Netflix

“The entertainment industry will be driven by the television business and not the movie business,” said Sony Pictures Television President Steve Mosko last night at a Chapman University panel session. TV used to be the industry’s “bastard child,” but it is now a creative mecca. “I think the motion picture business is still a great business, but there’s just so much television being produced — and so much good television being produced.” Execs of AMC and Netflix also appeared on the panel.

As Netflix continues to expand internationally, CEO Ted Sarandos said he wants to offer as many as 20 original scripted series per year as he sat in conversation with Netflix-friendly creators Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development) on Wednesday at NATPE.

Netflix Inc. added 13 million worldwide subscribers last year, including 4.3 million during the final three months, according to figures released Tuesday in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report. It marked Netflix’s biggest quarter of subscriber gains ever. Earnings also rose to a new quarterly high of $83.4 million, or $1.35 per share, a 72% increase from the same time last year.

The subscription streaming service is set to lose most of the popular kids show plus a host of kids TV series from the Discovery/Hasbro stable on Feb. 2. The content getting yanked at the Discovery deal expires also includes most of Transformers: Rescue Bots. The two sides failed to reach an agreement on a new rights deal.

“People want to see the movie and we want to be able to deliver the movie,” Ted Sarandos, the streaming service’s chief content officer,  told reporters Wednesday. Sony declined to comment on the possibility of a Netflix airing, a spokesman said.

Netflix remains committed to not releasing data regarding the viewership of its shows “for as long as we can,” Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told journalists at the kickoff of the semi-annual TV Critics Association press tour today. The streaming service has irritated reporters with its unwillingness to issue information regarding the metrics it uses to gauge the success of shows, and Sarandos held to that line, saying, “There’s no real business reason for us to report those numbers.”

Forget the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Netflix said today at the International CES consumer electronics confab, that it will start to endorse TV sets “to help consumers identify televisions built for a superior Internet TV experience.”

Netflix has slashed executive pay for CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, though both have the opportunity to earn far more in total compensation through stock options. Hastings’ salary will be cut from $3 million per year to $1 million. This comes just one year after the board upped Hastings’ salary by $1 million, according the company’s regulatory filing on Monday.

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s always a bit uncomfortable having to tell your boss what to do. So imagine how Steven Van Zandt felt when he directed his longtime friend […]

The satellite TV company said today that it is adding the Netflix app to its latest set-top boxes, its second-generation Hopper devices released in February 2013. Dish wouldn’t say how many customers have that box.

It is “really shortsighted for these networks to be selling their shows to Netflix,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht, a former CEO of HBO, said during a presentation Tuesday morning at the annual UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. Netflix would not be able to attract consumers, siphoning them away from live TV screens, without the benefit of networks’ second-run programming, he argued.

Discovery Communications would like to do a deal with Netflix to stream its programming over the popular company’s site. But the two sides have yet to come to terms on “value,” according to David Zaslav, Discovery’s chief executive.

Some analysts are becoming concerned that a rise in streaming television is fueling deterioration of traditional television — and advertising.

Yes, Netflix is winning over a lot of television viewers — and digital media are taking dollars from broadcast and cable networks. But not to worry, CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack told the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference today in his annual business forecast.

Comcast is tired of Netflix, that’s for sure. The cable giant had to answer a number of difficult questions from the FCC last week after Netflix objected in the strongest possible terms to a pending merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The cable giant’s answers are now redacted and available for all to see. And one of the most talked-about entities is Netflix: Its name comes up some 179 times over the course of the document, including in the footnotes.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s content guru, isn’t your grandpa’s “Mr. Television.” He’s not content to sit still with HBO and other heavy hitters in pursuit.

Over-the-top pay TV revenue from services like Netflix and Hulu Plus is expected to nearly double in the next four years. Infonetics Research estimates that revenue from OTT services will hit $5.8 billion this year and will rise to $10 billion in 2018.

Reed Hastings wants to talk about the future of TV. So he’s asking the people who run movie studios, TV networks and entertainment conglomerates to join him for a private chat. The Netflix CEO has invited many of the top executives in the TV and film world, along with some representatives from hardware and Internet companies, to a gathering at a Utah resort next month. Invitations to the event, distributed to the likes of CBS CEO Les Moonves and HBO CEO Richard Plepler, say that Hastings and Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos want to discuss the future of TV.

LOS GATOS, Calif. (AP) — Netflix says it plans to expand into Australia and New Zealand in March. The online movie and television provider said Tuesday that details on pricing […]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Netflix said it is postponing Bill Cosby’s upcoming standup comedy special, a decision that followed a growing number of allegations that the famed entertainer sexually assaulted […]

Netflix wants to further expand into international markets next year, according to the company’s CFO David Wells, who said at an investor event Tuesday that it plans a “sizable expansion” for 2015. Wells added that the expansion will be similar to what Netflix did in 2014, when the company entered six new countries in Europe, or potentially even “a little bit more.”

Major studio and network owners’ decision to sell shows to Netflix may go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders they’ve ever made if Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger’s compelling report today is correct. Like a lot of analysts, he’s alarmed by what he calls the “unprecedented” drop in C3 ratings across ad-supported TV,  especially among 18 to 49-year-olds.

Cash from Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime will still be dwarfed by the expected $18.4 billion projected next year for off-network domestic syndication spending from cable, but the gap between digital and TV dollars may close in the future given cable channels likely aren’t going to grow as dramatically 5-10 years from now.

Netflix, which was supposed to lay waste to traditional media companies, may have saved them instead.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said he’s buying shares of Netflix Inc. because the online-streaming service will probably be acquired.

Netflix has had better days than Wednesday. On the same day that HBO announced plans to more directly rival Netflix, the streaming video service reported that it had failed to attract as many new subscribers as it had anticipated three months ago.