HBO Will Add 50% More Originals, But Your HBO Now Subscription is Safe
Considering Netflix has pushed it to the point of debuting near of a new season or series every week, the premium providers of old seem almost deprived of new content. HBO won’t take that lying down, planning to up its original series haul by at least 50% of its current stable, but will it affect subscription fees?
Where earlier today the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet and Telecom Conference saw CBS boss Les Moonves promising renewals in their future, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes made a similarly confident claim of HBO that the network would increase its number of global original series hours by 50% to nearly 600 hours (via Variety). The lion’s share of its $2 billion content budget goes to original TV and movies, the remainder licensing new movies to air and stream.
The somewhat-struggling network also launched HBO Now as a means to attract cord-cutters, its current subscriber base somewhere around one million, but the $15 monthly price will stay intact for now. “We’re not trying to pursue the lower price strategy. If we think it would be optimized with different packaging or pricing, we can pursue that.”
It’s certainly a confident claim for HBO’s originals, given the network has struggled to launch major hits since Game of Thrones, Vinyl’s numbers continuing to decline while Westworld faces behind-the-scenes issues, amid other misfires. What could the increase in original content end up looking like?