HOME Box Office, Indeed
All this talk of HBO Max’s bold bet, reminded me of something: the original name was of course, Home Box Office. So this is a fitting return to form, in a way! Though actually, that wasn’t even the original name. Per Wikipedia:
Codenamed “The Green Channel”, the conceptual subscription service would offer unedited theatrical movies licensed from the major Hollywood film studios and live sporting events, all presented without interruptions by advertising and sold for a flat monthly fee to prospective subscribers.
That codename eventually yielded to the “Sterling Cable Network” — after founder Charles Dolan’s Sterling Information Services. But that would become the name of the entire cable system,¹ so they used “Home Box Office” as a placeholder name for this new premium channel. And it stuck.
I know I keep linking to the Alex Sherman AT&T/WarnerMedia/HBO piece, but two more elements related to the above:
There’s even been talk internally of changing the name of HBO Max — either internationally only or globally — once it rolls out worldwide in 2021, according to three people familiar with the matter. Executives have batted around several names with “Warner” as the title brand, rather than “HBO” — which makes even more sense if the service builds brand equity around having films the day they hit theaters. A WarnerMedia spokesperson said that a name change isn’t being actively considered at this time.
I had also been thinking about the Warner name, mainly because I thought ‘HBO Max’ was going to destroy the brand equity value of HBO — long known as the home of prestige television. And despite the name, HBO content is actually just one small part of HBO Max, hence ‘Max’ I guess, but why not ‘Warner Max’ or some such? But with this massive maneuver to drop their entire theatrical slate into HBO Max, perhaps Home Box Office makes sense again. Maybe even more than ever!²
But former executives point to Stankey’s push to add advertising to HBO Max, slated for the second quarter of 2021, as potentially ruinous, according to people familiar with the plans. Would brands have been comfortable associating with “Game of Thrones” beheadings or rape scenes in “The Sopranos”? HBO never wanted to find out and risk having to compromise its content to keep advertisers happy.
“If HBO stood for anything, it was making a product for the customer, not the advertiser,” said one former HBO executive.
As should be clear, I think the move to push all Warner movies into HBO Max is gutsy and fascinating. I think the move to add advertising to HBO content is beyond stupid. Again, per above, it’s antithetical to how it was founded.
Now, this clearly isn’t your father’s HBO, but it’s perhaps now even more HBO, again in the true Home Box Office sense. Don’t ruin that with ads. Of course, the money quote in the Sherman piece doesn’t give me a lot of hope:
“It’s not as though John is unpleasant. He doesn’t throw stuff. He just knows much less about television than he thinks and won’t be debated.”
¹ It’s slightly more convoluted than that with Sterling Information Services founding ‘Manhattan Cable TV Services’ which was later renamed to ‘Sterling Manhattan Cable Television’ which then sold to Time, Inc. (their largest outside investor) and Dolan went on to turn his cable service for Long Island into Cablevision…
² Now all we need is a full slate of live sports to pull it all together… HBO seemingly ceded boxing, perhaps time to get back into the ring, as it were?
