HBO Digital Team ‘Ankles’
Three of the head honchos from HBO’s online media efforts have left the network’s New York office, including Jim Moloshok, John Penney and Carmi Zlotnik, according to Variety. It’s no Terry Semel leaving Yahoo, but it is a sign of no confidence in former CEO Chris Albrecht’s hires.
HBO has been notoriously slow on the online takeup, though it is hampered by long-term licensing contracts with existing clients like movie studios and customers like hotel chains. The network has been futilely aggressive against downloaders, while at the same time hiring digital talent and expanding promotional distribution with the HBO Labs project.
New CEO Bill Nelson has an opportunity to replace the former digital executive team with a new batch of fresh faces, or he can choose to ignore their efforts entirely. I’d suggest the former.
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Those execs were in the LA office, not at HQ. Chances are we’ll see more activity, not less, on the broadband front, though HBO doesn’t have the same pressures on them that the broadcast networks do considering that they don’t have to worry about ad spend moving online.
Zlotnik’s been there for 20 years, so the Albrecht taint doesn’t touch him HBO hasn’t even tried to do much in the digital world, and it’s not likely that more will happen now.
Having TRIED to work with the guys in the NY office of HBO, they are frozen in time, slow to move, sure that everyone is going to pirate their programs on the web and sue-happy when it comes to people posting their stuff on places like YouTube. I am not expecting a lot out of the post-Albrecht NY efforts.