HBO to Go … Online
Premium Network’s Broadband Service Set to Launch in Q4
By R. Thomas Umstead -- Multichannel News, 7/15/2007 6:00:00 PM MT
Beverly Hills, Calif. — TCA Photo Gallery
Beverly Hills, Calif.— No Chris Albrecht? No Tony Soprano? No problem for HBO. Just keep expanding.
Online.
The nation’s biggest premium service will begin to deliver its original series, Hollywood movies and other content to home computers. HBO will launch a broadband video service in the fourth quarter, according to industry executives who spoke with Multichannel News at the Television Critics Association press tour last week.
The service will initially launch on a test basis with one cable-system operator. Sister company Time Warner Cable is the most likely partner. It could supply Internet customers with HBO content via the high-speed Road Runner service. More rollouts with more operators are scheduled for 2008, HBO says.
Former and fabled HBO chief Albrecht, who green-lighted The Sopranos, Sex and the City and other signature series that helped add millions of subscribers in the past decade, touted the broadband service before he left the company this spring.
The network is still ironing out specifics of the offering, such as the name of its broadband service and how much to charge for HBO programming online. But the network is expected to offer as much as 400 hours of the channel’s original series, documentaries, sports programs and Hollywood movies each month, through a broadband connection.
HBO has been reluctant to offer its content through broadband services for fear of devaluing its subscription TV service, for which 28 million cable and satellite subscribers pay somewhere between $5 and $10 a month. But HBO last month offered the pilot episode of its music comedy Flight of the Conchords to online video service YouTube, drawing approximately 500,000 downloads, according to HBO co-president Richard Plepler.
Plepler told TV critics attending the Television Critics Association tour last week that overall the network is in good shape despite the recent loss of its biggest show, as well as the architect that constructed the network’s current lineup of original series.
Plepler says the network doesn’t plan to veer much from the business game plan laid down by Albrecht, the network’s former CEO whose sudden departure from the network in May left analysts and subscribers wondering what would happen to the pay service.
That includes both launching the broadband service and rolling out series. On the programming front, Plepler said the network, even after the conclusion of The Sopranos, is on an upswing that will keep the network as a leader in original content despite the loss of arguably its biggest franchise. But none of HBO’s current series — Entourage, Big Love and John From Cincinnati — have the same cultural cache and viewership numbers as The Sopranos, which ended its six-year run this past June.
“The Sopranos obviously is such a transcendent thing, such an iconic piece of work that everybody asks the question … what’s next after The Sopranos?” he said. “Truthfully, there’s nothing that will ever top The Sopranos. The question is, do we continue to put excellent programming across a wide range of genres on our network so that our subscribers feel that the have real value and that they have something that’s worth paying for? I think that you will see the best is yet to come.”
But one highly anticipated project only has a 50/50 chance of returning to the small screen. President of the programming group and West Coast operations Michael Lombardo and Plepler said there was an even chance that Deadwood would have a final sendoff as a theatrical movie. But prospects for the film are “complicated,” given Milch’s current work on HBO surfer series John From Cincinnati and the availability of the Deadwood actors.
“It’s doable … but daunting,” Lombardo added.
Deadwood Movie Not Dead Yet
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