Netflix vs Blockbuster - HBO Gets In The Ring | 5

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We take a step back to explore how a little company called Home Box Office went from serving B-movies to 325 homes in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania to become the juggernaut that we know as HBO. In the process, HBO, become the standard by which all other cable companies would have to measure themselves - after all, it's not TV. It's HBO.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to Business Wars ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.
0:06.0	Most viewers who flip on HBO are used to hearing this.
0:14.0	Or maybe this.
0:19.0	These shows are far from their humble beginnings.
0:22.0	If you really want to get a sense of the origins of HBO, wrap your head around this for a moment.
0:30.0	On November 8th, 1972, the town of Wilkes-Bera, Pennsylvania is digging out from Hurricane Agnes.
0:42.0	Get out now. Get out now. There's no time that this is the warning that the river is starting to come over your bike.
0:48.0	So work on the bike, child. See? The water is expected to break through.
0:55.0	Back in the summer, the storm ravaged the town with 85 mile-an-hour winds and sent the nearby Susquehanna River surging over its dikes and into people's homes.
1:05.0	Now, on this fall Wednesday, another storm is fast approaching.
1:10.0	Charles Dolelin, an entrepreneur from Cleveland, feels his gut clenched as he tracks the devastation.
1:17.0	It's not that his home is a stake. It's his dream that's in trouble.
1:22.0	Dolelin's worried that this next storm will blow down the lines to his first 325 customers.
1:29.0	See, Dolelin's got this business he's developed, a pay-TV channel. He calls it Homebox Office. Maybe you've heard of it.
1:37.0	Weeks before, Dolelin and his sales crew descended on Wilkes-Bera to pitch this new channel to people who'd been living in a disaster zone for months.
1:46.0	The roads are still underwater, and yet somehow Dolelin and his salesman convinced residents to pay $6 a month for the cable service for what they call special programming.
1:59.0	Now, upon closer inspection, what that special programming amounts to are some pretty bad movies in sports from Madison Square Garden.
2:08.0	On this November evening, the schedule for Dolelin's special channel includes a New York Rangers hockey game and a two-year-old B-movie called Sometimes a Great Notion.
2:19.0	On this night, Dolelin's channel gets overshadowed by the local TV weather report.
2:24.0	Dolelin gets in his car anyway, slogs through the storms the headquarters of the local cable company, presses a button to turn on the feed for his channel and waits.
2:35.0	The clouds roll in, the wind howls, the cable wires strang, but everything holds together.
2:45.0	Throughout the night, despite everything nature throws at him, Dolelin's cable service is working.
	...

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