Farhad’s Week in Tech: Netflix Gets a Star, and Google’s Conflicted Ad Blocker
- 6 years ago
Farhad’s Week in Tech: Netflix Gets a Star, and Google’s Conflicted Ad Blocker
The cord, the familiar cable bundle of yore, required paying a whole lot for a bunch of bad TV you’d never
watch, just so you could have very convenient access to the handful of shows you sometimes did watch.
An absolutely gigantic one, to be exact — roughly $300 million over five years, besting
even the $100 million deal that Netflix made with Shonda Rhimes last year.
But the YouTube expansion shows that cutting the cord keeps getting easier,
and the Netflix deal shows how non-cable services keep getting more attractive.
Then along came DVDs and the internet, and now you could unbundle — you’d pay a
lot less for just the things you really wanted to see, provided you were O. K.
hazarding some minor inconveniences.
But as Netflix keeps driving trucks of money to TV’s top producers — it plans to spend $8 billion on new content this year — the script has flipped.
The cord, the familiar cable bundle of yore, required paying a whole lot for a bunch of bad TV you’d never
watch, just so you could have very convenient access to the handful of shows you sometimes did watch.
An absolutely gigantic one, to be exact — roughly $300 million over five years, besting
even the $100 million deal that Netflix made with Shonda Rhimes last year.
But the YouTube expansion shows that cutting the cord keeps getting easier,
and the Netflix deal shows how non-cable services keep getting more attractive.
Then along came DVDs and the internet, and now you could unbundle — you’d pay a
lot less for just the things you really wanted to see, provided you were O. K.
hazarding some minor inconveniences.
But as Netflix keeps driving trucks of money to TV’s top producers — it plans to spend $8 billion on new content this year — the script has flipped.