It was “particularly encouraging” for Time Warner to...
It was “particularly encouraging” for Time Warner to see “signs of stabilization” in the home entertainment industry in Q1, Chief Financial Officer John Martin said on an earnings call Wednesday. Sellthrough and total home entertainment revenue grew year-over-year and growth…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
was “especially strong for electronic sellthrough” (EST), which was up more than 60 percent from a year ago, he said. Those positive signs came “even as some of the industry’s digital initiatives, including UltraViolet, remain at a relatively early stage,” he said. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey “exceeded our expectations” across all distribution methods in Q1, he said, not providing details on sales of the title on digital platforms compared to physical formats. The company also offered no specifics on how it did with Blu-ray and UltraViolet in Q1. Warner Bros. film and TV entertainment revenue fell 4 percent from Q1 last year to $2.7 billion, mainly due to weaker theatrical performance and a decline in TV licensing revenue resulting “primarily from fewer significant international syndication availabilities,” it said. The declines were partially offset by higher home video revenue from The Hobbit and Argo, it said. Total Q1 revenue dipped to $6.9 billion from $7 billion. But profit grew to $720 million from $581 million. CEO Jeff Bewkes said HBO’s Game of Thrones is averaging more than 13 million viewers an episode this season, making it the most-watched HBO series since The Sopranos: The recently released second season of Game of Thrones “posted the highest first day DVD and EST sales of any HBO series ever.” Its HBO Go on-demand service “continues to pick up users, registrations and tremendous reports from the families that are using it,” he said. HBO has “the lowest churn of any premium service,” he said. HBO and Netflix are “very complementary” services and users of each tend to be heavy users of the other, he said. Time Warner has no current plans to offer HBO Go as a standalone broadband service, he said. HBO Go is only available now to viewers who get HBO via a traditional pay-TV service. “We have the rights to do it and we would do it if we thought it was in our economic best interest,” said Bewkes. “At this point, we don’t think it makes sense.” But he said the company is “going to keep evaluating it depending on the country.”