The rise and fall of Netflix

In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, then CEO of Time Warner, was asked if he thought Netflix had any chance of taking over Hollywood. His sarcastic answer deserves to go down as one of the all-time dumb predictions. Bewkes (like the dude who wrote the internal Western Union memo that said telephones were a waste of time) was not taking Netflix seriously: ‘Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’

A decade later, Netflix is not Albania. It’s imperial Spain during el Siglo de Oro. Massive, relentlessly mercantile and ruthlessly acquisitive, Netflix has rippled over the world to become one of the largest media businesses ever known. Count the hundreds of millions of subscribers, or the billion-dollar content deals. The old Hollywood system, the studios, the cinema chains — an entire infrastructure of production — has been torched and replaced by Netflix’s subscription-based streaming model. Its major competitors are all imitators: Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video.