Words matter. These are the best Ted Sarandos Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We’re closer to HBO than we are to the entire grid of cable on demand.
There’s no such thing as ‘too much TV,’ unless we’re all spending more and not watching more.
The best way to really make the VPN issue a completely nonissue is through global licensing that we are continuing to pursue with our partners.
Typically on a TV series, the writers on a show are writing for their life almost every episode. When someone sits down to write a Netflix show, they know there’s going to be a 13th hour.
When we say a show is successful, it’s because, relative to the investment, it’s successful, relative to how else we would have spent that money on licensing something else, does this creation – did it attract the audience that it was built for.
‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ is not a direct-to-video, low-budget sequel: it’s a big film. And it’d be fantastic to have the opportunity to see it on the IMAX screens at the same time, and IMAX has made arrangements with us for that to happen.
A lot of our animation projects are co-productions with French production companies.
The typical output deal from a studio is 10 to 14 movies a year.
I feel like if we can use the combination of basically data-driven hunches and bet on really first-class talent to deliver the shows, that I think we could do as well as the networks do, who basically have a 75 to 80 percent failure rate for new shows anyway – even after all that development and pilot work.
Our feature film, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Two,’ has a built-in fan base from the original film.
I really loved the ‘Sopranos’ but didn’t have HBO. So someone would send me tapes of the show with three or four episodes. I would watch one episode and go: ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to watch one more.’ I’d watch the whole tape and champ at the bit for the next one.
I love, personally, the experience of going to the theater, going to the cinema.
There are films like ‘Interstellar’ where you cannot replicate the experience of seeing it in IMAX – it’s an amazing film presented in a spectacular way. It really is an experience, like going to Disneyland, and you can’t replicate that by watching home videos of going to Disneyland.
I have a deep respect for the fundamentals of television, the traditions of it, even, but I don’t have any reverence for it.
What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?
We are anxious and open to all forms of doing business in China.
The star of ‘Narcos’ and the director and creator of ‘Narcos’ are both Brazilian superstars. So Brazil has received ‘Narcos’ particularly well as it’s been well-received around the world.
Networks can typically invest tens of millions of dollars in the development of a pilot. And if they put the show on the air and it fails, that’s all lost money. There’s no monetization of a broken series.
I think what’s going to happen with linear television is it’s going to become more linear. It’s going to become more about events and more about award shows, live sports – all those things that, really, you can’t replicate.
David Fincher’s work has all been incredibly well-received on Netflix, and Kevin Spacey’s films have all worked on Netflix.
The longer people watch Netflix and the longer they stay members – they’re the criteria of success for us.
In the first week of release, ‘Beasts Of No Nation’ was the most watched movie on Netflix, in every country we operate in.
When we set out our original program from the beginning, obviously our markets were pretty limited, and we were thinking about them mostly as U.S. shows, and they would travel like other U.S. shows have.
Movies are becoming more global, which is making them less intimate. If you make a movie for the world, you don’t make it for any country.
It’s a massive consumer frustration around the world about how long they have to wait after the U.S. to see television shows and movies. In the U.S., there’s the frustration of having to wait a year to watch a movie in the format that you choose.
Theater owners are exerting a lot of power over the studios to withhold access to content that people want to see. That’s bad for consumers, that’s bad for studios, and ultimately, I think it will be bad for theaters.
You need to get in studio; we’re excited about the Pay 1 opportunity with Disney because those movies are not just movies. They’re amazing family content that get flexed over and over again, forms great loyalty with our subscribers, and it’s a real trust brand for parents as well.
I don’t think on-demand brings anything extra to sports.
I think being a partner with the studios and networks and, more importantly, being a great source for consumers to watch that programming is always going to be a part of our programming mix.
I always love that phrase, ‘Oh, this is a good idea, but it’s execution dependent.’ As if anything in life is not execution dependent. Breathing is execution-dependent.
I think that we’ve got a huge head start on things that are not easy to do: progressive streaming, to be able to stream in very high quality, even in an environment of highly variable bit rate, and to work on a big variety of devices seamlessly.
We’re one of the largest employers in Canada for animation executives, and there is – I think something on the magnitude of $140 million a year be important to the Canadian economy producing animation for Netflix.
We expect ‘Narcos’ will be an enormous success throughout everywhere in the world and maybe out-index in Latin America, given the Brazilian star and Brazilian director and heavy Latin American cast and that we shot the show entirely on location in Colombia.
The major international appeal for ‘House of Cards’ was kind of a surprise because it’s a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global.
If you want to go out and see a movie and sit in a dark room with strangers, it’s not an experience you can replicate at home.
‘Marco Polo’ had some negative reactions in the press. Viewers have loved it, and the volume of viewing has been phenomenal.
Netflix is distributed in 50 countries around the world. It’s an incredibly affordable, well-distributed product that gives anyone with access to the Internet and a screen access to content in a very affordable way.
The two things that got everyone’s attention about the ‘House of Cards’ deal was the two-season commitment and David Fincher. After David Fincher directs a series for Netflix, no one else can say, ‘Well, I’m not going to direct a series for the Internet.’
To me, cinema is not a movie or a TV screen, and it’s not a seat in a building versus one in your living room. It’s the art of motion pictures.
What I didn’t want to do is get into a ratings race with television because really, for them, it matters. For me, it doesn’t.
