The Ledger
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Sarandos: Authentically local foreign shows travel globally better than English-language ones
“What we're trying to do is tell these stories that are authentically local, and the win for us is that they actually travel more the more authentic they are. Because there's something inorganic about the English language European television show that forces it…”
Sarandos predicts sports leagues like the NFL will go direct-to-consumer
“I think the winner will be NFL.com. That they'll just go direct to consumer, and there's plenty of people who pay an outrageous amount of money for a subscription for NFL, or NBA, or MLB, and ultimately the winners will be the league anyway, so.”
Sarandos asserts major TV networks lose money on sports broadcasting deals
“No, and I think not only that, I think that, that loss leader model that made them great is the thing that's making, that really cripples them now.”
Sarandos: Iron Fist is Netflix's worst-reviewed show
“Iron Fist is literally the worst reviewed show on Netflix.”
Sarandos: Cumulative buzz for top Netflix shows exceeds Game of Thrones
“The cumulative buzz of Orange is the New Black, the cumulative buzz of 13 Reasons Why, the cumulative buzz of Stranger Things is actually much bigger than Game of Thrones.”
Sarandos: Authentic local TV shows travel globally better than English-dubbed copies
“What we're trying to do is tell these stories that are authentically local, and the win for us is that they actually travel more the more authentic they are. Because there's something inorganic about the English language European television show that forces it…”
Sarandos: Netflix ordered two seasons of House of Cards with zero notes
“House of Cards was our first original show on Netflix. And The deal we made with David Fincher was, I'm gonna give you two seasons of the show, no pilot, and no notes.”
Sarandos: Content failure is failing dollar efficiency versus alternative investments
“Where we see we have a failure is that relative to what it costs, did enough people watch it that it was a good use of content dollars. So there is an efficiency measure in that way, which is, is it an efficient use of dollars relative to any other way you wou…”
Sarandos: Brazilian show '3%' achieved U.S. viewership rivaling cable hits
“You show a show like the three percent, which is a show we make in Brazil, in all in Portuguese, with an all Brazilian cast, and the watching on Netflix in the U.S. Would be equivalent to a pretty good sized cable hit.”
Netflix committed to two seasons of House of Cards without a pilot
“House of Cards was our first original show on Netflix, and the deal we made with David Fincher was, I'm going to give you two seasons of the show, no pilot.”
Peter Morgan writes every word of The Crown without a writers' room
“Peter Morgan writes every word of the crown. No, no writer's room. He has some research team that helps him, but every word of that show is written by him”
Sarandos notes Amazon paid 10x Twitter's price for non-exclusive NFL rights
“The cost of that Amazon NFL deal for basically games that are on two other networks at the same time, so completely non-exclusive programming, went up 10 times from Twitter to Amazon.”
Sarandos: Luke Cage defied conventional wisdom and performed globally on Netflix
“African-American superhero, and on and on and on, and it was hugely popular for us all over the world.”
Sarandos: Iron Fist had the biggest launch among Netflix's Marvel series
“And it was the biggest launch of all four.”
Sarandos: Content producers do not need to own telecom pipes
“I don't think so. I get the emotional desire to, and I also think it's more a result of kind of winner-take-all cutthroat negotiating that you end up in a place where I have to own it because I can't make a deal that we could both live in where I think you sho…”
Sarandos: Adam Sandler movies are among Netflix's top-watched films
“I think it's underrated relative to watching, and some of our top watched movies have been these Sandler movies, which tells you, again, what people's tastes are.”
Sarandos: Reed Hastings originally pledged Netflix would never make original programming
“When we've made a move into original programming, We were so convinced as a company that we would never do original programming that Reed had said, we'll never do original programming, yet I knew that I was in a safe place to do it.”
Sarandos: Silicon Valley is efficiency-driven while Hollywood is quality-driven
“The whole efficiency driven thing is very Silicon Valley. And the whole quality driven thing is very Hollywood. And rarely do those things meet.”
Sarandos: Brazilian series '3%' viewership matches a US cable hit
“And you show, show like the three percent, which is a show we make in Brazil, in all in Portuguese, with an all Brazilian cast, and the watching on Netflix in the U.S. Would be equivalent to a pretty good sized cable hit.”
Sarandos: Silicon Valley prioritizes efficiency while Hollywood prioritizes content quality
“The whole efficiency-driven thing is very Silicon Valley, and the whole quality-driven thing is very Hollywood. And rarely do those things meet.”
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.”
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 categorizes users into roughly 600 taste clusters
“There's probably 600 meaningful ones, yeah.”
Sarandos: Viewing preferences are highly mood-dependent across genres and context
“So much about choosing is mood-based. So, you know, I know you love drama, but the hard thing about the machine, even why the machine learning really is helpful in this, is you can watch 25 comedies, and I can tell you a lot about your comedy taste, but I know…”
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 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 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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”