The Pennsylvania Polka Festival
The first time I heard polka music was probably from John Candy et al. in Home Alone (1990).
The most recent time I heard polka music was today, on the latest episode of the “Business Wars” podcast:
Apparently, the first pay-per-view event in the U.S. aired on HBO (then fully known as Home Box Office) in 1973.
That event was The Pennsylvania Polka Festival, which was broadcast live for three hours, years before HBO entered original series programming.
Last night, I committed around the same three hours to Game of Thrones, Barry, Veep, and Last Week Tonight.
Game of Thrones, the penultimate series finale episode, was terrible.
Barry, nowhere near a sophomore slump, was above-average.
Veep, the series finale, was exceptional.
And Last Week Tonight was all right.
On a sadder HBO note than Game of Thrones’ underwhelming episode was the passing of Harold Lederman.
Harold Lederman was a ringside boxing judge who debuted with HBO in 1986 and was synonymous with almost every major fight during my life until he lost his battle with cancer on Saturday.
Recently, Hulu has seemingly been spending every single marketing dollar advertising that it has ‘live sports’:
Disney ($DIS) owns around two-thirds of Hulu and has no plans to shut down the service, which lags behind HBO and Netflix ($NFLX) in popularity, the latter of which acquired StoryBots last week:
“Netflix is further investing in its children’s programming ahead of the launch of a highly anticipated rival: Disney+. The company announced today it has acquired StoryBots — children’s media company and brand created by JibJab’s founders Gregg and Evan Spiridellis.
The streaming service isn’t disclosing the acquisition price, but CNBC says the price was ‘immaterial to Netflix,’ citing sources.
Netflix doesn’t often make acquisitions, as it prefers to spend directly on content. However, it does rarely buy content companies — as it did with its first acquisition, indie comic book maker MillarWorld in 2017.”
At worst, Hulu is a good hedge for Disney against Netflix to keep Reed Hastings honest in how he invests money in original and legacy content.
There will be very little crossover at all between Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+, but the user experience and, ideally, the data collection will all go to Disney.
One of the reasons why AT&T ($T) is primed to mess up its ownership of HBO is because an audience needs nurturing and content needs creative freedom, which far exceeds the exercise of creating an app or a website.
In 1975, before Sex in the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire, HBO Boxing broadcast the Thrilla in Manila fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to half-a-million pay-per-view buyers.
That earned trust: to use communication technology to deliver a continuous satellite signal of a live sporting event, gave HBO the respect it craved and gave cable television the early adopters that would birth a new industry.
