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A Scale Advantage

Former Vice President, Head of International Originals, at Netflix

IP Interview
Published on January 4, 2020
Netflix

Why is this interview interesting?

  • How scale drives a competitive advantage in subscription video on demand
Executive Bio

Erik Barmack

Former Vice President, Head of International Originals, at Netflix

Erik was responsible for the strategy, team management, and production of Netflix Originals outside of the US. He managed over 40 production and finance executives and led the production of various critically acclaimed shows such as Dark and Casa de las Flores. He was a key figure in scaling Netflix globally to regions such as India, Mexico, and Europe where Netflix now produces tens of local language shows. Erik joined Netflix in 2011 as Global Content Director after spending six years leading ESPN Business Development. He left Netflix in April 2019 to launch his own development and production house of shows outside the US.

Interview Transcript

How sustainable do you think that advantage is, for Netflix?

If you’re looking at the business school of it all, there is network effects, which is that talent wants to be seen around the world. Therefore, I think there is an advantage to having lots of subscribers and the more subscribers you have, the more you can funnel back into content. The more content you have, the more you can learn about what works and what doesn’t work, so you can optimise.

I think the answer is, you have significant advantages as a first or second mover, at scale. The flip side is, it’s really hard to be sub-scale and global. I think you need to be broad and global or you can be small and very targeted. I believe that you can be an animé only service, that can service a very specific niche. But if you’re trying to be global TV, having subscribers, a big content budget, technology that sustains across all these things, these all feel important to me.

So you think you could have vertical subscription video?

I think you can and you can see, in the Nordics, for example, Viaplay has just said, we can see that the US content is going to get sucked out, back to the studios, so we’re going to be focused on sports, which is basically the Premiership and Champion’s League and local content. That’s where we’re going to place our bets. I think they’re doing about 20 shows a year that are just servicing that market. You can still see Funimation, or somebody like that, doing animé. You can see, in South East Asia, that there are a lot of regional, hyper-local opportunities.

But globally, if you’re competing with the list of people that I’m sure we’re going to go through in a second, I don’t think that you can do that and be sub-scale.

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