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Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix

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The first comprehensive account of the biggest wake-up call in the history of the entertainment business: the pivot to streaming. Go inside a disparate group of media and tech companies — Disney, Apple, AT&T/WarnerMedia, Comcast/NBCUniversal and well-funded startup Quibi – as they scramble to mount multi-billion-dollar challenges to Netflix.

After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade’s head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges.

The battle for streaming supremacy may end up having more than one winner, but the cost and disruption to decades-old business models have also produced a lot of losers. Binge Times reveals the true costs of the vision quest as companies are turned inside-out and repeatedly redraw their org charts and strategic plans. Stretching from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Wall Street, it is a mesmerizing, character-rich tale of hubris and ambition, as the fate of a century-old industry hangs in the balance.

ISBN-13: 9780062980007

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 04-19-2022

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

Dade Hayes is the business editor at Deadline. Along with two previous books about entertainment, he has written for the New York Times, Variety, and the podcast Business Wars. He lives in Larchmont, New York. Dawn Chmielewski is an entertainment business correspondent for Reuters and was previously a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Recode, and Forbes. She lives in Southern California.

Table of Contents

Streamatis Personae ix

Preface xiii

Introduction: The Reckoning 1

Part I Netflix Sets the Bar

Chapter 1 The Discovery of Television Among the Bees 19

Chapter 2 Hollywood's New Center of Gravity 28

Chapter 3 Netflix Lives Up to Its Name 43

Part II War Drums

Chapter 4 The Red Wedding 61

Chapter 5 "The Status Quo, We Knew, Was Not Sustainable" 78

Chapter 6 Live from Cupertino 97

Chapter 7 Cooking Up "Quick Bites" 107

Chapter 8 The Kid with the Cartoons 120

Chapter 9 Long Game 133

Chapter 10 The Birth of ClownCo 143

Chapter 11 The Flywheel 153

Part III Showtime

Chapter 12 Touched by Tinker Bell's Wand 167

Chapter 13 "I Love That Show and I Think You Will Too" 178

Chapter 14 Quibi Vadis? 187

Chapter 15 "If You Want to Grab People's Attention, You Have to Tease" 196

Chapter 16 The IQ Test 207

Part IV The Incumbent Responds

Chapter 17 Netflix Bets on Itself 229

Part V Meeting the Public

Chapter 18 Liftoff 241

Chapter 19 In Space, No One Can Hear You Stream 257

Part VI Navigating the Recovery

Chapter 20 To Everything (Churn, Churn, Churn) 271

Chapter 21 Amazon on the March 291

Chapter 22 Paciencia y Fe 302

Epilogue 315

Acknowledgments 319

Notes 323

Index 333