By DAVID CARR
But Netflix already has.
Netflix knows a little about transformation. It’s worth remembering that it managed
to go from the largest user of the Postal Service to the largest source
of download traffic on the Web in the span of months, not years. After a
big stumble on pricing in 2011, Netflix recovered and then some, using
its expertise in technology and algorithms to accrue over 36 million
users worldwide, a number that will probably grow when it announces its
earnings on Monday. Its stock has already risen more than 200 percent in
the last year.
But few would have guessed that Netflix’s software expertise would
extend to entertainment produced by top-flight actors, directors and
writers. Beginning this year, Netflix streamed four original series —
“House of Cards,” “Hemlock Grove,” “Arrested Development” and “Orange Is
the New Black.” The shows earned generally good notices, kicked up a
great deal of chatter, and, drum roll here, were nominated for 14 Emmys.
It was the first time an Internet-only service earned a seat at the
big-boy table in television.
The Emmys were the most prominent marker of change, but hardly the only
one, in a week full of headlines about what TV is becoming. It’s not
their first foray, but if Apple and Google move further into the
television space, they are sure to collide with not only traditional
players, but Netflix, Amazon, Sony and Intel. And Aereo, which so far is
a small but persistent player backed by Barry Diller, won another court
victory for its plan to totally upend broadcast networks, by streaming
their content without compensating them.
Meanwhile, what were the traditional television players up to?
Squabbling yet again over retransmission fees, with a standoff between
CBS and Time Warner Cable that could set off a blackout, driving
audiences to other ways of viewing. The only constant was steady price
hikes on cable bills.
The future of television — a place where cable is not the only answer for average viewers — just drew a little closer.
Netflix has earned its place in that future. It won some victories on
the programming side by financing creators and staying out of their
hair, an approach invented and perfected by HBO. Given that HBO pulled
in 108 Emmy nominations last week, Netflix has a long way to go. But
David Bianculli, a professor at Rowan University in New Jersey who blogs
at TV Worth Watching, suggests another view.
“It took HBO 25 years to get its first Emmy nomination; it took Netflix
six months,” he said. In that sense, Netflix is more like Pixar than
Hulu, showing that a Silicon Valley company could produce creative,
successful programming.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told The New York Times
last week that the Emmy nominations solidified the idea that “television
is television, no matter what pipe brings it to the screen.”
He’s right. Television used to come over the air or through the coaxial
cable. Now it seems to come from everywhere on all kinds of devices.
Both Google and Apple continue to hover around the honey pot of
television. Apple’s rumored effort at making a TV set has been like
Godot — much anticipated, never arriving — but in the meantime it is in talks with distributors like Time Warner Cable and programmers like Walt Disney to explore collaboration on apps.
Google has been in talks with program providers, including cable
channels, about distribution over the Internet, a more complicated
approach — the cable systems that distribute programming would be left
out of the mix — with a higher risk in execution.
In both instances, the companies are taking the same wine and putting it
in a new bottle, creating a new interface to replace clunky remotes
while hoping to gain a lot of valuable data in the process. Figuring out
how to put a new skin on the same database can be lucrative — Weather.com,
a huge business, is built on existing government data — but it’s one
thing to present better navigation, and another to produce better
television.
Apple reinvented the music industry on its terms and in doing so cut the
legacy music business in half. The TV business, which is still sitting
on healthy earnings, if not ratings, saw that movie already and wants no
part of it.
But Apple is nothing if not relentless. One of its reported approaches
is to enable ad-skipping while making a payment to ad-supported
networks. “In essence they were saying that they would cut them a check
while destroying their business model,” said Craig Moffett, a
telecommunications analyst. “How long do you think that conversation
lasted?”
Meanwhile Google is selling its ability to make content more visible and
searchable; that sounds like the favor Google did for the newspaper
business, which, like music, is half the size it once was.
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