BANFF – The chief content officer for Netflix, Ted Sarandos, worked hard to dispel the notion that his company is “the devil in Canada” or “one of the four horseman of the apocalypse”, preferring to paint the content-streaming service as a new but savvy deep-pocketed buyer of Canadian content.
At his keynote presentation Wednesday morning at the Banff World Media Festival, Sarandos ackonwledged that a bad rep seems to come with the territory.
“I don’t know when, in any time in history, a new buyer has ever been a bad thing”, he told the packed room. “And that’s all we are, is a new buyer. I know there’s been particular interest and angst in Canada about our future here, and I’ll tell you that over the last several years, Canadian broadcasters and cable operators have been decreasing what they’ve been paying for content, and we’ve come in and reset the market a little bit. If you own content, that’s not a bit thing.”
Sarandos’ words appeared to be music to the ears of the Canadian content producers in the crowd, especially when he offered Netflix as “a gateway” for them to get their content more broadly distributed around the world as the service expands to other markets. He said that there could be some “interesting opportunities” for French-language films in particular, noting that they tended to be difficult to distribute outside of Canada.
It wasn’t long before he was challenged on whether Netflix should be obligated to contribute to the production of Canadian content. (Ed note: as Cartt.ca readers know, the CRTC is in the process of conducting a fact-finding mission on over-the-top services, which are currently classified as new media broadcasting undertakings and therefore exempt from Canadian regulation).
“It’s clear that on-line broadcasters like Netflix, and there’ll be many more, play in the same arena as the regulated Canadian players”, said Norm Bolen, president and CEO of the Canadian Media Production Association. “They compete with those players for programming and customers, they will earn hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually… why shouldn’t OTT players like Netflix, like the current players in the same arena, be mandated to make a contribution to the creation of original Canadian content?”
Sarandos replied that Netflix is already making contributions in Canada.
“We make a meaningful contribution to Canadian content by licensing content and injecting new money into the market”, he replied. “Secondly, Canadian broadcasters are not regulated when they deliver over-the-top either, and third, we don’t enjoy any of the protections and privileges like those Canadian broadcasters in this country, so we are about using commercially-driven contributions.”
Sarandos also tried to dispel the notion that broadcasters or BDUs that offer on-demand services should feel threatened by Netflix, by sharing some data from the U.S. market where his company has been streaming content for almost five years.
“In that time, television ratings have gone up, total linear viewings have increased, cable households have increased, overall pay subscription services have increased and, in fact, the parallel that we have with (U.S. pay TV network) Starz, where we have the exact same movies in the exact same window, and last year they grew by 600,000 subscribers. When you look at these numbers you’d say ‘if Netflix subscribers are the most likely to cut cable’, then cable should be breathing a big sigh of relief because no one seems to be doing it.”
Cartt.ca senior editor Lesley Hunter is in Banff this week covering the 2011 Banff World Media Festival.
