Reed Hastings Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos affirmed recent comments from the company that they are not — despite strong indications from insiders as recently as last month — intending to bid on sports rights.

Audiences expected Rian Johnson to deliver in 2019 with his sleuth comedy “Knives Out.” But nobody expected the film to become a runaway hit. In short, the film raked at the box office, making $311 million on a $40 million budget.

Here’s another bucket of cold water for the budding romance between Netflix and exhibitors.

Elon Musk’s back may be against the wall as Twitter’s new owner, but he has plenty of friends in high places, especially in the tech sector.

Ben Affleck says his newly minted studio Artists Equity, in partnership with Matt Damon, is going for films that are commercial but smart, that acknowledge popular tastes, but that “people remember 20 years later.”

Liberty Media chairman John Malone slammed AT&T, praised Reed Hastings and affirmed his faith in the Warner Bros. Discovery team led by David Zaslav amid the drama and red ink of today’s streaming wars.

Rodolphe Belmer, the former Canal+ CEO on the verge of heading up French network TF1, has stepped down from the Netflix Board.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Just over three years ago, Netflix unequivocally shot down the idea that it would ever roll out an ad-supported streaming service. “When you read speculation that we are moving into selling advertising, be confident that this is false,” the streamer said in its second-quarter 2019 investor letter. “We believe we will have a more valuable business in the long term by staying out of competing for ad revenue and instead entirely focusing on competing for viewer satisfaction.” Clearly, Netflix’s thinking about advertising has changed. Both Netflix and Disney+ are launching ad-based tiers this fall, seeking to broaden their addressable markets and tap into a new revenue stream as subscriber growth has slowed — in Netflix’s case, it lost 1.2 million in the first half of 2022, compared with a net gain of 5.5 million in the prior-year period.

Netflix may not be in the live sports business but it certainly wants viewers to know that it’s got some content around the edges.

Netflix’s ad-supported tier will be missing certain series and movie titles at launch, the company conceded today in announcing details about the rollout.

More than three years after Reed Hastings said Netflix wants to be on BARB, the UK ratings agency has its wish.

We may see a huge change in the way Netflix releases its shows, as it could axe one of it's most iconic features.

Netflix has batted down a report about aggressive moves in its rollout of a cheaper ad-supported tier as “speculation.”

After a decade-plus of having the streaming field virtually to itself, Netflix now faces historic levels of competition. Disney and other media and tech rivals have narrowed the gap, making for a rocky 2022 marked by subscriber and stock price declines.

Netflix have announced they will charge for password sharing in an additional five countries, as the streaming giant continues to crackdown on the practice.Today (July 22), news broke that Netflix have asked customers in five more countries – Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic – to pay additional fees if they are sharing their password with viewers outside of their household. The additional fees vary between countries but users can expect to pay no more than an additional US$2.99.According to IGN, the extra cost won’t affect the use of the streaming service from mobile devices.

Netflix executives see content spending of about $17 billion in 2021 lingering there for the next several year through 2023.

The economics of Netflix’s forthcoming ad-supported tier will be more favorable than those of its primary ad-free one, one senior executive indicated during the company’s second-quarter earnings interview.

Coming off a better quarter than anticipated, Netflix founder Reed Hastings today was showing some swagger and a lot of thanks to the first part of the latest season of Stranger Things.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterNetflix co-CEO Reed Hastings declared during the streamer’s Q2 earnings interview Tuesday that linear television will go the way of the dinosaur within the next decade.“It’s definitely the end of linear TV over the next 5 to 10 years,” Hastings said while discussing Netflix’s financial and subscriber results on the pre-recorded Q&A, which came on the heels of the reveal the streamer lost 970,000 subscribers in Q2. That loss was actually a win for Netflix, which had originally expected to lose 2 million subscribers by the end of June 30.Though very bold, Hastings thoughts on the state of linear television are hardly a shock given his position at the top of the world’s biggest streamer — and they carry forward data touted by Netflix earlier Tuesday.

The recent pink-slipping of hundreds of employees cost Netflix a bundle, with more likely to come.

Netflix is moving further into the world of animation with the acquisition of Australian studio Animal Logic.

Netflix said it’s targeting an early 2023 launch for a cheaper advertising tier as it seeks to stem subscriber losses and hopefully turn them back up. It will roll the plan out in a handful of markets first but didn’t say which ones.

Netflix will reveal its financial results from the second quarter on Tuesday afternoon, and the outcome is expected to set the tone for one of the most anxious and uncertain earnings seasons in years.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSUN VALLEY, Idaho — The moguls have arrived.On Tuesday, dozens of titans of the business, media and tech worlds came out to play at the Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho for the start of Allen & Co.’s annual meeting of movers and shakers.The invitation-only conference will include three days of seminars and meetings that are held away from the prying eyes of the public, which kick off Wednesday morning. So today was all about meeting and greeting each other at the posh retreat in Idaho’s picturesque Sawtooth Mountains.Arrivals began at the Sun Valley Lodge around 11 a.m.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorNetflix has made no secret that it would rely on third-party partners to roll into the ad-supported VOD space. Now word has emerged that Google and NBCUniversal are the top contenders to potentially land a coveted deal with the streamer to sell and serve ads for Netflix’s lower-cost plan with ads.Google and Comcast’s NBCU are both pursuing an exclusive pact with Netflix for the forthcoming ad-supported streaming package, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing anonymous sources.

Disney+ will generate $1.8 billion in U.S. ad revenue by 2025 from its forthcoming ad-supported streaming tier, with Netflix coming in at $1.2 billion, Wall Street analyst Michael Nathanson estimates in a new report.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaIt’s that time of year again. That post-July 4th period when media barons and billionaires break out the Brooks Brothers casual and don their sweater vests to hit an idyllic Idaho resort town of Sun Valley for another edition of “lets make a deal.”Many of the names expected to rub elbows next month are familiar ones. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Liberty Media’s John Malone, Comcast chairman Brian Roberts, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple pasha Tim Cook and Berkshire Hathaway guru Warren Buffett are among those who have once again made the cut for Allen & Co.’s annual media conference.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorRussia, in retaliation for economic sanctions the U.S. has imposed over the country’s attack on Ukraine, announced that it has added 61 Americans to its own blacklist — including Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings.Hastings and the other U.S.

Netflix’s fabled “culture deck,” which over the years has taken on the importance of the Magna Carta in tech and business circles, has gotten some updates reflecting the streaming giant’s current circumstances.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorNetflix loves to tout its culture of avoiding rules and minimizing corporate red tape. But of course, the company does have operating guidelines, famously detailed in the Netflix Culture document posted on its website.

ad-supported tier as soon as the end of 2022, according to a note to employees obtained by the New York Times.That’s also when Netflix plans to begin cracking down on password sharing, the newspaper reported Tuesday. Both the crackdown on password sharing as well as the ad-supported tier were ideas that the streamer had already floated in response to the Q1 loss of 200,000 subscribers that the company reported last month.

Netflix is intensifying its surprisingly sudden embrace of advertising, signaling to employees that it may roll out a cheaper, ad-supported tier of its streaming service by the end of 2022.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorNetflix may dive into the ad-supported VOD space as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022 — sooner than it originally signaled.Last month, as Netflix reported an unexpected drop in streaming subscribers in Q1 and forecast a 2 million sub loss for the second quarter, the company announced plans to roll out a lower-cost version of its streaming service with ads. Co-CEO Reed Hastings told investors at the time that Netflix would “figure out” the AVOD strategy “over the next year or two.”The company has evidently accelerated that timeline: Netflix informed employees of a Q4 target date for the ad-supported tier in a recent memo, the New York Times reported, citing two anonymous sources.

Netflix has opened an office in Italy and unveiled a huge slate of scripted and unscripted series and films from many of the country’s biggest producers, with Co-CEO Reed Hastings detailing the streamer’s roots in the nation.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentNetflix on Friday officially opened its Italian base in Rome, in a classy neoclassical building near the iconic Via Veneto, and announced a substantial slate of originals that stand as testament to what co-CEO Reed Hastings called the streaming giant’s “growing business in Italy.”“The breadth and variety of our Italian slate perfectly represents our ambitions,” said Hastings, who took the stage at the presentation’s conclusion. Hastings took the opportunity to note how pleased he is that Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” which Netflix produced, scooped top honors at Italy’s David di Donatello Awards, the country’s top film prizes, earlier this week.Netflix’s new Italian slate is headlined by a high-end English-language series adaptation of “The Leopard,” the classic Sicily-set novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Matt Blank, interim CEO of AMC Networks, said the company has “no plans” for ad-supported tiers of its family of targeted streaming services including Shudder, Acorn TV and AMC+.