Netflix kicks off the second-quarter cycle of media and tech earnings reports on Thursday with its after-market disclosure that is expected to deliver a solid if not spectacular quarter.
The forecast for Netflix is the top story in today’s episode of “Daily Variety,” a new podcast that features conversations with Variety journalists about news, trends and personalities making waves in media and entertainment.
Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writing for TV and gaming, breaks down what to expect from the numbers and the commentary from Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters during Thursday’s video conference call with Wall Street analysts. Also in today’s episode, our Cover Story segment features business editor Todd Spangler breaking down his reporting and the insights gained from his deeply reported look at President Donald Trump‘s war on media.
Netflix brass will likely field questions about the company’s AI strategy and how it is harnessing the new generation of revolutionary technological tools to enable content creation and save a few bucks at the sametime, Maas says.
“They’re going to be fielding quite a few questions about generative AI and different ways that that can impact not only the user interface, looking at viewership habits, feeding more people stuff to their algorithms, and also how it might affect production costs and distribution,” Maas says.
Maas predicts that the CEO duo will also be pressed on the competitive dynamic in TV viewing. YouTube’s milestone of now generating more viewing by traditional TV sets than via desktop or mobile devices has forced other outlets to recognize that they have to compete for entertainment leisure viewing with the Google-owned behemoth.
Nicolás Ortega for Variety
“Really the competitor is YouTube in a lot of ways,” Maas says. “The conversation surrounding that — time, TV share, just general attention span. There’ll be a lot of questions and commentary surrounding that.”
In the Cover Story conversation, Spangler says the single hardest question to answer about Trump’s assault on news media and First Amendment protections is the why of it all. What is the end game for weakening constitutional protections that have defined us as Americans?
“There’s certain factions [in the U.S.] that want to change the way America thinks about itself,” Spangler says. “That’s really, broadly speaking, what we’re talking about. And so that’s the lens through which I came to this story.”
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(Pictured top: Netflix co-CEOs Greg Peters, left and Ted Sarandos with “Emilia Pérez” star Zoe Saldaña at the Oscars in March)
