A few years ago, when HBO execs and their bosses at Time Warner were declaring that there was no point in selling HBO on the Web, Jake Caputo tried changing their minds.
Guy Who Complained About HBO Helps Sell HBO Now, With Help From ‘The Sopranos’
HBO will take your money after all, Jake Caputo.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Caputo was the guy behind “Take My Money, HBO,” a cute site that was supposed to show HBO that people would pay them a bunch of money to subscribe to the channel — but not the rest of the pay TV bundle — on the Internet.
Maybe not so cute! Here’s HBO’s tongue-in-cheek ad featuring Caputo, a self-employed Web developer. (An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Caputo worked for NBCUniversal. My apologies.) It’s good, but frankly “The Sopranos” guys are a little played out at this point. Would have been much more effective with Robert Durst:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvSo5vTCFE0
This is Caputo’s second cameo this week as part of HBO’s push for HBO Now. He also pops up in Nicole LaPorte’s very nice behind-the-scenes feature on the service for Fast Company.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
