Netflix Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] look at these pioneers i know these pioneers hollywood people you've been going to a lot of hollywood events last um saturday night was the first time in a long time like 15 months right out with people and i have a little bit of my voice too it's from talking louder than i have for a while for a long time yeah what did you go to uh the opening of the academy museum right i'm the chair of the board of trustees did you go to the emmys uh no emmy's was only for nominees right i got to watch that good emmy night for us in my sweats with the dogs oh okay all right okay so i missed some of those things but not all of them so let's start about the pandemic it has fueled enormous growth in netflix which is recently stalled so let's first talk about what the pandemic did you pass 200 million is that correct the number yeah um talk a little bit about the impact on your business because all the tech businesses have doubled tripled in size yeah have an enormous um good effect on it if you can use that word well we're trying to one of the things that we'll parse out over the next couple years will be how much of that was accelerated growth that was coming anyway so just accelerated pull forward and how much because you think about the trends in the history of television they're typically 20-year cycles so if you look at those things and if you look at this over the next 20 years you probably won't even be able to identify covet in that in that mix so the idea people were home and they were experimenting they were had time on their hands at the beginning and they were trying to you know try new things and watch them we think they were coming and i'd probably accelerate a lot of growth for us in terms of um pulling forward what was going to come down the road what was going to come that this was already a trend yeah at the same time you see it in the growth of streaming right just generally at the same time screaming has grown finally one of the things i think most peter kaufman noticed is that um you have laughed these companies over and over and over again well they're here now yeah so let's talk a little bit about that they're here whether it's disney nbc everybody apple um and many others talk about that first and then i'd like to talk about the challenges well look we've been competing with those very folks since the beginning since we started streaming uh they were either sometimes in different distribution channels but with the same kind of content folks who made great tv shows we had to make great tv shows people made great movies we had to make great movies um and i think our competing with them in this arena we're probably more confident because this is kind of home field so we know the technology when you push play it works when you come to netflix you find great things to watch isn't just that we have a lot it's just that finding it matters and being able to actually pop entertainment brands into the zeitgeist uh something that some of them have been working on for a hundred years and we've been at it for you know far far less but i think it's one of those things where we are competing on that on those grounds really well uh and you know we think that we'll you know they're going to continue to make great content and so are we and it's going to be up to the consumers to decide what they're all right that's the ceo answer yeah well the answer which is excellent good job thank you um but talk a little bit about i mean they are really now spending enormous amounts of money they're branding like crazy they're trying to sell subscriptions do you feel at some point it really affects you wall street certainly does your growth is stalled wall street talks about it almost almost incessantly look i think that's it's great for everyone to talk about competition it's great for them to think about competition we really don't we really do look at we really are competing with ourselves the things that i'm most concerned with for the next decade is internal execution can we continue to operate as well uh with 10 000 employees that we did with 2000 employees and then with twenty thousand employees and operating around the world um right now we started off as a domestic company mailing dvds around and we have made these pivots into the um bigger broader and different skill sets uh and to me it's like i keep looking at it saying it's a kind of a marvel of execution and can we maintain it at enormous scale to me that's more troubling than any competition that's on the marketplace do you worry about from any of them or is there something that makes you nervous about their entrance um just that we won't you know i have to take them seriously and i would just well i don't ever want to underestimate any of them uh because i think they all underestimated us right i just want to make sure we don't make that same mistake i used to think about um well we don't i'm sure that they would sit in their rooms and say we're not worried about them they're tech people they called you a lot the answer yeah like albanians yeah but they won't figure out creative uh we're they're tech companies they got the create they got the tech but we got the creative and i always want to make sure that we're not just sitting around dismissing that they'll get the tech right someday right dismissing that they will or won't yeah they certainly have gotten the tech okay they work my hbo max works just fine not last night all right so no but in general you're right we look at it this way that they're gonna figure it out i made this comment in the press a long time ago about hbo that had legs it just kept sticking around which was that we wanted to become hbo before they became us right that's basically what that was right and that's the way i think about it now you know as well which is you have to do all these things really well let's talk about the evolution of streaming because you were the one that got netflix into this i think reed gives you the credit yeah the original programming for sure yeah would i could tell i met reed in 99 and reid talked about netflix almost exactly like it is right now and that was a crazy vision in 1999 and but it talked about no dvds by mail and it was we talked about downloading instead of streaming back then right but it was essentially the same product you have we have right now and when you think about that piece of it um so reed always said that this digital leap was going to take place and it was going to come he probably thought it was going to come 10 years sooner than it would be but in general i look at that and think about you know the the next one was the two original programming which was if you believed all those things were coming then you better distinguish yourself against everybody else and typically you're gonna have to do that on programming all right we're talking about in a minute but talk about the streaming business now how does it break down and evolve so here you have all these competitors they're all selling subscriptions they're moving their content they're creating original content um what do you how do you look at that from a strategic point of view to compete with that well first of all we have i believe our advantage is that we're not conflicted in our business so we make our programming for our members on netflix so there's a other when you're kind of managing through legacy businesses you're trying not to kill them too fast you see how the studios today are conflicted about when to put movies out do they put them direct to their service do they put them on their theaters first do they wait 45 days wait 14 days so we we typically are not we're having none of those discussions i don't believe viewers and fans really care about those things right they really care about are you making great things that i want to watch and so they i think we don't have to get tied up in all that and i do think for us like having that becomes an advantage because we can focus and we focus on members when you look at those arguments that they're having i had jason kylar i think i got into a little bit of a trouble on my podcast um and he was talking about when he had just announced um putting everything out online to strengthen hbo max et cetera like that the kind of attacks he got was astonishing even though privately most hollywood studios acknowledged this is the future yeah i mean tell me what you thought when he when they did that look i think it's hard not to just acknowledge that this is what consumers want you can't look at the business i don't think you could look at the world and say how do we protect our business you have to look at the world and say what do people want and how can we serve that best and i think what's clear is that in a very short amount of time um in the u.s where we're most penetrated um 25 of time you're watching television you're watching streaming you're watching streaming content across some service and 25 of that time you're watching netflix so this is an enormous shift in consumer behavior from broadcast the cable that i thought was amazing and from cable to live live to on demand was amazing and this is like this is much more impactful what's happening and it's happening across all platforms so you can't look at this and say how do i want to bring this out and you can see how difficult it is now for a broadcaster to find audience on their network and how hard it is for someone to break into the culture anymore if you're not in that streaming zeitgeist where people can go to a party and hear you say oh my god i'm watching this new show and then go home and push play right watch it and it just feels so what do you think about the pushback he got this is something you've been doing for years um again so when we started making movies we didn't have to contemplate this hybrid world that the studios would have to right so they if what if we put it in a theater what if we don't put it into theater what do we put on dvd so for us it's like we've always in all of our original movie deals we've always contemplated what the world would look like in success and i think it's really important that talent has to be respected and how it's to be compensated competitively and for us it was like well what does this do what would this deal look like if you went somewhere else and how do i make sure you're compensated in a way you would have if you went somewhere else so we've always taken that approach to it anyway and when they had to be forced to pay them more um obviously disney's in a in a fight with scarlett johansson were you surprised by the reaction to scarlett johansson um look i've been i watch these things as a spectator sometimes too and you watch it thinking oh i would have said this or i wish would have said that and i do it myself all the time so i can i i understand sometimes intent uh this isn't always how it lands so i suspect this is kind of mean i think it was intentional yeah i mean i'm fortunate that we have not been in those in those shoes but it was but what does it signal about the economics because they're all shifting to your economics in these new ways yeah i mean i think this was what we're doing is not very exotic anymore right it was super exotic a couple years ago but now it's not very exotic at all in fact same thing about windows i think about the day and date was this one exotic idea that everyone had to fight do that just saying exotic because you want us to watch i do i want it to be misquoted as erotic so yeah okay all right so um uh he's still in jail right [Laughter] are you doing a follow not sure okay okay so uh like i lost my train of thought tiger king tiger king was coming erotic i was like oh [Laughter] when you when they when when when this is happening when it's happening with them with the economics what does that do for your business if they're all moving to your economics do you have to shift again no i i mean it's no use in being a disruptor just to disrupt things really we thought this was a better way to i mean we've looked at this is just a better way to do it for us and eventually people either adopt it or they just don't but for us i think we've always viewed it as a better way of doing business in terms of having i think that producers making films who had a steady return on their investments and is a lot better than this kind of lottery ticket environment that the movie business operates in generally which is back end yeah back in and you'll make a big move every once in a while one moment like we talked to how many years do we talk about my big fat greek wedding because it's that rare it just doesn't happen that often so when it does i'm sure people want to replicate it and it's like a the excitement of that is exciting for people but people need to sustain themselves and make make money and make more movies and the way that we can if you have a steady return on your investment in your movies you can make more movies and that's what we all really want that's really what we want from them right i want to talk a little about content in a minute but let's talk about verticalization do you need to verticalize you've gone into games yeah not in news no um do you need to do that i buy a device no i don't i don't think so look i think um those devices are pretty useless without something that the consumer really desires to watch so we just have to as long as we're focused on netflix being as desirable or more desirable in the future uh then we don't have to we'll those devices are much more powerful and we're good business relationships with all those folks so you do not need a device no if you don't think it's important like a road guru i don't know that it's not important it just i don't think it's vital for us i think it's important for us to be desirable to consumers today on pivot uh scott galloway was noting something like ted lasso won a ton of awards getting a lot of attention he thought it was sort of it's just an okay show it certainly doesn't match up with some of your shows but apple was able to push no i know there's ted lasso fans here but but no doubt was able to push it through because they can broadcast to a billion people on all these devices they have do they have an innate advantage against you now i i don't know and i think they got more emmys correct uh nothing else i would think a more ted lasso got most for the comment for our comedy right um and we won both for drama and for limited series and we had the most uh emmys of anyone since 1974 with the cbd it was the two of you right yeah um and but they but for us it was i look at that like they it's a nice marketing platform for sure uh but in general there's more effective ones than that and i look at these two and say that there's ted lasso fans until last so i love ted lasso too but i would say that the show itself is probably and we don't know because they don't give numbers um how big or small the show is but it did well at the awards and you can make smaller wordsy shows they win a lot of awards i'm not saying ted lasso is because i don't know the number ward z but award z that is the but it's awards and i would say that what i was most proud of our 44 emmys that night or that was that they were among our most watched shows on netflix our most popular shows uh were also awards all right that's that i'd rather than if i had to pick between them you don't need you don't think that they have an innate advantage the amazons the apples when they're in this space no and they may i mean like i said it's a marketing platform so that's a simple marketing platform but if they're going to use it as one then they probably should sell it to other people if it's that powerful right okay so speaking of that so one of the things that there was a story about people remember what they watch on netflix yeah um let me have some slides correct let me put them up let me get them up oh look at this this is like us being super transparent with you don't tell anybody okay so this is the first thing correct so here's the thing so there's all this talk about um do shows get you know how do people talk about ratings so you in ratings it's pretty cut and dry the nielsen's have been around for a long time it was designed to sell advertising it worked well for average for advertisers uh for streaming there's this kind of will point to some of the um complexity in the reporting so we're not trying not to be transparent we're trying to be representative so in this case we talk a lot about um the folks who choose to watch so in the first 28 days of a release of something this is the millions of accounts that started individual accounts individual accounts this is available correct this particular no this list has never been seen in other words in this form okay all right so but that's our so bridgeton at 82 million of individual accounts it could be more people that but 82 million accounts uh chose to to watch bridget in the first 28 days of its release and that's it all the way down to the bottom and then on that's film uh the other side is film uh so extraction is the most watched in the first 28 days of this is one of the hemsworth yeah right and this is the traditional uh measure that folks are using a lot of folks use around reach so it's certainly a good measure of popularity but it's not necessarily a complete picture of his engagement so this is people who choose to watch and they watch a couple of minutes in the first four minutes yeah this is two minutes this is two close to seven right and that means they're interested in it it means they're rich they didn't watch it but they didn't start it by accident they chose it uh and and people say so why do you do that instead of this uh now the next one i think actually is the other one which is engagement minutes of watching you see the list is incredibly similar so it's certainly super representative and where it gets disconnected is runtime so um on the previous list we saw some things that were on the higher on the chose to watch and lower on this is because they're 30 minute episodes or half a season and those kind of things right so it's so this is not runtime adjusted this is just by these numbers do not get released until now right correct that's correct so we're getting there right now we're gonna we're getting there in terms of being we're trying to be more transparent with the market and with the time with talon with everybody as to because everyone wants to know are you watching my show is my show being watched and it's a big black box for mostly so we are we do publish a lot of numbers uh and but this is a the most comprehensive look at this so what does this mean bridgerton season one obviously the most watched hours yeah so this is the people who push play they watched it they loved it and uh i love bircherton oh it's a great show yeah i do i think no idea why it's the straightest show ever but you're still in i'm in for season two i just saw your thing but the uh but we thought why this is an important view i think that when you think about what is success in this world i think success is in a couple of measurements and you could figure you can pick the order but subscribers of course matter uh uh revenue matters profits matter and engagement and for a subscription business i think engagement really matters and this talks about this goes this keeps them there so you don't get rid of your subscription yeah they value this i think this is a real indicator of value our members spend a couple of hours a day watching netflix um nielsen has been tracking uh in this kind of measurement for for a couple of months now and in the last four weeks uh the netflix netflix shows and films have been 10 of 10 in all but one week um so the idea that people don't know what they're watching how do you push back on that uh well the pop we have some metrics like if you look at on on our site where most people can look to uh the top 10 can give you a really good example oh they are watching of course they're watching right there yeah uh and then some of these kind of um oddities of of television where they show that have been on for three years like manifest yeah that um people this is an nbc show that is now the most popular show i mean we only had it in the u.s and canada and in the first 28 days where 25 million folks start so it was like that's gives you it's a good revival yeah so it was got canceled by nbc we went back and said we there's clearly an audience interest based on what we see just in the u.s and that we can pick up uh bring the show back and we're doing kind of a super-sized um season to tell the story was always cons you know at a beginning middle and end of pitch so we'll get to the beginning and middle as on netflix now and then we're going to produce the end you're going and you're making that correct right you did the same thing with cobra kai cobra kai was a big yeah yeah i'm a huge fan i introduced yeah it's a good it's he is a blast yeah and the show is great and it just didn't really find the big audience on on youtube red and on netflix it came out of the gate as a huge hit the third season was a monster we have another one coming up before the end of this year so when you're thinking about making this content how do you those numbers are showing that it's mostly all your original content that's doing the best how do you when you look at those numbers what do you what are you thinking of how you should make things when you're talking to creators you know obviously bridget and you signed a very splashy deal yeah with shonda rhimes yeah you signed another with ryan murphy i didn't see a lot of his stuff yeah up there how do you look at these big deals so the one thing about data i think it's a really good thing for letting other people judge how we're doing but i think in terms of creation you want to be careful not to use it too much so like this notion of reverse engineering storytelling is a disaster um none of those things on paper were going to be great projects look at queen's gambit right i mean no one was making queens gambit scott frank tried to make that as a feature film for more than 10 years right and he recasted and made and did you know recast it as a seven part series and it was a monster for us um and i think in looking at this that bridgeton uh is not on paper what it would be a big commercial show and again it's all about execution and picking the right people and the right storytellers and those big deals so shonda made bridgeton for us and people look at these how do you feel about these overall deals are they good are they bad and it's way too early to tell so you have to look back at these things and over many many years for when they're in the five-year period or so where they're making content for you what worked and what didn't now that bridgette that success shaun disney will be successful just on bridgeton um and if you look at that and say well she's got a lot more to come and we're thrilled about that and the same thing with ryan ryan is going to make a lot of cut he's very prolific so he's going to make a lot of things and things will work and things is that what you want to because when i first heard i'm like oh god ted's going hollywood doing it overall yeah no the beauty of it is if we didn't do those so those deals made a lot of press and got a lot of attention because i think they were kind of one of those man-bite dog stories like netflix got an overall deal what's that or i thought they were doing everything different and the main thing was we were also faced with reality which was in this world where uh abc and disney compete with netflix they no longer sell us their content so if we didn't do that deal with shonda bridgerton would be somewhere else or it wouldn't exist anywhere and you can see how impactful it's been so for me it's like one of those ways it's um ensuring access to the people who you believe are you know telling the story that the world what is your pitch to talent now then well the good thing is that most talent wants to be on the place that they're watching and that their friends are watching and their kids are watching and that's typically netflix so that that's the the easy end which is you know we want to be in the zeitgeist we want to be in the culture we want my things to be watched of course everyone wants to be paid and we pay very competitively but the one thing that's really difficult to do anymore as you see is just finding that audience at the scale that we are able to so like i said bridgeton shouldn't have been a hard sale if you look at those numbers but it was a really hard sale to get it done i mean yeah yeah yeah besides you um one of the things when you're thinking about content i should tell you the other reason it's not just like an accident because we're in a lot of places the the ui the site you know the way it picks things to show you yeah um it's super damn the only thing worse than a list of a you know a million titles list of 10 million titles right so you really have to figure out some way to organize it in a way that people will find things that they love and and one thing we know is that if you pick the things from those rows um you are much more likely to love what you're watching and watch more of it than if you just pick something off the top 10 or you search for something that your friend recommended in a weird way netflix recommends better than your friends right so that's and it really is a value in terms of when it comes to finding an audience although sometimes i'm like there's too much stuff is there too much stuff in terms of content it's it's just not all for you so you you just look well i am a narcissist yes how does that but like i look at those things like my my at my house like it's my wife and i never agree on anything to watch she loves virgin river she loves sweet magnolias she loves ginny and georgia she loves firefly lane and uh and i don't hate it so i watch them with it i love it i love the experience of watching something with her that we both enjoy uh but but you know when i when it comes to my picks they're completely opposite and she goes to bed what is your top pick right now uh you so we have my you don't want to say no i know it's so hard it's hard because you want to pick your you know you don't want to pick your children but i want you to you pick you only put one on stage i know that's true you're trying to protect the others what's your excuse uh though for me it's like i because i'm always out i'm always out of whack with the rest of the world because i'm watching the things as they're being made what do you like right now um anywhere anywhere anywhere anywhere i i do like ted lasso by the way um i really like uh there's a show on hbo max called um the two of the uh the other two i think was really funny never heard all right yeah see all right so when you think i have a couple though i think like the show is like the crown and and i mean the thing about those shows is they manage to be highbrow and mainstream and they're difficult material um and and yet can be consumed in a big audience if you want to pick a show on netflix right now that you thank your lucky stars for probably house of cards but it would be the crown now uh no you know what y'all want to hear some recent c bias what there's a show on netflix right now that is the number one in the world like everywhere in the world it's called squid game squid squid game is um will definitely be our biggest non-english language show in the world for sure uh it's only been out for nine days uh and it's a very good chance it's going to be our biggest show ever explain what it's doing enormously popular squid game is a show from korea it's um a kind of dystopian survival story kind of like hunger games or maze runner but darker uh and people love it because like all the children died in hungary yeah okay darker than that yeah but it's uh but it is enormously popular and what's been wild is the the growth of our we produce local language content all over the world uh we want those shows to be hugely impactful in the countries we make them and every once in a while one of them just breaks out like la casa de papel that was so enormously impactful wordpress money is here uh and squid games is going to be that lupine was luke was passed but it was at the time it was our largest non-english launch and the first non-english show to hit number one in the u.s and squid games is blowing past all of them right i like call myself watch good game if you want as you know um so i want a couple things the gamification of netflix what are you doing in games and again where are you going next in content so i would say and so in poland right now people are playing games on netflix so we just we did launch a couple of games and people are trying it out well good for the polls good for the polls and we're trying we're thrilled with how it technically is coming up coming together and i look at it like any other vertical of content we didn't couple years ago we weren't making it unscripted a couple years ago we were making movies uh and a couple years before that we were making foreign language content and i look at it now like games are this evolution of world building and storytelling uh two things that we do all day uh and there is a kind of future looking of saying i don't know for sure what people will do as they grow up if they played a lot of games as a kid but i'm sure people will support will spend more time gaming as adults than they did 10 years ago and 20 years ago and part of that is going to be is netflix the way of monetizing content uh better for the consumer in the game world like it was in tv and movies this will be original games and also other games correct correct and it's and it'll be we're still experimenting on what it's going to be and how it's going to play out it's going to be primarily focused on mobile uh and that it would sure for sure be part of our subscription and then when does it when does it get to the u.s uh still stay tuned so we're still working what does stay tuned mean yeah we don't we don't have a hard deadline on it we're not trying to make the fall season or trying to get out before ces or anything so we're just really trying to make sure that when it's ready what other verticals do you think are critical news we've been uh intentionally out of news so we do documentary uh we try to stay out of news because we're a global company and that um it because be delivering the news and from one place to another uh is highly scrutinized and we're really primarily an entertainment company we want to entertain people uh and i know the news can be not that entertaining music music's pretty well covered we think out there okay no not a natural crossover really all right a couple more questions what's it like being seen co-ceo i don't even know what that means so read like i told you i met reid a long time ago and i joined netflix in 2000 so we've been working together for a really long time in the last 10 years or so since we started streaming and certainly since originals we've been running the company together so um it's probably gonna on you know read well and he's this is a guy of unbelievable uh intellect and no ego and he um has been able like he said he always gives me credit for original programming i hope i'm as good a leader down the road uh to do that for somebody because he he could have taken the credit easily for things like that right so and he created the environment for me to do that which is super important so a lot of the day-to-day decision making and the running of the business we've been doing together for a long time so not fundamentally different what do you disagree on um you know i think overwhelms well we have rubbed off on each other a lot over the last couple years in terms of i mean i think he's made me a better tech executive i've made him a better entertainment executive he is um very in he he trusts my intuition and i trust his take on the data uh and he you know his infor his his intuition is more informed by the data and every once in a while he gets that but he takes himself out of his comfort zone every day in that way the same thing with me which is i look at this and say i know what that says but i think this is going to work and that has served us really well but i also am a rational i'm also rational about it and the data you know there's a lot of good that can come from both and i think it's the that mix of art and science and i think that you know when reid and i think about it we're we're kind of 60 40 on either side of that of the art and science of running the business does that ever end you wish he would get on like a penis-shaped rocket ship and go somewhere else i don't want to go there i know i can't speak for reading but i'm not that's not my plan no he doesn't have to get on a peanut shaped rocket you know you do something else yeah you see this you know what the thing about it is and i can kind of understand it's like for i've been doing this for over 20 years at netflix i've never had two years that feel the same so it really feels new all the time and the challenges are big right now is the most exciting time of the reason i'm asking is because you're famous for firing people and like moving moving them along yeah do you think about that with someone like him or not is he [Laughter] no not at all i'm fortunate i mean for me it's like i look at these things around what makes us pretty unique in this role is i i genuinely want him in that seat okay yeah now are you gonna change like what is your ceo ship different uh look at the i think we've got to focus on um mostly about making programming that people can't live without and as long as we're making movies and television that is better than the world has ever seen that's the direction i got to take everybody and make sure that we're making sure that netflix is a creative culture and there's no question it was born you know as a tech company and there's a ton of creativity in tech the question is is being a creator company like this versus what we were before which is a lot more of a distributor company using tech to improve the distribution now it's how do we use tech to improve storytelling how do we do it we're going to take questions in a minute but i just have a few more um what is there something a vision that you have that you think is going to go forward for example um movie theaters for example um when you think about that people have shifted dramatically to the home largely because of the pandemic but the home experience is better yeah for example are movie theaters dead no no they're because i think they will be less frequent maybe more expensive um a good more event to get out of the house and do something which people are still going to be looking for that um and i just i think i do think that movies premiering on television at home on that big screen on your comfortable couch it's pretty sweet it's pretty and it's pretty hard to compete with really but if you want to go out and you just want to go out i can't compete with that either yeah i think in the movies whether they're covered worthy now that's not good worthy on seinfeld yes that's sponge worthy yeah you got it um i do so far it's only been um uh the recent marvel movie yeah and james bond that's it yeah and i think when you think about a big loud spectacular thing you want us to feel like you i want to see that on the big screen now far more people will watch both of those movies at home but i do know that that is something that will get you out of the house and go do something there's nothing wrong with that people choose all kinds what do you make of an argument of many creators that know we must have this theatrical experience it just depends on who they're talking for if they're talking for themselves that's that's a short debate if they're talking about for the consumers that they'll that will play out in attendance all right so and i do think the kind of movies that are getting made it's not like big movies are for the theaters and small movies over home i do think that um the the kinds of things there's there's less and less room for um character-driven drama at the theater like you said that may not be coveted worthy for you right and i do think the idea that we can get those movies made and get them seen by big audiences is a saving to the industry i'm going to end by asking you about would netflix ever buy on movie theater chain no i don't see that and we we own we have two theaters now it's not really a chain um but it's we use we we screen movies there and we have our premieres there and we do repertory if you live in new york the programming of the paris theater is amazing so they'll screen our original movies and then the director will pick movies that inspire them and we curate them over the week that they're showing and it's a real reality we need to own a device or a movie theater no no we have got to make content that people can't live without and all the everything else takes care of itself and when you think about things you need to buy what do you need to buy um we are right right now we're thinking about different ways that we are uh how to scale production with the kind of the production infrastructure and those kind of things so not buying spotify for example no no no we have always been builders instead of buyers and uh this um so i do think our goal really mostly is to build so we can build it more more it's much more bespoke uh our business right so and the things that serve us well like you look at somebody well why don't you sell your data your union and i look at it as well it really doesn't inform much except for watching on netflix so the thing so i think for us it's like we're so narrowly focused i think it's what served us so well what about being bought being bought yeah no that's not not not i was just with a major studio they think they're going to get bought by a tech company in the next yeah five years i'm glad we don't think about that you know i mean i don't want i don't need people thinking about that i don't think about it i know reid doesn't think about it and then or the boy's not thinking about it so it's a good thing not imagine that would be a big business distraction to think about it yes it would yeah um nonetheless they feel like these big tech companies are going to suck up everything yeah over so if you look out i'm going to uh turns into audience questions in a second what what's the thing you're most scared of and the thing you're most hopeful about in your business um hopeful about every time something like squid game comes along like wow i'll be honest with you we did not see that coming in terms of its global popularity so to me it's like every time i look backwards that what do we predict in terms of how big something might be or what how impactful something might be we're even in our most audacious picking we're underestimating where things can go and how big things can be and how impactful they can be in the culture so that's super encouraging that's super exciting and i told you i think the scared thing i'm not that scared but i think when i think about things i worry about is that kind of internal execution and how do we become a company that is around in 100 years and 200 years and but i know if we do that by creating a great business culture by creating a place where people do the best work of their life uh investing and trusting people and you still follow those rules that read and patty and get out yeah and they evolve i mean we do the one thing we try not to do is that to get these things to be so precious people go how do you preserve the culture and i always tell people don't try to preserve the culture try to evolve the culture to being better than it was last year so there's so none of these things are in granite so the idea that you can you know challenge something that used to work five years ago and netflix is really important part of the culture okay questions from the audience come up to these things come on up here all right thanks for the talk and for letting me borrow my friends network's password all these years um just have a question about big franchises so have you thought about you know building these multi-decade franchises the way you know disney has with star wars or marvel or you know will we see tiger king spin-offs 50 years from now is that how you guys are going to work and that's how it starts in a way but if you look at it i mean franchises are nice but people what you want is hits right and i think when people look at this there's uh they some things get called franchises that are mostly just a series of hits uh and i think for us i think of what is a big world building franchise is something like stranger things things that could spin off and support new cast and time jump and films and live experiences and consumer products and all those things so stranger things is probably that and you're seeing a franchise being born uh in its early stages and just going into its fourth season uh but we did these live events that were wildly successful if you go to the universal studios hollywood uh halloween haunts it's all about it's all stranger things there too um so in general i think that that's the way to do it i don't know that you can only do it in franchises i think for us it's been liberating and challenging to tell original stories so all those hits that i just showed you there on the film side they're all original stories and that's i think what's there's plenty of room for original stories if uh franchises are crowding out relatively few screens although he wouldn't mind owning marvel and guessing yeah uh it's mark mahini at evercore ted um when people looked at kind of the sub softness earlier uh the year and they talked about a soft content slate is there something you can do over the next couple of years to minimize the chances that in any one period of time a quarter or a year that you do have a soft content slate as the company gets bigger or have you got learnings that allow you to reduce that risk well fortunately that was a complaint from wall street that you were you were saying yeah you had a soft whatever yeah the uh i look i think it's uh fortunately kobe is a once in a century thing uh in terms of that kind of that level of shutdown but our in general i'd say that people want to say why don't you hold out your content and spread it out a lot of people said that about during the during the shutdown i said well because people are locked in their homes let's give them as much content as they can watch right now so we didn't change our release schedule um and that caused some some things that were supposed to come out of the first half of the year to come out of the second half of this year and then there's a few things from the second of this year to early next year and the way we do that diff why it doesn't impact us as much is because we have so much to your point so some of these things are you know we're five or six deep um in terms of a week of new releases all the time in each of these content verticals so it's not as felt but the one thing that really caught us off guard in kovid our first shutdown actually was a movie that we have coming out in a few weeks called our the heart of they fall which is with idris elba where we've learned hard and fast about how to make these getting back to production safely and all the safety protocols we put into place but we went but at the time we didn't think about dubbing and we had the new season of ozark that came out at the beginning of this lockdown and we had difficulty getting the brazilian and the italian dubs made because at the time there were no dubbing protocols to record from home so the the unions and the actors and the gov and the governments were all shutting down so we had to navigate all those things so we learned a ton during this uh that will keep the um the impact of something like this from being prolonged again uh and in general the way you could do it is just plan as you know basically you plan to 150 but i think that would probably be over a gross overreaction okay nina hey ted eno freed from axios i know in the past you guys have been pretty not into the idea of live sports i'm curious if your thinking's evolved at all there doesn't care about sports oops i forgot that one look i think there's a couple reasons that i've been fairly dismissive of doing live sports on netflix i think first and foremost um we bring a lot to on-demand television and so scripted content is and unscripted in movies on your schedule is really attractive relative to watching some a linear timetable or a show time at the theater that's hugely attractive and being able to watch all at once and all those things are unique and that we don't really bring any of that to sports you know you you want to watch all at the same time and you don't once you know who won it's not that interesting anymore uh and it's just so it's really just not for us uh and i do think that there's been plenty the broadcast is built really beautifully for it cable's built beautifully for it other folks are playing with it now on demand and i just don't know where that's heading i feel like um the next best use of about 10 billion dollars because which i think would cost to get into a major sport uh if it is sports at some day then we'll do it but right now i think the next best use of that would be more film and television and unscripted and games and no sports sorry hina sorry but sports adjacent if you're a if you really watch uh drive to survive as we've really kind of blew up tf1 you know formula one racing and people really love it and it's growing all over the world the audience for formula one racing because of this show uh even something as big as michael jordan as big as the nba uh they cite you know the last dance as a huge growth in the sport so sports adjacent business is really exciting sports adjacent got it amy got that one i just made up a word well done it's like erotic thanks rick cutter with cloud for utilities first of all great you back in person yeah thank you um congratulations on success with netflix certainly well deserved and my question for you is can we get another season of queen's gambit what a great show wow okay a softball right right and then i would finish up it's a great one but they've not contemplated another one i'm finished with that one are you getting a season coin cam and answer them oh no it's no it's a it's a contained show it's a limited series yeah yeah we do love it too no more from scott frank and i'm sure you'll see you're getting another bridgertain and it looks very simple and i'm sure you'll see a lot more of right here you've got only a limited time going hey alex heath with the verge uh curious to get your thoughts on the apple epic ruling and how you see that changing netflix strategy for in-app payments on ios potentially yeah um it for uh it's it's hard to say that's but there's a pretty high profile case between the two of them and we'll just supposed to see how it continues to play out big ramifications for you all potentially though right uh ramifications for anyone who does business on the platform for sure yeah ramifications all right last one very quick hey thanks first of all thank god for netflix during the coven issue um i have a question you talk about being customers first and i'm not in the media business at all my name is karen and i'm i'm on the enterprise side of things yeah but i recently read that with media did a study where 70 of us are really tired and think there are way too many subscription services and even if you're not cost sensitive managing them back and forth and trying to remember where you saw something in that aggregation with you and disney clearly moving more into investing billions into production how important is that aggregator role and do you see a role for companies like strom who want to be the super aggregator and kind of have a class pass across not just the secondary and the tertiary folks coming in with content but you guys as well it's a it's a really great question i think if you look at um cable television with 500 channels and remember in the early days of cable 57 channels and nothing's on that's where people were expressing the inability to find things even though they knew they were there they know what channel they were on what time they were on and on demand solves a lot of that and personalized ui solves a lot of that and that other part about managing a bunch of multiple subscriptions just have netflix just have one that's all you need yeah okay all right [Laughter] okay i'm going to allow my son one more question what are you going to ask louie hi um i'm a big fan of stand up i really like the netflix specials you guys have especially the dave chappelle ones i was really happy to see the chappelle show on netflix but then it was removed due to complications of compensation so i was just wondering going forward what is netflix's strategy in adopting and engaging with content that's produced by other studios as well as content from before next netflix's time and uh also you're making sure that those creators of the content you didn't plant this did you care no no i was just over there inspired by this conversation but i just want to make sure that people who i care about and enjoy like dave chappelle and such compensated and treated fairly by studios like yours i'll tell you really no i'll tell you a really quick story good parent you're a great parent yeah all right that's a great question i'll tell you a great question good time for a quick answer faster no here's the better i'm gonna i'm gonna save my reputation okay so i um didn't do hardly any business travel in the last 15 months because it just was too dangerous to do risky early on i did two trips and one was to see dave chappelle in in ohio doing that show in a field in a corn field and the other was to fly to it to austin uh to talk to him because he wanted to have this conversation about the chappelle show and those those um that situation he said ted here's the deal i didn't get paid for that um these people are making a fortune on my i can't make a new chappelle show because they've used they they own my name in my face uh and i just feel like i really they are dealing in stolen goods and um i think that you should take it down and i said well we you know and i remember i had no financial recovery here we already paid for it and i told him i would and we took weekend until and we announced that we would take it down uh which then opened up a conversation for them to have a renegotiation which was uh which was great it led to him resolving that problem uh very few deals are as bad as that deal was in the in the early days of someone's career uh but we did what i felt was the right thing by dave uh and then the rest of the industry kind of followed and that's what saved him i i'm betting uh forward on our long-term relationship with dave not trying to you know arbitrage the something from the past but i do i would like to make that content available to people and they should be under deals that are constructive um next week we'll put all 180 episodes of seinfeld on it's been incredibly lucrative for all the talent on that show in every form of distribution and dave just didn't have a deal like that at the beginning of his career so i'm i'm like you i'm a monster comedy fan that's why i think it's we pushed it so hard we've got a festival coming up in los angeles next year called netflix is a joke festival we're gonna have 100 shows in five days in every venue in town and it's going to be the who's who's of stand-up comedy it'll be really remarkable but i'm glad you're enjoying the stand-up and i think this is probably the very very sustainable home for stand-up and for standard comics all right that's great how do taylor swift and britney spears um thank you so much you

Channel: Recode

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Rating: 4.6363635 out of 5

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Id: W9j9q_EdaNk

Length: 46min 30sec (2790 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021