AT&T’s purchase of HBO could lead to 20-minute Game of Thrones episodes

Enlarge / Just imagine how many 20-minute Game of Thrones episodes you could watch if you lived as long as Melisandre. (credit: HBO)

As AT&T prepares to purchase Time Warner Inc., AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has an idea for HBO's Game of Thrones: cut the hour-long episodes down to 20 minutes for mobile devices.

AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner would give the telco HBO and other lucrative programming properties. Stephenson discussed his thoughts yesterday at the annual JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston.

"I'll cause [HBO CEO Richard] Plepler to panic," Stephenson said. But "think about things like Game of Thrones. In a mobile environment, a 60-minute episode might not be the best experience. Maybe you want a 20-minute episode." Instead of showing full-length episodes on all devices, it might be best to "curate the content uniquely for a mobile environment."

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