Home Box Office
HBO (Home Box Office) is an American premium cable television network. HBO airs theatrically released feature films, original television movies, and various original series, including Real Sex, The Sopranos, Oz, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Entourage, Sex and the City, Da Ali G Show, Rome, and Tales from the Crypt. HBO is operated by the Home Box Office Group, part of Time Warner.
History
HBO was the first cable network to originate as a non-terrestrial broadcast TV network. In 1965, cable pioneer Charles 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.
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 (a plaque commemorating this event is found in Wilkes-Barre's downtown Public Square). 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 the fastest show in America 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.
1983 saw the premiere of HBO's first original movie and the first made-for-pay-TV movie, The Terry Fox Story.
HBO has been involved in several legal suits during the 1980s involving cable systems and legal statutes imposed by state and city laws that would have censored HBO and other pay-TV networks for programming that was considered "indecent."
In April 1986, HBO became a victim of broadcast signal intrusion when a man calling himself "Captain Midnight" intercepted the network's signal during a movie presentation. The man was later caught and was then prosecuted.
In 1991, HBO and Cinemax became the first premium services to offer multiplexed services to cable customers as companions to the main network, offering multiplex services of HBO (HBO2, renamed HBO Plus from 1998 to 2002) and Cinemax (Cinemax 2, now MoreMax) to three cable systems in Wisconsin, Kansas and Texas.
The move proved successful resulting in HBO and Cinemax launching additional multiplex channels of its service, HBO 3 (now HBO Signature, launched in 1995), HBO Family (launched in 1996), HBO Comedy & HBO Zone (launched in 1999) and HBO Latino, a Latino-themed channel of HBO (launched in 2000, HBO also had an HBO En Espanol, a Spanish-language service launched in 1988). Cinemax also launched the multiplex services Cinemax 3 (launched in 1996, launching again as ActionMax in 1998), ThrillerMax (launched in 1998) and WMax, @Max, OuterMax and 5StarMax (all launched in 2001).
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, Canada 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, Slovakia, Romania (and Moldova), Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and South Asia(Bangladesh, India and Pakistan). It also had an early investment in New Zealand's SKY Network Television through the channel HBO (now Sky Movies). HBO plans to launch international operations in "key markets" of Europe (France, UK, Spain, Germany and Italy) and Japan.
A Personal Note from Robin
See also Real Sex and/or Real Sex episodes 1 through 10 and/or Real Sex episodes 11 through 20 and/or Real Sex episodes 21 through 33
- Check out Real Sex Episode #13 -- aRRyana and I are in it!
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