HBO (Home Box Office)
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headquarters in New York City. HBO airs theatrically released feature
films, proprietary original full-length television movies, and various
original series. Some of HBO's popular series have included: The
Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Oz,
The Wire, Tracey Takes On..., Carnivàle, Entourage, The Larry Sanders
Show, Deadwood, Mr Show, Big Love, Da Ali G Show, Band of Brothers,
Rome and Extras (the last three were in collaboration with the BBC).
HBO broadcasts boxing matches under the banner name HBO Boxing &
B.A.D. (Boxing After Dark)
HBO was the first cable network to originate as a non-terrestrial
broadcast TV network. In 1965, cable pioneer and visionary Charles
Francis Dolan won the franchise to build a cable system in lower
Manhattan. The new system, named Sterling Manhattan Cable by Mr.
Dolan, was the nation's first urban underground cable system. Instead
of stringing cable on telephone poles and using microwave antennas to
receive the signals, Sterling laid underground cable beneath the
streets of Manhattan because television signals were blocked by many
tall buildings. Time Life, Inc., in the same year, purchased 20
percent of Dolan's company.
In early 1970, looking for new revenue sources, Mr. Dolan came up with
the idea of creating a Green channel for which subscribers would pay
extra to receive uncut commercial-free movies and sports coverage. To
help run his new project, Dolan hired a young attorney named Gerald
Levin, who had experience in contracting for televised films and
sporting events, as his Vice President of Programming.
Dolan presented his "Green Channel" idea to Time Life management, and
though satellite distribution was only a distant possibility at the
time, he persuaded Time Life to back him, and soon "The Green Channel"
became Home Box Office on November 8, 1972. HBO began using microwave
to feed its programming. The first program aired over the pay-channel
was a New York Rangers / Vancouver Canucks game, to a CATV system in
Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Also on that night was the first film to
be seen on HBO -- Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Paul Newman and
Henry Fonda.
Sterling Manhattan Cable was rapidly losing money because the company
had a small subscriber base of 20,000 customers in Manhattan. Dolan's
media partner, Time Life, Inc., gained 80 percent control of Sterling
and decided to pull the plug on the Sterling Manhattan operation. Time
Life dropped the Sterling name to become Manhattan Cable Television
and gained control of HBO in March, 1973. Gerald Levin replaced Dolan
as HBO's President and Chief Executive Officer. In September 1973,
Time Life, Inc. completed its acquisition of the pay service. HBO was
soon on 14 systems in New York and Pennsylvania, but the churn rate
was exceptionally high. Subscribers would sample the service for a few
weeks, get weary of seeing the same films, and then cancel. HBO was
struggling and something had to be done. When HBO first came to
Lawrence, Massachusetts, the idea was to allow subscribers to preview
the service for free on channel 3. After a month, the service moved to
channel 6 and was scrambled. The preview proved popular, obtaining
many subscriptions and the concept was used elsewhere. (Lawrence
receives HBO on channel 301 today.)
On December 13, 1975, HBO became the first TV network to broadcast its
signals via satellite when it showed the "Thrilla in Manila" boxing
match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. On December 28, 1981, HBO
expanded its programming schedule to 24 hours a day, seven days per
week. (Cinemax was 24/7 from the day it signed on, and Showtime and
The Movie Channel went 24 hours earlier.) In January 1986, HBO also
became the first satellite network to encrypt its signal from
unauthorized viewing by way of the Videocipher II System. Later, HBO
was one of the first cable TV networks to broadcast a high-definition
version of its channel.
Originally, HBO was part of Time Inc.. When Time merged with Warner
Communications in 1989, it became part of Time Warner, who serves as
its parent company today.
HBO has also developed a reputation for offering very high quality
original programming. HBO is a subscription-only service and does not
carry normal commercials; both of these factors relieve HBO from
pressures to tone down controversial aspects in their programs, thus
allowing for explicit themes, such as graphic violence, explicit sex,
profanity, and drug use.
The network is currently received in roughly one-third of households
in the United States. It can be quite expensive to acquire HBO because
subscribers are generally required to pay for an extra "tier" of
service even before paying for the channel itself (though all of the
HBO channels are often priced together in a single package). Someone
upgrading from a standard cable package might see their bill increase
more than 40%. However, federal law requires that a cable system allow
a person to get just basic cable (local broadcast channels) and HBO.
Cable systems can require the use of a converter box (usually digital)
to receive HBO.
Even in the days of the V-chip, the primary HBO channel still does not
run unedited R rated films or TV-MA rated programming during the
daytime. HBO's multiplex channels will do so (excluding HBO Family,
which doesn't run R rated films at all and will generally run PG-13
rated films only between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.).
Since TV critics are generally obliged to keep track of HBO, but the
general public is not, the network's influence can be overstated.
However, several HBO programs have been re-aired on other networks and
local syndication (usually after some editing), and a number of them
are also available on DVD. Interestingly, since HBO's more successful
series, most notably the trio of Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and
Six Feet Under, are broadcast on non-cable networks in other
countries, such as in the United Kingdom and Australia, HBO
programming has the potential to be seen by a higher percentage of the
population of those countries as compared to the U.S. Because of the
high cost of HBO, many Americans only view HBO programs on DVDs or in
basic cable or broadcast syndication, months or even years after the
network has first broadcast the programs.
HBO has international operations in Latin America, the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Romania, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria,
Pakistan and India. It also had an early investment in New Zealand's
SKY Network Television through the channel HBO (now Sky Movies).
HBO also had a couple of joint ventures, first, with the formation of
TriStar Pictures with Columbia Pictures and CBS. Columbia later bought
the 2/3rds interest of the studio. Then, HBO merged its Comedy Channel
with Viacom's HA! cable network to form Comedy Central. HBO also had a
joint venture with Liberty Media and many major cable companies in
Movietime channel (now E!). In 1997, The Walt Disney Company and
Comcast purchased control of E! In 2003, Viacom bought HBO's half of
the Comedy Central channel and merged it to its MTV Networks unit. In
2005, HBO and New Line Cinema launched Picturehouse, an independent
film distributor. HBO is the primary sponsor of the U.S. Comedy Arts
Festival.