Evans: Tech failed to turn TV into a single Spotify-like library
Benedict Evans · Netflix isn't a tech company · Apr 25, 2022 · at 16:34
Benedict Evans, independent tech and media analyst, discusses why television rights holders resisted platform centralization compared to the music publishing industry.
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“What the tech industry always wanted to do was to turn TV into YouTube or Spotify. That is to say, or what YouTube or Spotify then became, which is you've got this single universal library of everything, and you pay one fee, that's a reasonable amount of money, and not like 500 bucks a month, but you, and you get everything, and it's one user interface, and it's got one recommendation engine, and one library, and that would actually be better for consumers than having a Netflix app, and a Skype, and a Disney app, and this app, and that app, and the other app, and so on and so forth. And that happened in the web, that happened in content, for the sake of argument, everything's in the Google index. And it happened in music but it didn't happen in TV, because the TV content, there's less of it, it's more differentiated, it's more unique.”
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