HBO recently sold a slew of shows including Ballers and Insecure to Netflix, as first revealed by Deadline. Ballers, starring Dwayne Johnson, soon became a big hit for Netflix, accumulating 696M viewing minutes in its first week.
But Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, revealed that its own streaming service Max also saw a bump in streaming viewership for these titles. “What’s been nice about it is, without doing a thing on Max, the viewership of or engagement of Ballers and Insecure really saw a spike when it was on Netflix,” he said. “You’re introducing it to more people, it’s marketing.” “This is something we used to do all the time and the initial experiment with a couple of titles we’ve seen have an immediate positive impact to Max.
Remember everything we sell is co-exclusive, so it’s not like they come off, Max, and are only available elsewhere,” he added.
He said it’s essentially like the old syndication model, which saw shows such as Sex and the City sold to cable networks and Band of Brothers air on History Channel.
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