Freshly hired Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos, who has held the title since 2020, say no major strategic shifts are in the immediate offing after Reed Hastings passed them the leadership baton.
In a statement to Deadline, “We don’t have a bank of changes that we’ve been holding for this moment…so mostly it’s just continuity and moving forward.”
Hastings, who co-founded Netflix, is stepping down from his executive officer role and exchanging it for a role as executive chairman of the streaming service. He elaborated in an earnings interview that the move had its roots a decade ago, as the two Co-CEOs began establishing their authentic members at the company. At that time, a senior product executive, Peters made his mark by helping to spearhead the company’s move from the physical DVD business to streaming over the internet in the mid-2000s. Sarandos scaled the company’s original content efforts.
While it shouldn’t be a shock to anybody that a man in Hastings’s position would move 25 years after founding Netflix as a DVD-by-mail company, his absence from the executive management team will be another historic moment for both the streaming service and in the age of streaming services in general. In addition to pioneering the streaming field, Netflix under Hastings became the poster child for successful internet start-up companies, completely disrupting traditional Hollywood en route to a market valuation of $140 billion, with corporate culture and style all its own.
More recently, though, the company has been surrounded by streaming rivals; the list includes Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, and Apple TV+. Its also shown a willingness to be a follower of its competitors, having in its recent pursuits of video games and in-service advertising if those strategies lead to profit. Only time will tell how Netflix will change over time without one-half of its founder.
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