george kaplan

I attended shows there annually for a decade, working for two different electronics companies. I get cold sweats just thinking about working that show.

But this will be a massive financial hit to Las Vegas. The show isn’t just the Convention Center, it is whole hotels at max capacity, catering banquets, restaurants doing a month’s worth of business in a week, cabbies and Uber drivers in constant motion—all of it canceled.

This is a financial neutron bomb for the city.

davgreg said:

So how do we know it was a success without any trusted metrics?

I know many people who qualify for the free year of Apple TV+ and almost nobody uses it.
I qualify by multiple devices and do not see much of anything worth watching.

We don’t know for sure (same problem with Netflix, which also doesn’t report viewership).

But your concept that you don’t know anyone who saw Greyhound, therefore nobody saw it, is as foolish as it sounds. There are 1.4 billion iOS devices around the world, many of which have access to Apple TV+ in the nation of the owner. If half have access to ATV+, then that is 700M devices. If 5% of those devices watched Greyhound, that would be 35M views. Given a subject matter which crosses international boundaries (war and action movies) and a global star in Hanks, interest would figure to be high.

If movie tickets ballpark for $10 each, a $200M opening is 20M tickets sold.

Even if you don’t know anyone who saw it, the numbers are quite plausible.

repressthis said:

10 square miles is actually larger than the SF peninsula, which is 7 square miles. 

Ummmm...no.  It is roughly 6 miles from Pacifica to San Bruno as the crow flies.

I hope you’re not thinking the Penninsula is only 8 miles long.

I believe that 30 years from now, business schools will teach the history of the launch of HBO Max as a cautionary tale of how not to introduce a new product into a market which already features more than one of your current products, much as the saga of “New Coke” is taught today.

AT&T appears to be singularly inept in its launches of other products and services lately (i.e., DirecTV Now, which shed some of its channels AND became more expensive at the same time, then became AT&T Now—whether the mediocre video quality and negligible reliability of DirecTV Now was fixed in the renaming to AT&T Now, I can’t say).

Subscribers who paid HBO $15/mo for Now, get MAX instead, which has much more content in addition to the same relationship to current HBO shows as Now had. But if you subscribe for HBO itself through a cable provider for that same $15/mo, you get the rebranded old Go as before for free, but no access to the Max breadth of content—that will cost *another* $15/mo, thank you.

The only advantage to having HBO subscriptions through cable providers is the “live” schedule—John Oliver appears 11pm ET on HBO, but not for hours later on Max/Now. Otherwise, AT&T has built a case to have their 3rd party subscribers drop their HBO account through Charter/Comcast/Cox/etc, and take a sub with Max instead. While that figures to enrich AT&T since no fee would be paid to the cable company for their royalty on the subscription, it also figures to erode the decades-long relationships HBO has had with these signal providers.

The whole time, AT&T did an absolutely abysmal job of explaining features/benefits to both current and prospective customers. They danced around the “how much will it cost?” question for months, and then failed to be clear on “do I get this if I subscribe to HBO already?” question. They believe they will have a massive subscriber base by the time 2024 rolls around, but they will need much more compelling original programming that than which was part of the launch.

trashman69 said:

Apple is finally realizing that content is king...

....and the 50 ft inflatable And self lubricating statue of Oprah Winfrey standing in the corner of Tim Cook’s Office just 
ain’t gonna cut it. 

At least your content is consistent with your screen name.