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- [00:00]
Jim Miller
When you're the CEO of a company as big as Time Warner can, you afford even in the deep recesses of your mind to want to be liked.
- [00:07]
Jeff Buchus
Some people don't care if they're liked. And unfortunately, I do care. And it's a weakness that makes the job harder, right? Yeah, it does. And you don't do things you should. And I was conscious of that.
- [00:25]
Jim Miller
When you arrived at HBO in the late 70s, there were plenty of smart, ambitious people there and a bunch more ride through the years. How did you wind up running the entire place?
- [00:35]
Jeff Buchus
I didn't cheat anybody, and I told the truth.
- [00:38]
Jim Miller
And you never asked for a promotion, is that right?
- [00:41]
Jeff Buchus
Never a raise or a promotion. There were quite a number of times I was afraid I was gonna be promoted, and I was right. I kept telling my friend Tom Freston when I was running homebox and he had mtv. I said, look, whatever you do, things are not looking good up at corporate, at Viacom, Wartime wanted, they're going to come to us. Don't do it. And so he took it first. And then with AOL coming along and the smoking ruin up there, they said, you got to come up. Not my favorite day.
- [01:14]
Richard Plepler
I really began thinking about all the challenges and waking up in the middle of the night thinking about all the challenges. Retail price was high, the wholesale price was high. Competition was rising. You know, we had to continue to send up a lot of money, of course, to corporate, and where were the investments going to be made? So not only in keeping the halo on the brand, which was, of course, essential, we were just beginning the embryonic conversations about building Internet distribution, but they were very, very inchoate. So, you know, it happens very fast. When you get the nuclear codes, you realize that an enormous responsibility and there is no other stop.
- [02:06]
Jim Miller
That first voice you heard was Jeff Buchus, former CEO of Time Warner. The second was Richard Plepler, who left his job as HBO CEO in 2019. Welcome back to Origins. HBO Present Past and Future, a presentation of C13 originals, a Cadence 13 studio. This is episode five, titled Life at the Top. We're going to visit the big offices in this episode with both Bukes and Plepler, along with one of HBO's first CEOs, Nick Nicklaus, the man who unquestionably saved HBO. I wish you could all somehow meet Nick Nicklaus Jr. And I wish there were more like him in the world. Nicklaus was educated at Phillips Andover, Princeton and Harvard Business School. But with all due respect to that trio of pedigrees, it's Doubtful those places taught him as much as his father did. Nick's dad commanded two submarines during World War II, the Salmon and the Spikefish, and was part of the gang known as the Nimitz Boys after the great Admiral. Nick's dad instilled in his son a strong moral compass and a keen work ethic, one of numerous reasons why Nick Jr enjoyed such a spectacular rise at Time Inc. All the way to the top. But before the powers gave him his own set of keys to the kingdom that is the company, they sent him to HBO to further test the young star's operational capabilities. It was a challenge. Time Inc. Was on the verge of closing down HBO.
- [03:34]
Nick Nicklaus
It was in 1976, and my boss, Dick Monroe. Dick and I used to walk to the station at night, that is to Grand Central from Time and Life, building at high speed, a little cardio. And he broached the idea. He said, nick, I'd like you to move to HBO and take over the management. He said, things aren't going well. You know that it's losing a lot of money. The company, meaning Tom Inc. Is going to continue to finance it. So I want you to replace Levin whenever you can do it.
- [04:07]
Jim Miller
1976 was a brutal year for HBO financially. And we're talking about an extremely successful parent company in Time Inc. The that wasn't used to losing any money. How did that go down, Jim?
- [04:19]
Nick Nicklaus
Two things. One is there was no other pay television. That is a cable channel for which somebody paid money. So there was no frame of reference. Was this company doing well or poorly? Did it even would it succeed? Was the business model kind of relevant to customers, needs that sort of thing? So on the one hand, there wasn't another one to point out and say, gee, they're doing great. Maybe we should do more of what they're doing. And on the other hand, with 6 million bucks, HBO was projected to lose in 76, which was a gigantic sum of money in that magazine company. They were used to investing in startups. After all, Fortune was a startup after Time, Life Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Money and so on. But those were businesses in which they were extremely comfortable. So it was a different cat in terms of making a judgment. Put it this way. We were just. HBO was hanging on month to month as to whether the check would show up to subsidize its losses.
- [05:20]
Jim Miller
How did HBO function as a business back then?
- [05:24]
Nick Nicklaus
HBO was a wholesaler. We wholesaled in quotes our product, which was the HBO electronic fee, to cable companies. They then retailed it to their customers in their homes. So our negotiation with the cable company was one, please carry hbo, make it available to your customers, and two, please pay us a reasonable price. Our goal at all costs was to get carriage, but for price, we'd often say, whatever you'll pay us. So there was very little discipline around the fundamental blocking and tackling which any business has to do.
- [06:04]
Jim Miller
Nick, when you look back on it, what were the two or three critical moves that you made at HBO that helped the company survive and by the time you left, reach a new level?
- [06:14]
Nick Nicklaus
Okay, Jim, for me, that's pretty straightforward. Not of equal importance, but both very important. One, bringing in Austin first to run the programming side of the business and replacing the fellow who was there. And the second was getting deeply involved myself in the building of distribution arrangements. I became a salesman. You know, it was a slog.
- [06:44]
Jim Miller
You were a key architect of the Time Warner merger. I know the word culture is overused, but when Time Inc. And Warner Brothers came together, weren't you marrying two fundamentally different companies?
- [06:56]
Nick Nicklaus
I underestimated the difficulties that would come about emerging the two cultures. And this was compounded by the fact that we had on the Warner side Steve Ross, who was dying of cancer at the time of that negotiation and refused to acknowledge it to his family, to us, to anyone else. He was really a founder of that company and, and we didn't have a founder. So he had the spiritual ownership, if I may use that term, of the company and all of the key employees, every last one of the top rank he had personally hired. So it's tremendous and understandable loyalty there. But when you try to mesh that with this much more, I'm going to call it buttoned up, not better or worse timing culture of journalistic skepticism about lots of things. Eyebrows went up when people began to notice how the other half of the company lived every day. And you know, Jim, at the end of the day, you know, people who have read your book carefully will come to understand something I believe from the beginning, but I didn't live to see it while I was employed at the company. And that is that the stronger, more appropriate culture will always win in the end. Win, take over, be part of the success and drive the success of the company.
- [08:22]
Jim Miller
In 1995, after then HBO chairman Michael Fuchs was unceremoniously fired, his replacement, Jeff Fuchus, was strongly urged by Time Warner heavyweights Jerry Levin, Bob Daly and Dick Parsons to fire Fuchs right hand PR operative Richard Plepler. Actually, strongly urged may be an understatement, but. And that's because Plepler was seen as being too tied to Fuchs, fostering serious doubts about whether he could be loyal to the company in the wake of Fuchs fiery departure. But Bucus, showing some rather big balls to his bosses, refused to take Plepler out, deciding instead to make Plepler promise to dedicate his loyalty to the company, not to one of its past honchos. Plepler kept his word, left Fuchs behind, and emerged as what might be called the chief storyteller of the HBO brand, both inside and outside the company. Plepler became CEO and chairman of HBO in 2013, presiding over historic growth and launching HBO, now the company's standalone streaming service, which eventually morphed into HBO Max. I asked Pleepler about his training for the top job.
- [09:30]
Richard Plepler
Bill Nelson, my extraordinary predecessor, was so generous of spirit that when it was announced the previous September that I was going to be CEO, Bill, with unbelievable graciousness and generosity, literally moved out of his office and said to me, look, I want people to start coming to you. I want you to start thinking as the CEO, I'll be upstairs if you need me. And his office literally was empty. I sat in my old co president's office and a very interesting example of what he was trying to do and I think was really very wise of him, is he was just putting my head in a different space. Bill would always say to me, there is no other stop. You are the last stop. And he kind of wanted me to just begin to wrap my arms around that reality. And I remember Brian Roberts. The Universal movie deal was up and Brian called Bill and said, should we start talking about this renewing the Universal movie deal? And Bill said, yeah, call Plepler.
- [10:41]
Jim Miller
What is one of the most surprising elements of sitting in the big chair?
- [10:45]
Richard Plepler
Yeah, it's a good question. I think the most fundamental realization after a year sitting in that chair is all the problems are hard, right? Nothing comes into your office that is easy. The constant changing of the landscape, the velocity of change of the landscape. Gates had a famous line about the velocity of change, that things move very slowly until they change immediately. And I think you become very aware when you have that responsibility for managing that change, that nothing is easy. And there's no decision that you make that isn't going to affect something else. Everybody isn't going to be happy with every decision you make, whether it's a personnel decision, whether it's a creative decision, whether it's a business decision. And you just have to begin to reconcile all of those tensions. That's part of the job, but I loved it.
- [11:37]
Jim Miller
You made a major decision to join forces with Apple on the distribution front. Can you walk us through that, please?
- [11:44]
Richard Plepler
My pleasure. So the first thing of course, was getting Jeff's blessing. And I remember calling him and saying, listen, I think it's probably worth a conversation with these guys, what a perfect digital partner they would be. Jeff gave me his blessing to explore that possibility. And I actually, funnily enough, I didn't know Eddie then. And I called my buddy Jimmy Iovine and I said, could you just check whether he'd be interested in having a conversation? And Jimmy, who knew him very well, I'd obviously done the beats deal with him, called me back and said, call him up. And I called Eddie and said, we don't know much about technology and we'd like a partner. Would it be worth your time to come and talk about it? He said, I'll be there in a couple of days. And from the moment we sat down, I trusted him implicitly. We never really had a disagreement in the months. Neither did our teams really. Leading up to stepping on stage in Cupertino in March of 2015, they were good enough to invite me to be a part of that launch and announcing HBO Now. And that was really the beginning of digital distribution at hbo. And they delivered the goods as promised.
- [13:01]
Jim Miller
For those who may not know, this Apple deal was designed to give people who didn't have the cable bundle access to the HBO library to let them see your goods, so to speak.
- [13:10]
Richard Plepler
That's right.
- [13:11]
Jim Miller
So perhaps they would want to become subscribers.
- [13:14]
Richard Plepler
That's correct. Just creating optionality for the consumer at a time when people were making different choices about how they wanted to get content and we didn't want to be locked in only. And obviously that proved prescient on our part to cable or satellite or telco distribution. And Apple was our first foray into that. And I think it proved very successful. It opened up the digital distribution of the company and by the time I left In March of 2019, it represented over 20% of our sub revenue.
- [13:54]
Jim Miller
Decades ago, HBO had disrupted the world of television by challenging and threatening the broadcast networks with uncut movies, sexual content, and cursing all without ads. Now each HBO was being challenged and threatened by streaming services who had big budgets and direct connections to consumers, something HBO never had because of their arrangement with cable providers. I asked Plepler about his thinking at the time.
- [14:21]
Richard Plepler
Look, we were mindful of all of the transformative things that were going on in the business. I think we always tried to focus on the North Star, which was quality programming, differentiated programming. Be a part of the cultural conversation, I think be there for people who are looking for something that is out of the ordinary, that is utterly unique in the content space. And I think that was always very much part of HBO's brand differentiation and we tried to continue that and enhanced it and I think it served us very well. So obviously we were cognizant of the fact that there was all kinds of different programming showing up on Netflix. The HBO brand was always do something that other people aren't doing and do it really well. Hence John Oliver, Big Little Lies, the Night of Game of Thrones, Veep, Silicon Valley, and you know the list very well.
- [15:23]
Jim Miller
When we return, we'll sit down with Richard Plepper's boss during his halcyon days at HBO. Jeff Bukes, Time Warner CEO from 2008 to 2018 hey, I'm Ben Stiller.
- [15:42]
Richard Plepler
I'm Adam Scott and we make a.
- [15:44]
Jim Miller
TV show called Severance. On January 17th. Severance is back for season two on Apple TV plus and we can't wait for you guys to see it.
- [15:52]
Richard Plepler
And before, before the premiere, Ben and I are going to be binging season one and putting out daily recap podcasts.
- [15:59]
Jim Miller
Yep, each weekday beginning January 7th, we'll be dropping an episode featuring exclusive behind the scenes tidbits and brilliant insights from our cast and crew and us Patricia.
- [16:09]
Richard Plepler
Arquette, Britt Lauer, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, the list goes on.
- [16:13]
Jim Miller
All your favorite Lumen employees, their friends, families, enemies in your feed, every single.
- [16:19]
Richard Plepler
And here's the best part. After that, we're gonna keep going. Tune in weekly as we recap every episode of season two. The podcast drops on the same day the episode comes out.
- [16:30]
Jim Miller
It's the Severance Podcast with Ben and.
- [16:32]
Richard Plepler
Adam on Apple Podcasts, the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:44]
Jim Miller
Jeff Bukes arrived at the business side of HBO in the late 1970s, and years later Sheilan Evans would refer to him as that skinny kid from Yale in accounting. Bucus did go to Yale after graduating from Deerfield Academy, but you'd be wrong to stereotype him as an entitled Connecticut preppy from a wealthy family. Bucus grew up middle class and even after he finished Stanford Business school, found himself living in rat infested small apartments in downtown New York. Beucus became chairman of HBO in the fall of 1995 and went on to greenlight many of the most important programs in HBO history, including the Tom Hanks miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers, Sex and the City, the Sopranos, Curb youb Enthusiasm and others. Unfortunately for Bucus, he was promoted yet again in 2002, arriving at the corporate offices of Time Warner AOL just in time for all the wheels to come off that disastrous merger at HBO's parent company. Buca Speed beat back AOL's attempt to marginalize or indoctrinate him and HBO. He fought off Carl Icahn's takeover attempt, and he hit back hard at Rupert Murdoch's hostile attempt to take over Time Warner with such force that the news core stock languished in the ICU for years after. Point being, don't be fooled by Jeff Bukes sense of humor or the fact that, unlike many CEOs, he's not, sometimes, to his own peril, a narcissist. Jeff Bukes is a smiling killer of giants. During his reign, Bukes delivered record earnings to Time Warner shareholders. But as you will hear, there are a few things from his final chapter at the company that he still finds frustrating.
- [18:20]
Jeff Buchus
Netflix was the first big streaming equivalent to hbo. When you're subscribing to Netflix and you write them a check, all the money goes straight to Netflix. It's not like half of it goes to a cable company or satellite company in the middle. So that's a significant amount of money. In the case of Time Warner, it would be about 8 billion a year of subscription fees that people paid out of their homes to watch our networks that did not end up at CNN or TNT or HBO. It ended up at DirecTV or Comcast or some cable company. So that's a problem. Secondly, because we were a more traditional company, the whole media business is we had to make earnings to justify our shareholders owning the stock. So we were making about 8 billion a year in operating earnings, having to go up by almost a billion a year to keep the stock funded. And HBO was on demand by the year 2000. So the reason you could watch a show like Sopranos was and not worry if you missed last week because you were out to dinner is that you could watch it on demand. You could watch all the Sex and the Cities in a row if you wanted to. But if you were a big fan of Friends or the Office, one of your favorite shows on NBC or CBS or abc, you could not watch last week's episode. You couldn't watch three episodes at a time. You had to watch it on the schedule when it showed up on the broadcast network. And what we were trying to do in 2009, we made a deal with Comcast and essentially gave all of our networks away for free on demand, on, not just their cable set top box that goes into your home, but they were also free to them to distribute on broadband. We were trying to get the industry to virally adopt. We called it TV everywhere. But we basically thought, well, if NBC is paying a lot of money to put the Office on NBC, if you want to watch all the season of the Office, why shouldn't you watch it on NBC? Why do you have to watch it on a new thing, whether it's Netflix or Amazon? We tried to do that. We tried to get everybody, all the other networks to make that revolution, take the whole TV dial, make it on demand, put it on broadband, and basically nobody did it.
- [20:48]
Jim Miller
Why?
- [20:49]
Jeff Buchus
I think that it's that point of fragmentation, it's shortsightedness. It's expensive to not sell the rights to some guy that shows up in your parking lot. I remember I was getting these calls from the Warner Brothers part of our company, saying, hey, we've got an offer to sell the, quote, digital rights to these sitcoms and series that we're licensing for big money to the broadcast networks. We can sell them to Netflix or Amazon for some extra money. And I would ask, how much? And they would say, well, 10 cents on the dollar for what we're selling for the primetime airing on CBS or NBC. And I would say, do you think that's extra money? I mean, if you have to watch Two and a Half Men or the Big Bang Theory once a week at a scheduled time with commercials, and then you can go to Netflix and Amazon and watch 20 of them in a row with no commercials whenever you want, and they're getting it for a tenth the cost of what we're charging the main networks, the whole audience is going to move to this alternate way of looking at it, and then your revenues are going to drop to a tenth of what they used to be. The problem for legacy media is basically, it's fragmented. And if you asked Reed Hastings what his main advantage was, besides the brilliance of what they did at Netflix, was, is that he understood that the media business was going to have trouble coming together for some kind of effective solution to the replacement disruption that broadband direct delivery of video was going to bring. There's no sympathy for the CEOs, but it's pretty frustrating because you can't lie to anybody and you can't fail to tell material truths. But if you go around and say that we have a strategic, you know, we're coming into a box Canyon here because of what Netflix, Amazon Digital World is going to do to legacy media. If you go out and start pounding the table about that, you're going to cause severe dislocation for your stock, your shareholders and God knows ours had been through a lot of pain with these failed mergers of AOL and things that happened.
- [23:09]
Jim Miller
When you realized Time Warner was not going to be able to fight this war on its own, what was your course of action?
- [23:16]
Jeff Buchus
Apple came at a dinner, Tim Cook and Eddie Q. And suggested, well, we were trying to do this Apple TV thing. We've been talking around of which broadcast networks, which sports leagues would be in there. And we've thought that maybe the answer is the Turner Networks with hbo. And so we explored with them for several months in the fall of 2015 that Apple would put out a package of the Turner Networks plus HBO for like 20 bucks. Didn't end up getting across the goal line, though. They were focusing quite successfully on what they were doing with the Disney brand. Disney we didn't do, which is the other one. And Disney ended up with Fox. I think they could have ended up with us and that would have been a very good, I think, combination because.
- [24:06]
Jim Miller
They could have spun off the Turner Networks and ESPN together, right?
- [24:09]
Jeff Buchus
Yeah. And their concern. Understandable. And again, we weren't talking. I mean, I used to talk to Bob Iger regularly. We were longtime business colleagues, its competitors and allies and various things. We were co licensing together, the NBA, for example, which was a big, I don't know, $15 billion. I think we committed to that. And what they were concerned about, we all were in this business, was the basic cable channels. They didn't want more of them. They already had a pretty unique position at espn. That was their biggest basic cable channel in the bundle. They had quite a number of channels there and they didn't want the exposure to the Turner Networks.
- [25:00]
Jim Miller
No disrespect to Disney, but I would have taken Disney and Time Warner over Disney and Fox. That matchup of franchises alone would have been unparalleled, don't you think?
- [25:10]
Jeff Buchus
The strength of that would have been you'd had HBO plus the entire Disney IP family, kids, library and film operation, plus Harry Potter plus DC plus Marvel plus Looney Tunes plus Cartoon Network on a global basis with HBO as the platform.
- [25:33]
Jim Miller
Obviously, you couldn't say publicly how disappointed you were that a Disney deal didn't work out. And I'm sure you would have liked to have been more vocal, if you could, about the motivations behind the AT&T sale.
- [25:44]
Jeff Buchus
And here's another thing that annoys me about it, to have it said, which I haven't been in the press countering this, that we didn't want to change anything. You know, they had to go do whatever they did here because we were all stuck with our heads in the sand. Not making changes is absolutely not true. It's reductive. It is a false oversimplification. We were pivoting quite nicely at hbo. Did we have to speed it up? Yes. To digital. Did we have to go into more conflict with the cable distribution channels we were using? Yes, we did. That's why we wanted a big company like AT&T to absorb the blows that would come from it. And then our shareholders would know that we were going to see it through to the end, which we couldn't convince anybody of when we were just Time Warner. We weren't big enough. That was what should have happened and they didn't do it. And it's a huge disappointment. I think it was malpractice. I think it was stupid. It's unfair to our people. And it's self harm for the ATT Time Warner Corporation, which ended them up where they are now in having to reverse course and exit.
- [26:52]
Jim Miller
If you knew then what you know now.
- [26:55]
Jeff Buchus
Boy, that's a good question. You mean, would we not make the sale, what we would then do?
- [26:59]
Jim Miller
You're in a tough situation.
- [27:00]
Jeff Buchus
No, no. We'd have to do something. So then what we'd have had to do with no overall corporate solution is we'd have to spin turner, let it find a solution with some other set of basic cable channels. Warner, HBO would be separate, independent. Then you just watch your watch until somebody shows up with an offer that nobody can refuse for that.
- [27:23]
Jim Miller
Of course, all that is built on the premise that if you knew then what you know now, you would have said no then to AT and T.
- [27:32]
Jeff Buchus
You know, you've hit me. It's a surprise. I have thought about it. I think maybe yes, in order to find a better home. I don't know how that would have fared the shareholders. They might have ended up behind versus what we got. But it might have been better for the ongoing capabilities. And the people at HBO and Warner's? Not necessarily.
- [27:56]
Jim Miller
And the brand.
- [27:56]
Jeff Buchus
And the brand. I had two groups of people I'm trying to protect. One is the shareholders got screwed every 10 years at time Warner. Let's not do it again. And the other is our employees who got screwed every time we did a bad deal. And I didn't want the employees to suffer. And I was trying to find a home for them that would save and let them go on unmolested. And the saddest thing about this ATT deal, which did not have to go this way, is that it disrupted the operations, programming, and otherwise inside Turner and HBO in a way that was not optimal and not necessary.
- [28:35]
Jim Miller
When we come back, Richard Plepler will explain his two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue theory, and Bucus and Plepler will look into HBO's. Richard, was it difficult to run HBO when so much change was being contemplated at the corporate level?
- [28:58]
Richard Plepler
Well, remember, the opportunity to say yes to what we as a team wanted to say yes to was just up against the reality of being a division of a parent company that had its own demands and requirements about our earnings and what we needed to deliver. So that was just an honorable tension between, as I would always say, you know, what end of Pennsylvania Avenue are you sitting on? Right. Jeff's end of Pennsylvania Avenue. He has earnings that he has to deliver to the street. He has a multiple, which he has to be able to justify. He's thinking about different permutations of the company. If you're on my end of Pennsylvania Avenue, you know, look, you'd like to be able to charge a little bit less to your distribution partners because you know that that's going to result in more subscribers and you'd like all the resources for marketing that you could possibly get, both for the shows themselves and for the brand. We didn't have that much money relative to what Netflix was spending and what others were spending. We had very little money. So we had to figure out creative ways to break through the noise of popular culture through free media, through events, through social, eventually. And I think our guys did a very brilliant job of that. So we'd like more marketing money. We would have liked more programming money. And we would have liked, of course, the ability to adjust the price. Because the number one complaint of our partners, our distributors, was not that HBO isn't great, but it's expensive, right? So if we could have taken the price down a little bit, had more money for marketing, more money, that would have been terrific. But perfect wasn't on the menu, Right? We had to deliver what we had to deliver, and that's just running a business.
- [30:53]
Jim Miller
More than anyone, you were responsible for Casey Bloys being in the job he has today. You protected him as a junior executive and promoted him several times. What is it about Casey Bloys that drove you to make those decisions?
- [31:06]
Richard Plepler
Well, listen, it didn't require much Perspicacity on my part to see how talented and gifted Casey was and is. He had great taste. That was obvious to me. He was terrific with talent. That was obvious to me. He has the right kind of ego, an ego which is in the service of the work. He takes the work seriously. He doesn't take himself seriously. I think people feel that he's great to work with. His team loves him. They still love him, as they should. And the talent loves him, as they should. You know, I don't have enough wonderful things to say about him. I think he's a big talent and he's more than proven over and over again, not only his judgment, but his strategic chops. I haven't been there in three years, but my guess is there's not an unlimited amount of money. And so how you make those bets to get a white lotus, to get a mayor of East Town, that requires real judgment and real strategic thinking. So he's just first rate in every way. And he does it with a lot of elan. He does it with a lot of grace. He doesn't need to stand on stage, you know, looking for approbation. It's just the work speaks for itself. And I think his tenure speaks for itself.
- [32:25]
Jim Miller
As we sit here in March of 2022, are you optimistic about HBO's future? Are you concerned? Is HBO's future inextricably tied to how much financial support it gets from David Zaslav and the new team coming in?
- [32:38]
Richard Plepler
I think HBO is going to do great and continue to do great. I think they are doing great. David's very, very, very able. Nobody will outwork him. He's a lover of the business. He's a lover of the work. I remember having many lunches with him when I was running the company, and he would talk about the programming as knowledgeably and passionately as if he were inside the company. He was a fan. He was watching stuff. And I think that the team, the creative team is just superb. And they're going to continue to do breakthrough programming. They're going to continue to do good work. But, Jim, I've said this to you before. I said it when I was running the company. I say it today. This is not a zero sum game. There's more money. It's actually much harder right now than it was, paradoxically, because there's so much more money being thrown at content. But it is much harder now than when I was running the company because you have hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at six or so companies making an enormous amount of content. And so to be seen to be recognized and acknowledged by popular culture is harder and harder to do. So what does that redound to? It redounds to brand. It redounds to talent wanting to be a part of the company. Believe me, I know what it felt like to do it in the years that I did it. It's even harder to do today. But I am optimistic about HBO's future. I think they're doing really well and they're making great stuff and they'll continue to do that because they've got a great team.
- [34:12]
Jim Miller
Do you think five years from now we're going to have as many major players in the content world as we do now?
- [34:17]
Richard Plepler
No, no, I think there'll be, as you know and as I know, more consolidation. And I think the great John Malone's wise metaphor about free radicals is a good one. I think that those free radicals will be swept up and there'll be a few. And then the question is, how many services does the average American home want? My brother in law was here the other day and he was saying he switches in and out. The last research that I saw, people are voting with their feet all the time. They're in, they're out, they're waiting for something. They come back in and out was much harder to do when your subscriptions were locked in by cable or satellite or telco. Subscription is much easier to do in the streaming world. So again, degree of difficulty is high.
- [35:03]
Jim Miller
Jeff, do you think that HBO has another era in it? It always pivoted, it always managed to succeed. But this is the deep end of the pool. Now. This competition, these stakes and these restrictions are very formidable.
- [35:17]
Jeff Buchus
Yeah, I agree with you that it's the biggest challenge we've ever had. I do think, yes, they can prevail. That does not mean to say that they can get even where they're ahead of Netflix, Amazon and possibly even Disney. I do think HBO Max could take and sustain the fourth position and maybe over time get back to third or second. Casey Bluis, who's now running the programming, is a brilliant executive. I think he knows what to do. The challenge though, for whether it's David at Discovery or Casey at HBO Max, is simply whether they have the corporate resources to be in this fight with such huge competitors. That's the challenge.
- [36:11]
Jim Miller
Thank you for listening to Origins, a presentation of C13 originals at Cadence 13 Studio. This podcast is executive produced by myself and Chris Corker, Chief content officer and founding partner of C13. It's produced and edited by my brother in arms, Chris Basel, who always delivers. Many thanks extend to Terence Malangone who provides much appreciated production assistance in the trenches and our terrific cadence 13 gang production coordination by Kelly Rafferty, marketing PR and graphic design from Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Hilary Schuff and Karl Kurt Courtney. Cadence 13 is an odyssey company. Our thanks once again for joining us on this HBO chapter of Origins. If you visit our Origins feed, you can listen to previous chapters that include the 20th anniversary of almost Famous, Sex and the City, Curb youb Enthusiasm, Saturday Night Live, the Alabama crimson tide, and five different ESPN episodes, pardon the interruption, sports center, college games day 30 for 30 and social media. We'll be back with several more chapters this year, and as always, if you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to reach out to me@jamesamesandrewmiller.com for now, please stay healthy. Cheers Jim.
- [37:43]
Richard Plepler
The new year is here and it's the perfect time to kickstart your meditation practice. The Morning Meditation for Women podcast has short, daily guided meditations that will help you start your day with intention and focus and make it so easy to get you into the habit. Imagine feeling so much more calm and confident in 2025. Follow and listen to Morning Meditation for Women on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.