How Netflix became a billion-dollar titan

By THE DATA TEAM

WHEN Ted Sarandos joined Netflix in 2000, it was just a DVD-rental firm. In 2011, when Netflix was first moving into streaming video, he bought “House of Cards”, a television drama starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright and produced by, among others, the film director David Fincher, for $100m. The nine-figure statement of intent was widely derided as profligate, showing that Netflix might be a source of cash but scarcely offered serious competition. A mail-order video store could hardly be expected to take on networks and studios that took decades to build and were notoriously difficult to run.

Instead, Netflix has become an industry in and of itself. Mr Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, and his colleagues will spend $12bn-13bn this year—more than any studio spends on films, or any television company lays out on stuff that isn’t sport. Their viewers will get 82 feature films in a year when Warner Brothers, the Hollywood studio with the biggest slate, will send cinemas only 23. (Disney, the most profitable studio, is putting out just ten.) Netflix is producing or procuring 700 new or exclusively licensed television shows, including more than 100 scripted dramas and comedies, dozens of documentaries and children’s shows, stand-up comedy specials and unscripted reality and talk shows. And its ambitions go far beyond Hollywood. It is currently making programmes in 21 countries, including Brazil, Germany, India and South Korea.

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