The Future of Netflix, Amazon and Other Streaming Services
Ted Sarandos, 59, co-CEO of Netflix, worked his way up through the now-defunct DVD industry before jumping straight to Netflix when the company was still renting DVDs by mail. Mike Hopkins, 55, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, was immersed in digital as CEO of Hulu, the pioneering streaming service owned by Disney, Fox and NBCU, before joining Sony as head of its TV unit in 2017. He joined Amazon in 2020 and reports to the company’s CEO, Andy Jassy, 56, who has no professional experience in entertainment.
Over the past five months, The New York Times has interviewed the three most senior and two youngest executives, as well as numerous other owners and senior executives of major media companies, to assess the problems facing the industry and what the future might look like.
Rarely do these executives speak so candidly, on the record, about the challenge that lies ahead. And aside from yacht meetings, executives in that stratosphere rarely meet to discuss strategy. Not only are many of them fierce rivals (Mr. Roberts famously drove up the cost of Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment business by bidding against Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger), but meetings between direct competitors could draw unwanted scrutiny from antitrust regulators.
Our conversations still revealed many areas of disagreement, but some consistent themes also emerged, all with important implications for investors, advertisers, and audiences.
The magic subscriber number
Streaming has long been hailed as a promising business because companies like Netflix can add more subscribers at minimal additional cost. The more paying subscribers a service has, the more the company’s costs can be spread widely, lowering the cost per subscriber.
