AT&T’s Real Challenge to HBO

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Media industry tongues are still wagging over AT&T executive John Stankey’s June 19 town hall meeting with HBO employees, in which he discussed the telco-giant’s plans for the network.

As first reported by the New York Times, which got its hands on an audio recording of the event, Stankey came off  like a bull in a china shop, seemingly admonishing HBOers they were in for a “tough year” to meet AT&T’s goal of making the boutique network “bigger and broader,” in the Times’ characterization, by cranking out subtantially more content to better compete with over-the-top services like Netflix.

“We need hours a day,” the Times quoted Stankey saying. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.”

The goal, he said, was more engagement. Read More »

The Weight Of The World

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Shares of Netflix touched $349.29 this week, raising its stock market value to $153 billion, eclipsing Disney’s $152 billion and making the streaming service, briefly, the most valuable entertainment company in the world.

Netflix’s stock has been the top performer in the S&P 500 so far this year, surging nearly 70 percent since January. But a bullish forecast put out last Friday by Bank of America analyst Nat Schindler suggested the peak is yet to come, fueling this week’s rally.

“We believe Netflix still has a considerable opportunity ahead if it can achieve reasonable penetration levels internationally,” Schindler said in a note to clients. “Netflix will face varying levels of competition, regulation and economic conditions in each individual market it participates in, but its content scale should allow it to become the dominant streaming player in virtually all markets.”

Schindler predicts that Netflix’s global subscriber base can continue to grow by 8 percent annually, reaching 360 million by 2030, as consumers in a growing number of markets get access to broadband. Netflix currently pegs its global subscriber rolls at 125 million. Read More »

Comcast And Netflix: We’re Chill

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A story appeared this week in the the music trade Digital Music News claiming that Comcast had coerced Netflix into their recently announced agreement to bundle the streaming service in with Comcast’s pay-TV offering by threatening to impose “paid prioritization” charges on Netflix for delivering its streams to Comcast broadband customers.

The story cited an anonymous source, who pointed to a paragraph in the press release announcing the deal, which reported that “Netflix-related billing will be handled directly by Comcast, giving customers one, simple monthly statement,” as evidence of Comcast’s arm-twisting. Read More »

Set-Top Rapprochement

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Back in 2012, writing for the now-defunct GigaOm, I predicted that peace would eventually breakout between pay-TV operators and over-the-top services, a process I dubbed the set-top rapprochement (I was able to find one archived example of my musings still available online).

As OTT services evolved into ever-more viable substitutes for traditional TV, pay-TV providers, I assumed, would eventually realize they were better off embracing the enemy that fighting him, lest they be displaced altogether. OTT services, I imagined, would eventually see the benefit to getting their service onto TV-input 1 in households that held onto their pay-TV service, which is to say most of them. Read More »

Mirror Mirror

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Netflix’s content chief Ted Sarandos once famously quipped that his goal was for Netflix to become HBO “faster than HBO can become us.” By that he meant, for Netflix to establish itself as a high-end global TV content brand before the reigning high-end global TV content brand, HBO, could un-tether itself from the legacy pay-TV ecosystem.

So far, Netflix is winning that race. The streaming service now reaches over 100 million subscribers worldwide, more than the entire U.S. pay-TV universe, and will spend upwards of $8 billion in 2018 producing 700 original series.

What’s more, Netflix has successfully colonized HBO’s home turf in the living room. Although today you can watch Netflix on virtually any connected device nearly anywhere in the world, the company reported this week that 70 percent of its streams are delivered to a stationary TV set, either directly via smart TV app, via streaming box, or via its growing number of integrations with traditional pay-TV platforms. Read More »