight into the shitter" right to our face is just a weird amount of honesty. I mean, they coach it in positive terms as PR people are ought to do. But even they acknowledge it's going to be painful.
HBO targeting PHONE audiences. So.... Westworld, but cut down to 6 second VINE clips. Season 10 of Game of Thrones will be flash animation with 3 characters remaining after the killing of the rest. And it won't be the expensive ones.
Study what is selling and what people enjoy watching that does not need a huge budget.
Consider what a computer can design into the look and feel of a series.
Find out what your audience will become interested in and return to watch due to its creative production.
Vampires? That like humans as new best friends.
A saga about people will billions of US $. To look after, spend, protect and enjoy. Who also want to make new friends
Pirates with ships, maps and treasure.
A hospital with amazing doctors. Really amazing with skills and who like to make friends after their shift.
Most of the plots can be done with a low, low budget and many very well educated people can create years of plot for the above.
A plot with history and pirate will cost more due to costume and location. The need for a real/digital ship design and a digital war.
A plot with time travel to a modern time for the pirate crew could reduce the production costs. Rather then moving one person from 2018 back to complex pirate times.
With the France, Spain and lots of Scotland.
Make sure every show gets sold globally at the same time. Flood the online market with content so no nation/region has to wait.
Sell that creative product direct to the world. Lots of simple shows that are charming and fun for a set demographics that they will pay for.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
... more video that can compete for the attention of smartphone users, ... AT&T wants to boost revenue both in advertising and subscriptions, ... upending HBO's longtime strategy of producing a relatively small number of high-quality shows.
So a lot of pain, yelling and pooping? Sounds *wonderful*.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
HBO must compete with smartphones for people's attention, ...
PBO - Phone Box Office.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It seems 2 me pretty much anything AT&T touches goes to shit.. in some form or another..
1. ATT+pacbell
2. ATT+@home
3. ATT +Zenith/Bull business systems
Those are just of the top of my head, i am sure there are PLENTY more.. Greedy profit motives..
HBO is so fucked.. I am wondering when Bill Mahr/ John Oliver and or Vice leave (or are asked to leave) due to the controversial material they produce.
Look out IFC you may get some interesting programming choices..
John Stankey is an MBA who was in charge of DirectTV over the last couple of years while it's been hemorrhaging customers. He introduced the DirectTV Now streaming service which was supposed to boost profits. So far, it's only helped to offset the number of subscribers lost. Unfortunately, since it's a lower cost service, their profits have tanked.
Now they've acquired HBO and they want to make it cell-phone-friendly by cutting episodes to 20 minutes in the idiotic hope that doing the same thing will produce different results.
How will AT&T produce more shows without reducing quality? Stankey said that AT&T and HBO will have to "figure [that] out."
"I have an idea! Make more shows and more money! No, I don't know how to do either of those things. You guys have to figure that part out. Anyway, my work is done here. I'll take my bonus now!"
Listen sweetcheeks - Megamergers aren't good or bad - they ARE.
Thus talked the pseudo-conservative who wouldn't be able to distinguish his Russell Kirk from his Eric Voegelin from his G. K. Chesterton.
Here, little fake-conservative, read some real ones for a change, will you? You may begin with Hilaire Belloc and proceed from there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So, all the good talent is leaving for a new internet-only production company that will take most of HBO's market share? Cool.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
when the layoffs are coming you never tell anyone they're coming. Otherwise they get busy looking for new jobs. The good people leave, the bad stop doing their work and everything goes to hell. There's an easy way to tell if a suit is lying when he says no layoffs are coming: lips are moving. It's a tell tale sign.
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Netflix has to be just loving this. AT&T will turn one of the only remaining traditional TV stations into complete and utter shit. Well, at least it will have plenty of company. Meanwhile watch how subscribers run for the hills as the price goes up and the quality goes down.
AT&T has always been run as a monopoly. They haven't the faintest idea about customer service and now they are going to be in for a very rude awakening. RIP HBO.
Seriously, does anyone actually watch any SINGLE channel for hours a day? And of those, how many are watching hours a day of a single channel on a PHONE? Why in the world would anyone think that they're somehow able to make that the slightest bit enjoyable in any way? Has Stankey actually been a human being in America for very long, because any human being in America would quickly realize that nobody wants to stare at a cell phone for hours a day to watch a single channel. Nobody. And then to top it off, he goes right into collecting customer data to monetize it in the form of advertising and subscriptions-seriously, is the guy from another planet? How could that possibly be a good idea for any customer?
âoe we intend to kill the culture that made this company successful âoe
with their new jobs at Netflix and Amazon. The existing employees are all highly talented with a string of hits on their hands. They're also unionized.
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There goes any value in HBO.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm thinking a simple addition to reflect the new corporate reality for employees: H O BO.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I honestly can't say I'm particularly surprised about this seeing how the motivation behind corporate consolidations, when broken down, always come back to wanting to make a profit as big as possible. Disney didn't buy LucasFilm and their IP for any other reason than to make a lot of money from their IP and AT&T's takeover of Time Warner (who owns/owned HBO) is not any more different.
Considering massive the 85.4 billion USD price they had to pay for the whole lot it's kind of obvious that getting parts of Time Warner, particularly HBO, to become drastically more profitable was what was not just plain greed, it was a necessity for the deal to make fiscal sense. You simply don't borrow 85 billion without paying a lot of interest every year or big amortizations.
As an HBO subscriber it seems like this is probably the right time to un-subscribe from their service. I don't find most of their catalog all that appealing and mostly just watch their old shows (Sopranos, The Wire, etc.) along some of their newer stuff (Westworld being the only one I've actively followed even if the un-planned nature of the writing really has really started to show) so it's not like I'm going to miss out on all that much when I move back to Netflix and the local BBC equivalent's streaming service.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
These morons with MBAs but no experience actually creating something all think of themselves as "visionaries" but most could not have the vision to navigate out of a wet paper bag. The guy's no Steve Jobs.
He claims to have a business idea that "need[s] hours a day" of each customer's attention - never gonna happen, dude. You're doomed to fail. The average adult with adult responsibilities does not have hours per day to give you. Certainly, people will set aside a couple of hours a couple times a week if the quality is there to justify it, but only kids and the elderly can spare that much time every day - and these groups lack the resources to make it worth "monetizing" them.
Usually, an even moderately smart manager with such an idea would launch it with a PLAN to provide something to lure the customers in, but apparently not this idiot. Don't pity him for being a prime example of the peter principle - like most such worthless people in management positions, he almost certainly has a better "golden parachute" than all the people working below him who are likely to be harmed when he fails.
People with stock in this company should think about this and consider adjusting their portfolios, not because of this little non-plan plan but rather because of the sign it is of the dearth of quality in management there.
Don't ruin Game of Thrones :(
I tend to rant.
That's where people watch hours of a day. If they made it a serious YouTube competitor, it's they only way it could work and meet their requirements. >>> Which they will not because it would take too much investment... and they are already in the hole after the merger. So... it's doomed.
" Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow's world."
Your world sucks, please die and take everyone that wants that world with you....
When Netflix first started announcing they were spending the GDP of a small country on original content I figured we might get something like another HBO. Original programming at most other content providers was either a slave to traditional ratings, hobbled by censorship or broadcast standards, or a small-budget.
The first couple of Netflix efforts were pretty good -- House of Cards had real talent on its cast and the production value was top notch. But since then it's seemed to slip. Every time I turn on Netflix anymore, there's more "original" content than I can keep up with but every time I try something I'm totally underwhelmed. Nobody casts, cheap production values, empty, formulaic scripts, it's really ordinary.
I used to think the only obstacle to more HBO-quality content was just the usual business model in entertainment, now I'm mostly convinced that it's a fragile mixture of both money and some kind of production side magic that is very difficult to get right. HBO has too few shows (at least to fill my time), but it's because they're hard to make.
If AT&T thinks that HBO is just a sausage machine and if you only turn the handle faster you can get more sausage, they're wrong and trying to do so will just degrade the product.
They aren't talking about ads on HBO, they're talking about using HBO to gather monetizable data on viewers. Which may be far shittier behavior.
ATT Watch is part of their cell service, DirecTV Now is the one with a Roku channel. AT&T is so well organized that it's competing against itself.
And it certainly didn't turn out well for them, or their online media biz. They messed with something that was working due to their over-sized egos and unfounded "I know better" attitude, doubled its size and halved its performance unnecessarily, and 18 months later they all had to go looking for new jobs because they ruined a highly effective development team.
Stankey better hope he gets promoted before the inevitable tanking of HBO.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Aww, how cute! It's a kindergarten-level discussion now!
Me: "You're X."
You: "No! You are X! And ugly and stupid and I'm not your friend anymore!" (shows the tongue)
Begone, little troll. I've dealt with much stronger opponents. You're not up to the task. :D
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I was a paid HBO subscriber for years, but after the buyout, ATT now offered it to me for free so I cancelled my paid subscription.
I also remember HBO showing shorts like 'Hardware Wars' and 'Godzilla vs Bambi'. If they could tap into that, I could see some potential there.
What? Replying to your glancing over Simple Wikipedia's article on Belloc and, for lack of a better word, "concluding" he or any true conservative are in favor of central-anything? Sure! Here's the polite reply: "Read the book then come back."
You don't want to know the impolite one. ;)
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
"as they can help smaller companies survive and flourish when guided by the right hand"
[Citation needed]
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I subscribe to HBO precisely because HBO is not the low-quality ad-riddled turd AT&T wants to make of it. I was one of the people that contacted HBO years before they launched their HBO Now! unbundled streaming service and told them that I wanted to buy such a product from them. I dumped AT&T as my cell carrier and later as my ISP precisely because they don't care about what I want to buy from them.
Buying HBO and then making them produce shite? I think there will be a few leaving parties this year!
Just what we consumers need: more corporate tentacles into our psychy!
Advertisements on HBO shows now?
I have yet to watch more than 90 minutes of HBO this month as it is; with the incessant reruns of lousy movies,
and mediocre mini-series, it is already not worth the premium cost.
(Oh. Wait! I guess that would justify advertisements on HBO!
Kinda sucks the way we humans tend to fuck things up as we go along!)
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
AT&T, don't mess with HBO, you don't need to screw up a good thing.
there's already an entire channel devoted to that point of view. it's called Fox "News"
John Stankey's email address is JS9991@att.com.
HBO already has plenty of incredible content. How many people still haven't seen Big Love or even Six Feet Under? Besides which, they are complex enough to watch multiple times. If they improved their interfaces, they could get a lot more enjoyment into the subscription, and gain an hour or so from YouTube and Netflix.
Some trivial examples:
- allow me to binge without seeing 'previously on' scenes, 'upcoming on' scenes, or theme song
- sort series menu in additional ways besides alphabetical
- a film is removed from watchlist after viewing. A series has its subsequent episode put on watchlist after viewing.
- let me see the old Carlin specials
- metadata on actors. HBO has hundreds of instances where a given actor has been in several of their series. Put that in the interface!