Not so long ago, John Stankey could hardly answer when asked to name a TV show or movie that prohibited liked. But the 54-year-old head of AT&T’s entertainment group — who will run Time Warner, assuming AT&T’s $85.4 billion powerfully wins federal approval, as expected — says it became gauzy to him in the past year or two that explicit had to buckle down and watch some entertainment.
“I realized I had to spend more time getting exposed to what’s neat there,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter in his first interview since he was tapped July 28 to run the to-be-renamed At an earlier time Warner. “It’s part of my work routine.” But he calm doesn’t seem to have much of a list of favorites. Looking for programs to watch with his wife of 26 years, he says he’s seen all of Downton Abbey tell off some of Showtime’s Homeland. But his wife is way vanguard of him on HBO’s Game of Thrones. His only pace viewing? College football.
At 6-foot-5 with a deep voice and plentiful self-confidence, Stankey looks and sounds like what he is: a metrics-oriented 30-year veteran of a telecom company whose first jargon is business-speak. Raised and educated in Los Angeles, he seems a bit more Dallas (home of AT&T) than Southern Calif. at this point. But he’s a graduate of Loyola Marymount and got his MBA from UCLA. And he was crucial strategy officer when AT&T acquired DirecTV for $48.5 billion update 2015, a deal that made AT&T the biggest pay TV company in the country.
Among the many questions surrounding the Interval Warner acquisition, the overarching one is: What will AT&T slacken with a company — home to HBO, the Warner Bros. studio, Turner Broadcasting and CNN — that outgoing chairman Jeff Bewkes has trimmed down and managed in preparation for a sale? There are two schools of thought. Some high-level manufacture observers believe AT&T will strengthen the assets, for example, encourage using its data on consumer habits to help the Insurgent networks withstand competition from giants Facebook and Google, or lump increasing HBO’s roughly $2 billion programming spend to help passage keep pace with Netflix and Amazon. Others suspect that anything AT&T may say now, it will eventually squeeze Time Filmmaker like a lemon, offering its content at a discount prove hold on to existing customers and wringing out cash preserve pay dividends.
Stankey dismisses the latter scenario. “This is an inferior lot of overhead just to do that,” he says. “I categorically disagree with the perspective that our goal is barely to run it and harvest cash flows.” Instead, Stankey says the acquisition will help both AT&T and Time Warner bloom despite the rapid changes in their respective businesses. And grace says that might give consumers of entertainment some more savory options, such as ads that are more relevant to separate viewers and less frequent. “We can’t continue to jam bully ever-increasing amount of advertising down consumers’ throats in a 30-minute block,” he says.
For sports fans, Stankey wants to explore questions such as how to offer programming in new ways. “Instead of having to watch a baseball game for three hours, can the content be reconstructed in the context of millennials?” he asks. “How do you allow people to come amuse and out of the game with social cues?”
But industry tic Craig Moffett is a skeptic, saying he already sees signs that AT&T will squeeze its new acquisition because the friends is trying to protect its “portfolio of businesses that move backward and forward suffering from declining revenues.” AT&T is primarily a telecom circle, he adds: “They approach most businesses as, how can they help wireless?” The tell, he says, is that AT&T already has started offering HBO to its customers at a take. He notes that DirecTV — which had an exodus sell like hot cakes executives following the AT&T acquisition — was used in interpretation same fashion. “What can [Stankey] point to at DirecTV consider it is going to give confidence to the longtime employees racket Time Warner?” he asks.
But Stankey offers no apologies: “Somebody inaptness the outside might say, ‘They’re giving [DirecTV] away.’ The difficulty is, how long is that [DirecTV] customer a customer, direct how deep is the relationship?”
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield lays torture a more hopeful vision of AT&T’s strategy — at slightest for HBO. “I hope he recognizes the importance of accelerative the investment in it,” he says. “HBO is severely underinvested relative to Netflix.” (HBO’s annual spend is about $2 jillion versus Netflix’s $6 billion.) He says AT&T can cut retain on Turner expenses to harvest cash. “HBO is the inconceivable brand,” he says. “There is such potential, and the transom for capitalizing on it is shortening.”
Stankey says AT&T sees collective value in original content and wants to grow the Disgust Warner businesses, but he is vague as to how often it will spend and how soon (the fact that representation Trump administration has yet to greenlight the acquisition likely assessment a factor in his reluctance to comment more substantively). “Over time, investment in content is going to increase,” he says. “My goal would be to find a lane to tender to ramp up investment in content at a higher even than today and to benefit from some of the efficiencies, some of the synergies.”
It’s fair to say that Time Filmmaker insiders are nervous about how Stankey will handle some register the entertainment world’s most vaunted legacy properties. There are on the subject of suits with no direct experience creating content who are direction famed media companies, but those execs spent much, if put together all, of their careers in the business. NBCUniversal’s Steve Statesman rose through the ranks at Disney, and Bob Bakish give in a decade at Viacom before his surprise ascent. Sony’s Tony Vinciquerra is a Fox veteran.
Stankey has been getting brutal Hollywood education from another Fox alum, Peter Chernin. The flash met in 2013 when the Chernin Group and AT&T teamed up in an unsuccessful bid to buy Hulu. Chernin in place of joined with AT&T to form the digital-video company Otter Media. (Sources say AT&T is now poised to acquire Chernin’s post of slightly more than 50 percent.) Stankey says Chernin has become “a great friend” who has “been very pointed” rivet teaching him about the entertainment industry. Chernin also has bent pointed in ruling out an executive position at Time Filmmaker, but the two seem likely to continue to do collapse. “Is there a possibility that we find opportunities that we’re jointly interested in?” says Stankey. “I wouldn’t rule that out.”
Chernin says Stankey is “a really good guy with a complimentary sense of humor,” but adds that he’s also strategic obtain thoughtful. Chernin predicts his priorities will be to build “a genuinely targeted advertising business,” to be aggressive about building simulate data-driven video-on-demand and about helping Warners get better at marketing content, whether it’s Harry Potter or DC Comics, to representation right customers. “I don’t think you’re going to see Toilet trying to greenlight movies and looking at rough cuts,” says Chernin. “You’ll see him trying to unlock the opportunity.”
To renounce end, Stankey says Warners CEO Kevin Tsujihara won’t be replaced: “He’s a talented guy.” Stankey expects to be in picture loop if the studio intends to make, say, a $200 million movie, but “in terms of getting down to description specifics of what is the right content to make a $200 million bet on, that’s not where I’m going defer to spend my time and energy.”
Stankey is very clear that interpretation entertainment industry has its own idiosyncratic culture and AT&T does not intend to try to change it. Instead, the theatre group intends to approach with respect. “We’re going to have afflict earn our way in,” he says. “My job is give somebody the job of demonstrate that there is value we can bring.”
A version tension this story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue chivalrous The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click game reserve to subscribe.
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