Ted Sarandos: Last News

Reed Hastings saw his total pay package jump by about $10 million last year to $51 million on a new stock option grant. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos pulled in total compensation of $50.3 million, up from $38.2 million, also on a bigger option grant.

Netflix Orders Season 2 Of ‘Rana Naidu’

Naman Ramachandran “Rana Naidu,” the Indian adaptation of “Ray Donovan,” has been renewed for a second season by Netflix. The news emerged the same day that Netflix announced a 1.75 million jump in subscriptions worldwide. The action thriller that stars Venkatesh Daggubati and Rana Daggubati trended on the No.1 spot as the most watched series in India for three consecutive weeks after launch last month and continues to be in the top 10 series in India for the fifth week in a row. It trended in Netflix’s global top 10 for non-English TV for two weeks after it launched on March 10.

Netflix is owning up to the long delay they had with the Love Is Blind live reunion.

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company will likely spend roughly $17 billion on content in 2024, steady with 2023 levels.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters revealed what exactly went wrong with the live “Love Is Blind” Season 4 reunion special on Sunday — and how they plan to fix the problem with other live broadcasts moving forward. “We’re really sorry to disappoint so many people,” Peters said during a prerecorded Q1 earnings interview Tuesday. “We didn’t meet the standard that we expect ourselves: to serve our members and just be clear from a technical perspective. We’ve got the infrastructure. We had just a bug that we introduced, actually, when we implemented some changes to try to improve live-streaming performance after the last live broadcast, Chris Rock[‘s ‘Selective Outrage’] in March. We just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we put multiple systems interacting with each other under the load of millions of people trying to watch ‘Love Is Blind.'”

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Netflix doesn’t want Hollywood writers to go on strike — but the streamer has a “pretty robust slate of releases” that will help it weather a walkout better than others, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said. His comments, on the company’s first quarter 2023 earnings interview, come a day after Writers Guild of America members overwhelmingly passed a strike authorization vote, giving union leadership the power to call a strike once the contract expires on May 1. “We respect the writers, and we respect the WGA,” he said. “We couldn’t be here without them. We don’t want a strike. The last time there was a strike, it was devastating to creators. It was really hard on the industry. It was painful for local economies that support productions. And it was very, very, very bad for fans.”

As part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Netflix is one of those companies currently at the table negotiating with the Writers Guild over a new deal.

Netflix plans to phase in “paid sharing” — the company’s preferred term for cracking down on the loaning of login credentials — in the U.S. in the coming weeks.

Netflix said it’s closing down its original DVD by mail business, marking the end of an era as it focuses on retooling its streaming offerings including a new ad-supported plan.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Netflix’s famous red envelopes are headed to the recycling bin of history. The company announced the shutdown of the DVD-by-mail business Tuesday ahead of its first-quarter 2023 earnings report. Since 1998, according to the company, it has mailed out over 5 billion DVD and Blu-ray rentals to subscribers across the U.S. The final Netflix DVDs will be shipped out on Sept. 29, 2023, according to co-CEO Ted Sarandos. “After an incredible 25 year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com later this year,” Sarandos wrote in a blog post on the company’s site. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult. So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023.”

Peter Caranicas Deputy Editor Continuing its global territorial expansion, Netflix picked up and is now streaming Greek TV series “Maestro in Blue,” its first-ever exclusive worldwide distribution deal for a Greek scripted series. Created for Greek broadcaster Mega TV by multihyphenate Christoforos Papakaliatis, “Maestro” was launched on the platform internationally on March 17 and this week hit the global top 10 of the most-watched shows on Netflix. “Maestro” debuted on Greek linear TV last October. Season 1, consisting of nine episodes, premiered on Netflix in Greece and Cyprus in December before expanding to audiences around the world.

13D and 13G reports. For those outside of the inside-baseball world of corporate finance: Forty-five days out from the end of the year, companies are required to have filed 13D and 13G disclosure forms with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These reports are required for investors who amass 5% or more of a company’s total stock issue. Starting with this primer on how to monitor big-dollar investment bets, Variety will offer a quarterly survey of how the media and entertainment sector is faring among the world’s most sophisticated stock pickers.

Netflix’s Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has told an audience of Indian filmmakers that they “ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of the streamer’s ambitions in the country.

Naman Ramachandran Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed a continued investment push in the Indian market on Saturday. In a freewheeling chat with Indian filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali in Mumbai to promote the latter’s upcoming Netflix series “Heeramandi,” Sarandos was bullish about India, repeating what he said on Friday to local media about the market’s growth. “India is the fastest growing Netflix market in the world this year and because of that, we’re able to continue to invest in great storytelling. And I think when you see ‘Heeramandi,’ you’re gonna see why it has been such the honor of a lifetime to work with Sanjay and to be able to bring this to screen. And you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Sarandos said.

CBS President and CEO George Cheeks is to keynote this year’s Banff World Media Festival.

Dave Chappelle was the winner of the Grammy for Best Comedy Album for his Netflix special The Closer, which sparked outrage for featuring jokes aimed at the transgender community.Chappelle, 49, who did not attend the awards ceremony last night, beat out Jim Gaffigan, Randy Rainbow, Patton Oswalt, and Louis C.K., another controversial comedian, for the award.Chappelle generated anger after the release of The Closer in 2021, which included remarks about the transgender community and prompted swift backlash from offended onlookers and even staffers at Netflix, which in recent years aired a slew of the comic's specials.The backlash included a staged walkout from employees at Netflix's LA HQ, after the streaming giant's CEO Ted Sarandos defended Chappelle's jokes as artistic expression and nothing more than an example of the comedian's 'creative freedom.'In The Closer, Chappelle is at pains to stress that he does not hate transgender people, and tells a long anecdote about a trans woman comic, who he describes as a friend, who came to his defense in earlier entanglements with the community.  Dave Chappelle was the winner of the Grammy for Best Comedy Album for his Netflix special The Closer, which sparked outrage last year for featuring jokes aimed at the transgender communityHe was criticised for intentionally misgendering the trans friend.Chappelle says: 'Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth.

Award-winning writer, producer, comedian, and actor Quinta Brunson, creator of ABC and Warner Bros. Television’s TV series , will receive the ICG Publicists (International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600) 2023 Television Showperson Award. 

Netflix stock closed the week at its highest level since last April, rising more than 8% Friday to end at $342.50 after the company reported strong subscriber growth and executed a smooth handoff atop its executive ranks.

Netflix’s landmark entry into ad-supported streaming, which began last November, is off to a “solid” start and will soon bring in at least $3 billion in annual revenue, executives said.

On the heels of the announcement that Netflix would stream the SAG Awards beginning in 2024, co-CEO Ted Sarandos spoke more about the streamer’s approach to live programming during Thursday’s Q4 earnings call.