The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 91 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Network television testing measures subjective opinion, unlike Netflix's behavioral streaming data
“But it's never been a thing that I've really paid attention to in a real way in network television because testing in network television is really about opinion. I'm very excited about it at a place like Netflix because that, the data is very different than te…”
Netflix does not evaluate Shonda Rhimes's show pitches using subscriber projections
“We don't have to ask those questions. Like, that's not a thing that happens. It's more about, are you excited about this?”
Koppelman: Mid-budget $14M-$30M films are much harder to make outside Netflix
“It's much harder to make those mid, mid, those sort of mid budget, 14 to 25 or thirty million dollar movies. Though Netflix does it, right? You can do it at Netflix now, which is probably where it would happen, but, and then, or you would try to tell the story…”
Andreessen: Tech giants decoded media and culture between 2015 and 2018
“It really is in the last, like, three years, it feels like a bunch of the Valley companies are really starting to decode culture, A bunch of the big, I mean, Netflix being, you know, Netflix sort of, you know, sort of setting a new model, but now being, you kn…”
Chen: B2B software is significantly less price elastic than consumer subscriptions
“When Netflix increases their monthly subscription by two dollars, everyone's, you know, screaming bloody murder. And B to B is obviously less elastic.”
Mariotti: Enterprise transition to microservices will take ten years
“At an enterprise level, you know, 99.9, they're still monolithic, so it's more a 10 years transition that we'll see, and what Netflix did, it will happen to Coca-Cola, to McDonald's, so there's a lot of value to be unlocked and to help companies doing this tra…”
Netflix spent almost no marketing money on Making a Murderer
“We didn't, we spent almost no marketing money on the show at all, and it just exploded on its own. Nobody inside of Netflix foresaw that was going to be, you know, an overnight sensation like that, like it was.”
Sarandos: Netflix greenlights roughly 1% of pitches across its content slate
“This year we'll have 30 original series, 80 original films, 35 original kids series, 19 local language original series being produced all over the world 65 documentary projects, so I would say it's about one in a hundred.”
Sarandos: Netflix categorizes users into roughly 600 taste clusters
“There's probably 600 meaningful ones, yeah.”
Andreessen: Netflix driving biggest TV revolution since color television
“I also think Netflix, even beyond that, it's catalyzing the most dramatic period of revolution and change in the television video industry. You know, certainly since the arrival of color TV and maybe, maybe even before that.”
Hastings: Netflix Canada streaming launch hit three-month subscriber goal in three days
“Then we did our first test in Canada, our first test of streaming only, so we picked a new country that wasn't used to our DVD service to see with the content that we can get, can you build a service that there's word of mouth and grows in a, in another countr…”
Hastings: Netflix was named for streaming because DVD-by-mail was temporary
“So we always viewed the DVD by mail as a digital distribution network, And then we knew eventually, and that's why we called the company Netflix and not DVD by mail or, you know, that kind of thing. So we had the slight advantage that the thing that we, our fi…”
Hastings: Amazon has invested far more in video content than expected
“In Amazon's case, I would say they've exceeded the amount of investment that I would have thought they'd, ah, put in. They spend a tremendous amount of money in the area, and some of the shows, as you said, are working out.”
Hastings: Funding a TV series requires $30M to $100M upfront
“You know, you're in for the whole thing at, you know, thirty million to a hundred million dollars. So the size bets that you have to make on these are larger.”
Hastings: Disruption requires turning new businesses into profit drivers, not just dabbling
“The key thing is not getting into the new business. Lots of companies do that. They just don't get in and make money. They don't create it as a profit driver, They get in and dabble with it and lose money in it, essentially”
Chokshi: Netflix reshapes cultural consumption through on-demand catalog lock-in
“It's already working on some level because you might have a million other movies out there, but you really don't care because you only care about what's in the Netflix catalog because you're Being able to binge watch and get it on demand in the moment. So it's…”
Roman Mars: DVR and Netflix normalized curated entertainment, driving podcast adoption
“I think people are used to curating their lives a little bit more with DVR and Netflix. They're used to, like, programming their own entertainment, and podcasting doesn't seem like that big of a deal anymore.”
Evans: Netflix is fundamentally a content business, not a tech company
“Netflix is kind of a cable channel. Now, this is in the content business that happens to use technology to do interesting and new and disruptive ways to things.”
Bilimoria: Streaming hours was the metric most correlated with Netflix retention
“There was two metrics at Netflix that every product manager was geared toward. It's subscriber retention and streaming hours. The most highly correlated variable to subscriber attention was streaming hours, right?”
Sarandos: Netflix immediately bought Stranger Things but misjudged its massive scale
“I knew as soon as we heard the Stranger Things pitch that we were doing the show. And I knew at every step of the way, as the episodes, as the scripts were coming in, as the episodes were coming in, that it was something special. Not at the scale that it is. I…”
Sarandos: Netflix employs 1,000 content staff in LA and 4,000 in Silicon Valley
“The people who work for me in LA, there's about a thousand people who work in LA that, on all the aspects of content they all think they work at the greatest entertainment company in the world. And I hope they, I think they're right. And I think there's about …”
Sarandos: Netflix greenlights about one in 100 pitches received
“This year we'll have 30 original series, 80 original films, 35 original kid series 19 local language original series being produced all over the world 65 documentary projects, so I would say it's about one in a hundred.”
Sarandos: Netflix spent almost zero marketing on hit Making a Murderer
“We didn't, we spent almost no marketing money on the show at all. And it just exploded on its own. So, nobody could, I mean, nobody inside of Netflix foresaw that was going to be, you know, an overnight sensation like that, like it was.”
Evans: Netflix holds the fourth largest content production budget in the US
“Netflix itself has the fourth largest production budget in the USA.”
Andreessen: Consuming 12 hours of Netflix daily is 'existence of a cow'
“I'm a fan of Netflix, but like, maybe not 12 hours a day. That's existence of a cow.”
Rice: Netflix views its primary strategic growth path as international expansion
“I think that the main thing that I bring is a deep knowledge and understanding about many, many different parts of the world and the international landscape to a company like Netflix that is increasingly growing globally and views its, you know, its path forwa…”
Netflix employs 1,000 LA content staff and 4,000 Silicon Valley tech staff
“There's about a thousand people who work in LA that, on all the aspects of content, they all think they work at the greatest entertainment company in the world. And there's about 4000 people in Silicon Valley who think they work for the best tech company in th…”
Netflix shipped 60,000 unique DVD titles daily out of 100,000 catalog
“That we had a 100,000 titles on DVD, and every day, 60,000 of them shipped.”
Sarandos: Crouching Tiger II was Netflix's first major commercial movie flop
“The ones that don't ultimately realize those audience, or that, that audience, and one of those was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon II, our first big movie we put out. We thought it was going to be, The second coming.”
Netflix's investment in original programming reached over $7 billion
“Today's episode features a Q&A with Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, which evolved from a company that sold DVDs by mail to streaming to including original programming, which is now an over seven billion dollar investment for them.”
Ted Sarandos greenlit Stranger Things immediately upon hearing the pitch
“I knew as soon as we heard the Stranger Things pitch that we were doing this show. And I knew it every step of the way as the episodes, as the scripts were coming in, as the episodes were coming in, That it was something special. Not at the scale that it is. I…”
Hastings: Ted Sarandos bought 5,000 DVDs at Costco to fulfill early Netflix orders
“In his first two years at Netflix, he had to work out of the home because he couldn't afford an office, and he used to drive down with his crew to Costco and, you know, buy 5000 copies, and, you know, we would load them up and mail them out.”
Hastings: Netflix accounts for under 5% of global content created
“If you look at the total global ecosystem, we're still sub-five percent of all content being made around the world.”
Hastings: Netflix's early attempt at Sundance movie acquisitions lost money
“In the middle of the blockbuster wars, we started buying films on DVD out of Sundance, and we couldn't make the economics work. We bought a whole bunch of films, and it turned out we just spent a lot more money than we got.”
Hastings: Netflix bundled streaming with DVDs due to limited content licensing budgets
“Our commercial proposition, the two services, had to be highly integrated in the beginning. Because we just didn't have enough content. A combination of money to license that content and studio comfort.”
Cockcroft: Netflix had 100 engineers deploying a single monolith every two weeks
“We started off basically running away from a monolith. We had over a hundred people every two weeks trying to get all the code they'd written in the last two weeks jammed into one code base, get it through QA and get that out into production.”
Arbesman: Netflix uses Chaos Monkey to randomly disable live production subsystems
“Netflix, they have this chaos monkey suite of tools where the tool will periodically take subsystems out of commission and see how the overall system responds live. It'll just kind of knock out portions of Netflix and see how it responds. And the idea is to lo…”
Hindman: Twitter, Airbnb, Netflix, and PayPal run on Mesos
“The open source components that, that make up a large part of the DCOS are used by a large number of companies today. Some of the biggest users out there are companies like Twitter Airbnb, HubSpot, eBay, and PayPal are using it for running things. Netflix is u…”
Bilimoria: Netflix spent over $100M for two seasons of House of Cards
“The hits are really starting to drive, I think, Netflix's business, which is why they realized that, They can spend a hundred million dollars to actually fund a total of 26 episodes across two seasons for House of Cards. Actually, it's probably much more than …”
Netflix Began International Expansion After Hitting 30 Million U.S. Subscribers
“As soon as Netflix hit thirty million paying subscribers in the U.S., they started expanding everywhere, because the population of the U.S. Is three hundred million.”
Geico Values Safe Drivers at $2,000; Netflix Values Subscribers at $100
“You're worth 2000 dollars or more to Geico if you're a relatively good driver, you're worth a hundred dollars to Netflix, you're worth hundreds of dollars to the cell phone carriers, and these companies will pay some percentage of this to whoever refers you to…”