8 ms·

My problem with this is as follows: HBO has led the way in making some of the highest quality television of the last 20 years. Competition has gotten stiffer,

My problem with this is as follows: HBO has led the way in making some of the highest quality television of the last 20 years. Competition has gotten stiffer, but I still view HBO as the premier place for TV (Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Curb, Veep, Leftovers, True Detective, Deadwood... and of course GoT, the list goes on and on). I would argue many of our favorite broadcast/cable shows would simply not exist if HBO hadn't gone there first. They've had some duds, and certainly have a lot of small-audience niche TV, but for the most part it's a premium quality that I'm willing to pay for. I'm reading through the lines a bit and here is what I see in the article: "More content, faster, cheaper." This isn't about an outdated streaming strategy, HBO Go/Now are fine. If they race to compete with Netflix (dropping price, increasing output), who is quite literally shitting out content every day, the overall quality of HBO will decline greatly. Netflix started with premiere TV (House of Cards) but has evolved into a massive mess of content, rarely of which any really captures my attention anymore. Unfortunately, as the money machine needs to be fed, I 100% see HBO slowly turning into a content factory, and quality is going to fall off. I hope in 3-5 years to come back to this comment and laugh at how wrong I was, but I feel pretty certain about an upcoming quality drop from what was once the bellwether of high quality entertainment.

ghaff 8y ago
WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content as demonstrated (at least for a time) by House of Cards.But it became evident pretty quickly that 1.) The beast needs to be fed with quantity as well as quality (as you say) and 2.) Quality TV/film isn't just an algorithmic exercise.
- sharkweek 8y ago
  Your last point is a strong one - Great TV seems RISKY before it finds success and it should be! For example, Netflix show "Ozark" is pretty good! But I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't have existed if AMC hadn't taken a gamble on "Breaking Bad" first.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  You can have the best 3 shows on any platform, but if all you have is 3 shows, people won't sign up or stay. Netflix had to invest in quantity side by side with quality because the content providers started taking their ball and going home.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    If you have economical access to a bunch of OK mainstream content, it's reasonable to put all your wood behind just a few arrows. You won't get a big hit every time but you can increase your odds by lining up the right people and opening a fat checkbook. And those few hits may be enough to get people to renew. But if your licensed content is mostly drek, you have to create filler content yourself, even if it's mostly just OK.
    - mikepurvis 8y ago
      I don't disagree with this, but it's important to acknowledge that "drek" for you might be someone else's niche interest. Sure, some TV is just objectively bad (low production values, whatever), but easily-dismissed shows like Sugar Rush and movies like the Christmas Prince series have legitimate audiences who find them interesting and engaging. One of the most significant and under-acknowledged strategic differences between Netflix and a traditional TV network is that they're not limited by a schedule— they don't need to pick just one show to put in that key Sunday night primetime slot, and they don't need to look at what they're "up against" in the same slot on the other networks. Their only practical limit is budget— ergo, a strategy of lots of niche, long-tail appeal type content makes a ton of sense.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        All good points. There's a flip side to the schedule aspect too. Traditional broadcasters also need to fill up slots even if they know they don't have anything great to fill a hole. Which I expect was one of the drivers behind reality TV; you might as well fill the hole with something cheap if you don't expect a scripted show to be at least a reliable audience draw. (And I expect scripted shows are less predictable as well.) (By "drek," I was mostly thinking of old second-tier and third-tier sitcoms and the like. I'm actually a bit surprised there isn't more of this sort of content; perhaps it's the tension between having lots of content and basically burying your tier-1 content with a bunch of mostly "crap.")
- slg 8y ago
  >WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content I would argue that Netflix has and does do this except for a different definition of superior. They aren't really trying to make a single show with broad market appeal. An algorithm isn't going to help with that anyway. What an algorithm can do is find niches to serve. Netflix has done a good job of creating these smaller shows that have an intense appeal to a small number of people. Gather enough of those shows together and eventually you have everyone covered. It is basically just targeted advertising except with TV shows. HBO might have GOT that everyone watches, but Netflix has Black Mirror, BoJack Horseman, GLOW, You, The Crown, Russian Doll, Narcos, Maniac, Ozark, One Day At A Time, Big Mouth, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and numerous other shows that have received critical acclaim and everyone probably watches at least one of those.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    There's truth to that. The dynamics are certainly different than simply counting the total number of eyeballs watching your programming. Everyone having one or two must sees on your [all you can eat subscription] network probably trumps 10 shows that people are "Meh, it's something to watch."
mpalmer 8y ago
Absolutely this. A number of reasonably happy HBO customers will be turned off by the side effects of this strategy. But a lot of media consumers won't mind or even be aware that they're becoming more of a commodity than the content itself. I kinda do.
chaosbutters 8y ago
everyone forgets Oz :(
- ravenstine 8y ago
  I know, right??? I was gonna say the same thing.
- sharkweek 8y ago
  Ugh I hate admitting to this, but I still haven't watched it
- brandall10 8y ago
  I love Oz, watched every episode during its initial run. But it was not a critical darling at the time. The bigger sin is not mentioning Larry Sanders. That was a cultural milestone during its time in the same way Sopranos and Sex and City Were. Curbed feels like its spiritual successor. And of course the one that started it all for HBO in the early 90s, the one that broke the mold for an adult sitcom, from the creators of Friends - Dream On.
  - sharkweek 8y ago
    I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television. There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Because it's not that good. It was good for its time, but TV today is different and better than TV was in 1999. People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime. Like... Big Bang, the number one network sitcom which averages 18.5 million viewers?
btmiller 8y ago
Agreed. Content is king, and I think HBO understands that very well. I go to HBO for curated, high quality entertainment. I see this less as a business problem and more of a technology problem with regards to their streaming platform. All big platforms suffer (possibly painfully) in the beginning (e.g. Twitter's fail whale), but that's when it's up to business leadership to stay the course, dive into the problem, and commit to solving it on your own. Look at how much emphasis in this article is placed upon HBO getting away from rivals running their platform! Yet a short period ago they surrender in-house operations to MLB AM? Constant pivoting gets you nowhere. I see AT&T swooping in to "pick up the pieces" as they see it, and the sad conclusion I foresee is exactly what you described.
tptacek 8y ago
We're in a golden age of television in part because everyone is producing high-quality shows. For every Deadwood, there's a Justified; True Detective, a Mindhunter. HBO has never been the best place for comedy series and, good as Crashing was, it remains an also-ran there as well. HBO's quality has been pretty far off its peak for awhile. GoT is a tentpole show with a rabid audience but it's not especially good (it's no The Wire). Deadwood and the Sopranos are from a different era of TV. Veep is great, but True Detective, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Enlightened, and The Newsroom would all be in the middle of the pack at Netflix. More importantly than what Netflix itself creates is the fact that everyone else is creating great TV, and Netflix can just license it. The Americans is better than anything HBO ever produced except The Wire, and it's an FX show. So are Atlanta and Better Things, both better than any HBO comedy series other than Veep. AMC has Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, which arguably are the best thing ever done on TV. The Deuce is great, but if I have to choose between paying for one show of that caliber per month, or just getting access to stuff like Counterpart, Legion, Get Shorty, Halt and Catch Fire, and Fargo, it's pretty obvious where I'm getting my money's worth. Which is the big dilemma with HBO's previous strategy. There is too much content that clears the bar HBO set available outside of HBO for them to charge a premium, unless they can keep bottling lightning like they did with GoT, which is not at all a sure bet.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  It boils down to preferences. I personally feel the quality of HBO’s shows & series is dramatically higher than even the peak quality of Netflix or Prime original offerings. They are simply nowhere close. They’re not even playing the same sport. Pretty much every Netflix darling I’ve spent time to watch (Stranger Things, House of Cards, Russian Doll, Maniac, Bird Box, Roma) has been a huge disappointment. By comparison with HBO, I only feel that way about True Detective Season 2 and Crashing (the Pete Holmes show). Other shows have variation of course and some are more interesting or less to me, but none of them have been sincerely big disappointments, while nearly every single darling that Netflix puts out is pretty crap.
- wyldfire 8y ago
  > True Detective, a Mindhunter. "Mindhunter" was great but it's no "True Detective" IMO.
Thriptic 8y ago
Yeah I really don't understand this move. HBO has a product that is profitable and well loved by it's users explicitly because it is not Netflix and features content that would never show up on Netflix (except maybe via FX). It makes no sense to blow that up in order to create Netflix 2. Frankly I think going after Netflix in general is a dumb move. They own that mass market content space, you're never going to displace them, Hulu already tried and failed miserably, give up. Why not amass a series of these premium brands (eg Showtime) and focus on becoming the place for awesome smart content to augment Netflix?
deckar01 8y ago
> Netflix .. has evolved into a massive mess of content, rarely of which any really captures my attention anymore. I think this really gets to the difference between the two. With Netflix I am provided a barrage of content suited to my interest at a quality that is distractingly mediocre. With HBO I constantly find myself running out of content that I think suits my taste, but when I try something out of my wheelhouse I often find the production well executed and the subject surprisingly engaging.
vlan0 8y ago
>This isn't about an outdated streaming strategy, HBO Go/Now are fine. This has been my experience for anything that isn't live. I can never successfully watch a "live" episode of Vice without the stream degrading to potato quality at various times. But within minutes of the episode completing I can view that same content without any issue. I can only speculate as to what their problems might be. But their live streaming experience is quite poor.
anth_anm 8y ago
> HBO Go/Now are fine. Not really, they are lousy apps. You can fix that without engaging in the "spew content and see waht sticks" style of netflix.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  HBO Go was pretty bad when I used it; worse than HBO Now was both before and after. Not sure why it isn't just exactly HBO Now with the added cable provider verification component.
paganel 8y ago
I’d add Tom Fontana’s “Oz” [1] to the list, to this day I keep track of its excellent actors by saying “I’ve seen this guy on Oz before” whenever I see a former Oz actor in a movie or a newer series. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/
stingraycharles 8y ago
I concur. I am both a Netflix and HBO subscriber, but even though it has far less content, I watch HBO much more often. I would easily be willing to pay much more for it to survive. HBO is the rare gem in today's entertainment world that still produces high quality content, where you can rely on it to be good when it's coming from them. I hope they don't join the race and stay on their own path.
pmart123 8y ago
Simply put, AT&T will drag HBO into the dark ages.

ghaff 8y ago

WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content as demonstrated (at least for a time) by House of Cards.But it became evident pretty quickly that 1.) The beast needs to be fed with quantity as well as quality (as you say) and 2.) Quality TV/film isn't just an algorithmic exercise.

sharkweek 8y ago
Your last point is a strong one - Great TV seems RISKY before it finds success and it should be! For example, Netflix show "Ozark" is pretty good! But I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't have existed if AMC hadn't taken a gamble on "Breaking Bad" first.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
You can have the best 3 shows on any platform, but if all you have is 3 shows, people won't sign up or stay. Netflix had to invest in quantity side by side with quality because the content providers started taking their ball and going home.
- ghaff 8y ago
  If you have economical access to a bunch of OK mainstream content, it's reasonable to put all your wood behind just a few arrows. You won't get a big hit every time but you can increase your odds by lining up the right people and opening a fat checkbook. And those few hits may be enough to get people to renew. But if your licensed content is mostly drek, you have to create filler content yourself, even if it's mostly just OK.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    I don't disagree with this, but it's important to acknowledge that "drek" for you might be someone else's niche interest. Sure, some TV is just objectively bad (low production values, whatever), but easily-dismissed shows like Sugar Rush and movies like the Christmas Prince series have legitimate audiences who find them interesting and engaging. One of the most significant and under-acknowledged strategic differences between Netflix and a traditional TV network is that they're not limited by a schedule— they don't need to pick just one show to put in that key Sunday night primetime slot, and they don't need to look at what they're "up against" in the same slot on the other networks. Their only practical limit is budget— ergo, a strategy of lots of niche, long-tail appeal type content makes a ton of sense.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      All good points. There's a flip side to the schedule aspect too. Traditional broadcasters also need to fill up slots even if they know they don't have anything great to fill a hole. Which I expect was one of the drivers behind reality TV; you might as well fill the hole with something cheap if you don't expect a scripted show to be at least a reliable audience draw. (And I expect scripted shows are less predictable as well.) (By "drek," I was mostly thinking of old second-tier and third-tier sitcoms and the like. I'm actually a bit surprised there isn't more of this sort of content; perhaps it's the tension between having lots of content and basically burying your tier-1 content with a bunch of mostly "crap.")
slg 8y ago
>WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content I would argue that Netflix has and does do this except for a different definition of superior. They aren't really trying to make a single show with broad market appeal. An algorithm isn't going to help with that anyway. What an algorithm can do is find niches to serve. Netflix has done a good job of creating these smaller shows that have an intense appeal to a small number of people. Gather enough of those shows together and eventually you have everyone covered. It is basically just targeted advertising except with TV shows. HBO might have GOT that everyone watches, but Netflix has Black Mirror, BoJack Horseman, GLOW, You, The Crown, Russian Doll, Narcos, Maniac, Ozark, One Day At A Time, Big Mouth, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and numerous other shows that have received critical acclaim and everyone probably watches at least one of those.
- ghaff 8y ago
  There's truth to that. The dynamics are certainly different than simply counting the total number of eyeballs watching your programming. Everyone having one or two must sees on your [all you can eat subscription] network probably trumps 10 shows that people are "Meh, it's something to watch."

mpalmer 8y ago

Absolutely this. A number of reasonably happy HBO customers will be turned off by the side effects of this strategy. But a lot of media consumers won't mind or even be aware that they're becoming more of a commodity than the content itself. I kinda do.

chaosbutters 8y ago

everyone forgets Oz :(

ravenstine 8y ago
I know, right??? I was gonna say the same thing.
sharkweek 8y ago
Ugh I hate admitting to this, but I still haven't watched it
brandall10 8y ago
I love Oz, watched every episode during its initial run. But it was not a critical darling at the time. The bigger sin is not mentioning Larry Sanders. That was a cultural milestone during its time in the same way Sopranos and Sex and City Were. Curbed feels like its spiritual successor. And of course the one that started it all for HBO in the early 90s, the one that broke the mold for an adult sitcom, from the creators of Friends - Dream On.
- sharkweek 8y ago
  I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television. There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
tptacek 8y ago
Because it's not that good. It was good for its time, but TV today is different and better than TV was in 1999. People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime. Like... Big Bang, the number one network sitcom which averages 18.5 million viewers?

btmiller 8y ago

Agreed. Content is king, and I think HBO understands that very well. I go to HBO for curated, high quality entertainment. I see this less as a business problem and more of a technology problem with regards to their streaming platform. All big platforms suffer (possibly painfully) in the beginning (e.g. Twitter's fail whale), but that's when it's up to business leadership to stay the course, dive into the problem, and commit to solving it on your own. Look at how much emphasis in this article is placed upon HBO getting away from rivals running their platform! Yet a short period ago they surrender in-house operations to MLB AM? Constant pivoting gets you nowhere. I see AT&T swooping in to "pick up the pieces" as they see it, and the sad conclusion I foresee is exactly what you described.

tptacek 8y ago

We're in a golden age of television in part because everyone is producing high-quality shows. For every Deadwood, there's a Justified; True Detective, a Mindhunter. HBO has never been the best place for comedy series and, good as Crashing was, it remains an also-ran there as well. HBO's quality has been pretty far off its peak for awhile. GoT is a tentpole show with a rabid audience but it's not especially good (it's no The Wire). Deadwood and the Sopranos are from a different era of TV. Veep is great, but True Detective, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Enlightened, and The Newsroom would all be in the middle of the pack at Netflix. More importantly than what Netflix itself creates is the fact that everyone else is creating great TV, and Netflix can just license it. The Americans is better than anything HBO ever produced except The Wire, and it's an FX show. So are Atlanta and Better Things, both better than any HBO comedy series other than Veep. AMC has Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, which arguably are the best thing ever done on TV. The Deuce is great, but if I have to choose between paying for one show of that caliber per month, or just getting access to stuff like Counterpart, Legion, Get Shorty, Halt and Catch Fire, and Fargo, it's pretty obvious where I'm getting my money's worth. Which is the big dilemma with HBO's previous strategy. There is too much content that clears the bar HBO set available outside of HBO for them to charge a premium, unless they can keep bottling lightning like they did with GoT, which is not at all a sure bet.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It boils down to preferences. I personally feel the quality of HBO’s shows & series is dramatically higher than even the peak quality of Netflix or Prime original offerings. They are simply nowhere close. They’re not even playing the same sport. Pretty much every Netflix darling I’ve spent time to watch (Stranger Things, House of Cards, Russian Doll, Maniac, Bird Box, Roma) has been a huge disappointment. By comparison with HBO, I only feel that way about True Detective Season 2 and Crashing (the Pete Holmes show). Other shows have variation of course and some are more interesting or less to me, but none of them have been sincerely big disappointments, while nearly every single darling that Netflix puts out is pretty crap.
wyldfire 8y ago
> True Detective, a Mindhunter. "Mindhunter" was great but it's no "True Detective" IMO.

Thriptic 8y ago

Yeah I really don't understand this move. HBO has a product that is profitable and well loved by it's users explicitly because it is not Netflix and features content that would never show up on Netflix (except maybe via FX). It makes no sense to blow that up in order to create Netflix 2. Frankly I think going after Netflix in general is a dumb move. They own that mass market content space, you're never going to displace them, Hulu already tried and failed miserably, give up. Why not amass a series of these premium brands (eg Showtime) and focus on becoming the place for awesome smart content to augment Netflix?

deckar01 8y ago

> Netflix .. has evolved into a massive mess of content, rarely of which any really captures my attention anymore. I think this really gets to the difference between the two. With Netflix I am provided a barrage of content suited to my interest at a quality that is distractingly mediocre. With HBO I constantly find myself running out of content that I think suits my taste, but when I try something out of my wheelhouse I often find the production well executed and the subject surprisingly engaging.

vlan0 8y ago

>This isn't about an outdated streaming strategy, HBO Go/Now are fine. This has been my experience for anything that isn't live. I can never successfully watch a "live" episode of Vice without the stream degrading to potato quality at various times. But within minutes of the episode completing I can view that same content without any issue. I can only speculate as to what their problems might be. But their live streaming experience is quite poor.

anth_anm 8y ago

> HBO Go/Now are fine. Not really, they are lousy apps. You can fix that without engaging in the "spew content and see waht sticks" style of netflix.

dragonwriter 8y ago
HBO Go was pretty bad when I used it; worse than HBO Now was both before and after. Not sure why it isn't just exactly HBO Now with the added cable provider verification component.

paganel 8y ago

I’d add Tom Fontana’s “Oz” [1] to the list, to this day I keep track of its excellent actors by saying “I’ve seen this guy on Oz before” whenever I see a former Oz actor in a movie or a newer series. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/

stingraycharles 8y ago

I concur. I am both a Netflix and HBO subscriber, but even though it has far less content, I watch HBO much more often. I would easily be willing to pay much more for it to survive. HBO is the rare gem in today's entertainment world that still produces high quality content, where you can rely on it to be good when it's coming from them. I hope they don't join the race and stay on their own path.

pmart123 8y ago

Simply put, AT&T will drag HBO into the dark ages.