The above graph indicates the numbers of Emmy Award nominations that HBO received between 1997 and 2011; it helps to verify HBO’s success in maintaining what Jaramillo considered as a ‘quality brand’.

In It’s Not TV: Wahtching HBO, in the Post-Television Era, Marc Leverette unpacks the premium cable’s attempt to focus on ‘counter-programing, resisting other commercial networks’ formulaic approach’. HBO’s tagline – “IT’S NOT TV. IT’S HBO” signifies this idea. Leverette points out HBO’s strategy to subsist on “first-order commodity relations” that aims to satisfy actual consumer demand rather than advertiser demand (Rofers et al 2002: 46).

“The premium cable model, in contrast to the network model, is underpinned by a direct economic relationship between the institution and subscribers who pay a fee in exchange for access to its programming; as a consequence, episodes of premium cable series are not interrupted by commercial pods” (Smith 2013: 152).

Organizations like Netflix and AMC also follow this trend. While HBO spokesman explained in an article from The Economist in 1998:
“We don’t care how many people watch our show, we just want people to decide at the end of the month that it’s worth renewing their subscription,” (Leverette 2002: 50)

Netflix’s chief marketing officer, Kelly Bennett echoes this idea, stating:

“Our intention is not to release ratings, and that’s for a very good reason: We don’t have to,” “We’ll define the success of these original shows in our own way” (Maclean 2013). 

Anthony N. Smith’s article, Putting the Premium into Basic, unpacks the objective of this strategy. Sighting former HBO’s CEO, Chris Alrecht he points out the specific aim of HBO targeting ‘wealthy, educated, blue-chip audiences’ due to the prospect of such audiences being the ones that ‘can probably more easily afford to keep [the subscription] service” (Meisler 1998: 45). In this case, the value of ‘quality content’ is even more essential to HBO’s success. It is logical for HBO to welcome shows that explore more sophisticated and challenging themes. In a sense, television shows become ever more culturally relevant and no longer just ‘dramas for your entertainment’ but shows that actually encourage viewers to reflect deeper into the themes explored.

“HBO narratives’ unorthodox storylines concerning such sensitive topics as death in Six Feet Under (2001–2005); polygamy in Big Love (2006–2007); and drug cultures in The Wire contribute to this process. These themes tie into HBO’s efforts to promote its series to blue-chip audiences as distinct, sophisticated, and culturally superior to “regular” TV fare” (Smith 2013: 158).

The nature of HBO’s non-ad-supported programs further breaks away from conventional network model, which is heavily advertiser driven. This means that rather than targeting the widest demographic, hoping to pull in a large enough number of ratings to please the advertisers, HBO are allowed to explicitly attribute their products to ‘audience satisfaction base not on quantitative data, but qualitative measures (Leverette 2000: 50). Deborah Jaramillo’s paper, The Family Racket: AOL Timer Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of Quality Brand, looks deeper into the advantage of HBO’s movie library and sees how the cable network mobilises its ‘inherent advantages and creatively, amounting to a qualitative difference from broadcast television’ (Hamilton and Brown 1999: 68). It is worth noting that HBO subscribers are not only attracted to the network for its critical acclaimed programs but also are interested in its substantial movie library. Hence, not only is HBO not required to produce many original programs to fill their weeklong schedule, they also have the opportunity to fulfill their customers’ movie seeking demands, structuring their program to be more ‘cinematic’. HBO’s shows are thus referential with not only television text but also film text. Jaramillo uses the example of HBO referencing Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas with their similarly gangster-themed program, The Sopranos, as a way to demonstrate the extent to which HBO innovatively tailor-made their brand’s image to match that of their audience’s interest.

“These inter-textual references of varying degrees of difficulty are well-defined niche—that of the film buffs. But, these are not just any films. As Hollywood films go, these are royalty. They are what The Sopranos aspires to be and what HBO is betting The Sopranos will become, while the conglomerate behind it all carefully positions its product in the marketplace”(Jaramillo 2002: 68).

Although Netflix is an online streaming service, through the company’s recent diversification into original content , analysts see traces of HBO’s analogical model of production. Netflix’ chief content officer, Ted Sarandos recently asserts their company’s goal – “To become HBO faster than HBO can become us,”, an indication of Netflix’s ambition to move away from its plain content distribution roots, embarking on its current content producing phase. HBO also began with movie streaming, delivering ‘non-intervening’, ‘ad-free’ movies to subscribers. Hence , it is logical for Netflix to follow a similar path. With the David Fincher-directed original series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey, it is clear Netflix certainly is following HBO’s ‘cinematic’ approach. Apart from Netflix’ online distributed infrastructure, there is another advantage of Netflix, which is its more precise and detailed customer data-collecting service. An article from Gigaom notes down the power of Netflix algorithms, listing down the many statistics that Netflix are tracking everyday.

Netflix is currently tracking:
• More than 25 million subscribers
• About 30 million plays per day (and it tracks every time you rewind, fast forward and pause a movie)
• More than two billion hours of streaming video watched during the last three months of 2011 alone
• About four million ratings per day
• Around three  million searches per day
• Geo-location data
• Device information
• Time of day and week (it now can verify that users watch more TV shows during the week and more movies during the weekend)
• Metadata from third parties such as Nielsen
• Social media data from Facebook and Twitter



House of Cards is the result of the company’s Big Data algorithmic. Netflix utilises its algorithm to indicate the ‘best match’ for their customer’s ideal program.