• by Ray Schultz , October 17, 2022

Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, will be back on the air with a new podcast: "Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.” 

“We didn’t care about the ratings,” says guest Jeff Bewkes of his time as former HBO and Time Warner’s final CEO before their merger with AT&T and their original programming gambles that paid off. 

They used to say, “It's not TV, it's HBO. We were saying that we're different," Bewkes says. We're not like every other network.” 

Bewkes continues, “People were not signing up for HBO so they could tune into a specific show that Sunday night, they wanted the range of shows that they were hearing everybody raving about. So that fact that we didn't have advertising is what shaped our original programming breakthroughs and it led to what we modestly call the Golden Age of television because we were the only network, with Movie Channel, that didn't make shows for the advertisers, we made shows for the audience."