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Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley and Curb Your Enthusiasm aren't mentioned enough and a big reason I subscribe.

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.

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They might be why you subscribe (and I like Silicon Valley, too) but they're not why customers in general subscribe. True Blood had something like 6x as many viewers as Silicon Valley (this is what I mean when I say HBO's business isn't really "quality" so much as stickiness); for Game of Thrones, it's more like 12x.

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.

The Wire. Arguably one of the best dramas ever created. The Sopranos. Deadwood. Carnivale.

You're avoiding some incredible shows.

People arn’t going to continue subscribing to HBO because they had a bunch of shows they liked 10 years ago. They subscribe because of new things they want to watch.

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.

OITNB is a Netflix show, which makes my point for me.

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.

If you say another single bad thing about Carnivale we go to war...

It's fine. It's much better than John from Cincinnati or Luck or Vinyl was. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Boardwalk Empire.

War I say.

You're correct, I was misattributing OITNB.

Not only is OITNB on Netflix, but it has, in the manner of all Jenji Kohan efforts, turned _quite awful_.

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