Ten years ago then-Netflix Content Director – and now Co-CEO – Ted Sarandos said GQ“The goal is to turn out to be HBO faster than HBO can turn out to be us.”
But, to cite HBO’s The Wire, “The thing concerning the old days: they concerning the old days.”
Currently, the plain goal of each firms is to avoid becoming themselves.
The last two weeks have crystallized the divergent priorities of the media giants. Parent company Discovery Warner Bros decided to remove HBO from the name of its flagship streaming service Max to guard the HBO brand from becoming … Netflix. Reasonably than risk undermining HBO’s prestige brand with a plethora of reality TV shows from Discovery+, Warner executives want HBO to remain pristine.
“HBO is HBO. It has to remain that way,” said Warner Bros. streaming head. Discovery, JB Perrette, on the April 12 event where the brand new Max brand was unveiled. “We is not going to push it to a breaking point by forcing it to tackle the total scope of this recent content proposal if we kept the name within the service brand.”
In a not-so-subtle shot on Netflix, HBO CEO Casey Bloys praised Max, highlighting the strength of his brand.
“We’re not a large undifferentiated blob of programming,” he said on the event.
Preserving HBO, not developing it, has not all the time been a priority. Owned by AT&T, then CEO of WarnerMedia (and now CEO of AT&T), John Stankey appeared to be comfortable leaning on the HBO brand to challenge Netflix. This was the driving force behind the creation of HBO Max – combining HBO programming with other original content and library programming from the WarnerMedia catalogue. Stankey believed that HBO couldn’t compete with Netflix by itself since it was too limited in scope.
John Stankey, CEO of AT&T, speaks during lunch on the Boston College Chief Executives Club in Boston, Massachusetts, March 24, 2023.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
“We’d like hours a day,” Stankey he said on the inner city hall in 2018 after AT&T accomplished its acquisition of Time Warner, HBO’s parent company. “These aren’t the hours of the week and they aren’t the hours of the month. We’d like hours a day. You might be competing with devices which can be in people’s hands and attract their attention every quarter-hour.”
That sentiment didn’t sit well with HBO boss Richard Plepler, who left the corporate just months after City Hall. Plepler’s mantra, which he often repeated, was: “More just isn’t higher. Only higher is healthier.”
AT&T will mix WarnerMedia with Discovery in a deal that closed last 12 months. Warner Bros. CEO Discovery’s David Zaslav will proceed to pursue Netflix, but he won’t be expanding on HBO or its brand.
Netflix is leaving HBO
Meanwhile, Netflix seems clearly focused on providing content that has the widest audience possible. Removed from becoming HBO, which was Netflix’s goal around 2013. On the time, Netflix was just getting began with original content, competing with HBO for shows like Kevin Spacey’s drama House of Cards. When Netflix hit again with the drama “Orange Is the Latest Black”, Sarandos appeared to be on its solution to making Netflix the brand new HBO.
Nevertheless, through the years, Netflix’s ambitions grew. Investors cheered for higher spending. Just buying prestige programs gave the look of a small potato. HBO’s U.S. audience was typically around 35 million subscribers, and Netflix quickly surpassed that threshold by constructing a worldwide streaming service that targeted the complete traditional pay-TV ecosystem, not only HBO.
Netflix reported this week that it ended the primary quarter with over 232 million subscribers worldwide.
However the importance of making high-profile shows to rival HBO seems less and less vital to Netflix every 12 months. It is also argued that Netflix didn’t have the identical hit rate as HBO when it got here to producing prestige TV shows. Since 2013, HBO has won dozens of major Emmys greater than Netflix.
Ted Sarandos attends the 94th Academy Awards on the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California, March 27, 2022.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
“Once we discuss our content, sometimes it appears like a laundry list,” Sarandos said this week during a Netflix earnings conference call. “Everyone has incredibly diverse tastes, that you simply have to have very various things for various fans, and that is what we’re good at doing on a big scale.”
Netflix has decided that its competitive advantage is a wide selection of programming. Sarandos said The Latest Yorker earlier this 12 months that Netflix’s recent strategy is to operate as “equal parts HBO and FX and AMC and Lifetime and Bravo and E! and Comedy Central.
Ten years after Sarandos’ statement to GQ, it’s clear that HBO won’t turn out to be Netflix, and Netflix won’t turn out to be HBO. And good for each of them.
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