HBO Chief Executive Richard Plepler will leave the network after being remained in the company for nearly three decades, Plepler said in a memo to HBO employees on Thursday.
The premium television network came under new parent company when AT&T acquired its previous owner Time Warner and now is going through a phase of restructuring in the board, which is also leading to an expected resignation of David Levy, president of broadcasting company Turner, which is also owned by AT&T, reported Reuters citing sources familiar with the plan.
Both HBO and Turner are working as a part of WarnerMedia, a unit of telecom giant AT&T.
Under Plepler’s leadership company grew to become one of the market leaders in streaming video on demand, which remained successful to air some of hits shows including “Girls” and “Game of Thrones”.
It is hard for me to leave a company as well as its peoples to whom I remained loving during my career, but it is the right time for me to make this decision, Plepler wrote in the memo.
Earlier on Tuesday, AT&T came on winning an appeals court decision for its acquisition of media company Time Warner, to which the Turner networks and HBO are the subsidiaries and it was the second time when AT&T remained victorious over the U.S. Department of Justice, which had filed the current lawsuit in appeals court to stop the merger.
After that winning, which declared the merger of Time Warner with AT&T as legit, most of the media industry had been expecting that AT&T will now come up streamlining its Turner and HBO properties as earlier this year reports prompted about a cultural clash between the AT&T and its newly acquired companies.
Under the new structure in AT&T, Pleper would be seeing less of the autonomy which partially drove him to take the decision of leaving, according to a person familiar with the transition.
