Netflix’s new co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters have addressed a major elephant in the room: the streamer’s decision to cancel fan-favorite TV shows.
Among the most recent cancellations that have sparked outrage on social media are “1899,” “Inside Job,” and “Warrior Nun.” However, Sarandos maintained while speaking to Bloomberg’s Screentime newsletter that the company has “never canceled a successful show.”
“A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget,” he explained. “The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.”
In the same joint interview, co-CEO Peters noted their über-popular international hit from South Korea, “Squid Game,” as an example of this.
“It is very rare that a show like “Squid Game” from Korea would be as global as it was. Within 30 hours, the world was watching ‘Squid Game’ with no human intervention to try to market ‘Squid Game’ to the world,” he said. “We’re just getting started to make ‘Squid Game’ not an unusual thing, but basically something that happens literally every week.”
When it comes to their content strategy, Sarandos described Netflix as “equal parts HBO, AMC, FX, the Food Network, HGTV and Comedy Central.”
“You used to have to hunt through 500 channels of cable to find them all and now they’re gonna be on Netflix,” he explained. “The measure of quality is, if you love a dating show, make it as good as ‘The Ultimatum,’ make it as good as ‘Love is Blind.’ There’s no difference in prestige quality television in each of these genres as long as they’re well executed.”
Looking ahead, Netflix plans to grow its advertising business and continue expanding its games offering in 2023, with a focus on Netflix-related IP. Netflix will also begin experimenting with live programming, partnering with Chris Rock on a standup special in 2023.
Additionally, the company plans to begin a broader rollout of paid sharing in the first quarter of 2023 to crack down on an estimated 100 million households sharing passwords.
“Those people know how to watch Netflix. They’ve watched something on Netflix that they’ve loved. Our job is over the next couple of years to win all of them back,” Peters said. “We won’t do that out of the gate. Some of those folks are borrowing because they’re more price sensitive, they’re less engaged or whatever. But if we deliver a ‘Wednesday’ every week, if we deliver a ‘Glass Onion’ every week, we’ll get the vast majority of those viewers back.”
