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“The goal is to make HBO HBO faster than we can become.”
That’s it Netflix Director Ted Sarandos in 2013, shortly before his company made the leap to the original content House of Cards. And not just the original content, bright high-budget content made by a famous director, starring a famous actor (at the time). HBO style content.
Even if you don’t follow the media business closely, you probably know what happened next: With House of Cards, Netflix proved pretty quickly that it can do programs just like things that famous pay-per-view networks do. And then Netflix started doing a lot more things, and consumers liked that too. And now Netflix is the company of others the media company wants to emulate it – and this is the main reason why every big media company is trying to decide to be bought or sold to all other large media companies.
But he didn’t have to go that route. In 2005, two years before Netflix entered the streaming business, some HBO executives were pushing companies to do the same. HBO wanted to use the Internet to sell its products directly to consumers instead of selling them to major cable TV distributors.
A year later, after conveying that idea, HBO considered another move that would rewrite media history: some of its executives wanted HBO to buy Netflix, which at the time was a $ 1 billion DVD mailing business.
Netflix is now worth $ 300 billion. And HBO, which didn’t start selling its own Netflix-like service Until 2015, not only with Netflix, it is under pressure to continue with many streaming competitors, such as Disney +, Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. Meanwhile, HBO’s main business has changed three times in the last three years.
These two stories about HBO’s undecided decisions, which I’ve never seen, appear here. Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, A new book on the oral history of journalist James Andrew Miller, which has challenged major media organizations as before ESPN and Saturday Night Live. The book is a 50-year-old story, partly a scenario about sessions that change games like HBO. Game of Thrones, and, to some extent, the history behind the HBO scene, which has a lot going for it GET-like round plots. I talked to Miller about all of this in this week’s session Recode support section, which you can listen to at the bottom of this post or on the podcast platform you want.
But while Miller’s stories are eyebrow-raising, you don’t want to give too much weight to the alternative stories they can create.
Although HBO and Time Warner, its parent companies in 2005, then decided to start selling HBO programming directly to consumers, it may not be successful. At the time, most U.S. homes did not yet have broadband Internet access. More importantly, HBO was relying on its distribution to ensure that the cable TV industry would fight hard to keep it from shifting.
And buying Netflix in 2006 didn’t guarantee that HBO would now own the Netflix company. Well, once Netflix was part of a big entertainment conglomerate, it would certainly make the different decisions it made when it came to competing with entertainment conglomerates when it was a small player.
However, the stories that Miller tells in his book are useful in reminding us of the history of the media — or the narratives we often hear about any history — just that: the narratives, which are often cleaned and simplified, according to what he tells.
In this case, HBO and Time Warner are often portrayed as Big Media Dinosaurs who are often blinded by the future. And the former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes he went out of his way on both Netflix and rise in cable cord cutting, when both were rising, helps to strengthen the argument. But what some HBO executives could at least see would happen to their industry makes things harder: should they get credit for their vision, even if they can’t act on it?
Speaking of Bewkes, who is treated fairly well in Miller’s book: For 2014, he says he also understood what Netflix and the rest of the tech business were doing to his company, even if he didn’t say it publicly: “We. or we need to buy or merge someone to get what we need to compete with the digital giants, or, failing that, sell Time Warner. … I told the council that in the long run, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and maybe Apple will empty all media companies. ”
Bewkes also discussed it combining his company with Apple, but in telling her, Apple wasn’t ready for that: “I wish we could have done that.”
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