HBO has many admirers in the UK because of the quality of its drama, but is usually dismissed as a model because of the much greater size of the US population.
Some facts: HBO gets about $10 a month from 29m US homes, mainly better-off ( median income $63,000 in 2007). Thus around a quarter of the US homes pay a premium for HBO on top of cable fees and basic packages. For this HBO provides about 140 hours of ad-free new content each year. (Subscribers do not just sign up for brilliant series like The Wire or Curb Your Enthusiasm but for films and boxing as well.) Its subscribers value HBO highly and feel a sense of ownership. (In our terms, HBO is a specialist, premium-subscription content provider, carried on nearly all US multichannel platforms.)
In the UK subscription basically means Sky or Virgin. Most Sky subscribers in the UK pay about £40 a month for various bundles -- so Sky as a platform is broadly in line with US cable systems like Comcast which includes HBO as an option. OK, so the UK is probably not large enough to fund a specialist service of high-end drama and comedy funded by subs from better-off homes like HBO. However, though the £12 per month License Fee paid by over 25m UK households has no equivalent in the US, it looks like very good value and delivers a wide range of material -- including some HBO-type fare like Outnumbered or The Thick of It. Does the UK offer the opportunity for new variants of the pay model -- perhaps big advertiser- supported channels going behind a "lite" pay wall? And may we one day find a way to tap the wishes of a minority who want more of what they value and are ready to pay for it, which is what drives HBO -- after all, innovation is so often led by enthusiasts or "early adopters"?
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I'm very dubious that the whole per-channel subscription model of television has much longer to live at all. That and this idea of TV distribution networks being limited by national borders.
ReplyDeleteHBO has come out with some fantastic stuff, and a lot of it is never licensed in this country. BitTorrent saves the day. I watched The Wire, six months before Season One was licensed in this country. I would gladly have sat through adverts every 15 minutes, or paid a quid for each episode.
I see the internet utterly disintermediating content distribution. Studios select a script and film a pilot and -- rather than sending it to TV stations -- it's distributed on youtube with adverts, or advertless on iTunes.
Now, where the TV network would stump the cash for filming the series, either investors stump based on ITMS sales or youtube views; or viewers can commit to purchasing an entire series if it is filmed in the end.
The technology end-point you propose is very persuasive: cross-border marketing and cheap and efficient universal distribution must be the way ahead. Of course, internet distribution (e.g. YouTube or iTunes) is still not a mainstream consumer option for many -- too complicated, inadequate quality, etc. -- where high-quality video content is concerned. In practice everyone in the enertainment business is trying to figure out the phasing...wondering what parts of the "old" order will survive, -- the theatrical launch still provides essential marketing for a film -- , and trying to avoid a period of chaos if or when the current content funding models collapse.
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