The NFL may be the biggest event programming on TV, but Netflix thinks that it can also bring something to that table.
At a Financial Times conference Friday, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters touched on a number of topics close to the streamer, including how he sees the use of artificial intelligence in the entertainment business, and Netflix’s foray into advertising, which he is leading.
And of course there’s live sports, an area where Netflix always seems to be the center of attention. In the case of the NFL, Peters said that the company is approaching it as a singular event, rather than something with a more regular cadence (“for one day, football will be on Netflix,” he said), and hinted that the streaming giant has plans to approach NFL games a bit differently than other rightsholders.
“We plan to Netflix-ify them a little bit,” Peters added. “So we’ll plan to have a little bit of stuff around the games with our talent, stuff like that, that’ll hopefully make it super fun.”
And, notably, Peters did not dismiss the potential of Netflix expanding its sports portfolio.
“We’d love to do those things, it would be amazing. We also want to do it in a way that works for the business and those have been typically challenging deals to go do and make it work for the business,” Peters said, adding that he learned to “never say never, keep your mind open to how to do it and think creatively about it. And certainly we’re poking at the edges of that.”
In fact, “never say never” applies pretty cleanly to Netflix’s approach to advertising as well. The company was clear that it was not in the advertising business, until then-CEO Reed Hastings stunned Wall Street by announcing plans to get into ads on an earnings call.
Peters said that the decision as made quickly amid the pandemic, which turbocharged subscriber growth early, only to see it stall out.
“We realized that what had happened is we had pulled forward about two years worth of growth into those two quarters, and then it hit a wall,” Peters said. “So at this point, we’re like, okay, all the things that we had been planning to do for the next two years, we sort of have to do now. And there’s nothing like a desperate situation to focus the decision-making apparatus of the company a little bit more tightly. And so we decided, very quickly, okay, it was time to go do advertising and to do it as rapidly as we possibly could.”
He also contrasted Netflix’s slow and steady approach to Amazon, which turned on ads for all Prime Video subscribers earlier this year, flooding the market with inventory.
“Amazon came into the market in a pretty strong way,” Peters said with a smile. “My general sense is that they are an advertising company. This is a core part of their DNA. So their angle was, it’s advertising, and then you have this option to sort of buy out of it if you want, but really, it’s advertising first. And very much like Amazon does, they sort of came at it and said — what’s their their mantra, ‘your margin is my opportunity’ — they came in and said, we are going to go drop to the bottom, essentially, and start to compete from that basis. And that’s their playbook.”
“We have not matched that, because I think our proposition is not that,” he continued. “Our proposition is, we have some of the most important — from a society and culture perspective — titles out there at any given point in time, these are titles that brands or advertiser partners want to be next to. They want to be part of that societal conversation. So we want to anchor in the top of the market in that regard, and then we also are working to build into that.”
Peters also addressed generative artificial intelligence, saying that while he is “excited” about the potential, it may not be the instantly transformative game-changer that some make it out to be.
“I would say — for those of us are actually using the technologies — we’re in that point of the technology adoption cycle where we’re past the super hype bump,” Peters said. “And now people that are actually using it realize, wow, actually going from a demo to something that’s at scale in production and working in a high quality way is a lot of work and takes longer than you actually think it’s going to take.”