HBO Max, the new streaming service from WarnerMedia, launches May 27. Not only will it catapult the entertainment conglomerate into its streaming future, but it will also mark the beginning of a new era for the prestige TV brand from which it takes its name: HBO.
For a long time, Netflix was not worried about its streaming rivals. Most competitors were either US-centric plays, like Hulu, or much smaller offerings, like HBO. There was enough room for everybody to win. “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO,” Netflix told investors last year.
Netflix has long had a reputation for having a lot of content on its service, often taking a quantity over quality approach. That’s in contrast to the strategy of a network like HBO, which offers a much smaller, highly curated library of content.
The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged entire industries, tanking businesses and forcing executives to completely rethink strategies.
In January 2013, when Netflix was just dipping its toes into the original content waters, Ted Sarandos, the company’s content boss, issued a pithy assessment of the battle for entertainment supremacy that was to come. “The goal,” Sarandos said, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”
Could Amazon buy the world’s largest chain of movie theaters?
Disney theme parks lost $1 billion in profits in the last financial quarter due to Covid-19—and that’s just the start of its expected losses, the company told investors today.
Cinema historians may look back at an unlikely film as a crucial turning point in the history of the industry: Trolls World Tour.
Tonight, ABC and ESPN will broadcast the first live sports event from one of the major US sports leagues since the coronavirus pandemic forced the suspension of leagues in March: the NFL Draft.
We’ve suspected the coronavirus pandemic was probably good for Netflix’s business, but now we know just how good. The answer: even better than anyone expected.
For only the second time ever, Netflix is worth more than Disney. But this time, it could stay that way for awhile.
Sports and other forms of live entertainment are free to return to Florida, so long as they stay closed to the general public.
The Disney+ streaming service has more than 50 million global subscribers five months after launching, Disney announced yesterday. It had 29 million subscribers as of early February.
The original pitch for Quibi, a new video app launching today (April 6), was that young people would pay a few bucks per month for premium original content designed to be watched on their phones in “quick bites” (hence its name) on the go. Netflix, but shorter. TikTok, but with more celebrities and better production values.
Actors, athletes, musicians, and TV personalities don’t have a whole lot to do right now. Hollywood and the sports world are shut down. While many of us can work from home, there isn’t anything that, say, a daytime television talk show host can do besides sprawl out on her very expensive couch and call her other famous friends.
I’ve never felt better about staying home and playing video games.
Having made films like Ex Machina and Annihilation and now the tech thriller TV series, Devs, Alex Garland does not have an especially optimistic vision of our future. But his concerns are much more immediate than the coming dystopias suggested by his work.
Coronavirus is putting a temporary halt to the decades-long decline in broadcast television viewership.
For perhaps the first time ever, all those fake hospitals on TV medical dramas may actually save lives instead of pretending to.
TV networks and advertisers think they can weather the coronavirus storm. But much of that hinges on the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo proceeding as scheduled. They very well may not.
A number of niche streaming services are using the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to show off their products to a population suddenly in the market for cheap, at-home entertainment options.
Movie theaters might be closed and live sports put on hold for the foreseeable future, but video-game streaming is very much still in business.
America’s oldest film studio is using the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to experiment with what many believe is the inevitable future of film distribution.
Movie ticket sales are cratering as theaters in the US and around the world close their doors or restrict capacity amid the coronavirus pandemic. The last time the US box office was this low on this particular March weekend was 1995, when, ironically, the highest-grossing movie was Outbreak, a film about the spread of a deadly virus through a California town.
