Can someone explain why it’s obviously doomed?
HBO makes a few REALLY good series. That’s what they do. They are not setup to produce 10x as much content. If they do they may not have the people who can do that with reasonable quality. They’re used to polishing gems.
You wouldn’t buy Nintendo and order them to make a console more powerful than the XBox One X. That’s not what they do.
This probably won’t go well.
HBO used to be the pinnacle of stand-up shows, but Netflix has taken that torch now it seems.
For comedy series they do well though. Curb, Silicon Valley, VEEP, Last Week Tonight, Eastbound & Down, and back in the day Larry Sanders, Mr. Show, Ali G and more.
They always deliver with great shows non-comedy as well: Band of Brothers, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, Sopranos, The Night Of, GoT, Big Little Lies, True Detective and on and on, hard to find this level of quality and creator freedom that allows that. Netflix definitely giving HBO a run for their money in quality and creator freedom, hard to imagine AT&T even giving creators the level of control HBO and Netflix have.
But also, you can't look at those shows in isolation. Compare them to Netflix's properties. Stranger Things is as big a deal as literally anything HBO has launched in the last decade, including Game of Thrones (I really want to believe that HBO is kicking themselves for not buying the script for that; it was shopped to them). For any given HBO 30 minute comedy, Netflix has probably launched 3 equally credible comedies.
The very best, most important 60-minute scripted dramas in the past decade have not as a rule, with the exception of Game of Thrones, been on HBO. If AMC can do Mad Men and FX can do The Americans, there is no reason to believe that Netflix can't do equally well just by pouring investor dollars into acquiring shows. At the end of the day, that's what these businesses do: pick production companies to fund, fund them, and then distribute the results.
You're avoiding some incredible shows.
At any one time HBO has about 3 to 5 shows a year that I like. Netflix seems to have about the same ratio. Netflix’s firehose seems to ensure they have at least a few shows most people like. Without the cable TV lock-in HBO is going to have to do something to convince people to keep payng more for less.
Season 5 of The Wire was just about a decade ago, and it was abbreviated because it didn't get great ratings.
Carnivale was cancelled for low ratings after its second season. I'm not saying it's bad (it was a mess, though). I'm saying that HBO has to do more things like Carnivale, on a much faster schedule, if it's going to keep up with Netflix.
But HBO used to have buffers for this stuff: a captive audience of cross-subsidized cable subscribers that were paying for HBO as a part of their TV package, and a competitive status as basically the king of the hill for prestige scripted television. They could take flyers on John From Cincinnati and Carnivale and wait for the next tentpole --- the next Game of Thrones or Sopranos or True Blood.
But both of those buffers are going away. Cable TV packages are going the way of Blockbuster Video. If you want subscribers, you're going to have to get them to sign up, in a crowded market, and bill them directly. And HBO isn't even close to the only game in town for prestige television. Even Hulu is competitive here; arguably, The Handmaids Tale has done as well as any non-GoT property HBO has launched in the last couple years.
To me, what this suggests is that for HBO to be competitive, their model is going to have to look more like Netflix's: they're going to need to fund and develop a lot more properties, rolling the dice more often until they can find a bunch more tentpole shows. Which is all the article really says, too.
But paying $10 a month for a “throw stuff at the wall“ approach of TV? Why not just subscribe to Hulu.
Meanwhile: if "throw stuff at the wall" is Netflix's model, go look at Netflix's numbers. They're not hurting. Their model works; they stand on their own two feet. We actually don't know if HBO's model works: they're cross-subsidized not just by cable companies, but also by their corporate owners. They were one of the most important players in the old TV model. It remains to be seen how important they'll be in the new model.
I think it would be hard to argue that Netflix was less important than HBO in the modern TV marketplace.
Except Nintendo could do that and be fine. Probably not, but if the third party is strong.
This is more like telling them to start shoving out a mario game twice a year.
I believe otherwise. Most of Nintendo's marketing and appeal is based around gameplay and nostalgia; not graphical prowess.
A Nintendo more powerful than one X would cost more since Microsoft amortizes some of the cost over Live services and in-store purchases whereas Nintendo focuses on 1st party games with no recurring revenue. Price elasticity is perhaps most visible in the console arena where consumers are extremely sensitive to upfront costs.
Sure they could get all the multi-platform AAA games, but then they would just be another MS. There wouldn’t be anything to distinguish them.
Except their terrible online services.
Their games would have to get better (graphically) to fit on the console as best-of-breed, which would dramatically increase their development cost. So we wouldn’t see the wonderful variety and depth of first party releases from them anymore.
And as history has shown both Microsoft and Sony have HUGE budgets and can afford to lose a few generations to stay in the game. Nintendo can’t.
David go from special player on this side who’s doing great to a nobody. Does anyone really think a lot of parents are going to spend $600 to buy their kids the next Mario game?
It’s true that today’s Nintendo can get away with lower specs, largely due to their high reliance on first-party exclusives – both because their titles tend to use cartoony graphics which don’t benefit as much from increased processing power, and because their status as exclusives creates differentiation, a reason to buy Nintendo’s console over the others even if it doesn’t win on specs. And in exchange, Nintendo is typically able to sell their consoles at a lower price point.
But this strategy has its costs, as Nintendo learned with the Wii U. In the original Wii era, it was completely unfeasible to port titles designed for PS3 or Xbox 360 (or PC) to the Wii, because it was far too underpowered (single-core 729MHz CPU, 88MB of RAM!). But it had a large selection of third-party titles anyway, including the big brand names, because the Wii sold so many consoles that third parties were incentivized to develop games (or versions of their games) specifically for it. On the other hand, the Wii U was if anything slightly less far behind than its contemporaries in specs, but still not close enough for successful ports of AAA titles. And since it sold much less, third parties didn’t target it nearly as much as a primary platform, either. The result was a serious dearth of third party titles – which further reduced console sales, a vicious cycle.
The Switch seems to be at least somewhat of a different story. For one thing, as a portable console it’s a successor to not just the Wii U but also the 3DS – which has always been highly popular. And its sales to date have looked more like the Wii’s than the Wii U’s. It also benefits from a relative stagnation in processing capabilities of its competitors, which has given it a bit more room to catch up (even though, as a mobile Tegra based design, it’s still far behind). But it’s still going to suffer a lot from not having the usual complement of AAA games that are on every other system. For most hardcore gamers (which is not Nintendo’s core demographic but nevertheless a big one), it’s a second console, not a first.
If it were just a matter of price, I don’t think it would be all that surprising or unreasonable for Nintendo to come out with an equal-spec console next time around. Maybe not the most likely possibility, but not super unlikely either. And there would be a clear sales pitch. Your $600 figure is an exaggeration – Xbox One X launched at $500, PS4 Pro at $400; and the Switch at $300, only $100 cheaper than the latter. So it would be more like, $400 to buy a console that has the new Mario game (and Zelda and Smash Bros. and all of Nintendo’s other games)... plus CoD, whatever comes after Skyrim, and all the other cross-platform stuff that appeals to kids. Or you can pay the same price for a competitor’s console with the same cross-platform games, no Mario, and far fewer exclusives overall.
In reality, though, it’s not just about price but also portability. While it’s just a guess, I think Nintendo’s next console will be a “Switch 2”, with the same hybrid form factor, and probably a similar NVIDIA architecture to allow backwards compatibility. If so, while they might be able to narrow the gap some more, they won’t come close to getting rid of it, regardless of price point.
HBO can be a $80 billion premium product company and co-exist with Netflix, versus $150b for Netflix. If AT&T is smart at all, they'll happily keep their Ferrari instead of trying to become GM/Ford/Honda/whatever and destroying the brand in the process.
Simply put, there will only be one Netflix, if HBO goes the clone route they will die. If HBO stays HBO, Netflix can't kill them.