Time Warner CEO Talks HBO Budget Increases to Original Programming, Defends Batman v Superman
Time Warner intends on boosting HBO's programming budget to compete with the ever climbing competition coming from companies like Netflix. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes confirmed the news during an investors gathering.
“We have a pretty hefty budget, a couple of billion dollars,” he told the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. “We’re not spending our programming money on library product. We’re doing original shows…We’ve been increasing it and we’ll keep increasing it.”
Bewkes clarified that Time Warner simply controls HBO's wholesale price. “A lot of times the distributors have priced it very high in order to drive other pay TV serveisces they bundled with it,” he says. But Time Warner “always wanted to [offer] HBO in a more affordable price range, ….It’s all aimed at providing good retail offerings for consumers.”
On Warner Bros.' approach to Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, Bewkes defended the company. “We were launching new characters,” he says. “So we had triple duty to do: launching those characters and producing a good film. I don’t think we fell short by a giant amount.”
Source: Deadline
