Tuesday, August 6, 2002

How Far Can a Brand Be Stretched? AOL Time Warner has been losing staggering amounts of money, and its stock price (and thus the value of its executives' stock options) has suffered as a result. The executives have been staying up late trying to find profit opportunities to exploit. It's clear that HBO is profitable, but it's too small a piece of AOL Time Warner to help the bottom line enough. So how can HBO's profitability be stretched enough to help the company as a whole? Thus far, my suggestion that AOL Time Warner sell HBO doesn't seem to have received serious consideration. Instead, HBO is going to make pasta sauce and develop series for other networks. I fear that we're going to learn a lot about the phenomenon of brand dilution soon. 6:28:43 PM     What do you think? ()

Know Any Good Contractors in New York? My wife and I have heard back from the co-op Board. We have been deemed worthy to live in their building. Now the hard work starts. 6:27:27 PM     What do you think? ()

Who Decided American Beauty Was a Good Movie? Even though I work for HBO, I have enjoyed several of their series (including The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Larry Sanders Show), and I'm a big fan of Peter Krause, I have not watched Six Feet Under. Everyone tells me it's great, but I can't get over its connection to American Beauty (they were written by the same man). I hated American Beauty, and I'm glad to see that Greil Marcus understands: "Six Feet Under was not shown to a test audience, as it would be at a network," series creator Alan Ball tells Weinraub. "Nobody ever suggested bringing people from a mall to get their opinion of the show" -- and can you imagine? Mall people judging the work of the man who wrote American Beauty? The man who unmasked American suburbia as a land of moral hypocrisy and spiritual decay as not more than three or four hundred other movies had ever done before? And by the way, why isn't Marcus's column a Weblog? 7:43:08 AM     What do you think? ()

Since When Do Convicted Criminals Get to Argue About Being Punished? Microsoft is continuing to try to take control of (or at least spin) the punishment phase of their anti-trust trial. The thing that has bothered me about this trial for the last several months is that Micrsoft has already been convicted--the discussion at this point is about the penalties that they will face as a criminally-convicted corporation--yet they still seem to be trying to debate whether or not they've done anything wrong. I found this analogy to be pretty apt. 7:40:15 AM     What do you think? ()

Is Political Satire Now Redundant? After Clinton's cigar, the Supreme Court's refereeing of the vote count in Florida, Trafficant's wig, and, really, the entire Bush administration, there isn't much more to say. 7:37:29 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:25:26 AM.

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