Entertainment Features

This week Ireland finally got its hands on movie and TV streaming juggernaut Netflix, which offers thousands of hours of content. JOE caught up with Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos (pictured on the right, above).

JOE: So as the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, you’re the main person in charge of content acquisitions with studios and so on, right?

TS: Yes. Studios, networks, all the content providers around the world.

JOE: And do you have any plans to deal with Irish content producers at the moment?

TS: Absolutely. Right now, on the TV side, most of it comes from the British distributors but for Irish film, we made a point to ensure that we were representing at least the iconic Irish movies.

So you’ve got In America and I’m Dancing Inside and we’re focusing on things that are upcoming and were quite successful on the festival side of things. We’ve always focused on international and independent cinema anyway, so these films have already been widely successful in the US as well.

I should mention the movie Once; I imagine more people have seen that movie on Netflix in the US than anywhere in the world.

That personalisation, being able to uncover a small film that you’re going to love better than anybody, it means people can be really adventurous because it's a subscription. You see that your friend's seen something and see that the Netflix recommendation is very high...

JOE: So rather than having your friend tell you that you should watch a movie, you can see straight away that they’ve seen it and rated it.

TS: Absolutely, and if they’re wrong, you can just turn it off. So it lets you try new things because there’s no cost to trying it.

JOE: So in coming to the UK and Ireland, are you finding that some of the avenues that you want to go down – content-wise – are quite closed?

TS: Not uniquely. Sky Movies has the major studios locked up but when we started streaming in the US five years ago, all those deals were locked up with HBO (home of Game of Thrones), Showtime (Dexter), AMC (Mad Men) and Starz (a US premium movie channel) too.

In that period we’ve grown to a subscriber base of 20 million people and rapidly expanded the content so I’m not concerned that there’s something unique about the marketplace that makes it difficult to grow.

JOE: With a channel like Sky Atlantic over here that has exclusive HBO content, will it now be a case where you’re going to compete directly with Sky or as you mention with your deal with Starz, a channel similar to Sky Movies, could there be a different way of looking at things?

TS: The way we were able to change a lot of this was to turn our competitors into suppliers. So Sky has the HBO shows and that’s great; the content is fantastic, but we also have Showtime and AMC and all that content too.

Evidently not a photo of Ted Sarandos, it's Irish actress Sarah Bolger (The Tudors)

As long as there’s exclusivity – and the TV business tends to be pretty exclusive – there’s going to be fragmented content availability. It would be great to have the HBO programming, we just have to outbid Sky Atlantic for it next time. It’s one of those things where we compete directly for content with them now and then later we may compete for subscribers. But today we compete with them for content, for sure.

JOE: Would you consider Sky or LOVEFiLM to be your biggest competitors right now?

TS: Well LOVEFiLM is a DVD by mail business that has just started streaming, so it’s difficult to tell what they’re going to be in terms of a competitor.

JOE: But for example, last month they signed a deal with Sony Pictures for exclusive streaming rights…

TS: We have a bunch of those deals too and from a content perspective, the little bit of content that they stream now in the UK, they’ll expand it rapidly and all these things, but I don’t know how to think of them as a competitor because they’re in their infancy in streaming and they are a DVD by mail company.

We were too - five years ago - and we started streaming so we knew where we took it and that’s all I can really say about LOVEFiLM.

With Sky, we don’t compete with the cable systems or the platform but we do compete with individual channels like Sky Movies and Sky Atlantic for sure. Ultimately, as LOVEFiLM and others get better at streaming, it’s going to be a real interesting competition between this over-the-top landscape versus the old media models.

So think of Netflix, LOVEFiLM and anyone else that’s in the business competing against Sky eventually - that will be an interesting business story.

JOE: So what kind of reaction are you expecting in Ireland? In the UK, as you mention, they have LOVEFiLM’s streaming in its infancy – we don’t even have LOVEFiLM, so for a lot of people that were experiencing Netflix yesterday for the first time, this is completely different.

TS: There’s nothing uniquely Irish or American or British about wanting control over your viewing and what you want to watch, so I think having pure on-demand functionality is something that’s brand new to their territory in so many ways and being able to have it on the Internet.

You’re talking about rethinking a lot of different paradigms in a really short time and that’s why we’re doing the one-month free trial – there’s nothing I can really explain to you as well as you can understand just by using it for a few days.

JOE: In terms of your job title, what is that you’re working towards – is it to get as much content as possible or to narrow release windows from cinema releases?

TS: It’s to get as much high-engagement content as possible. If people watch more movies because they’re newer, then we want to get newer movies.

We think that having the entire history of a TV show is important to high engagement, so that’s why we go after all the previous season, not just randomly getting season two and not season one of a show. Very highly serialised one-hour dramas like Dexter or Breaking Bad, people get very addicted to them and watch a lot of hours of programming.

So what we really want to focus on is getting super high engagement content in every territory, whatever that is.

JOE: When it comes to the experience that is out there at the moment, do you think that it will still take some time to change habits?

For example, the power of Xtra-vision in this country is enormous because as I said, we’ve never really had a streaming system like this before and you’ve got a lot of different internet service providers with strict limits on download allowances and broadband speeds.

Do you think one of your biggest challenges – at least initially – will be convincing people that this is what they’ll want to do, that they don’t want to drive down to a store?

TS: At this price point, it can be quite complementary to whatever else you do. It’s not meant to disrupt your cable subscription or your video store behavior.

The product is typically different from what you’re renting from a video store and certainly different than what you’re watching on cable, which is typically live sports or competition shows. We dealt with internet data cap issues in Canada and we’re growing dramatically there.

I think that long-term, there won’t be data cap issues because it’s bad business to cap internet usage and it’s a reason for people to upgrade their internet service and use it more. So that’s good news for the cable provider and for you and for me.

JOE: So if we look at Ireland 12 months from now, what kind of service do you want Irish people to be talking about?

TS: I hope that customers in Ireland talk about Netflix with as much love and admiration as they do in the US, Canada and Latin America, which is that Netflix is this almost indispensable source of movie discovery and television discovery for them.

There’s far more content being produced than you can ever consume in your lifetime. One of the biggest problems of the internet is unlimited inventory. It sounds like it should be a big win, right? Well the only thing worse than a list of 100 movies to watch is a list of 1,000 movies to watch.

So we try figure out ways to make that list manageable and that’s why we put so much energy into personalisation. While I may have an infinite inventory, I only have this much mindshare to show you, so I want you to see the most relevant things we have to show you every time you turn on your TV.

Netflix was officially launched yesterday and includes a free one-month trial for Irish users. For JOE's breakdown on what exactly Netflix offers, you can read our 'Dumb it Down' piece here.