Covering All The Bases Is A Baseball Expression
Michael Hedges September 11, 2020 Follow on Twitter
Streaming media has been around long enough to cast off that start-up image. Certainly, some of that remains. The automobile industry has a hundred year lead, banking more than 500 years. But business moves fast, except where it doesn’t, these days. And the business world wants to follow the winners right now.
 Every word and deep thought of Netflix founder and chief executive Reed Hastings continues to attract media coverage. This is hardly a surprise. Actually, he is co-founder and co-chief executive. He gets all the credit and writes books about it all. His latest is “No Rules Rules.”
Perhaps all this drove the Economist (September 12) to publish a long critique cum homily to the “curious management style” at Netflix. The company recruits top talent - top to bottom - and gives employees considerable decision making latitude as well as sumptuous compensation. “It sounds like a recipe for expensive anarchy.”
Beyond the hyperbole Netflix is, still, beloved by investors and, for different reasons, its international subscribers. Investors put up with profligate spending for sake of long-in-coming profitability. Spending on top notch series and movies, not to forget a few duds, drive more investment, which continues to drive more investment in series and movies. What’s for an investor not to like? Plus the company has that high-tech mystique with a big splash of show biz. Mr. Hastings - and Netflix - are being quoted and studied in every MBA program.
Subscribers, Netflix has quite a few; 193 million worldwide at last count (Q2 2020). Of the 26 million new subscribers for the first half of this year 22% were from the Asia Pacific region while North American subscriptions grew just over 1%. In the North American market the company has several well-financed and highly experienced competitors; Hulu, Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon Prime, HBO. There are also many competitors in the rest of the world, typically without Hollywood exposure or big league financing.
Nothing illuminates like the passage of time. Since Netflix evolved from a mail-order DVD shop to the icon of streaming video on demand competitors have popped-up. Big names in the TV and film scenes blasted Netflix for breaking “the rules” then hustled into that business. Some have held on quite well; Amazon Prime for one. Others have carved out the geographic niché; NENT in Scandinavia.
The continued surge in international (non-US) subscribers appears to have contributed to VP Original Content Cindy Holland, on-board since the DVD days, exiting the company, announced this week (September 9) by Ted Sarandos, the Chief Content Officer who became co-chief executive six weeks ago. A new position - VP Global TV - has been created for Bela Bajaria, merging English-language and other language TV programming. Ms Bajaria had been headhunted, according to Deadline (September 8), by NBCUniversal for its top TV programming job.
Mr Hastings equates the Netflix business model to professional sports. “If you’re going to win the championship,” he said to CNBC (September 9), “you got to have incredible talent in every position. And that’s how we think about it.”
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