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Binge Times
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Binge Times

Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix

Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
William Morrow, 2022
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As Netflix moves to acquire Warner Bros., this look at how it grew, written by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski, takes readers back to its beginnings. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant stay-at-home orders made streaming movies and television shows not just a convenient diversion but a helpful advantage. By the time of the pandemic, Netflix had already spent a decade transforming the entertainment industry, and it had become the default streaming service. However, rivals such as Hulu were already operating, and new ones were emerging. By the fall of 2019, Apple, Amazon, Disney, WarnerMedia, HBO, and NBCUniversal all had subscription streaming services in the wings. These competitors and more are now active, streaming has boomed, and Netflix has thrived along with it. 

Summary

Streaming really began in 1996.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States and Europe in 2020, everything closed down. People had to stay home with nothing to do. Often, homebound people found the answer to boredom by streaming television programs for hours a day. Many people already spent time on computers or smartphones, checking their email or social media accounts, or watching videos on YouTube. Traditional television didn’t offer sufficient options to fill all that time.

Years before, in April 1993, New York City film artist David Blair premiered a movie on computers and online. This demonstration required considerable resourcefulness and computing power. After all, the World Wide Web had existed for only a few years. Blair mounted a slow, blurry video stream based on his compression research at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Things moved forward quickly. Film producer Jonathan Taplin realized that innovative technologies might provide a new way to distribute films. In 1996, he founded Intertainer, which sent movies to computers...

About the Authors

Dade Hayes is the business editor for Deadline Hollywood. Dawn Chmielewski is the US entertainment business correspondent for Reuters.

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