"If there was any doubt AT&T (NYSE:T) is moving forward with plans to offer an ad-supported version of HBO Max, they were wiped away earlier this week. Speaking at Citi Global TMT's virtual conference on Jan. 5, CFO John Stephens commented: "That's what AVOD is going to help us do [with HBO Max]: expand the opportunity to serve customers in a different way." He went on to say ad-supported streaming would be a chance to "amortize the investment in content over a greater customer base.""
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/10/ad-supported-hbo-max-is-a-double-edged-sword/
4 replies (most recent on top)
I"m wondering how well this will work. It's fine for reruns of Friends, but "artists" are not going to want their first run movies interrupted with commercials.
Also, what do you do with shows like Game of Thrones? Is any company going to want their commercial to run immediately after a s-x scene or a scene where someone had their c— cut off?
Stephens is retiring soon, so he can predict anything he pleases to. When said prognostications are proven wrong, he'll be long gone with his golden parachute.
Any party taking him seriously will get what they deserve in spades. Don't you be that fool
one would think that a company would make an effort to determine what potential customers actually want, and from that design a product or offer to appeal to that interest. the dullards running at&t seem to start with an idea that on paper would make the company money, and that becomes a product or offer. either they don't care what people actually want, or they have an amazing talent for convincing themselves that if they think something would be a great way to make money, the rest of the world will just naturally think it's a great thing to spend money on. in the wireless space this has not been so obvious because they've always been able to just fall back on copying whatever verizon has been doing when their own dumb ideas don't pan out. as this concept of hbo with ads suggests, this approach seems to be a lot harder in the entertainment world, where they don't have a stable source of ideas to copy and they have to rely instead on their own inbred groupthink mo–ns.
It'll do as well as ad-supported Hulu. Which is not that well.