HBO’s death rattle

Plus: The speculative gamification of collecting

Read in browser

Welcome back to Pursuits Weekly, our look at the world's biggest culture stories, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, dining and art. Sign up here to get this newsletter every Saturday in your inbox. This week's newsletter is deeply indebted to Bloomberg's resident HBO expert, Felix Gillette. All insights are his; all errors are mine. HBO's diminishing relevance Is winter coming for HBO? Source: HBO "HBO should stay HBO," said Game of Thrones fan and Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison last week, after submitting a winning $111 billion bid to buy the venerable TV channel along with the rest of Warner Brothers Discovery. "They built a phenomenal brand." If TV was the great mass-entertainment medium of the 20th century, then HBO was TV at its most elite and luxurious, the outlet that was willing to spend almost any amount of money to make the highest-quality programming possible. That means Ellison's plan for HBO — "we just want them to continue doing more of it" — is going to be extraordinarily difficult to pull off, given the extraordinary amount of debt under which the new company will be struggling. Ellison has yet to announce a name for his new company. My vote, naturally, is that a merger of Discovery with Skydance should create an entity named DiscoDance. Ellison has also promised to cut $6 billion per year from the overall budget. Although he says there will be no "reduction in production capacity," he'll still want to save money on production costs where he can. More profoundly, as the legacy TV channel withers away as the world moves to streaming, HBO — along with many of DiscoDance's other assets, like Adult Swim or Animal Planet — will increasingly become a brand in search of a product. The HBO name still exists as part of the HBO Max streaming service, but once that's merged with Paramount+ it will probably disappear, to become at best a small section of a vast unified library. It's not easy being a billionaire's son and a media CEO. Source: HBO As Lucas Shaw writes, HBO was historically a product "associated with high prices and coastal elites." But for cord-cutting HBO fans, there's no HBO product they can buy. They can subscribe to the DiscoDance streaming platform and search for HBO shows among its plethora of options — or they can also find HBO shows elsewhere, including on Netflix. The closest thing to HBO these days is not HBO Max, home to Dr. Pimple Popper, but rather Apple TV, a streaming service that, like the HBO of old, is much more interested in high quality and critical acclaim than it is in the kind of penny-pinching that has afflicted HBO since it was acquired by Discovery in 2022. Another similarity to the HBO TV channel: Apple TV isn't available in an ad-supported version. HBO retains a home and a revenue stream of its own, thanks to legacy cable companies still pushing its product to their customers, but that's all dwindling. For the majority of HBO viewers who don't get the linear channel, the brand has become little more than a two-second burst of proprietary static before the opening credits. As HBO becomes an ever smaller thimbleful of Ellison's vast content ocean, only the most nostalgic among us are likely to consider it something special and unique. By the numbers One of these Wolfgang Tillmans photographs (the one at top right) is a lot more valuable than the others. Photographer: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images $785,510 The auction record for an abstract photograph by contemporary German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Abstractions make up Tillmans' top 48 auction results, Julia Halperin reports, despite representing a small fraction of his total output. The market these days wants a "politically neutral quality and brand-name recognizability," per Natasha Degen, the dean of Sotheby's Institute of Art. $320,141 The reported average annual household income of people going to Broadway plays last year, according to the Broadway League. That's 20% more than the $266,881 average household income of people going to Broadway musicals. $284,300 The starting price of the new Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet. That's up $68,000 from its predecessor, and yet it still "feels more like a compromise than a win," writes Hannah Elliott. A golden age of flight cancellations The past three years have seen fewer than 1.5% of US flights being canceled, per official statistics — significantly below both the 2% average and the 1.7% median so far this century. You can be forgiven, however, if it doesn't feel that way. Extreme weather events are on the rise, and flight cancellations have dominated the news of late, whether they're from Puerto Vallarta or Dubai. If you do end up stranded, don't assume your travel insurance will kick in. As K Oanh Ha reports, nearly all policies exclude war-related claims. The appeal of the Ozarks Iván Navarro's Death Row at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photographer: Emily Followill One way to avoid international upheaval is to travel to Arkansas instead. The Ozark Mountains have traded their homespun charm for a little star power, and now feature among the global destinations on our Where To Go list for 2026. Perhaps wait until June, however, when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will wrap up a 114,000-square-foot expansion that represents a 50% increase to its floor plan. The speculative gamification of collecting Trading indicates that there's a 69% chance Rolex will discontinue the "Pepsi" model this year, per Kalshi. Source: Rolex Can turning a pastime into a speculative investment increase interest in the activity in question? That seems to be the experience of sports betting, where 27% of fans say they have found new rooting interests through gambling. Now Bezel, a watch marketplace, has teamed up with Kalshi to make it easier to bet on the market in timepieces. Even if you can't afford a Rolex, you can still bet $10 on whether its GMT-Master II "Pepsi" model will be discontinued this year. That "broadens the watch market and brings more folks into the hobby," per Bezel CEO Quaid Walker. Similarly, there was a market on Kalshi projecting whether Logan Paul's Pikachu Illustrator card would sell for more than $13 million at auction. The chances of that happening were between 10% and 20% on the prediction market — but then AJ Scaramucci, son of financier Anthony Scaramucci, paid $16.5 million for the card, armed with a thesis that Mooch père described using terms like "currency debasement" and "liquidity mismatch." Speculation is always part of any market in collectibles, of course — but until now you've had to be able to take part in that market in order to speculate on it. Which raises an interesting question. Now that the gambling part of the hobby has been spun off and democratized, will speculative trading in the collectibles themselves go up or down? I could make a case either way. Perhaps Kalshi can find a way to list a market on it. You'll probably never see this masterpiece The Painter and His Model, Pablo Picasso's 1927 masterpiece. Source: Skira In 1927, Pablo Picasso created The Painter and His Model, the largest work of his postwar period. The painting, 7 feet tall and acclaimed as "one of the supreme achievements of his career" by art historian Jeremy Melius of Tufts University, has been in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art for the past 40 years. Last year it was even briefly on display, for the first time in three decades, before all of Tehran's museums were closed in the wake of Israel's 2025 attacks on Iran. The monumental Picasso is part of Iran's little-known multibillion-dollar art collection, which also includes Mural on Indian Red Ground, arguably Jackson Pollock's best drip painting, as well as a huge 1968 triptych by Francis Bacon, Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants. Back in 2015, Iranian revolutionary Hossein Sheikholeslam told Bloomberg Businessweek that "art can be a bridge between Iran and the West." But then the country's economy imploded, hurting domestic galleries' attempts to show Iranian artists around the world. Now the broader geopolitical picture is worse than ever. While it would be wonderful were a new regime in Tehran to show goodwill by putting these treasures on an international tour, don't hold your breath. New for subscribers: Free article gifting. Bloomberg.com subscribers can now gift up to five free articles a month to anyone you want. Just look for the "Gift this article" button on stories. (Not a subscriber? Unlock unlimited access and sign up here.) We're improving your newsletter experience, and we'd love your feedback. If something looks off, help us fine-tune your experience by reporting it here. Follow us You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Pursuits newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, sign up here to get it in your inbox. Unsubscribe Bloomberg.com Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10022 |