“They’re playing a different game; it’s cool, whatever,” Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s vice president for programming, said brusquely at one panel discussion. Netflix also recently canceled two expensive shows within the space of a week — a rare move for the streaming service. Instead of scanning ratings numbers in the early morning, they may be reading entertainment websites like Vulture or The Ringer. “I like a show that generates think pieces,” Casey Bloys, HBO’s programming president, said as the audience started to laugh. Mr. Erwich, of Hulu, said, “One of the things that TV does really well is that audiences love discovering people.”

Source: New York Times June 13, 2017 02:26 UTC