TV Talk: WarnerMedia CEO, Murrysville native Jason Kilar talks streaming wars

Looking back, Jason Kilar can see how his Murrysville upbringing led to his job today as CEO of WarnerMedia, the parent company of Warner Bros., HBO and streaming service HBO Max.

His father, the late Lance Kilar, was an engineer for Westinghouse in Monroeville, a “technology geek” who ensured their home had the latest “whiz-bang technology” of the era, including the early adoption of dial-up internet. Kilar’s mother, Maureen Kilar, considered herself a local Erma Bombeck, writing the column, “Enough is Too Much” about raising six children for Murrysville’s Penn Franklin News.

Kilar’s father took a job in Florida during Jason’s junior year at Franklin Regional High School and the family relocated, but Jason Kilar still gets back to Pittsburgh to see his brother, Jimmy, who teaches at Bradford Woods Elementary School, and to take in the occasional Steelers and Pirates games.

“These things only make sense in hindsight, of course, but I had this incredible influence of a storyteller from my mom and a technologist from my father,” Kilar, 50, said in a phone interview last week from his Burbank, Calif., office, where a huge subway poster from HBO’s “Band of Brothers” hangs on his wall. “I have to go back and say, it’s because of me growing up in that house in Murrysville and having this amazing dichotomy between the storytelling and the technology … that I think has led to me to doing what I do and loving what I do.”

What he’s done since 2007, when he was the CEO at the launch of Hulu, is to bring media companies into the streaming era.

Kilar points out his Twitter bio includes, “Can take the kid out of Pittsburgh but …” He said he does think about the impact of the decisions he makes on Pittsburgh consumers, including putting Warner Bros.’ 2021 movies on HBO Max on the same day as they arrived in theaters (subscribers loved it; movie directors, actors and theater owners did not).

“When we make these decisions as a team, I think the most important person in that meeting is the person who’s not there, which is the customer, the audience, the fan,” Kilar said, noting the necessity of a customer-centric culture. “They are the ones that decide whether or not they want to go out to the movie theater today to Monroeville Mall. They’re the ones that decide whether they want to respond to a new series on HBO Max or not.”

Kilar agrees with the general consensus that there will be a winnowing of storytelling company streaming services with Netflix (222 million subscribers globally), Disney+ (130 million) and HBO Max (74 million) best positioned to survive a shakeout.

Conventional wisdom suggests Paramount+ and Showtime OTT (56 million) will be absorbed by another company, which could also be the ultimate fate of NBCUniversal’s Peacock (25 million active accounts, most though an Xfinity cable subscription; of those 9 million are paid subscribers). How long Disney’s Hulu (45 million) remains a stand-alone service remains in question, too.

“To be a skilled, general entertainment streaming service, you have to do two things at the same time: You have to commit tens of billions of dollars in order to serve all audiences over the course of the year, to retain them and to delight them day after day after day,” Kilar said. “At the same time, you have to get to scale because you have to get the revenue to be able to allow for you to afford the tens of billions of dollars investment. There will only be a [small] number of services that attain that skill and thus can afford to make the investment.”

Each day, headlines proclaim both a bright future or reasons for concern about streaming, but Kilar said it’s too soon for any grand pronouncements given that aside from Netflix, most streaming services are less than two-and-a-half years old.

“Anytime you have a new service, you’re going to see a lot of dynamic results,” said Kilar, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1997 before working at Amazon, then in its infancy, for nine years.

With streaming services easier to subscribe to and cancel than cable bundles, the churn rate of people who dip in and out of streamers is high. The longer a service is around, Kilar said, the greater the retention rate will become.

It didn’t help that HBO Max and Peacock launched mid-pandemic when production was shut down, reducing the amount of original programming each service could initially offer. Now the production pipeline is once again robust with services debuting new programs aimed to woo a wide array of demographics.

Kilar gave an example of a string of HBO Max premieres designed to appeal to, retain and serve viewers interested in shows with “a young female sensibility,” not an HBO specialty historically, but an audience HBO Max is now in a continuous groove of courting with “Gossip Girl,” followed by the premiere of “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” followed by the “Harry Potter” movie cast reunion, the return of “Euphoria” for a new season and the movie “The Fallout,” starring fellow Murrysville native Maddie Ziegler.

As for what’s an HBO show versus what’s an HBO Max show, Kilar said HBO has a prestige, “highest-quality storytelling” brand while HBO Max shows have a “younger, maybe even more modern and accessible sensibility.”

Follow Kilar on Twitter and it’s clear he’s as interested in the future of entertainment as he is in its past, often posting facts about the history of Warner Bros., which dates to the opening of the brothers’ first theater in New Castle in the early 1900s followed by the founding of Pittsburgh-based film distributor Duquesne Amusement Supply.

“I’m fascinated [with history] because I think we will do a better job inventing the future if we understand how we got to where we are,” Kilar said.

It’s likely Kilar will soon become a part of WarnerMedia history himself. When the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger closes later this year, possibly by April, it’s expected Kilar will depart the company. Until then, he’s all-in on WarnerMedia, which expects to grow its subscription ranks with a “Game of Thrones” prequel premiering later this year, the launch of yet another stand-alone streaming service, CNN+, and more interactive video games.