Netflix is moving television beyond time-slots and national markets
It may make screen-based entertainment a winner-takes-most business
IN THE heyday of the talkie, Louis B. Mayer, head of the biggest studio, was Hollywood’s lion king. In the 1980s, with the studio system on the wane, “superagent” Michael Ovitz was often described as the most powerful man in town. Now the honour falls to someone who used to run a video store in Phoenix, Arizona.
Ted Sarandos joined Netflix, a DVD-rental firm, in 2000. 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 which took decades to build and were notoriously difficult to run.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "The television will be revolutionised"
From the June 30th 2018 edition
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