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Ronnie, where are we today? We are in Los Angeles. We're about to turn onto Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood, maybe. In Hollywood. Okay, so we are approaching sort of the Hollywood Hills...
Right, lots of really tall palm trees. So should we explain why we're driving through sunset right now? There's a bunch of billboards here, right? That's what we're getting at. Last fall, Ronnie, our producer Zach, and I all piled into an Uber and took a drive down Hollywood's main track. It's a traffic jam packed with billboards promoting new TV shows and movies. I've been covering the business of media for a long time, so I served as tour guide for this trip.
But Ronnie is a data reporter who mainly writes about tech companies. She doesn't typically pay a lot of attention to what's going on in Hollywood. Here we have The Crown, Netflix, up on the right. Have you watched any of The Crown yet? I have not. On the left, we have a marriage story billboard. This is Scarlett Johansson. Yeah, I don't think I want to watch that. You may not be the right person for streaming, Ronnie. Two in a row, we got The Irishman, that's Scorsese's film, and then...
Dolemite is my name? Am I reading that right? Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy. These are both movies. They are both movies you can see on... Netflix. There you go. I don't know any of these. This is a worthwhile trip for you. You're learning what's on Netflix. And you could just actually go to your browser. Are these, like, already out? Or these are, like, I don't know. It's almost as if someone, like, hermetically sealed you inside your office. You're, like, unfrozen caveman.
A drive down Sunset isn't just a chance for Ronnie to see what's coming on TV. It's a way to watch Hollywood talking to itself. These billboards are messages which are very much directed at Hollywood. Except now, Netflix is doing most of the talking. Oh, Stranger Things. Netflix. The Politician.
Netflix. One Netflix billboard. Two Netflix billboards. Three Netflix billboards. Yeah, Netflix. Wow. Years ago, when Netflix was first getting into its own programming, an executive there told me that because they were a tech company, they didn't have to do the things that traditional media companies do, like renting billboards so it could show big-name talent that Netflix was serious about Hollywood.
That guy, it turns out, was wrong. Netflix has decided it loves billboards so much that it went out and bought some for itself. And now the company owns many of the signs on the strip. What did this used to look like before streaming? That's one of the main ideas we keep running across as we're working on this series. It's almost impossible to imagine what the world looked like before Netflix, even though that time was just a few years ago. If you didn't know any better, you'd think Netflix has always been a huge part of Hollywood. Oh, sorry.
Syphilis can be fatal to your baby. Free STD check. That is not a Netflix show. Unclear. Unclear. That's a Netflix show. Welcome to Land of the Giants, The Netflix Effect. I'm Peter Kofka. Today, we're talking about how Netflix, a Hollywood outsider that no one took seriously, took over the town and changed the lives of the people in it. You are the co-founder and CEO of Netflix. Yeah.
-I'm gonna conduct this interview Netflix-style. I'm gonna have, like, five questions you're gonna love and 5,000 you've never heard of. -Today, it's a given that Netflix has remade the media world. The company has become so omnipresent in our lives that its CEO, Reed Hastings, even counts as a sort of celebrity. He's a big enough deal for a guest spot with Stephen Colbert. -You're, like, one of those big new media disruptors. Why did the entertainment industry need to be disrupted?
- Oh, I think just for the fun of it. - All this happened really quickly.
We talked to Kim Masters, the veteran show business journalist at The Hollywood Reporter, who said that a decade ago, Netflix was an afterthought for big media companies. Newcomers from Silicon Valley or anywhere else did not strike fear in the hearts of moguls. There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, which is the outsiders come in and they think, boy, there's a lot of stupid rules in Hollywood and people sure do dumb stuff, but we're going to be, we're much smarter than these idiots. And then they get killed. It turns out that Netflix was the exception to the rule. It didn't get killed. It won.
And Netflix did it with Hollywood's help. You can trace all this back to 2008, which is when Netflix really broke into streaming by getting its hands on a bunch of blockbuster movies for a bargain bin price. It had made a deal with Starz, the premium cable channel that let Netflix stream all these great movies from Sony and Disney. So Starz had created this service called Vongo, which nobody listening to this podcast is going to remember. But there was a service before Netflix that was streaming movies called Vongo. Vongo was losing $70 million a year.
Rich Greenfield is an analyst with LightShed Partners. He's been following digital media closely for years. And in walks Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos and says, hey, we'll take that streaming content. You could sub-license it to us and we'll pay you tens of millions of dollars. Netflix used it as the base to build their streaming service versus what was historically just a DVD service. And the rest, as they say, is history.
This deal gave Netflix a big library full of movies you've definitely heard of. I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. He's heavy. Like Pirates of the Caribbean. And it cost Netflix almost nothing. It was an estimated $30 million per year. To put that in context, years later, when everyone did take Netflix and streaming seriously, Netflix ended up paying Disney about $300 million each year for its stuff.
But back then, the Stars deal, which instantly turned Netflix into a really good streaming service, went basically unnoticed. Netflix snuck in through the back door.
Then Netflix kept on buying TV shows and movies, now from networks and studios directly. And Hollywood was happy to have more money coming in, especially from old TV shows and movies it wasn't selling anywhere else. In some cases, like the Breaking Bad story we told you about last episode, Netflix actually increased the value of the stuff it was buying. They're buying our old TV shows and our old content, and this is great for us.
As Netflix's streaming business started to take off, you would hear faint chatter that maybe someday this could be a problem for the TV and movie business. Those companies had watched the music business get decimated by Napster and file sharing. And in the tech world, lots of people predicted that the internet would remake video, too. But publicly, the guys who ran big media companies said they weren't worried. The most prominent was Jeff Bukas, who ran Time Warner, the company that owned HBO and Warner Brothers.
In the distribution business, Netflix is the new 800-pound gorilla. And you have spoken in great detail in opposition to Netflix. No, not opposition. I would say it's like a 200-pound chimp. It's not an 800-pound gorilla. But does Netflix—? Bukas wouldn't sell Netflix his most valuable stuff, like the rights to HBO shows.
But he would sell them stuff he thought was less valuable, like episodes of Gossip Girl, because Netflix wasn't ever going to displace Time Warner. "HBO's had a lot of competition over the years, and HBO's done just fine." "Will Netflix be a threat?" "No, it's just another competitor." Lucas didn't just say this once. He wanted everyone to know that he was not losing sleep over Netflix. His most famous version of this disc came during an interview with The New York Times in 2010. He said, "It's a little bit like, 'Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?'
I don't think so. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings paid attention to this, by the way. A couple weeks after Bukas' comments, Hastings went on stage at a tech event and showed off some Albanian Army dog tags he was wearing. I remember this era really well because every time Netflix would make a deal with a big media company, Viacom, Discovery, Time Warner, I would write up a little story about it. And every time I did, the people who ran those companies would tell me what a good deal they made. Netflix was buying their leftovers and it was almost pure profit for them.
One conversation has always stuck in my head. A big media executive had told me gleefully and off the record that Netflix was going to choke on all the stuff it was going to have to buy from him for years to come. Netflix was small and it didn't have any leverage. So if it wanted anything good from his company, it would have to buy his crap too. And Netflix bought a lot of crap back then. In big media's mind, Netflix was the sucker at the poker table and everyone wanted to take the sucker's money.
But here's the thing. Netflix wasn't the sucker. The company was just working on a different timeline than everyone else. They were playing the long game.
There were lots of decision points that these companies had where they chose to take the easy money and support the legacy ecosystem versus doing the hard thing of investing aggressively to build a long-term business. This is Rich Greenfield again. But by taking the easy money for all of this content, forget about whether they built it themselves, by taking the money and helping basically teach consumers that there was a better way to watch television at a far better price value,
Effectively, they slit their own throats. When I was working on this episode, I called up the guy who told me about Netflix having to choke on his stuff years ago. He doesn't work in media anymore. Turns out Mr. Choke does not remember telling me about choking Netflix, but he does remember cutting those deals. They were a perfect example, he says, of the innovator's dilemma. That's when big companies that have a lead can't see the problem a new, undersized competitor can create for them. And even if they could, it's hard for them to react because they have to keep running their big business.
I asked Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, about the complicated relationship he was developing with studios and networks. Did you get the sense that they now saw you as a competitor? I think Matt Blank at Showtime, he and I had a meeting one day, and he said, let's be honest, you're a frenemy.
And I don't remember hearing the word frenemy before, or I don't remember hearing applied to me anyway. And he was right, which we were a way, we were important to them because their shows being on Netflix made them more valuable. The revenue we derived from them was for them meaningful, but it ran the risk of undermining their place in the ecosystem. The big media companies could have shut down Netflix early in its streaming push by just building their own streaming services. And eventually, belatedly, they did.
Sarando says he was a little puzzled that Hollywood gave him the chance to grow without any meaningful competition for so long. Look, in the world, we'd say that going back to that 1999 conversation with Reed, that all filmed entertainment was going to come in on the Internet. I was surprised that they were not situating themselves to do that, which created a lot of opportunity.
Eventually, you did start to see some big media executives talk publicly about the fact that they'd been building Netflix up, and now Netflix was competing with them. The head of 21st Century Fox started talking about changing things. So did Jeff Bukas at Time Warner. This was the same guy who wasn't worried about Netflix just a few years earlier.
Because by 2015, even the most optimistic media guy could see what was happening to the old business. TV subscriptions and ratings were falling and movie ticket sales were stalling. And the media people were intensely aware that Netflix was taking off. Subscriber numbers were skyrocketing and so was the value of the company. In 2010, investors thought Netflix was worth around $10 billion. Five years later, that number was up to $50 billion. You remember the plot of the Frankenstein movies, right? Quite a good scene, isn't it?
One man crazy. You know, Netflix was devouring their content for bargain prices. It's alive. It's alive. And they're like, what the heck have we done? We've created a monster. It's alive!
It's one thing to see the problem and another thing to act on it. Disney, for instance, made that mega deal to sell Netflix its movies and TV shows back in 2012. And for years later, it worried that it had made a mistake. Internally, the company debated whether it should keep giving Netflix access to its most valuable stuff, like its Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar movies. But it took Disney until 2017, it's a full decade after Netflix had started streaming, to do something about it. That's when Disney CEO Bob Iger said he wasn't going to sell his best stuff to Netflix anymore.
He was going to build his own Netflix, even if he didn't want to call it that. Tell us a little bit more about this Disney app that you're building for 2019. It sounds like you're building a mini Netflix. Well, we're building a direct-to-consumer Disney service.
You know what's happened since? Now everyone is building their own streaming service, and content that used to run on Netflix is moving to those services. And Netflix is making a ton of its own shows and movies to replace them. And it's more than that. The big media companies now view their streaming services as their most important businesses, even though they're just starting out and they're way, way behind Netflix. They need help to compete.
Disney bought most of Fox in an effort to bulk up to fight Netflix. And Jeff Bukas, who said Netflix would never beat HBO, sold Time Warner to AT&T. It was an admission that one of the biggest companies in the world wasn't big enough to take on the Internet anymore. And now AT&T is trying to build its own version of Netflix. HBO Max, where HBO needs so much more. If you don't get on board, you're going to be left behind. Like the train has left the station.
And I think everyone's sort of realizing this shift is accelerating. And if they don't jump on board, they're going to be left in a really bad place. Now that Hollywood has finally stopped ignoring Netflix and started chasing after it, the town is undergoing a fundamental change. It's not just that media companies want to deliver content directly to consumers, just like Netflix does. It's also that the amount of stuff they're making has just exploded. Netflix needs a lot of new shows and movies, but so do all the other streaming services because they're competing with Netflix.
The numbers spell it out. In 2009, Hollywood made about 200 original scripted TV shows. Last year, after a decade of the streaming boom, that number had climbed to more than 500. It's not just HBO, Disney, and Netflix ordering new shows, by the way. Even Spectrum, the cable TV company, has its own originals. One of them is a cop show, and you've never heard of it. It stars Jessica Alba and Gabrielle Union. Hashtag cops and robbers? Yeah. It's in its second season, because everyone wants new stuff to stream.
So what does all that mean for the people who make TV shows and movies? After the break, we'll hear from a creator who's had a lot of success in the Netflix universe.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
So a few months ago, my producer Zach and I drove out to an industrial stretch of the San Fernando Valley, just north of Hollywood, to a dumpy office. We went because I wanted to sit down and talk with a creator who's thriving in the Netflix system. He's got a show now in its fourth season that probably wouldn't work anywhere but Netflix. We were excited to meet him. Are we starting? So I've just kind of, I got your levels and we're...
Perfect. Okay, cool, cool. We haven't officially started. Yeah, yeah, great. No, I don't care. I was just curious. Walk you into it. Yeah, yeah. Should we have Justin introduce himself? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, I'm Justin Simeon. I'm a filmmaker, storyteller, and creator and showrunner of a show called Dear White People. Simeon and I sat and talked for a while because I had a lot of questions about what it's like to work for Netflix, how the machinery works, and how many people watch the show, and a little bit about money.
But first, we wanted to talk about how he got to Netflix and who he thinks his audience is and what he wants to tell them. Dear White People follows students of color at a predominantly white college as they figure out how to be in a world that has already decided who they are. Dear White People, here's a list of acceptable Halloween costumes. A pirate,
slutty nurse, any of our first 43 presidents, top of the list of unacceptable costumes, me. Winchester couldn't get through 2017 without blackface. I came out of college being one of very few black kids and just sort of recognizing two things that, one, the conversations we were having about being black in America were not anywhere in the culture. I wasn't seeing them in movies or TV shows.
And two, the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be was one that sort of created space in cinema to have conversations that people were having, but it wasn't being reflected in culture. So this is 2014? Yeah, this is probably like somewhere between 14 and 15. So Netflix has started making original shows. I think House of Cards is 2013. Right. Orange is the New Black is 2013. Did you think...
I think Netflix, I see what Netflix is doing and I think my stuff works there. Or did you think.
I want to go anywhere that will make the show I want to make. It was a little bit of both. I mean, I was certainly attracted to the idea that, uh, my audience was probably watching Netflix, uh, in a way that they weren't able to access, say like a traditional cable channel. Can you talk about that a little more? What does that mean? Everyone I knew had Netflix or had a password to Netflix. And I just felt like I could get right to, uh,
the kind of folks who were showing up for this movie, primarily black kids, uh, kids, I would say, you know, under 20 to over 35. It just felt like I could reach the most people, uh,
through a Netflix. And there was a myth of total creative freedom at Netflix, which wasn't exactly the case for me, but certainly was more free than I think it would have been at a more traditional television network. So it's the delivery and the fact that they're reaching an audience that you know you want to reach. Mm-hmm.
Did you look at stuff they'd already been making and putting out and going, that makes sense too? Well, I mean, I was obsessed with House of Cards at the time. Loved Orange is the New Black. I just liked the kinds of things that they were doing. There was a kind of...
chaotic, wild, wild west kind of vibe over there at the time that just felt like, you know, maybe they... Because again, like, there wasn't Atlanta. There wasn't Insecure. There wasn't, like, weird black stuff on TV to be like, oh, let's go to that network. Or, oh, let's do something like that. Like, this was all brand new. And so the idea of going to a place that hadn't quite defined themselves yet was appealing. I mean, the whole purpose of Dear White People is to...
portray versions of blackness that aren't in other things, that weren't in previously checked boxes. And so it just felt like going to a place that was still defining itself felt just really appealing to me. I just want to say that I find your show offensive and highly divisive. We need to come together at times like this. Are you a white male? Why? Race is a social construct. I'll take that as a yes.
Simeon also understood that he was bringing something important to Netflix. His show let the service send a signal to an underserved audience, there's something for you here. And it's worth noting that according to Parrot Analytics, interest in the show skyrocketed in late May and early June in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing and amidst the reckoning America is having over racism. Well, I think the fact that Netflix even picked this up is, you know, evidence of their interest
not only just like them doing the right thing, but being smart enough to recognize that there are audiences out there that have not found themselves in the culture and have found it very difficult to sort of find themselves and may even be settling for other things just because it's the closest thing to them. And so really doing a deep dive and finding the niche audiences, I think is something Netflix has actually done very, very well. And it's,
The thing about black folks is that, like, so often we show up and are disappointed by what we see because, yet again, we're not in that. And so it's harder sometimes to get us to trust the show. And certainly when my show came out, there was a question of, is anyone going to show up for this? Is this too new? Are people ready for this kind of a thing? Even you have to admit your show comes off aggressive. Dear white people is a misnomer.
My show is meant to articulate the feelings of a misrepresented group outside the majority. Can you talk about that idea of creative input and the myth that they give you total control? I remember when they launched, there was a lot of talk about how they were going to use data to inform their decision. I think
they've subsequently said, well, actually, we don't do much of that. But in the real world, how does that work for you? What kind of control do you have? What kind of notes are they giving you? I mean, I think for the first season especially, there were a lot of notes, which was at the time a little shocking because there was this idea that at Netflix, nobody gives you notes. They just let you do whatever you want. I think that probably might have been true for certain filmmakers.
white ones and established ones and things like that. But the good thing about it is that I never got stupid notes like, you know, we're worried this is going to turn off this segment of the audience. We never got any sort of thing that was like advertising. Everything was just like, is this the best way to tell this story? Did they ever come to you and say,
Our data says that at minute seven, you should be doing this. Or if you have a character like this, you're going to turn off this segment. And this is not just us being studio executives. We have data that tells you this. We never got that kind of a deep dive into the data. I would say more like around season two, we began to get kind of like summaries of things that they discovered.
particularly of interest is like, you know, what images did people click on the most, you know, on the home screen. Right. But no, I never got like a minute five, you know,
There was a dip. We never got that kind of a thing. Are you getting data about overall viewership now? What kind of transparency do you have into actual consumption? Yeah, they're sharing. I'm certainly getting a sense now of how many people are watching our show and where we stand among other shows on their network and other shows just generally in the world. And I'm very encouraged and excited by it. How many people are watching the show? Well, I can't say that. How do you think it compares to a network show right now?
Very favorably. A lot of people watch our show. Millions of people watch our show. And I don't think we're recognized as a show that is watched by as many people as we are. I will say that. If you were on network TV, would you have enough viewership to stay on network TV? They would be very happy.
That's pretty wild, right? That you feel like in some ways you are, because you're on Netflix, you're allowed to, you have all this freedom, but you also get kind of lost. And you probably couldn't have been on network TV, but if you were on network TV, you'd be killing it. They would love it. They would love those kind of, I think any network would love the numbers that we get.
But here's the thing. On Netflix, Dear White People is just one show among many shows. There's a lot of shows. They've got something new coming just about every day. So it's hard to feel special, even when millions of people watch what you make. This is something we often heard from people who make things for Netflix. I think it's probably frustrating for creatives, and I know it's been frustrating for me in times to feel like...
you know, you're going to get lost because the upsides are so big at Netflix. You know, I mean, when you have shows that are like pulling Super Bowl style ratings for every episode, even a really well watched show like ours, the worry is like, well, do we just feel small in comparison? And will we fall out of, you know, I mean, so much content comes out. So how does it get promoted? Are we really going to find our audience? I've certainly felt myself worrying about that.
Yeah. What does that look like to you when you feel like I'm getting lost? And what does that response look like? Is that I went to my home screen and I didn't see us and I see Bird Box being promoted or I don't see billboards or I'm not going on TV shows? Yeah, sometimes it's all of that. And because the sheer breadth of material that they put out, it's impossible to treat each thing like a little perfect gem. Do you drive down Sunset and go, I can't believe there's a billboard for that. Where's my billboard? I've had that moment. I've definitely had that moment.
But when Netflix does want to give you a push, it can definitely give you a push. Last year, the company spent more than $2.6 billion on marketing. But that marketing budget is dwarfed by Netflix's spending on its core product, its TV shows and movies. Last year, it spent $15 billion on content. And in 2020, it was projected to get to $17 billion. That number may shrink a bit because the pandemic has put production on hold around the world.
Netflix has a reputation for showering some of its talent with truckloads of money. Ryan Murphy, the prolific TV producer behind Glee and American Horror Story, got $300 million to leave Fox and join Netflix. Simeon isn't getting Ryan Murphy money, but he's not complaining. He is curious, though, to see if the streaming boom is sustainable. What do you think about the money? There's so much money flowing in. They're all saying we're going to lose billions of dollars building up our service.
Do you think, boy, this is a pile of money and I should get whatever I can right now because this can't sustain itself? Or do you think, actually, this is the new normal? I don't know. The next time I make a deal for a TV show, whether it's a streamer or not, I'm going to have a lot of questions about how and when I'm going to get paid and for what. Because...
That is a wild, wild west that can sometimes not always be in favor of the artist. I think we see this with streaming where, like, you know, the songwriters really had to fight and are still having to fight to get their fair share of the streaming money. You've been super generous with your time. Are we good, Zach? We're good. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Simeon says he's happy working for Netflix, but not everyone is.
As we reported this story, we heard a lot of grumbling about Netflix and how it's changing the way people in Hollywood are treated, especially the rank and file. One of their biggest complaints is about pay. Make a move! I dare you! Stars like Shonda Rhimes and Adam Sandler have gotten ginormous deals from Netflix. But writers and actors you probably haven't heard of say their checks are getting smaller. That's because a meaningful part of what these workers made in the past came from something called residuals.
It's basically a royalty check generated from reruns. Traditionally, residuals have stepped in as sort of like the way that people, you know, this is something that people depend on so that they're able to make this like a sustainable life. That money helps keep Hollywood going. Jack Allison, a writer who has worked on Jimmy Kimmel Live, says residuals are important because so much of the entertainment business is about projects. You work on a TV show or a movie for a day or weeks or months, and then you may go a while without working again.
People who work on Netflix shows still get some sort of residuals, but the big difference is that Netflix and the rise of streaming has meant that platforms are holding onto their content for themselves, and they're not selling that content to other places.
You can't get paid when your show airs as a rerun on another network if it never leaves Netflix in the first place. The bottom falling out on residuals is a pretty significant blow to people's ability to say, like, I'm going to make a career out of this and be able to expect a certain amount of income from that and do things like buy houses and stuff.
Netflix says it accounts for that gap by paying people more upfront. And the company also notes that the payouts it does make have increased over the years, but you often hear from actors and writers that they like the old system better. It definitely is the death of the middle class. This is Alison Becker. She's an actress you might recognize from her recurring role as reporter Shauna Mulway-Tweep on Parks and Rec. Ten years ago, that pay discrepancy still existed, but the middle class was still able to survive as a working actor, just acting.
It is next to impossible now to survive as just an actor. If I meet someone who is an actor who is not super famous, they're just a working actor, and they are paying their rent, there's two things that are happening there. Either they have family money,
or they also have another job. - Actors and writers who relied on residuals may not love the Netflix model, but just like Hollywood studios, they're gonna have to get used to a new system because media executives tell me they think this will be the one everyone's gonna use as all the big media companies launch their own services that are stocked with their own shows that are never gonna leave. And if they're looking for a sympathetic ear, they should not turn to Jason Blum.
He's a producer near the very top of the food chain. He's best known for creating a method to churn out low-budget, highly profitable horror movies like Get Out. If you're good at your job, you're super in demand and you're taking home a really healthy salary. Blum says the new world has more opportunities, even if the chance of a long-term, steady gig with lots of residuals is harder to get.
Yeah, sure. I mean, so what? You have to hustle more. Yeah, okay. But there are better jobs. No, you can't like go to, you know, Law & Order and work there for 15 years. And yeah, sure. Yeah, of course. You have to adapt. Right.
But if you adapt, it's, I don't buy that at all. Even Blum, by the way, says there are things about the old system he likes better. He thinks TV budgets are way too bloated now and unsustainable. And he says that old-timey TV networks like Showtime can do a better job than Netflix at making creators feel special and promoting their work.
But that doesn't matter because this is the way it is now. You've never done better. And if you're not doing better, you should go work in another industry. There's never been more paying jobs. There's never been more content being filmed. So you're doing great. It ain't going to ever get better than it is right now.
Netflix has completely upended Hollywood, from the way its studios operate to the way its actors and writers get paid. And while those changes aren't always welcome with open arms, they are probably here to stay. Netflix is the new normal, even at Hollywood's biggest award shows.
Thank you, Ricky Gervais, who, by the way, works for Netflix.
Okay, we're done here, but we're coming back next week to talk about money. Netflix money. Netflix is a unicorn. It is different. And Wall Street so far has not punished it for that difference. In fact, it's kind of celebrated. Netflix couldn't have changed Hollywood or even just operate the way it does without cash. Tons and tons and tons of cash. The company is spending billions and billions of dollars to pay for that gigantic library filled with those original shows and movies.
But Netflix doesn't have billions and billions of dollars. It borrows that money. So how does that work? And how come Netflix is able to spend money in a way that its competitors can't or won't? And what happens if all that changes, say, because a pandemic plunges the world into a global economic crisis? We'll talk about all of that next week.
Thank you.
Did you like this show? I think you did because you're still listening to it. If so, please rate and review and share. We appreciate it. Quick disclosure, Vox.com and Vox Media make shows for Netflix. None of the people working on this season of Land of the Giants are involved in the production of those shows. I'm Peter Kofka. Thanks for listening.