HBO’s Flexible Gold (original) (raw)

HBO: Brand Management and Subscriber Aggregation: 1972-2007

This is a copy of my PhD thesis, completed in 2011 at the University of Exeter. It represents a new history of Home Box Office, and particularly considers the importance of analysing the early history of the company for understanding its later success as a quality programming brand. As the thesis was researched and written between 2007 and 2011, its historical scope only goes up to 2007, with some mention of later series. It doesn't cover Game of Thrones or other recent HBO series, but I'm happy that certain trends identified in the thesis are still going strong. Feel free to contact me for questions about the thesis.

This is not Marketing. This is HBO: Branding HBO with Transmedia Storytelling

This article deals with the way HBO promotes its shows today using strategies of 'transmedia storytelling' (Jenkins 2006). The US pay-per view cable channel has a history of creating a specific promotional system around its programs. Its famous slogan 'It's Not TV. It's HBO.' accompanied the introduction of narrative complexity in shows like The Sopranos (HBO/Brillstein Entertainment Partner, 1999-2007) or The Wire (HBO/Blown Deadline Productions, 2002-8) for example. Transmedia Storytelling, as theorized by Henry Jenkins, is a way to extend stories across multiple media platforms in order to create a coherent storyworld, giving information on characters or insights on the plots and the narrative universe. This article analyses how HBO is developing strategies of transmedia storytelling. I will focus on two specific television shows, True Blood (HBO/Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, 2008-) and Game of Thrones (HBO/Television 360/Grok! Television/Generator Entertainment/Bighead Littlehead, 2011-), in order to understand how HBO managed to promote these shows and expand its brand in the American and international television landscape. I use a dual methodology, first presenting an analysis of the transmedia strategies related to the universes of the shows. Then I will draw on interviews with the creators of these strategies in order to understand how they are included in the promotion of HBO.

The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand

Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2002

The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand This paper examines HBO's The Sopranos in the context of several industrial factors. I begin with the series'generic inscription. As a gangster program, The Sopranos comes to us in the form of a pedigreed pre-sold product, a television text of esteemed cinematic lineage. This leads to the examination of branding. In order to corral The Sopranos into the slogan, "It's Not TV, It's HBO," HBO seeks to differentiate its product from lowest common denominator, broadcast fare. The separation results in the construction of the "quality" brand, a problematic concept academics have linked to demographics. HBO's branding strategy has also intensified the claim of competition between pay cable and broadcast television in popular discourse. This claim is problematized by the ratings gathering methodology of A.C. Nielsen and by AOL Time Warner's tiering strategies. By examining the aforementioned strategies, I uncover the materialistrather than auteurist-foundations of The Sopranos.

Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era

Alongside computer games and video games, a more experimental ludic form emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century: alternate reality games (ARGs). This essay explores ARGs in relation to digital media and finance capital through the case study of Speculation, a game that we directed and cocreated with students at the University of Chicago and Duke University throughout 2012. From cryptographic puzzles and online simulations to live performances and geocached dead drops, Speculation incorporates a wide range of media to imagine a transmedia world based on the culture of Wall Street investment banks and the context of the 2008 global economic collapse. Because gamification (a design strategy that uses motivation-oriented game components to promote consumption, labor, and education) and convergence culture (the flow of content across multiple media platforms) are already core components of contemporary capitalism, Speculation’s ARG format offers a platform for thinking within and through our contemporary information economy. The game appropriated the strategies and logics of capital in a medium already caught up in the contradictions of neoliberalism and explored the relationship between contemporary finance and convergence culture through a process that we call “derivative worlding.” This term entangles the futures projected by financial derivatives with the derivative nature of collaborative storytelling inherent to the ARG form. Building on practice-based research methodologies, Speculation blurs conventional divisions between creators and consumers, producers and players, artists and researchers. In the process of discovering, decoding, remixing, and remaking Speculation, thousands of players transformed the game into a collaborative platform for speculating on the future of finance capital.

Symbolic Production and Value in Media Industries

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2009

This article discusses value creation within the fields of cultural production. It departs from Bourdieu’s field model, and seeks to develop it to fit unrestricted cultural production, for example television production. Bourdieu for the most part discussed the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his best known works dealt with television, one cannot say that he used the possibilities inherent in his own theory thoroughly enough to analyse this field of mass production. This article builds on recent discussions on the role of field theory in media studies, and seeks to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale or unrestricted cultural production. It is argued that the conflation of commercial value with other kinds of value is more intense in the subfield of unrestricted cultural production, as production in this part of the field needs to obey outer demand in a way that production at the pole of restricted production does not.

Television production, Funding Models and Exploitation of Content

Revista ICONO14. Revista científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías emergentes, 2016

El creciente aumento de las plataformas digitales está transformando las estrategias de financiación de los medios de comunicación para la producción y la explotación del valor económico de los contenidos creativos. En la industria de la televisión, los cambios que se han producido en las tecnologías de distribución y la aparición de servicios VOD (video bajo demanda) como Netflix están cambiando gradualmente tanto al público como el poder financiero de los radiodifusores, al tiempo que está generando oportunidades sin precedentes para los realizadores de programas. A partir de los resultados de un reciente investigación financiada por la RCUK (Research Councils UK), este artículo examina cómo estos cambios están afectando a la financiación de la producción de contenidos para televisión. En particular se centra en evaluar los cambios en las dinámicas de los mercados de derechos así como los nuevos enfoques estratégicos para la financiaciónde la producción de la televisión con el fin...

Walt’s Street and Wall Street: Theming, Theater, and Experience in Finance

Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2003

The traditional research perspective on finance asserts that the structures and institutions and the employees and customers of Wall Street are devoted to exchanging financial resources in order to maximize their wealth. We argue that the structures and institutions of Wall Street are a themed environment and a theater where employees and customers play the fantasy roles that are a part of the popular culture created by Madison Avenue and in Hollywood productions such as Wall Street and Boiler Room. Financial activity is not just about wealth maximization, but about creating a satisfying narrative experience. Theming, theater, and experience are not some sort of cultural overlay on an underlying economic reality. Without them, there is no reality.

Using Public Televisions Trillion Dollar Bet As A Primer On Financial Risk

Journal of College Teaching & Learning (TLC), 2011

In this special topics classroom discussion/ project, the financial management issues of systemic and model risks are examined, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is analyzed, and the emerging field of Behavioral Finance is introduced. This interactive approach of having students respond to a list of instructor-prepared discussion issues/questions during the showing of the video is a great break from courses that are straight-lecture in orientation. The potential to require a follow-up assignment where students act as market participants in a virtual financial market on www.pbs.org adds to the interactive nature of the project.