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“Our goal is to become HBO faster than HBO becomes us.”
That is Netflix executive Ted Sarandos (Ted Sarandos) in 2013, Shortly before his company jumped into original content House of Cards. More than just original content-brilliant big budget content produced by a famous director, featuring (at the time) a famous actor. HBO style content.
Even if you don’t pay close attention to the media business, you probably know what happened afterwards: House of CardsNetflix quickly proved that it can produce as good a show as the legendary pay TV network. Then Netflix started to make more things, and consumers liked it.Netflix is now a Media companies want to follow ——This is the main reason for every large media company Trying to decide Whether it needs to be bought or sold to all other large media companies.
But it does not have to do that. In 2005, two years before Netflix entered the streaming business, some HBO executives were pushing the company to do the same. They want HBO to use the Internet to sell subscription content directly to consumers, rather than wholesale their products to large cable TV distributors.
A year later, after delivering this idea, HBO considered another move that might rewrite the history of the media: some of its executives wanted HBO to acquire Netflix, which was a DVD mailing rental business worth about $1 billion at the time.
Netflix is now worth about 300 billion U.S. dollars.And HBO, it didn’t start selling its own products Netflix-like service By 2015, not only must keep up with Netflix, but also many streaming competitors such as Disney+, Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. At the same time, HBO’s parent company has undergone three changes in the past three years.
I’ve never seen two stories about HBO’s not making a decision that I’ve seen before. Both appear in Tinderbox: HBO’s relentless pursuit of new fields, A new oral history book by journalist James Andrew Miller, who has previously worked with large media organizations such as ESPN with Saturday night live. This book is a 50-year story, partly a behind-the-scenes observation of game-changing shows produced by HBO, such as game of Thrones, Part of HBO’s behind-the-scenes history, many of which Got-The plot is tortuous.I talked about all this with Miller on this week’s show Recode media The episode, you can listen to it at the bottom of this article or on the podcast platform of your choice.
But while Miller’s stories are fascinating, you don’t want to overemphasize the alternative history they can produce.
Even if HBO and its parent company Time Warner decided in 2005 to start selling HBO programs directly to consumers, it might not succeed. At the time, most American households did not have broadband Internet. More importantly, the cable television industry on which HBO relied at the time would work hard to ensure that it would not be replaced.
Buying Netflix in 2006 does not guarantee that HBO will eventually own today’s Netflix company. If anything, once Netflix becomes part of a large entertainment group, it will definitely make a different decision than a small company trying to figure out how to compete with an entertainment group.
Nonetheless, the stories Miller found in his book are useful reminders that the narratives we often hear about media history or any history are simply: the narrative is often cleaned up and simplified, depending on who is telling them.
In this case, HBO and Time Warner are often portrayed as clumsy big media dinosaurs blinded by the future.In fact, before Jeff Beeks, CEO of Time Warner Deliberately belittles Netflix and The rise of cable cutting, When both are on the rise, it helps to strengthen the argument. But the fact that at least some HBO executives can see what will happen in their industry does complicate things: even if they can’t take action, should they be praised for their insights?
Speaking of Bewkes, who was well treated in Miller’s book: He said that by 2014, he also understood what Netflix and other technology businesses did to his company, even if he didn’t say publicly: “We will or have to acquire Or merge with someone to get what we need to compete with the digital giants, or if we fail, we sell Time Warner. … I told the board that, in the long run, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon And Apple may hollow out all media companies.”
Bix even discussed Merge his company with Apple, But in his statement, Apple is not happy: “I hope we can do this.”
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