The “Insurance Policy” That Would Protect HBO from Becoming Netflix
Inside the house of Plepler, creatives see an “insurance policy” that will protect them from becoming Netflix
By Joe Pompeo
In summer 2016, Richard Plepler flew to Dallas to attend a business dinner with a relatively new contact of his named John Stankey. The two men could not have appeared more dissimilar. Plepler, the urbane C.E.O. of HBO, was a natural creature of Manhattan and Beverly Hills, who had helped turn the premium cable network into perhaps the most pre-eminent cultural product in American life. Stankey, on the other hand, was a career AT&T executive who had once overseen the business solutions and operations departments. He had since segued into media, however, and been placed in charge of the telecommunications giant’s freshly acquired satellite-television service, DirecTV. Stankey approached the new space steadfastly. He had invited Plepler from New York to his country club in order to discuss the details regarding an unprecedented agreement they were hammering out: AT&T and HBO, then owned by Time Warner, were on the verge of striking a first-of-its-kind deal in which the network would be included in DirecTV’s new streaming bundle, DirecTV Now.
