Ted Sarandos is so over Warner Bros.
Less than one month after Netflix walked away from its takeover bid for the storied studio major, the co-CEO is trying to shift the focus from the streamer’s failed Hollywood merger to its future plans for Europe.
In a wide-ranging interview with Politico in Brussels, published on Tuesday, the Netflix Co-CEO was keen to discuss new efforts by the EU to regulate the media industry, but appeared eager to put the story of Netflix’s unsuccessful WBD bid to bed.
In the interview, Sarandos insisted there was “no political interference” from the Trump administration in the WBD negotiations, which saw Warner Bros accepting the $111 billion bid by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance over Netflix’s lower offer. The political dynamics “complicated the narrative [around the deal], not the actual outcomes,” Sarandos said. “I think for us it was always a business transaction.” He also dismissed President Trump’s Feb. 21 post on Truth Social calling for Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice as simply “a social media post… It was not ideal, but [Trump] does a lot of things on social media.”
Sarandos was more forthcoming on the subject of European regulation. EU lawmakers this year plan to reopen discussion of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the EU law coordinating various national regulations covering TV, streaming, and video-sharing platforms. Among other provisions, the AVMSD enforces a 30 percent European content quota for streaming on-demand services like Netflix.
Sarandos noted how embedded Netflix is in Europe. “The EU is now our largest territory,” he said. “We’ve spent, in the last decade, over $13 billion in creating content in Europe. It makes us one of the leading producers and exporters of European storytelling. We’ve got a lot of skin in the game in Europe.”
While the streamer can live with EU regulation, Sarandos suggested incentive schemes to encourage production through tax breaks and other support — like those used in Spain and the U.K. — were “much more productive” than regulatory mandates. He also warned against fracturing the European single market with a patchwork of different national regulations that would result in the loss of “all the benefits of the single [EU] market.”
He also warned that European regulators are underestimating YouTube as a direct competitor for TV viewing, too often treating it like a social media platform rather than a massive streaming rival.
“One of the things that we saw in recent months with the Warner Brothers transaction is a real deep misunderstanding about what YouTube is and isn’t,” Sarandos said. “YouTube is a straightforward direct competitor for television, either a local broadcaster or a streamer like Netflix…I think what happens is people think of YouTube as a bunch of cat videos [but] YouTube is in the same exact game that we are.”