Perhaps one missing piece is that there is a first-mover advantage to being the tech disruptor, but in many cases the tech quickly becomes “table stakes” and the strategy goes back to where it was.
A useful contrast is with HBO. Yes HBO has a streaming service and app... but its competitive advantage is in prestige content people will pay $$$ for. Somehow HBO's management team is incredibly good at nurturing content in an artistic critically-acclaimed way, rather than tech-data-driven way.
For Netflix, tech is the primary differentiator and the content is table stakes. While for HBO it's reversed. It all depends on how a given company is choosing to compete in the same market.
And a lot of their Netflix-branded shows are quite mediocre. I'd say they're not so much confident of their statistics about each individual show as they are about being able to promote their shows and get them viewed anyhow.
And on the average, it works out for them without the messy bits in the middle with ordering a pilot and having to somehow assess the quality of that pilot in regards to a full show.
It was good. As far as I understand, ATT got rid of most of the bosses responsible for nurturing that quality over quantity atmosphere and they are also now pumping out garbage.
A few months ago, I opened up the HBO Max app (which I only have access to due to it being bundled into my mobile phone plan), and this is the show that was being advertised:
https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYN4ywAXUS1OLNg...
...you mean shows like the critically-acclaimed Mare of Easttown and Hacks and The White Lotus, all this year?
Nobody ever said HBO was exclusively prestige content. There isn't enough to fill multiple channels 24/7. But it's still the main factor that drives subscriptions.
Thanks for the recommendations though! They look interesting.
Then Disney, HBO, and CBS are now tech companies.
To stretch your analogy, you might even argue that Target and Walmart are tech companies too. Or UPS, DHL, and FedEx. They do massive scale logistics using computers.
I would go by a different definition for tech. Are engineers the principal innovators and expense driving the company forward? Are automation, growth, measurement, iteration, and hard problems a chief mindset? That's what tech is to me. You could even meet those definitions without being an internet company. SpaceX, Tesla...
Is Netflix still a tech company when Disney (incumbent) now offers similar tech? Does Netflix still have tech as its principal competitive advantage, or are subscribers now choosing who they subscribe to based on content?
If the latter, then Netflix is now a media company, and whatever tech superiority they still have is about as relevant as Betamax's tech superiority over VHS.
It's pretty much the only differentiator, and what people mean when they say "content is king." Very few companies can compete with Netflix on fidelity and technical performance. Yet Netflix is second fiddle to industry giants that contracted out their streaming platform development, because ultimately consumers care more about what they're watching than how they watch it.
Did they develop any of these technologies?
I think it's generally understood that, in the 21st century, a "tech company" is a company that uses tech as the principal competitive advantage to replace traditional "non-21st-century-tech" incumbents.
Obviously, Netflix used streaming, collaborative filtering recommendations, and a massive CDN to replace cable TV subscriptions.
If that's not a perfect example of a tech company, I don't know what is.
Yes Netflix needed a good content library too, but that's never been its primary differentiator. NBC and HBO have been producing good content for many decades now. That's table stakes.
There's another "level" of tech companies, you could argue -- companies that supply tech rather than just use it as a competitive advantage -- e.g. Microsoft, Apple, MongoDB, Dropbox.
But today we tend to label those "software" or "hardware" companies specifically (or a combination). Perhaps in the 1980's those were the only "tech" companies. But at least ever since the dot-com era, "tech company" has meant companies that use tech as the principal competitive advantage (as opposed to merely increasing internal efficiency).