HBO

Home Box chain HBO is an American pay television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc.; itself a item owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.

Programming submission on a network consists primarily of theatrically released motion pictures together with original television programs as alive as made-for-cable movies, documentaries, occasional comedy as well as concert specials, and periodic interstitial programs consisting of short films and making-of documentaries.

HBO is the oldest and longest continuously operating subscription television improvement in the United States. HBO pioneered modern pay television upon its launch on November 8, 1972: it was the number one television usefulness to be directly remanded and distributed to individual cable television systems, and was the conceptual blueprint for the "premium channel," pay television services sold to subscribers for an additional monthly fee that make not accept traditional advertising and submission their programming without editing for objectionable material. It eventually became the first television channel in the world to begin transmitting via satellite—expanding the growing regional pay service, originally usable to cable and multipoint distribution service MDS providers in the northern Mid-Atlantic and southern New England, into a national television network—in September 1975, and, alongside sister channel Cinemax, was among the first two American pay television services to advertisement complimentary multiplexed channels in August 1991.

The network operates seven 24-hour, linear multiplex channels as alive as a traditional subscription video on demand platform HBO On Demand and its content is the centerpiece of HBO Max, an expanded streaming platform operated separately from but sharing management with home Box Office, Inc., which also includes original programming produced exclusively for the service and content from other WarnerMedia properties. The HBO linear channels are non presently accessible on HBO Max, but conduct to be usable to existing subscribers of traditional and virtual pay television providers including Hulu, which also sells its HBO add-on independently of the streaming service's constitute TV tier and as equal streams to legacy Roku customers through existing streaming partnerships with those companies.

The overall home Box group business unit—based at WarnerMedia's corporate headquarters inside 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan's West Side district—is one of Warner Bros. Discovery's near profitable assets, generating operating income of near $2 billion regarded and identified separately. year as of 2017.

History

Cable television executive Manhattan Island causing impairment of television signals, the agency had laid cable positioning beneath the streets of and into buildings throughout Manhattan.

With external expenses resulting in consistent financial losses, in the summer of 1971, while on a bracket vacation to France aboard the Codenamed "The Green Channel", the conceptual subscription service would offer unedited theatrical movies licensed from the major Hollywood film studios and live sporting events, any presented without interruptions by advertising and sold for a flat monthly fee to prospective subscribers. Dolan wanted to offset the service's start-up costs by having Sterling enter into carriage agreements with other cable television providers to transmit and sell the service to their customers, and throw revenue from fees charged to subscribers who added the channel onto their existing cable service which then consisted exclusively of local and imported broadcast stations. Dolan later presented his idea to management at Time-Life, who, despite the potential benefit to the company's cable assets, were initially hesitant to consider the "Green Channel" proposal. Attempts to launch pay television services, dating back as far as 1951, had professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors minimal success because of campaigns backed by movie theater chains and commercial broadcasters to convince television viewers that pay television would threaten the viability of the movie industry and free-to-air television access; limited user interest; and FCC restrictions on the breed of programming offered to subscription services. However, Dolan managed to persuade Time-Life to help him in backing the project. On September 10, 1971, the FCC gave preemptive authorization to Time-Life and Sterling Manhattan Cable to begin a pay television operation. On November 2, 1971, Time Inc.'s board of directors approved the "Green Channel" proposal, agreeing to manage Dolan a $150,000 coding grant for the project.

Time-Life and Sterling Communications soon proposed for the "Sterling Cable Network" to be the name of the new service. Discussions to conform the service's name took place during a later meeting of Dolan and the executive staff he hired to support in developing the project, who ultimately settled on calling it "Home Box Office", which was meant toto potential customers that the service would be their "ticket" to movies and events that they could see in their own home. The moniker was described as a placeholder name to meet deadlines to publish a memorandum and research brochures about the new service; management intended to come up with a permanent name as development continued; however, the "Home Box Office" name stuck.

Multiple obstacles had to be overcome to get the service on the air. Because of a pay-television franchise agreement provision by the New York City Council that prohibited Sterling Manhattan and other local cable franchises from telecasting theatrical feature films directly to their customers, Dolan chose to scout another city with two competitive cable franchisees to serve as Home Box Office's inaugural distributor. Originally, he settled on the Teleservice Cable now television blackout radius, which the team enforced to protect revenues generated from ticket sales. Since HBO was planning to carry National Basketball Association NBA regular-season and playoff games, all 76ers games that the service aired would have been prohibited from being shown within Allentown. Time-Life subsequently agreed to an offer by Teleservice president John Walson to launch HBO on the company's Wilkes-Barre system located external of the 76ers' blackout radius, fed from an AT&T microwave joining at the Pan Am Building in New York. HBO, which elected to forego pursuing telecast rights to 76ers basketball games, wouldon to Teleservice's Allentown system as itscable affiliate in February 1973.

Home Box Office launched at 7:30 p.m. double feature which, under FCC anti-siphoning rules then supports to protect programming render for broadcast stations until they were struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in March 1977, tended to be releases dating no more than two years from their initial theatrical exhibition, or a combination of either a sports or special event and a theatrical movie, often bridged by a short film or other interstitial content.

HBO's launch came with very little fanfare in the press; other than print advertisements promoting the launch in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, the service's debut lacked coverage from local or national media outlets. The city administrator of Wilkes-Barre declined an offer to attend the launch ceremony, while Time Inc. vice president J. Richard Munro became stranded in traffic on the George Washington Bridge en route from Manhattan, and was not experienced such as lawyers and surveyors toin Wilkes-Barre for the ceremony. Further complicating preparations for the inaugural telecast, in Midtown Manhattan, strong winds—produced by a storm system that brought areas of freezing rain over portions of the New York City area that evening—toppled the Pan Am Building reception dish being used to relay the Home Box Officeto microwave towers linked to Teleservice's Wilkes-Barre headend. Time-Life representatives sent a technician to repair the antenna in time for the service's launch, completing maintenance about 25 minutes previously the initial telecast. By the end of 1972, the service was received by 1,395 subscribers, all from Teleservice customers in Wilkes-Barre; this number increased to around 4,000 subscribers by February 1973, across Teleservice's Wilkes-Barre, Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, systems.

On February 28, 1973, Sterling Communications announced it would spin-out HBO and associated assets into a new subsidiary, Home Box Office, Inc. Time Inc.'s controlling shares in HBO expanded to around 75% equity and Time dedicated a $3-million direct investment in the subsidiary. Sterling also purchased additional stock and a converted $6.4-million note obligation to raise Time's equity in the company to 66.4% in exchange for the added HBO stake. Dolan—who reportedly had major disagreements with Time-Life management on policy issues, claims which the company denied—subsequently resigned as chief executive officer of Sterling Communications and HBO, accepting a $675,000 buyout of a an necessary or characteristic component of something abstract. of his stock while remaining on the board of directors at both companies in the interim; Dolan used portions of the sale's proceeds to repurchase Time's share of the Sterling Nassau systems and to start the Long Island Cable Community Development Co. the forerunner to Cablevision Systems Corporation, which would be combined with the Sterling/Cablevision systems on Long Island as the system's parent company. Gerald M. Levin—an entertainment industry attorney previously with New York City-based law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, who had been with Home Box Office since it began operations as its director of finance, and later as its vice president and director of programming—replaced Dolan as the company's president and CEO.

Following an aborted try by Warner Communications to purchase Sterling, on July 19, 1973, Time Inc. reached an agreement to purchase and assume debt of Sterling Communications for $6.2 million. Time completed its acquisition of Sterling on September 18, 1973, formally dissolving the Sterling holding company and transferring Home Box Office and Sterling Manhattan Cable to its Time-Life Broadcast division. The "Sterling" name was subsequently removed from the Manhattan system, which was renamed "Manhattan Cable Television" in August 1974. As the acquisition was being completed, HBO was struggling to grow: by October, the service had around 8,000 subscribers across 13 cable systems in Pennsylvania and southern New York that cumulatively served 110,095 subscribers, and it was suffering from a significant New Jersey. After receiving permission by the New York City Board of Estimate to offer HBO on a two-year experimental basis on a leased channel, in exchange for a 5% fee paid to the city from the system's subscription revenue share, Manhattan Cable began offering HBO to its subscribers in Midtown and Lower Manhattan on October 18, 1974, giving the service much needed distribution in America's largest city. Manhattan Cable turned its first quarterly profits in the first half of 1976, generated in part from, among other factors, revenue from HBO subscriptions.

As Home Box Office's distribution expanded throughout the northern Delaware, and Maryland —had reached around 40,000 subscribers. By April 1975, the service had around 100,000 subscribers within its four-state service area.

On April 11, 1975, Levin and Time-Life unveiled plans to begin distributing the HBOvia geostationary RCA Americom Communications to lease a transponder on the then-under construction Satcom I—which was expected to be launched at the end of 1975—for a five-year term. In addition, cable television equipment manufacturer Scientific Atlanta—per a proposal by company president Sid Topol—agreed to established earth-based satellite relay stations to beam the signal to and from HBO's Manhattan headquarters and client cable systems. HBO also signed an agreement to distribute the satellite feed on eight UA-Columbia Cablevision systems in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Arkansas and Washington State, and have earth station receivers built at their headends to intercept and relay the signal. Time/HBO reached agreements with various cable system operators—including MSOs like American Television and Communications Corporation, Comcast, Cox Cable, Jones Intercable, Heritage Communications and TelePrompTer Cable—to redistribute the satellite feed.

On September 30, 1975, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Home Box Office became the first television network to continuously deliver its signal via satellite when it transmitted the "Cubao, Philippines. Subscribers of UA-Columbia's heavyweight championship technical knockout. HBO temporarily fed its domestic Eastern and Pacific feeds to Pacific Time Zones, allowing the same entry that are first broadcast in the eastern half of the United States to air at accordant times in the western factor of the country. Within the month following the satellite launch, preliminary estimates showed that around 8,250 of approximately 25,630 subscribers between the three charter systems had signed up for receive HBO, increasing to 58,000 customers or approximately 32% of their combined penetration among six of the eleven cable systems that added HBO—in Jackson, Mississippi; Fort Pierce and Vero Beach, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Fort Smith, Arkansas; and Laredo, Texas, association 230,000 subscribers in the Northeastern U.S.—by December 1975.

HBO estimated that eleven cable systems received its signal via satellite by the end of 1975. HBO achieved coast-to-coast distribution in December 1975, when TelePrompTer added the network to its CBN Satellite Service and later to become the present-day Freeform, started by Pat Robertson as the first satellite-delivered religious network in April 1977. By April 1976, Home Box Office reached 386,000 subscribers 306,000 through its terrestrial microwave-landline network, 75,000 through satellite distribution, and 5,000 through MDS-served apartment complexes, increasing to 500,000 subscribers by August 1976 including 180,000 added through the July 27 closure of its purchase of pay-television programming services company Telemation script Services, which Time/HBO acquired to provide content mediation with script distributors and, with initial intent, to ownership Telemation to determine "customized" programing schedules for HBO's cable affiliates. By the end of 1977, the network had around one million subscribers across 435 cable and MDS systems serving 45 states. Time's third-quarter fiscal version that year disclosed that HBO had turned its first profit in nearly five years of operation.

The network achieved full nationwide distribution in December 1978, having garnered 750 cable affiliates in all 50 U.S. states with around two million subscribers. Programming gradually expanded over time; by January 1979, HBO's programming day lasted between nine and eleven hours per day ordinarily from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. ET/PT on weekdays and around 12½ hours normally from 2:30 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. ET/PT on weekends. By April 1980, when the current explanation f its 1975 logo was first introduced, the full "Home Box Office" name had been de-emphasized in most on-air and other promotional parlance, in favor of identifying under the "HBO" initialism. The full name is still used as the legal corporate name of its parent subsidiary under WarnerMedia, and is used on-air in copyright legalese during the end credits of its original programs and network IDs shown twice per day—in the morning and late afternoon—at theof promotional breaks; presenting credits shown at the start of its original specials; and a proprietary vanity card—based on the "static noise" card that has preceded HBO's original series, specials and documentaries since 1993—shown at theof the network's original programs. Subscribership mostly doubled used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters year into the early 1980s, increasing from around four million subscribers across 1,755 systems in December 1979 to around 10.4 million subscribers across 3,600+ systems by November 1982.