BINGE TIMES

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.