
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings in 2002. Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
WHEN READING ABOUT THE MEDIA BUSINESS these days, there are some things you know without being told. You can be pretty sure that when a bunch of conglomerates come together to create something they call TV Everywhere, it will end up delivering TV nowhere. Or that when the head of a mighty corporation says, of a pint-size digital competitor, “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?”—the answer is going to surprise him.
That was Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s CEO, famously dismissing the threat of Netflix in 2010. Ten years before, Time Warner had been the biggest media conglomerate of them all. But having sold itself to AOL in 2000 in a near-disastrous attempt to achieve digital competence, it went on to shed its cable-system subsidiary, its music colossus, its magazine empire and AOL itself before Mr. Bewkes, in 2018, sold what was left to AT&T for $85.4 billion. This month, AT&T offloaded WarnerMedia to Discovery Inc. for barely half that amount.
The men who ran these conglomerates were a hubristic lot, chasing dominance in an analog industry while remaining utterly clueless about the coming digital tsunami. It was only a matter of file size: Music labels were already being gutted by the early aughts, but movie studios and television networks, whose output requires vastly more bandwidth, had another decade to contemplate the inevitable—not that it did them much good.

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