After 28 years, HBO boss Richard Plepler is leaving the company
CNN is reporting that HBO boss Richard Plepler has announced that he is exiting the premium cabler after roughly 28 years. Not specifying a reason for his departure, Plepler made the announcement via a company-wide email, in which he said: “it is the right time for me to do so.”
“It has been the great joy of my professional life to share this ride with you over these many years. And the great honor of my professional life to be your CEO,” Plepler’s email stated. “I don’t have the words to express my gratitude for the support and talent that made our success together possible. But suffice it to say, my love for this place, and for all of you, is deeply a part of me and will last a lifetime.”
Plepler’s announcement comes on the heels of a favorable ruling in appeals court, allowing AT&T’s purchase of HBO’s parent company, WarnerMedia (formerly Time Warner), to stand. With that out of the way, John Stankey, Chief Executive of WarnerMedia, can move forward with his mission to have HBO start churning out content at a Netflix-like pace.
“We need hours a day,” Stankey said in a town hall meeting of 150 HBO employees, last year. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.”
AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion, and immediately let it be known that it would be pumping more money into the budget so that HBO could crank out more original content. If that sounds like Stankey and AT&T are trying to compete with streaming giant Netflix, the message has been received.
AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson even went so far as to try and demean Netflix. “HBO is a very, very unique asset. I think of Netflix kind of as the Walmart of [subscription video-on-demand services]. HBO is kind of the Tiffany.” Shot fired. If Stephenson wants to remain the “Tiffany” of future streaming content, then WarnerMedia is going to have to carefully pick and choose what airs through HBO.
Streaming pioneers like Netflix, Hulu, and even Amazon, can throw tons of content at the wall and hope for the best to stick. Meanwhile, HBO is known for quality and excellence, and should rightfully be credited for ushering in the Golden Age of Television with shows like Sopranos, The Wire, and Game of Thrones. This means that if WarnerMedia wants to make HBO the next big streaming giant, then it will have to take some chances.
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This brings us back to Plepler’s exit from HBO. During that aforementioned town hall meeting, Stankey and Plepler had an awkward back and forth that made it seem like Plepler wasn’t on board with pushing quantity over quality:
"Stankey: “[W]e’ve got to make money at the end of the day, right?”Plepler: “We do that.”Stankey: “Yes, you do. Just not enough.”"
Plepler further explained his standing on the matter, by saying: “I’ve said, ‘More is not better, only better is better,’ because that was the hand we had. I’ve switched that, now that you’re here, to: ‘More isn’t better, only better is better — but we need a lot more to be even better.’”
Perhaps this is why he’s leaving the company, and why Stankey is now the head of WarnerMedia. It’s clear AT&T wants to use HBO’s well-earned good name in the premium cable industry, in order to build a streaming service it hopes will be unparalleled by its competitors.
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