
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.
Books: Digital Life |
Swept Away by the StreamBinge Times, by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski“Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” Old-media conglomerates famously dismissed Netflix when it was a fledgling startup. Time Warner, Blockbuster: Where are they now?
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After the DisruptionSystem Error, by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy WeinsteinThe digital transition was always going to be a messy one—look at the antitrust fights that followed the telephone during the analog era.
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The New Big BrotherThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana ZuboffTech companies have shown themselves to be increasingly cavalier with our personal data. Are we handing over too much information?
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The Promise of Virtual RealityDawn of the New Everything, by Jaron Lanier
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When Machines Run AmokLife 3.0, by Max TegmarkThe author was taken aback when he observed an AI program teach itself to play an arcade game—and play it much better than its human designers.
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The World’s Hottest GadgetThe One Device, by Brian MerchantApple’s iPhone—a 21st-century American icon—could not exist without the labors of Bolivian miners and Chinese factory workers.
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Soft Skills and Hard ProblemsThe Fuzzy and the Techie, by Scott Hartley
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Confronting the End of PrivacyData for the People, by Andreas Weigend
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We’re All Cord Cutters NowStreaming, Sharing, Stealing, by Michael D. Smith and Rahul TelangWhat happens when media executives refuse to believe the Internet is a challenge to their businesses?
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Augmented Urban RealityThe City of Tomorrow, by Carlo Ratti and Matthew ClaudelCan smartphone connectivity and shared data solve the problems of crowded cities?
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Word Travels FastWriting on the Wall, by Tom StandageTwitter and Facebook are just the latest incarnations of a tradition that dates back 2,000 years, Tom Standage says.
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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.

BINGE TIMES: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
By Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
William Morrow