What is this, Bizzarro-Boing?
I can’t show you the 4-year old, because most I know are eminently sensible. But I can show you their parents.
HBO, still known as premium TV, has 36 million US Subscribers out of 116 million US households with TVs. If I know my maths, that makes the 31% elitist, but probably not as wonderfully filthy as the 69%.
Compare against: “PBS stations reach more kids aged 2-5, more moms with children under 6 years old and more low-income children than any other kids TV network.”
But, that’s the old TV paradigm. What about this brave new world of streaming content? “Sesame Street shows now accessible on Amazon and Netflix will soon go away under this new agreement.”
mmm. I love the smell of paywall in the morning.
There’s other alternatives, and some are political. As Daedalus noted upthread, It’s not like conservatives haven’t been trying to kill CPB/PBS/NPR for decades. We can’t pretend that this pressure isn’t connected to the conservative push for school vouchers, which obviously diverts educational resources from public schools to private and religious schools.
Meanwhile, single-parenting is increasing, which often means things get lean for those families, Income inequality ain’t getting better anytime soon.
Come on, fUNRULY, I hear you muttering, surely this isn’t the most you can contribute to the outrage economy!
HBO CEO Richard Plepler is good buddies with Christopher Dodd. We all remember Chris Dodd of the MPAA, right? This is precisely why I used the “fast lane” analogy - we all understood what it meant in the context of net neutrality.
Why wouldn’t we want to trust our children to a guy who views his customers as addicts?
At least it’s not Fox, right?
Last summer Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, was the subject of an unsolicited $71bn takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. The word at the time was that the assets Murdoch most prized were its collection of sports rights and HBO… The Fox offer was a premium to Time Warner’s then-share price but Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, vowed that he and his team could get the company’s price to the bid level with their own initiatives.
But, sure, other than all that, this is great news.
