Hastings: Comcast bought NBC Universal for tax efficiency, not vertical integration
Reed Hastings · a16z Podcast | Tech and Entertainment in the 'Era of Mass Customization' · Jan 2, 2019 · at 30:15
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, responds to Marc Andreessen's question about whether telecom-media mergers create closed distribution ecosystems that threaten independent streaming services.
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“So it's a tax law thing. So if Comcast is very profitable, if you return all that money to your shareholders, it gets taxed. So the shareholders would like you to invest it smartly if you can, if you're trusted to invest it, rather than return it to them and keep it tax shielded. And so by buying a good related business and running it well, but very independently, then they create a lot of shareholder value in that. But they haven't, like, taken the NBCU networks or content And tried to make it exclusive you know, to that. So again, it's not much of a vertical integration the way you all might think about it.”
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