Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Throws Shade at Apple and Disney, Calls Them ‘Very Late to the Game’
Apple and Disney are set to launch their own streaming services this year, but Netflix’s chief content officer doesn’t seem too concerned about the competition. “I have no idea what they’re doing until we see it,” Ted Sarandos told Deadline today of those companies’ upcoming platforms. “So I have to really reserve comment and judgment.”
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He didn’t entirely reserve comment, however. “We’ve been competing with 500 channels of cable and penetrated nearly every household in the world for a long time,” Sarandos said of Netflix, which is currently available in 190 countries (but not, notably, in China). “So it’s the same stable of competitors, just very late to the game.”
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“We need to be good in parallel in getting Hollywood content to the world and more importantly from the world to everywhere else in the world,” he added. “Sometimes you get something like ‘Casa De Papel,’ that’s a global sensation at the same level of a ‘Stranger Things’ in terms of how it plays around the world.”
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One reason for concern, at least among consumers, is that studios launching their own streaming services means that fewer movies and TV series will be available on any one platform; alarmists might even envision a scenario in which cord-cutters are meant to subscribe to so many different sites that it all begins to feel like having cable again.
Disney has yet to announce a release date for Disney+, which will include the new “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” but Apple is widely expected to offer a preview of its service at an event being held next Monday, March 25. Five original series are said to have already wrapped production.
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