Robert Greenblatt, the new chief content officer of AT&T Inc.’s T, -0.47% recently restructured WarnerMedia entertainment division, told staffers Wednesday that creating a direct-to-consumer streaming service would require closer coordination between the company’s entertainment units, saying its large competitors were “eating our lunch.”
Greenblatt, whose appointment was announced earlier this week, joined several other top executives in addressing employees at a town hall in the Time Warner Center in New York, according to people who attended.
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He lauded the power of HBO’s brand and Turner assets that include TNT and TBS. “Taken separately, they’re great assets,” he said. “But I think bringing them together makes them more powerful. But ultimately we’re going to join forces with everybody here, in that streaming service.”
During the conversation, Greenblatt said that there were enormous companies that are “eating our lunch” as he emphasized the importance of bringing the company’s various assets together into one product. Greenblatt — a former chairman of NBC Entertainment who also had years of experience running programming at the premium cable channel Showtime — said he would “nurture the brands that we have” while reorienting the strategy to tackle modern competition. “Unless you have scale and power in the marketplace and with the consumer, you’re just out there scrambling on your own,” he said.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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