Not just cinema. But also games. For kids, but not only because shooting ghosts with a virtual gun or challenging a Nadal-like player on the Wimbledon fantasy platform is also popular with baby boomers or the generation. It's thereReed Hastings' last challenge, the creator of Netflix. One who does not like to rest on his laurels, even after having achieved a "mission impossible": last Tuesday, in fact, the platform was able to announce the first accounts in robust profit: for the first time since its inception, Netflix can self-finance, giving up the continuous request for capital that Wall Street has also given with great generosity. In short, it is time to change, combining the leadership of Hollywood with the control of the new super Mario or other heroes of the console. In short, an American story under the banner of one rule: always do new things.
This is probably one of Reed Hastings' secrets: a mathematics graduate, a past in the marines and then ending up teaching in Swaziland as a volunteer. In 1981, after graduating from Stanford in Artificial Intelligence, he founded Pure Software, a sort of guide to using Unix. A millionaire, but not yet a billionaire, he has the idea of the century: “I forgot to return the Apollo 13 videotape in time – he recalls – And so, unbeknownst to my wife, I had to pay a 40 dollar penalty for the delay. Is it possible, I thought, that there wasn't a better system for renting a film?”. So he kicked off Netflix, the streaming giant which in less than a quarter of a century, has exceeded 200 million subscribers, denying among other things the prophets of doom, that is, the many experts who over the years have predicted the economic collapse of the king of streaming. “All this time – says Matthew Ball, one of the gurus of digital media – skeptics have practiced with graphs and statistical processing to demonstrate that Netflix's business model was unsustainable: to face the competition without having a adequate reservoir of proprietary content, Netflix would embark on a mad run on debt to prop up growth. To the point of no return." It didn't happen that way. Indeed, at the end of 2021, the company will be able to announce profits of one billion dollars.
The US stock exchanges did not celebrate, on the contrary. The title lost its shots, completely insensitive to the improvement of the accounts (1,35 billion dollars in the quarter) or to the increase in subscribers: 3,5 million more by the end of the year. Less, say the insatiable, of the 5 million already planned, confirming that, once the lockdowns are over, streaming enthusiasts will return to cinemas and drive-ins. And then, the Cassandras insist, the competition begins to bite: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV +, Hbo Max, Universal, but above all Disney + which has now launched a total war to erode Netflix's primacy, to the sound of billionaire agreements. In short, on the day of the record, Hastings finds himself singing the swan song. And perhaps he thinks so, the old fox of artificial intelligence: Netflix, he writes in the quarterly, cannot afford to go on like this, but must strengthen its grip on customers, large and small, American and otherwise. For heaven's sake, streaming has a bright future ahead of it, given that it covers only 27% of TV consumption (7% for Netflix alone) against 66% for traditional networks. But the margin to raise prices it is now reduced, given the poor rates of Disney and the big e-commerce companies.
The solution? gaming, the egg of Columbus which Hastings, someone who cut his teeth by explaining mathematics to Third World kids, arrived following the planetary successes of Twitch, the platform that creates spectacular audiences by framing videogame champions in action in front of their communities of fans. It is more than possible to combine a streaming platform with a gaming platform. Without charging anything more and in the belief that, alongside the children, parents and grandparents will also go down to the post office more than willingly, once freed from the Peter Pan complex. But on these grounds, Hastings, after having successfully challenged Hollywood, will have to contend with the giants who divide a 300 billion pie: EA Games, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and so on. Giants who already feed the Hollywood supply chain with increasingly human virtual heroes, such as the "black widow" Scarlett Johansson. And the boundaries between real world and fiction they are destined to be increasingly unstable.
