Binge Times

January 24, 2022
Deadline editor Hayes (Open Wide) and Forbes writer Chmielewski chronicle the rise of Netflix and the influx of streaming services in this smart, comprehensive take on how “a single monolithic company unsettled... Hollywood.” The authors recount how Netflix was the brainchild of Reed Hastings, who saw a flaw in video rental chain Blockbuster’s model and wondered, “What if there were no late fees?” Beginning in 1998 as a mail-order DVD rental business, the company transitioned to streaming in 2007 and picked up the rights to Disney and Sony movies. Then came original content in 2013 with the release of House of Cards, and the 2019 release of Oscar contender The Irishman, both of which further shook up the entertainment industry. The authors spend plenty of time on the “forces of Hollywood” that “allied against Netflix, seeking to knock it off its streaming throne” with competing services, including Disney’s launch of Disney+ in 2019 and cable channel HBO’s addition of streaming service HBO Max in 2020. Things get bogged down a bit with the long-winded and fawning appreciation of Netflix, but the copious research and astute analysis are worth the price of admission. This fascinating study will enthrall those interested in the business side of entertainment.

February 15, 2022
It began as a DVDs-by-mail service and, later, was an early adopter of streaming technology, which made it possible to beam movies directly into people's homes. By any measure, Netflix was a spectacular success story, and it caught most of its potential rivals flatfooted. In recent years, however, companies like Disney, Apple, Comcast, and NBCUniversal have mounted expensive attacks on Netflix's supremacy in the streaming market. (Not to mention a whole string of startups that sounded good but didn't last.) This excellent book takes readers deep behind the scenes at Netflix and its challengers, showing us the people who had the ideas, made the decisions, and, in some cases, took the blame. In their writing, in their perceptive analyses, and in their vivid portrayal of a large cast of characters, Hayes and Chmielewski's book easily rivals such business-book staples as Barbarians at the Gate, The Informant, and Too Big to Fail. The authors, respectively a business media editor at Deadline Hollywood and an entertainment correspondent for Reuters, take a complex subject and make it not only understandable but riveting.

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March 1, 2022
Anecdote-rich tale of how Netflix came to dominate the streaming-video market. "Underestimating Netflix was an industry default," write entertainment business reporters Hayes and Chmielewski in their aptly titled study of the streaming giant and the many tech- and film-industry competitors that rose to challenge it. The authors begin their account with the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the world indoors. "America, already accustomed to spending hours a day in a screen-filled cocoon, would respond to the crisis by serving itself more and bigger portions of comfort food," they write. This comfort food came in the form of bingeworthy series, freshly made or in the vault, and Netflix delivered a substantial portion of it, having essentially had a decade head start in delivering streaming video--though predecessors had paved the way. These included Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com, which, in the 1990s, pioneered the delivery of sports via the early internet, and Jonathan Taplin's early amalgamation of the libraries of several film studios--a holdout being Paramount, whose corporate parent owned Blockbuster, the now-defunct video-rental chain. Netflix arose from its ashes with a business model that once relied on mail-order rentals but then captured the market for streaming that resulted from ever faster internet speeds. It took years for rivals such as Disney, HBO, Amazon Prime, and other providers to catch up, and all but Disney still trail. Consumers are the beneficiaries, with an embarrassment of riches to watch. The "binge" model was a great hook, even if some insiders didn't quite understand it. When Lilyhammer star Steven Van Zandt complained that he'd spent months making the series in Norway only to have it dumped all at once, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos chuckled, "Yeah, just like an album." And the biggest hit of 2021? Squid Game, the Korean show that, the authors convincingly argue, "could really have been launched by only one company: Netflix." A revealing, highly readable look at the making of the modern home-entertainment environment.

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March 11, 2022

The COVID pandemic will continue to reshape the entertainment industry for the better part of this decade, but for television and movies, the first lockdowns in 2020 both helped and hurt the launch of seven major streaming services. In this timely look at the industry's pivot toward streaming services, Hayes (Anytime Playdate) and Reuters entertainment business correspondent Chmielewski trace the decisions and deals that went into the creation of Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Quibi from inside their corporate headquarters. The book provides an early history of how traditional media companies attempted to take on Netflix and Amazon only to hit technological and cultural snags. The book places the launch of streaming services within the larger context of the mergers and acquisitions that have been happening within the entertainment industry. Hayes and Chmielewski's coverage of AT&T's streaming strategy, which ends with a jumble of HBO-branded services, provides an incisive case study. This book provides insight into the rationale and corporate strategy that caused five major services launches within a seven-month span. VERDICT This will appeal to readers of business and media books as it reports on the difficult launches of several streaming services. Recommended.--John Rodzvilla

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