Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos lashes out at rival streaming services: “I don’t understand”
The current streaming landscape is dominated by a handful of giants, but Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has criticised the company’s biggest rivals by pointing out that their strategies are incomprehensible for the Netflix team.
Sarandos, celebrating his 25th anniversary with Netflix, spoke to Variety about transforming the company from a DVD subscription outlet to a streaming service that has completely changed how Hollywood operates. Naturally, this dominance has led to some opposition from observers who believe he has destroyed the movie business forever, but Sarandos pays little attention to such claims. Instead, he focuses on Netflix’s 300million subscribers and the $18billion the company intends to spend on content in the coming year.
When talk turned to Netflix’s rivals and its dominant victory in the so-called “streaming wars”, though, Sarandos took the opportunity to give an honest opinion on their strategies. Variety noted that he said he didn’t understand Amazon’s Prime Video original content strategy in 2017, and Sarandos revealed he still feels similarly. “This is just me as an observer,” he mused. “Sports has been very effective. And I don’t know if that’s their entire strategy.”
When asked if Amazon is getting to a place where it competes with Netflix in terms of original movies and shows, Sarandos was unequivocal. “I don’t,” he stated. “It’s hard for me to say. I don’t know what their long-term plans are. They’ve been streaming exactly as long as we have. They’ve been making original content exactly as long as we have.”
As for Apple – the streamer for whom Sarandos has just made his acting debut with a cameo as himself in The Studio – he was cutting. “I don’t understand it beyond a marketing play,” he admitted. “But they’re really smart people. Maybe they see something we don’t.”
Finally, Sarandos was asked about HBO/Warner Brothers and the puzzling decision to change the name of its streaming service from ‘HBO Max’ to ‘Max’. “It was a surprise,” he confessed. “We would always watch what HBO was doing, and at one point they had HBO, HBO Go, HBO Now and HBO Max. And I said, ‘When they’re serious, all those names will go away, and it’ll just be HBO’.”
Concluding, “I would have never guessed HBO would have gone away. They put all that effort into one thing that they can tell the consumer — it should be HBO.“