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As if June 2023 wasn’t already a chaotic enough month for WarnerDiscovery between the gutting of Turner Classic Movies and The Flash becoming one of the biggest box office flops in history, this conglomerate faced further blowback with the news that it was planning to sell off HBO shows to rival streamers. While certain HBO programs like The Nevers and Westworld had been leased to ad-supported platforms like Tubi, the revelation that WarnerDiscovery was gearing up to sell the rights to the Issa Rae HBO show Insecure to Netflix was a massive next step. Now an HBO production would be found on a rival ad-free platform (and presumably the ad-supported version of Netflix as well), thus shattering decades of precedence that said that HBO viewers could only watch HBO shows ad-free on this platform.
The WarnerDiscovery team has demonstrated little regard for tradition in its other sweeping moves, so it’s no surprise that the company would now see finished HBO projects as just another way to squeeze out a few extra pennies. Going this route doesn’t just upend the norms for how HBO distributes its programming, though. It’s also a signifier of the larger state of the streaming entertainment landscape. The norms of the last few years are getting increasingly torn down in favor of business practices that harken back to older ways of doing business.
HBO Has Sold Shows in Syndication Before
WarnerDiscovery is not the first operation to see dollar signs when it comes to the idea of selling reruns of HBO shows to other networks. In the mid-2000s, in a peak era for HBO’s notoriety as a brand signifying premium storytelling, the network sold off some of its most beloved shows to various cable networks for syndication, including Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos. It was a move meant to emulate how countless classic TV shows (from Seinfeld to MASH to The Golden Girls, among many others) made untold riches once their old episodes began to rerun endlessly on cable. However, those shows didn’t need to get drastically overhauled to fit within the parameters of Nick at Nite programming. Productions like The Sopranos became unintentionally comical as cable networks awkwardly censored nudity and harsh language that you could only do on HBO.
Thanks to this problem, the process of HBO selling off its show to syndication markets dropped quickly. In the 2010s, even as shows like Game of Thrones began taking off as pop culture phenomenon’s, HBO didn’t sell off its productions to other streamers and networks, save for a brief deal in 2014 where some HBO programs began showing up on Prime Video. This practice coincided with studios and companies beginning to eschew the process of selling off their wares to rival companies and platforms. Disney, for instance, promised that its movies would go to its own streaming service starting in 2019, while Netflix began loading up on homegrown movies and TV shows rather than focusing on licensing older productions. To compete in the age of Netflix and streaming, studios and streamers saw exclusivity as the name of the game and a way to give their individual brands a boost of distinctiveness in the marketplace.
This approach worked for some companies better than others, but at least for HBO, it fit right in with the idea that its productions could find no better home than HBO. Succession, Barry, Los Espookys, and so many others were the ideal fit for the kind of idiosyncratic productions that one could only find on this long-running stalwart of premium cable. Trying to translate those singular shows into the world of syndicated reruns just didn’t click, especially since getting revenue from those markets meant compromising the artistic integrity of The Sopranos. However, the age of studios and streamers only selling to themselves has come to an end.
A New Day Has Dawned for Streamers
Disney is now openly talking about selling its projects to other streamers, while Amazon has launched a distribution company dedicated to selling its original movies (like The Tomorrow War and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) into ancillary markets. Everybody is back to selling to rival companies, which would’ve been unthinkable even three years ago but used to be the norm in the world of television. It’s an especially enticing prospect in 2023 since selling reruns of Insecure to Netflix won’t require HBO to deliver edited versions of that show (Netflix is open to adult programming with nudity and harsh language). A new revenue stream has opened up that aims to improve on previous forays into syndicating HBO programming.
Still, this doesn’t mean that this potential plan is going over like gangbusters with all personnel at WarnerDiscovery. In its initial report on the news of Insecure heading to Netflix, Deadline reported that long-time brass at HBO were against this move. Exclusivity has long been a cornerstone of the HBO brand and just selling off shows to other streamers (thus letting them be seen as “Netflix programming” by the general public) feels like it goes against that principle. Plus, the streamer’s programming would now be supporting Netflix, one of the biggest players in the streaming wars. This isn’t just Warner Bros. Television developing an original TV program for Netflix, this is HBO giving away some of its unique assets to Netflix (the Max streaming platform will apparently still be able to stream Insecure even with this Netflix deal, for the record).
Above all else, the Insecure Netflix licensing deal demonstrates that long-standing rules about streamers not giving each other programming are about to come crumbling down. It also, unfortunately, reflects the reality that WarnerDiscovery executives won’t listen to people with extensive experience handling the unique artistic entities that these suits now own. When there’s easy money to be made, WarnerDiscovery brass is willing to do anything, including going down a road that led HBO to temporary ridicule in the mid-2000s. Still, there’s no turning back now, especially since this Insecure news included the nugget that other HBO shows are in talks to be added to Netflix. A new day has come for HBO programming…only time will tell if it will be a day of glorious fortune or one of endless turmoil.
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