Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, jokingly requested some credit for not canceling his appearance at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference Thursday which came at a very awkward time. It was held two days after Paramount‘s streaming chief Cindy Holland’s exit cleared the way for Bloys to take over the combined Paramount+/HBO Max streaming operation but ahead of Paramount’s acquisition of HBO parent WBD officially closing and the merged company’s leadership structure, including Bloys’ exact position and title, being announced.
That led to a series of deflected questions, including whether HBO Max and Paramount+ will be fully merged or bundled.
But Bloys did say that Paramount CEO David Ellison “is very, very excited, very respectful of what the HBO team has done — not just in my tenure, but the entire history of HBO” and that he believes Ellison will “maintain what we’ve done.”
Bloys did address in depth the ongoing TV industry contraction — which the Paramount-WBD merger will likely be contributing to — in the aftermath of the Peak TV era that was driven by the rise of streaming.
“We are an industry in disruption, we used to compete against people who were selling cable subscription or advertising, main product was video entertainment,” he said. “We are now competing against companies that are in very different spaces, have different economics. We’re also on the backside of a bubble bursting, we went from 600 shows to 400, whatever it is. If you just think about those numbers, 200 shows and the average show, depending on how big it is, is a couple of hundred good paying jobs. That’s a catastrophe. That is very hard across the board. That is what it looks like when a bubble bursts. It’s ugly.”
He did indicate that the downfall was inevitable, referencing the craze at the height of the market when over 600 scripted series were being made in one year.
“People were greenlighting shows based on an idea, it was not sustainable; you couldn’t make that many shows as an industry and monetize it properly, so it was never going to be sustainable,” Bloys said. “A bubble has some benefits on the way up in terms of people learning on shows because there’s so much work. The downside is really painful.”
It was not all bleak as Bloys had a positive outlook and said he would still recommend pursuing a career in entertainment because it’s “a lot of fun.”
“My hope is, like any industry that gets disrupted, there is mergers, there is new players coming in,” he said. “Maybe we will find some certainty, some calmness.”
English (US) ·