A starry group came together for a meeting at Courteney Cox’s Malibu beach house on Oct. 5, 2019. Had the paparazzi gotten wind, pandemonium would have surely ensued. Cox invited her five “Friends…
streaming venture that bows May 27 — came by to explain exactly what the company’s new on-demand streaming service was and how it would showcase the 236-episode library of “Friends.” They outlined their vision for a global platform to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others in TV’s new frontier of the direct-to-consumer cavalcade.Then the trio broached the idea of some form of “Friends” reunion event to propel the service.
Bringing WarnerMedia boldly into the streaming wars has been job one for Greenblatt ever since the NBC, Showtime and Fox veteran was recruited to lead WarnerMedia Entertainment and Direct to Consumer in March 2019. The timetable for HBO Max’s target spring 2020 launch date was incredibly aggressive — a challenge that Greenblatt believes helped Team Max power through its planning even as it faced a huge curveball with the pandemic lockdowns that began in mid-March.
The hope is that HBO Max is built up over the next few years to be a multipurpose platform for the global distribution of WarnerMedia content as well as an engine for bundling subscriptions to AT&T’s wireless and data services. The fear is that an underwhelming HBO Max would tarnish or, worse, be a financial strain on HBO proper. The pay TV pioneer generated operating income of $2.3 billion from revenue of $6.8 billion in 2019.
“All of a sudden all of our marketing organized around sporting events, Comic-Con — now all these events were not happening,” says Andy Forssell, a Hulu and Otter Media veteran who is executive VP and general manager of HBO Max. “Those plans were redone from the bottom up at the last minute.” WarnerMedia chief marketing officer Chris Spadaccini led the charge.
“Can the last lap of this all be done at home? Miraculously, the answer is yes,” Greenblatt says. “It’s still shocking to me that it was all still able to carry on, even the tech side of it.” Four years ago, it was clear to Stankey and outgoing AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson as they weighed the purchase of Time Warner that the pay TV foundation of the company’s television businesses was in a state of transition.
Stankey was amused by the intense focus on HBO Max’s price amid the streaming wars. “There are all kinds of opinions about price. Every member of the board of directors had an opinion about the price,” he says. But in his experience, “price is the easiest attribute to change in a product. It’s the 20-pound sledgehammer in marketing.”
All of the enthusiasm about the merger possibilities was put on ice for 20 months while AT&T battled the Justice Department’s efforts to block the acquisition. In June 2018, two days after AT&T prevailed in the antitrust trial in D.C. federal court, the telco closed the deal, although it was under orders to keep the Turner assets separate from the rest of what AT&T renamed WarnerMedia while the government pursued its appeal.
In late November 2018, around the time Stankey outlined the broad strokes of what he called “a software experience wrapped around creative excellence” at an AT&T investor day presentation, AT&T marketing executive Brad Bentley was tapped to serve as general manager of WarnerMedia direct-to-consumer. “Everyone was lending a hand because they had to and because it was exciting,” Greenblatt says. “But we knew we couldn’t move quickly if we were asking people to do two jobs. We had to fire up a network, in old-fashioned terms.”
“HBO speaks to certain audiences and demos, but there are lots of demos they don’t speak to,” says Greenblatt. “Kevin and Sarah did really good work defining what the Max originals should be. It’s younger and with a more female skew. We’re focused on filling out the kids and family audience in a big way.”
One producer who has been working with HBO Max on a project says the infrastructure for productions and talent was a little chaotic at first as the company staffed up quickly under Greenblatt. As Greenblatt oversaw HBO and Turner integration efforts, the technical work and content development for HBO Max continued apace. For many, it’s been months and months of seven-day workweeks. But there’s a strong spirit of mission and a recognition that AT&T leaders see HBO Max as the beacon of WarnerMedia’s future profits.
“We’re doing this in a historical fashion” for a Hollywood heavyweight, Goncalves says. “The ingredients have been laid out, and we have the opportunity to make a gourmet meal.”
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