An Original Voice
“We didn’t get mad, we got smart,” HBO CEO Michael Fuchs said about hitting The Wall, looking back at HBO stalling in 1984 from the vantage of the early 1990s. Actually, a lot of the rank and file didn’t get mad or smart; we’d seen 125 of our friends and colleagues get shown the door when the company had suddenly flatlined after eight years of phenomenal growth, and what we got was scared.
But it’s to the credit of HBO’s execs that whatever anxieties they may have had, they showed no panic or even nervousness in public. Instead, they poured any concerns into energetically and immediately addressing the question of, “What do we do now?” The world we knew had changed and there was no going back to the Gold Rush days of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The company required a humongous...
“We didn’t get mad, we got smart,” HBO CEO Michael Fuchs said about hitting The Wall, looking back at HBO stalling in 1984 from the vantage of the early 1990s. Actually, a lot of the rank and file didn’t get mad or smart; we’d seen 125 of our friends and colleagues get shown the door when the company had suddenly flatlined after eight years of phenomenal growth, and what we got was scared.
But it’s to the credit of HBO’s execs that whatever anxieties they may have had, they showed no panic or even nervousness in public. Instead, they poured any concerns into energetically and immediately addressing the question of, “What do we do now?” The world we knew had changed and there was no going back to the Gold Rush days of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The company required a humongous...
- 10/11/2013
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
12) Into The Skies, Junior Birdmen!
Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something,
perhaps when you are least expecting it.
I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
Charles F. Kettering
Home Box Office debuted to a handful of subscribers on a single cable system in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania one November night in 1972, and then — …
And then not too much.
There’d been no media coverage at all of the HBO launch, not even from the local press. The one “celebrity” that was supposed to show — the Wilkes-Barre city manager — decided to pass on attending. Time Inc.’s president and chief executive officer, J. Richard Munro, was supposed to attend the opening ceremonies, but he got stuck in a traffic jam on the New York side of the George Washington Bridge and wound up phoning in his regrets from a White Tower burger palace.
Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something,
perhaps when you are least expecting it.
I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
Charles F. Kettering
Home Box Office debuted to a handful of subscribers on a single cable system in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania one November night in 1972, and then — …
And then not too much.
There’d been no media coverage at all of the HBO launch, not even from the local press. The one “celebrity” that was supposed to show — the Wilkes-Barre city manager — decided to pass on attending. Time Inc.’s president and chief executive officer, J. Richard Munro, was supposed to attend the opening ceremonies, but he got stuck in a traffic jam on the New York side of the George Washington Bridge and wound up phoning in his regrets from a White Tower burger palace.
- 8/18/2013
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
10) The Green Channel
Let’s say it’s the 1960s, and you live in New York City, some place in downtown Manhattan. You’re cool, you’re with it, so maybe it’s a nifty loft in the Chelsea district. That puts you maybe twenty blocks from the Empire State Building, the transmission source for all over-the-air TV signals in the city. Well, if your neat, beatnik pad happens to be in just the wrong place, with one of those famous New York City skyscrapers standing between you and the Empire State, somebody living 15 miles away in the New Jersey ‘burbs is getting better TV reception than you. While you may appreciate the poetic irony of living amidst the greatest collection of television signals in the country and not being able to get any of it, you don’t think it’s nearly as funny as your friends over in Jersey do.
Let’s say it’s the 1960s, and you live in New York City, some place in downtown Manhattan. You’re cool, you’re with it, so maybe it’s a nifty loft in the Chelsea district. That puts you maybe twenty blocks from the Empire State Building, the transmission source for all over-the-air TV signals in the city. Well, if your neat, beatnik pad happens to be in just the wrong place, with one of those famous New York City skyscrapers standing between you and the Empire State, somebody living 15 miles away in the New Jersey ‘burbs is getting better TV reception than you. While you may appreciate the poetic irony of living amidst the greatest collection of television signals in the country and not being able to get any of it, you don’t think it’s nearly as funny as your friends over in Jersey do.
- 8/11/2013
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
9) Walson’s Mountain
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge
has marked the upward surge of mankind.
From the movie, Wall Street (1987)
Up until alternate delivery systems — like home satellite dishes, home video, and, later, HBO’s online service, HBO Go — Home Box Office was synonymous with cable television. In fact, go back far enough and there was a time where, when you said “cable,” you meant “HBO,” and when you said “HBO” — … Well, you get the picture.
And that’s one of the several ironies in the birth of HBO, because cable TV was not originally developed as an alternative to broadcast television, but as an adjunct; you subscribed...
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge
has marked the upward surge of mankind.
From the movie, Wall Street (1987)
Up until alternate delivery systems — like home satellite dishes, home video, and, later, HBO’s online service, HBO Go — Home Box Office was synonymous with cable television. In fact, go back far enough and there was a time where, when you said “cable,” you meant “HBO,” and when you said “HBO” — … Well, you get the picture.
And that’s one of the several ironies in the birth of HBO, because cable TV was not originally developed as an alternative to broadcast television, but as an adjunct; you subscribed...
- 8/3/2013
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
Not only do they finally have a jury, lawyers presented opening arguments today in AMC Networks’ $2.5B breech of contract suit against Dish Network. And lawyers representing AMC seemed to draw blood by ”repeatedly highlighting Dish’s systematic, bad faith, year-long destruction of evidence during the critical stages of this dispute,” says Susquehanna Financial Group’s Thomas Claps, who’s tracking the proceedings. He says that this “will be impactful in determining the outcome of the case.” The trial will determine whether Dish had the right in 2008 to terminate its 15-year deal to air the Voom Networks suite of HD channels. The defunct channels, formerly owned by Cablevision, were packaged with AMC when the cable company spun off the network operation this year. Dish’s contract with Voom required backers to spend at least $100M a year on the channel. The big question is whether spending devoted to overhead and for overseas activities should count.
- 9/28/2012
- by DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor
- Deadline TV
Get ready to pony up if you bet that there’d be a settlement before AMC Networks’ $2.5B breech of contract suit against Dish Network goes to trial. Lawyers are scheduled to pick jurors tomorrow in a case that AMC says motivated Dish to drop the company’s channels in June. (Dish says AMC’s channels cost too much.) Beginning Thursday jurors will see a parade of media big shots explain whether Dish had a right in 2008 to terminate its 15-year deal to air the Voom Networks suite of HD channels. They were launched by Cablevision, but the Voom business entity was included with AMC last year when the cable company spun off its former networks unit. Cablevision founder Chuck Dolan is due up on Thursday followed by AMC chief Josh Sapan and, on Monday, Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan. Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen is expected to testify around October 3 when the defense presents its case.
- 9/18/2012
- by DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor
- Deadline TV
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