I love to get low so the hearts keep breaking and the heads just roll 1, 2, 3, theyre gonna run back to me they always want to come up and never want to leave oh, oh, oh wow. Now . Say that word again. Now. Charlie Richard Plepler at this table for the first time. In the interest of full disclosure, Richard Plepler is a good friend of mine and has been supportive of this program. Tell me about the decision to stream and how you came to it and what are the implications and what does it say about the future. Richard we want hbo to be available, quite simply, in as many ways as possible for a vast part of our audience and potential audience. There are 10 million homes in the United States that only have broadband subscriptions. Previously before the introduction of hbonow, those people were not able to get hbo. We wanted to open up the possibility, expand our audience, make hbo as accessible as possible and that is what this service does. Right now, it is available on all apple devices. Cablevision has bundled it with its broadband subscription. And, there are a lot of millenials who are not subscribing to cable, satellite or telco services. And we want to go after those young people and we think this is a millenial opportunity to attract them to our service and then get them into the house and we hope include them for many years to come. Charlie did the Cable Companies fight you on this . Richard different responses from different partners, but our position is this is a winwin for everybody. They have a lot of broadband only homes in their systems so we are saying join us, grow with us as well. You have people inside your cable systems, telco systems who dont have video packages. Why not give them an opportunity to get hbo as well . We think this is an expansion of the pie. We think it is a win for the consumer, for our current partners and new partners. We want to build maximum flexibility into our model and that is why we have developed the streaming service. Charlie what is interesting about you you care deeply about programming. Programs. You watch them. You stimulate people to produce them. You are not just simply managing assets. You are creating assets. Where does that come from . Richard the history of our company i have been at the company for over 22 years it is being a magnet for talent for storytellers. My colleagues and i, our programming president who has done a masterful job, we are trying to become the best place, continuing to be the best place for talent to do what they do best. What happens is that becomes very infectious. Marty scorsese comes and does boardwalk empire and stays because he wants to do rock n roll. People come back tom hanks has come back over and over again. We see this as a pattern because it is an extraordinary place to work. Not only do we support our talent creatively the way we market, the way we promote i think the experience creative people have inside hbo is second to none. Charlie it used to be big movie stars didnt do television. Now they do television. Richard right. It is a great vehicle to tell stories. If you are Matthew Mcconaughey or Woody Harrelson and you do true detective, you have an opportunity to play at the highest level of your game. I think Matthew Mcconaughey is quoted as saying the best Oscar Campaign he had was true detective on hbo leading up to the oscars. We agree. Charlie i want to talk about game of thrones. A show that i dont watch. What am i missing . Richard i think you are missing epic storytelling. You are missing great fun. Archetypes like power, war and conflict dealt with in remarkable ways by two brilliant writers and show runners. When they pitched the show to mike and myself, one of the points they made is this is about power and about old themes that have been present from the bible through greek tragedy through shakespeare. I think if you follow the show coming now into its new season you will see some of the most remarkable they are like really 10 hours, 10 separate movies. People say why dont you do more . When you see the quality and the intricacy of the work, i think you see why 10 is an extraordinary achievement. Charlie here is the trailer for season five of game of thrones. Lannister. Boratheon. Stark. Tyrell. They are all just spokes on a wheel. This one is on top, that ones on top and on and on it spins. Crushing those on the ground. You are not going to stop the wheel. Im going to break the wheel. Stannis boratheon has an army at castle black. He means to take the north. This is the time and i will risk everything. Winter is coming. We know what is coming with it. We can learn to live with the wildlings. We can add them to the army of the dead. You are the few and we are the many. We serve the gods and the gods demand justice. Clean this city out so the rats have nowhere left to hide. Im a queen, not a butcher. All rulers are rather butchers. Charlie here is one of my favorite people. John oliver. The program is called last week tonight with john oliver. This has to do with edward snowden. An interview he did in moscow. John did you do this to solve a problem . Edward i did this to give the American People a chance for themselves to decide the kind of government they want to have. That is a conversation that i think the American People deserve to decide. John no doubt it is a critical conversation, but is it a conversation that we have the capacity to have because it is so complicated we dont fundamentally understand it . Edward it is a challenging conversation. It is difficult for most people to even conceptualize. The problem is the internet is massively complex and so much of it is invisible. Service providers, technicians engineers, the phone numbers john let me stop you right there, edward. This is the whole problem. I just glaze over. It is like the i. T. Guy comes into the office and you go oh dont teach me anything. I dont want to learn. You smell like canned soup. Edward it is a real challenge to figure out how do we communicate things that require years and years of technical understanding and compress that into seconds of speech. Im sympathetic to the problem there. Charlie brilliant. Just brilliant. Richard remarkable talent. Charlie both the comedic instinct and to do that interview with snowden. Did you know he was going over . Richard no, we didnt know he was going over. We only knew when he returned. And, he called mike and i in the middle of the week and told us what he did. And there it was. Charlie when you went after him, was that your decision . Richard mike and my decision. We did it together. Charlie you watched him when he substituted for jon and said oh, my god. We can create a show. Richard a quintessential original voice. Somebody whose dna aligns with our dna. What we said to him was very simple we will give you a canvas. You paint on it however you want. We trust your voice. And, we will stay out of your way and support you in whatever way you need. Charlie project all this out for five years, 10 years. What are we looking at . Richard a world in which content is king. In which you want to have a wide range of content that is connecting with all kinds of different audiences. We look to build passion and engagement with our viewers. Some people are addicted to girls, silicon valley. Some people love boxing. Some people are addicted to our documentaries. Some to our dramas. Some to late night. All that is important to us, because we are not selling advertising, we are selling a brand, a subscription. We want our subscribers to say this is more than worth it. I think if we provide all kinds of flexibility for how you get that Service Going forward, we think this is multilateral. It is not binary. It is not either youre a streaming service or youre locked into an old ecosystem. We will have a big business with comcast, with charter and directv, verizon, dish, at t as well as apple and new partners. This is an expansion of the pie. Charlie tell me about vice. Richard we are big fans of shane and the work he does. Charlie he was smart when he hired alyssa. Richard they have an expansive view of news and storytelling. The vice show which has been on hbo is doing terribly well. Charlie what do you mean terribly well . What does that mean to you . Richard many millions of viewers are watching the show every week. I think it also has a particular stickiness with young people which is also exciting for us. What we said to shane a number of weeks ago was lets do more. Lets expand the number of shows you are doing. Lets make some documentaries together and lets create a daily news show. Lets build a daily news show that is anchored on hbonow and migrates to hbo. We dont have any particular schedule. We can put it on at any particular time. Let your imagination stretch and see how the vice voice is on hbo and he liked that idea. Charlie the late david carr said, his daughter works for vice, he said i like vice more than i trust them. Richard i have Great Respect for david, but i respectfully disagree. I think if you look at the quality of their work on our network and on their site, they have been dogged, intrepid brave. They are in kandahar, the deserts of africa, on the streets of ferguson. They are doing very illuminating and insightful work. I trust them implicitly. Charlie you can see vice, you can see everything hbo around the world now. Richard thats correct. 60 countries, 150 markets around the world. We have networks in 60 countries. We license our programming to about 150 markets around the world. We have home of hbos which is our licensed programming with the hbo brand name in nine countries. Charlie a producer comes to you and to michael and says i have to show you something. I have a fantastic idea. I even made a video i want to show you. What are you looking for . What is the metric they have to pass for you and your partner . Richard two things, i think. One is that potential show runner is breathing the idea. Can you feel the passion coming, emanating from that individual as opposed to are they thinking the idea . Everything that i have observed that has really worked well on our network over time, you can see that the person bringing it in is living it, feeling it, has thought about it for a long time. And, whether that is mike judge or anyone, it is so palpable. Secondly, do we have a shared vision with them about where we think we want to take that storytelling . Once we do, we dont hand the keys over. We certainly hope they have the preponderance of the good ideas and not us. Charlie and writing is always crucial. Richard of course. Charlie what is the future of sports on hbo . Richard we have a long tradition of boxing real sports, which has been on for 20 years hosted by bryant gumbel. It has won so many awards. Hard knocks which is our look inside an nfl Training Camp. Documentaries that have crossed the spectrum of all sports. Sports has always been a vibrant part of the hbo brand. The live boxing, World Championship boxing, the one sport we can play in, that we can afford, has always done very well for us. Charlie what is going to happen with the fight . Richard who knows . It is going to be a great fight. Charlie not who is going to win. Why did it take so long to get these two guys together . Richard because the principles needed to want to get together more than we wanted them to get together. It is a little like what tom friedman says about the israelis and the palestinians. They need to want to have the Peace Process as much as we do. Charlie they didnt want it as much as you did. Richard i think that is right. Charlie was it one or the other . Richard i think the stars finally aligned. I would tip my hat to lester because without his imagination and energy this would have not come together. He called me and said i think we can make this happen. Lets do it as partners. I agreed immediately. We will be ready to go on may 2. I dont think itll only be a great event for boxing, i think itll be a great event for sports. Charlie will you be there . Richard absolutely. Charlie this is a clip i will show you. This is when the late david carr and other people were on here. You will recognize the subject they are talking about. Roll tape. I have this feeling about the last 15 years in tv that have to do with at the beginning of it, people were defensive at the idea that tv could be good. There was this initial move in talking about television that had to do with comparing it to books and movies. To praise a show, you had to say this show is the wire is good because it is like dickens. To me, this was the status anxiety that Haunted Television because earlier it was in the medium where people thought of it as commercial junk that was made collaboratively. I think the last 15 years has been this fantastic period because people have moved past this notion to compare to talk about tv. They are talking about the value of television as a medium itself, as something that takes place episodically, over time and is a little bit like a live performance. Terence one of the nicest things that was ever said about my show when we premiered was that this may forever blur the lines between television and film. Charlie scorsese was directing the first episode. Terence the fact that the scope of it and how big it is and what we can do visually, it is almost incidental that it is a television show. I think 20 years from now, people want to necessarily identify it is it a tv show . Josh i think there is something really different because i think rewind 10 plus years ago and was all of the tv shows were made with market considerations almost exclusively. Will it sell, how many people will watch, what are the estimates . Terence it has to be a big number. Josh today, outlets like hbo, showtime, fx, amc we are making tv shows and saying if the material is great and the writing is exquisite, it will find its audience. If we have some patience. That is not an irresponsible business decision. That is because it actually happens. Charlie you are agreeing . Richard absolutely. Josh says it very well. We only get 20 of our viewing for a particular show on premiere night. 80 of the viewing is over the period of the week. People are watching it on demand, on hbogo, on hbonow. You dont necessarily need to be there on sunday night at 9 00. That also creates the power of wordofmouth. People will come to it, hear about it. If you are a network like ours and not worried about advertising, but about people valuing their subscription, that is a tremendous enhancement. Charlie there is enough creative talent, enough writers, talented performers to feed this demand . Richard im constantly amazed at the array of talent that is lined up at our door. It is breathtaking, actually. The challenge is doing everything we want to do and figuring out a way to use that talent. Charlie thanks for coming. Richard great pleasure, charlie. Charlie Richard Plepler of hbo. Back in a moment. Stay with us. Charlie al michaels is here. He is one of americas most respected and prolific sportscasters. He is the only broadcaster who has called a super bowl, the world series, the stanley cup, the nba finals and the olympics for network television. He is currently the playbyplay voice of nbcs sunday night football which is among televisions highestrated shows. All of those stories and more are told in this book you cant make this stuff up miracles, memories, and the perfect marriage of sports and television. Im so pleased to have al michaels back at this table. Welcome. Al every 18 years we do this, charlie, right . I think we did this in 1997. Charlie it has been a great life. It is a great life. Al it has been. I am blessed in so many ways. My family, number one. My wife linda, weve been together since the 10th grade. Kids and grandkids. I think i said in the book, i dont believe in reincarnation probably because if i do come back and god wants to get even with me, i will be working in a sulfur mine in mongolia on the night shift. This was a pretty good run. Charlie curt gowdy said dont ever get jaded. Al he did. Charlie what did he mean . Al he was basically telling me at that point i idolized curt and wound up working with him. He said to me, look, you are going to have a really good career. Which i did not know at that time. I felt i was off to a good start, but he wanted to make sure that down the line, i always appreciated what it was that i was doing. I grew up wanting to do all of these things dreamed about them. You have to have a certain naivete when you are a kid. I dreamed about doing all these things the world series, the olympics. The super bowl did not even exist when i was a kid. And they all seemed very possible. I look back now and i go, oh, my god. How in the world did that happen . Charlie the life has been bigger than the dream. Al it has been in a way. You need an unbelievable number of good breaks. Not everything has been a smooth sail for me. Along the way, you wind up in a lot of right places at the right time. For me to wind up where i have that is just serendipitous more than anything else. Charlie there is a story when you were 17 years old at Arizona State in tempe, you were standing in line and the guy in front of you was al it was sal bando. Charlie sal bando. 10 years later, he is in the world series and you are announcing it. Al how great is that as a kid . Im standing there, i introduced myself to i dont know who he is. He is there on a baseball scholarship. Im there because i want to broadcast the games on the campus station. We were talking about our dreams. We were 17 years old. 10 years later, he is the third baseman for the oakland as. Im doing the world series because im the announcer for the Cincinnati Reds at the time. If your team won the pennant you joined curt gowdy and tony kubek on nbc doing the world series. I walked into the clubhouse when they got to cincinnati. We looked at each other and said what . Where are we . [laughter] charlie how did this happen . Al god, you can take me now but just wait until the world series is over. Charlie the idea of growing up you loved the dodgers. Al loved them. I grew up within walking distance of ebbets field. It was a 15minute walk. When i was in Grammar School and the dodgers were playing day games at the time, my mother came up with an excuse to take me out of the afternoon session it was a split session to get me in the 8 00 to 12 00 session in the morning so we can all leave school and one parent would be with us and walk us over to ebbets field. When i was 10 years old, i probably saw 55 games. Charlie who was doing the games at that time . Al red barber and vince scully was the young and upandcoming announcer. There was another announcer by th