Julia Alexander

ESPN 8 or whatever else existed, meant that they could kind of be within this system and reap the rewards of it, even if they had a very small base overall compared to kind of what the Disney networks and the NBC Universal networks and the Paramount networks.

When you're Netflix and you're operating at scale, when you have 325 million global members, when you're kind of putting out these massive projects and trying to appeal to everyone, you can't be HBO.

And so I think part of the realization for someone like Reed Hastings or now, of course, Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos was if we're not going to become HBO, because we're not going to make these kind of offbeat, witty comedies or these kind of dense dramas.

And that's all we're going to do.

Then we can just buy them.

HBO became much more appealing post kind of.

the 2018, 2019 AT&T acquisition, and then really going into the 2022 WarnerMedia acquisition.

When they started to do more Game of Thrones stuff and spinoffs, they started to do more DC stuff.

They started to do a lot more kind of genre IP, which is where they see the vast majority of their big engagement happen is on those IP shows that you can see working under someone like Bella Bejaria, who's the head of content at Netflix, while Casey Bloys, who's the head of HBO, can continue doing what works really well for HBO.

The thing about library, which is, again, the most important part of this conversation, is that it's really hard to build up a library in the time that Netflix needs to.

Warner Brothers, including all the things that come with it, is 100 years old.

There's just a lot of stuff in there, including...

Shows like ER and Friends and the things that people really want to watch, the movies that people really want to watch.

And so in order for Netflix to get to that point, they would have had to have another 30, 40 years to build up the library.

And because of the competition from YouTube and these free ad-supported services and Instagram, you know, you have Ted Sarandos saying Instagram is coming in a very Game of Thrones.

like way, right?

This way.

I think in order to get there, they made a very traditional, for kind of this tech disruptor in the media space, they made a very traditional media play, which was just to go and buy someone and scale quickly in that regard.

A big part of it is the economics.

So if you look at why a show like ER, which ran 15 seasons, a show like 30 Rock, which ran I think six or seven seasons, any of these type of long-running shows, big reason was that –