Ankler Preview: Stankey's Machine
Max Attack; Max of My Tears;
Well they went ahead and did it. The launch of HBO Max defied just about all the conventions we've accepted in the streaming era so far. The deficiencies seemed fairly obvious and glaring.
But when a company's got a new product to launch, the purple beast must be fed.
Lessons of the streaming war so far, more or less The Netflix model:
Give people a lot of new stuff.
In particular, a lot of new stuff that they will talk about a lot.
Don't stop giving it to them.
Have lots of places for them to go after they've swallowed the new stuff.
Low price-point simplicity.
Pain-free adoption.
So, I guess one out of six could be worse?
I've seen a lot of reviews of the new service oohing and ahhing at "So many hubs!" and "Well it was easy for *me* to sign up!" and "Look some Criterion movies!"
All just fine. But can we get real?
They don't have a hit. They don't have a target audience. They're not available on half the services. They have a confused overlap in terms of branding and app adoption with their existing streaming option.
As for their pricing point, the NYT explained the plan:
The phone giant hopes that HBO’s 35 million subscribers, each of whom pays $15 a month, will shift their loyalty to HBO Max, which costs the same.
To Mr. Stankey, it’ll be a gauge of brain power. “I look at it as a degree of an I.Q. test, which is: Why wouldn’t you want twice the content for the same price?” he said at an event for investors in October.
Hey dummy, yeah you, what could be clearer? Do I need you to draw you a map? Yes, we're now offering you another product with the same name, at the same price, but this one is bigger. That’s why we added the Max. So are you too stupid to take us up on it when we give you something that makes no sense for us? Huh?!
Sooooo, given all that . . . . What the hell are we talking about here?
The catalog is indeed, as is widely noted, impressive and deep.
But the "impressive catalog"—when it comes to Friends, Two and a Half Men, Harry Potter—equals a lot of things people have seen before.
Back in the dawn of streaming, when all this was new and exciting, people were still thrilled by the notion that, Hey, look at this! I can punch a button on this controller and in just eight seconds I can see season two of Hart to Hart right here on my TV!
But we're a bit past that now. If you want old stuff, you can drown in old stuff on any of the services you've already got. The point is, if your offering is "A bunch of stuff to watch," it's not like people are short on stuff to watch.
When it comes to the old movies . . . yes, that makes me happy. Having a bunch of TCM classics there makes a ton of film critics and media writers happy, but when it comes to measuring how big that audience is outside of a few hundred members of Film Twitter, two years ago when FilmStruck hosted TCM plus Criterion, they had such a massive demand that AT&T decided to shut the whole thing down because it wasn't worth paying the electric bills on it.
As for the HBO segment of it . . . . If you were interested in HBO, you not only were already likely subscribing to HBO but in all likelihood you're a HBO type who has already consumed most to all of the HBO catalog along the way. Which is why building upon HBO was always such a challenge.
As for the much-heralded interface, I've got interface fatigue at this point in the streaming wars. It looks to me like they took HBO Go and added a few things in and then said, "What if we tried this in purple?!"
Which is fine. Lots of great big rectangles to remind you they've got Friends right here, step right up. Perfectly functional but hardly the revolution once promised by this great tie-up of the data geniuses at the phone company and the Hollywood types.
So it's a new service with an unclear differentiation from the existing service, with an interface that looks like every other interface you already have (but in purple!), featuring a bunch of stuff you've watched before . . . .
If this were, say, 2016—the year AT&T first cooked up the idea to buy TimeWarner and do this whole thing—that would be huge. But this is a mature streaming war today. No one's default is: Gimme another service because I've got so much free time and nothing to watch!
How did the public react to this Game Changer:
Allow me please especially draw your attention to that subhead:
Jeffrey Katzenberg, please yield the hot seat to the CEO on your left.
Listen, the day is young. AT&T is already $150 billion in debt; in for a dime, in for a dollar. They aren't about to go out of business over this.
The Telephonies may have ignored the basic rule of entertainment—we’re in the hits business—with their launch, but they are eventually going to start putting up some of their major new shows there. If JJ or Greg Berlanti churn out two or three shows that set audiences on fire, then we live in a different world. The well-regarded Jason Kilar came on board too late to scrub the launch but presumably is working on it all.
This has been a preview of today’s edition of The Ankler, the industry’s secret newsletter. To read the rest of this special report on the launch of HBO MAX, subscribe today for just $10 a month.
This is a preview from today’s edition of The Ankler, the secret news of Hollywood. Want to see it all? Click below to subscribe. You never know who’ll be in the Hot Seat tomorrow…
If you are interested in advertising on the Ankler: write us at ads@theankler.com for rates and info.
Enjoy this issue? Why not click on the little heart below so it can surfaced to others in the Substack universe. Or better still - share it with the world!