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This isn't about an outdated streaming strategy, HBO Go/Now are fine.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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
I personally have not found the UX of HBO's streaming offerings (I use HBO GO, primarily through an iPad and a PS4) to be appreciably worse than Netflix's. The apps load and are straightforward to find my way around in, I can always find the content I'm looking for, I've never had any technical issues prevent me from streaming that content.
In some regards, I would even say their UX is better than Netflix's -- scrolling through a list of items in the HBO apps doesn't trigger a parade of loud auto-playing videos, and HBO doesn't visually privilege their own original content over stuff they've licensed by giving it huge icons and putting it at the top of every list.
The article mentions that HBO couldn't handle the streaming demand for Game of Thrones in 2014, which is pretty bad, but which was also five years ago. It doesn't mention them having problems like that anymore, so it seems reasonable to assume they learned something from the experience.
If anything, I would say HBO's biggest failure is in marketing/branding: naming their offering for cable subscribers "HBO GO" and the one for cord-cutters "HBO NOW" is an invitation for confusion, and the logos/icons for the apps are so similar anyone could be forgiven for downloading the wrong one. They need to distinguish these services better, and provide some incentive to use HBO Now to attract people like me who are getting HBO through their cable company to jump to having a direct relationship with them instead.
There's also the DirecTV Now app, which gets bundled with some AT&T mobile plans, and the UX there is much worse than in HBO Now. I don’t think you can make watchlists, and it won’t pick up from the same time if you get interrupted.
A couple years ago, HBO GO was horrible in FireFox, so much so that I downloaded Chrome specifically to use HBO GO. Not sure if it's still the case.
HBO is still lacking certain basic features; their dearth of different watcher profiles is appalling, especially when Netfix has had it for years. It's personally a pet peeve of mine when I share an account, the other person watches something I was in the middle of, and I lose my place. Basic UX shit like this is inexcusable.
I wonder if they've unified HBO GO/NOW. I remember reading when NOW launched that it and GO were separate Java applications maintained by separate teams.
Completely agree - HBO's app is as good as any of them.
I'll add that Netflix is the only video app I've used that mismanages the chromecast control ui. Basically every other time I cast Netflix the app loses track of the cast stream, reverts to the browsing ui or other failure mode and I can't pause the stream from my phone. No other app does this.
I subscribe to HBO Now on an Apple TV. I really wish it could remember that I have enabled closed captions (I have a hearing impairment). Netflix does not seem to have trouble with persisting settings.
I like HBO just as it is and can't fathom why anyone would claim it is in the dark ages.
"Decisions are made slowly and by consensus; longtime employees guard the network’s lucrative, award-winning status quo." -- this is said like it is a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with not being "disruptive" and being slow and steady to stay excellent.
Many businesses and consumers would be better off if there were less pressure to be #1.
Deliberation is slowly going extinct in favor of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. I see it as the "news feed"-ification of video content.
For those (like me) who are puzzled by some of the assertions made in this article -- I suspect that it's what journalists refer to as a "beat sweetener"[1].
Reporters have particular sectors, companies, etc. they're assigned to cover; these are referred to as their beat. To get stories, a journalist has to develop sources within those sectors/companies/etc. -- people "in the know" who are willing to share information with them. Developing sources is a hard thing to do, as people tend not to talk to reporters unless they've got an axe to grind, which biases their information and makes it less useful to you.
One way to get potential sources to open up to you is to butter them up in advance with some flattering coverage. Once you're fixed in their memory as the guy/gal who wrote that great story about them, they're less likely to see you as an adversary.
So it's not uncommon, when a new executive takes over somewhere, to see a glowing profile of them appear -- a profile that "explains" how all the problems the place the executive just took over at are the fault of their departed predecessor, who was an idiot whose momma dressed him funny, and how the new executive's bold, daring Vision for the Future™ will solve them all at a stroke.
I have no hard evidence whether that's the actual thought process that led to this puzzling article, of course. It just really, really reads that way.
If AT&T wants to drag anything out of the dark ages, I wish they would take a look at the DVRs they give to their customers. They are so slow and their user interface is atrocious.
When our contract is up, we are going to try YouTube TV and Hulu to see if either of those is better.
Am I going to be able to give them money in exchange for watching Game of Thrones? Or do they still expect me to mix and match a cable TV package, a "partnered" home entertainment box, and some other nonsense?
I fear HBO Now will get bundled with whatever other Time Warner channels into some Netflix-like app. You can still pay for HBO without cable, but now instead of $15/mo, it’s going to cost $30 with twice the content (that you didn’t want in the first place). And they’ll expect it to compete with Netflix. I expect for none of this to affect GoT last season, but probably by the time season 3 of Westworld rolls around.
But at least if you have ATT phone service, you’ll be able to watch it for free.
If you live in a country where they offer HBO Now, you should be able to do it today. You'll still need a box of some type to consume the content, but it looks like they're covering all of the major players[0].
Knowing they're owned by ATT, once Sonic installs my fiber I'm going to ditch Comcast and explicitly avoid spending money on any of this telco-aligned junk.
The best HBO experience is on Amazon. HBO Now is so unreliable and bad that I cancelled it and added the HBO Now channel to my Prime Subscription. Same content, but a player that actually works.
HBO Now's web player (on my Macbook Pro, anyway) would not play in HD on an external monitor no matter what I did. HDPC is working. Every other service (including Netflix) worked fine. Only HBO reverted to SD video as soon as I moved my browser window to my 4K display, no matter what browser I used. I'm sure the problem is Silverlight. But it's ridiculous that they still use that piece of garbage.
Slight tangent: Does anyone find it weird that no matter what you watch, HBO puts a 30 second preview for something else before your show. Fix that - and a skip intro button. Otherwise, keep it as is.
Needs an "Are you still watching?" prompt as well. It will play every episode of a series if you fall asleep while watching. Would cut costs for them too.
While I can appreciate "HBO Now", which is netflix-esque, I fear HBO is still too bogged by the legacy of being a premium cable channel. "HBO Go" is just that, restricted to the cable TV bundling problem. With AT&T in the mix, I can see it going to needing Cable TV or AT&T wireless internet as the requirement to be able to buy HBO. If that happens, they'll still not be as good Netflix at distribution.
Subtitle: With Richard Plepler out, new boss Robert Greenblatt will need to fix years of missteps to catch up to Netflix.
If what they are giving HBO is anything like the “AT&T Watch TV” app, that’s a pretty accurate subheading. The user experience is a solid 5 years behind Netflix and Hulu.
The current HBO Go app has a really good interface, much better than Netflix and sooo much better than Hulu's jumbled mess (on the AppleTV). I can find the shows I want to watch easily, the current shows are easy to find on the main page, the categories are clean and easy to sort through. Just the fact that you scroll down and not some infinite row like in Netflix works so much better on the TV.
By 5 years behind do you mean HBOs interface is like Netflix of 5 years ago? If so that isn’t going to take 5 years to catch up.
I’m not sure what’s so bad about it. Then again I knew exactly what I wanted to watch.
most of the large media companies need a wakeup call... why is it easier to find pirated content then finding a source willing to take your money for non-drm content...
Perhaps their streaming strategy needs to be dragged out of the dark ages, but I don't think the situation bodes well for the quality of their content. The CEO who just left was apparently beloved by creators in the industry, and the new one just wants a firehose of content like what Netflix offers. So it feels like the end of an era.
Looks like the future will be HBO trading on the brand they built over the last few decades but content-wise attempting to match Netflix. I hope I'm wrong.
[+] [-] sharkweek|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Thriptic|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/
[+] [-] btmiller|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] deckar01|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stingraycharles|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anth_anm|7 years ago|reply
Not really, they are lousy apps.
You can fix that without engaging in the "spew content and see waht sticks" style of netflix.
[+] [-] mpalmer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmart123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaosbutters|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|7 years ago|reply
In some regards, I would even say their UX is better than Netflix's -- scrolling through a list of items in the HBO apps doesn't trigger a parade of loud auto-playing videos, and HBO doesn't visually privilege their own original content over stuff they've licensed by giving it huge icons and putting it at the top of every list.
The article mentions that HBO couldn't handle the streaming demand for Game of Thrones in 2014, which is pretty bad, but which was also five years ago. It doesn't mention them having problems like that anymore, so it seems reasonable to assume they learned something from the experience.
If anything, I would say HBO's biggest failure is in marketing/branding: naming their offering for cable subscribers "HBO GO" and the one for cord-cutters "HBO NOW" is an invitation for confusion, and the logos/icons for the apps are so similar anyone could be forgiven for downloading the wrong one. They need to distinguish these services better, and provide some incentive to use HBO Now to attract people like me who are getting HBO through their cable company to jump to having a direct relationship with them instead.
[+] [-] pronoiac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|7 years ago|reply
HBO is still lacking certain basic features; their dearth of different watcher profiles is appalling, especially when Netfix has had it for years. It's personally a pet peeve of mine when I share an account, the other person watches something I was in the middle of, and I lose my place. Basic UX shit like this is inexcusable.
I wonder if they've unified HBO GO/NOW. I remember reading when NOW launched that it and GO were separate Java applications maintained by separate teams.
[+] [-] negativez|7 years ago|reply
I'll add that Netflix is the only video app I've used that mismanages the chromecast control ui. Basically every other time I cast Netflix the app loses track of the cast stream, reverts to the browsing ui or other failure mode and I can't pause the stream from my phone. No other app does this.
[+] [-] mcculley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|7 years ago|reply
"Decisions are made slowly and by consensus; longtime employees guard the network’s lucrative, award-winning status quo." -- this is said like it is a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with not being "disruptive" and being slow and steady to stay excellent.
Many businesses and consumers would be better off if there were less pressure to be #1.
[+] [-] fooey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ready2operate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btmiller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|7 years ago|reply
Reporters have particular sectors, companies, etc. they're assigned to cover; these are referred to as their beat. To get stories, a journalist has to develop sources within those sectors/companies/etc. -- people "in the know" who are willing to share information with them. Developing sources is a hard thing to do, as people tend not to talk to reporters unless they've got an axe to grind, which biases their information and makes it less useful to you.
One way to get potential sources to open up to you is to butter them up in advance with some flattering coverage. Once you're fixed in their memory as the guy/gal who wrote that great story about them, they're less likely to see you as an adversary.
So it's not uncommon, when a new executive takes over somewhere, to see a glowing profile of them appear -- a profile that "explains" how all the problems the place the executive just took over at are the fault of their departed predecessor, who was an idiot whose momma dressed him funny, and how the new executive's bold, daring Vision for the Future™ will solve them all at a stroke.
I have no hard evidence whether that's the actual thought process that led to this puzzling article, of course. It just really, really reads that way.
[1] See https://www.thenation.com/article/washingtons-beat-sweetener..., https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/04/a-beat-sweetener...
[+] [-] criddell|7 years ago|reply
When our contract is up, we are going to try YouTube TV and Hulu to see if either of those is better.
[+] [-] rwc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbreese|7 years ago|reply
But at least if you have ATT phone service, you’ll be able to watch it for free.
[+] [-] stolson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|7 years ago|reply
(By contrast, Netflix shows are not available on iTunes. I had to wait a year for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay...)
[+] [-] ascagnel_|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.hbo.com/order/hbo-now-devices
[+] [-] rconti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitrose|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|7 years ago|reply
HBO Now's web player (on my Macbook Pro, anyway) would not play in HD on an external monitor no matter what I did. HDPC is working. Every other service (including Netflix) worked fine. Only HBO reverted to SD video as soon as I moved my browser window to my 4K display, no matter what browser I used. I'm sure the problem is Silverlight. But it's ridiculous that they still use that piece of garbage.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasthomas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonseel|7 years ago|reply
If what they are giving HBO is anything like the “AT&T Watch TV” app, that’s a pretty accurate subheading. The user experience is a solid 5 years behind Netflix and Hulu.
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwilkes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrgNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickfigure|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] draw_down|7 years ago|reply
Looks like the future will be HBO trading on the brand they built over the last few decades but content-wise attempting to match Netflix. I hope I'm wrong.