Few brands in TV enjoy as consistently positive a reputation as HBO. Sure, the premium cable network throws up the occasional flop like anybody else, but the channel that helped inaugurate the whole concept of \u201cthe golden age of television\u201d continues to post many of TV\u2019s most critically and commercially successful projects with notable regularity. While the functionality of many of the brand in Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s portfolio runs somewhere between \u201csemi-\u201d to \u201cdys-,\u201d HBO remains a pretty obvious outlier, and one of the big gets for whichever rival company ends up snatching up all or part of the company and ramming it down its gullet.<\/p>\n
Netflix, for its part, is swearing not to screw up this particular golden goose too badly. Executives from the streamer\u2014which currently is in pole position to buy large portions of WBD, provided Paramount doesn\u2019t sue<\/a> and complain its way into making the acquisition itself\u2014gave an interview this week where they made it clear that, regardless of what other changes Netflix makes if\/when the sale goes through, they know enough to not mess with president Casey Bloys\u2019 empire of Actually Good TV.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to keep that HBO team,\u201d Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters\u2014i.e., \u201cthe one who\u2019s not Ted Sarandos\u201d\u2014said in an interview with\u00a0Stratechery\u00a0this week<\/a>. (Peters is, per\u00a0THR<\/a>, doing a bit of a press tour at the moment, possibly in response to Wall Street making unhappy noises about the company\u2019s big acquisition plans.) \u201cThat HBO team is good at working with that talent and giving them the environment that they need to tell those amazing stories and they get to do it under a great brand that speaks to the kind of program they\u2019re trying to make, and we\u2019re going to give them a bigger audience.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s worth noting that Peters is talking here about HBO personnel, and not the brand\u2019s actual offerings\u2014and, specifically, whether HBO Max will continue to exist as a separate service, or be smooshed into the existing Netflix. (He notes that one of the reasons Netflix thinks Warner Bros. is a good fit for their company is that the much larger streamer also has much better international reach, existing in markets like India where HBO Max currently has to rely on Disney\u2019s JioStar to distribute its content.) When asked point-blank about whether HBO Max would continue to exist separately, Peters would only say, \u201cThis is the kind of thing we would want to sort out.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few brands in TV enjoy as consistently positive a reputation as HBO. Sure, the premium cable network throws…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-435215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}