In other words, if Netflix were a country, it would have the economy and population almost the size of Pakistan. Netflix has surpassed 203 million subscribers Pakistan, with 216 million citizens, is the fifth most populous nation in the world. By 2019, the combined content spending of Netflix, Disney and Time Warner (parent company of HBO Max) had spent close to 250 billion dollars the whole size of the economy of Pakistan in that very year was 278 billion dollars! Netflix and Pakistan: some startling facts and figuresįor added perspective, let’s compare some stats with Pakistan. The same logic, people think, persists in online streaming. Case in point: Facebook, Amazon and Google rule their domains with very little competition. Secondly, the winner-takes-all approach of internet markets forces everyone to bring their maximum firepower very early on in the game. The online audience segment has been the fastest growing component of the entertainment industry in the last decade. The reason for this gold rush has to do with the logic of capitalism, and partly to do with the economics of the web. Icon looks at how the current options stack up It’s a race to the bottom when it comes to price, even when content is what drives viewership. The streaming game resembles a knife fight in terms of competition. The media barons at HBO, Disney and NBC, who scoffed or laughed off the prospect of streaming content on the internet on mobile devices, are now betting the farm on their own streaming apps. In the years following the meeting, the laughter died down as the old media elite scrambled to bring their own streaming apps for the throne now being held by Netflix. The good-humoured folk at Blockbuster still bang their heads against a wall for walking away from the deal of the century. Meanwhile, the flip-flop-wearing team of Marc Randoplh and Reed Hastings would go on to turn the global media industry on its head with their company named Netflix, valued at 231 billion dollars in 2021. Needless to say, the meeting ends in a failure.Īs history would unravel, that same Blockbuster, where one could throw a boomerang on any street in America and hit at least three of its stores, would be reduced to just one store, and that too as a mere tourist attraction.
In the meeting to follow, they would try to sell the future of content to a clutch of sceptical executives of a company by the name of Blockbuster - a video rental company as ubiquitous as Coca Cola or Starbucks in America at that time.Īt the end of the meeting, there would be muffled laughter by the amused audience of Blockbuster executives when the duo offer to do a digital streaming service for all of Blockbuster’s catalogue for 50 million dollars. It’s September in the year 2000, and two guys in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops are seated in a grand corporate boardroom, in awe of their grand surroundings.
0 kommentar(er)
