from the everything-to-everybody dept
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.
The merger disaster was notably hard on HBO,once the pinnacle of prestige television. AT&T executives were obsessed with distancing themselves from the popular brand, and their decisions (like demanding Game Of Thrones be shot in short-form verticality so it would be easier to watch on phones) showed they really didn’t understand what made HBO popular in the first place.
So they engaged in a long series of pointless name changes, they eliminated a lot of the programming people liked, they threatened new restrictions on password sharing, they generally lowered overall quality in the mindless pursuit of scale, and they began hiking streaming video prices three times in the last three years. This, unsurprisingly, drove subscribers to the exits.
HBO Max CEO casey Bloys seems to have realized that all of that pointless deal-making by the extraction class wasn’t great for the brand or for quality television.Being everything to everyone in a bid to obtain impossible scale (by producing a lot of low quality mass market appeal bullshit) wasn’t what HBO was all about: