Ted, I don't know if you know this, but Delhi doesn't know how to handle rain.
I have no idea.
So, but it's wonderful to have you, Ted, and it's really special for us. You know, somebody who's got such incredible impact on popular culture around the world. It's just wonderful to have you and welcome to India.
Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here. I love coming to India. I started coming when Netflix was getting ready to come to India for the first time. So for me it was Netflix that brought me to India. But every time I come it's the food, it's the people, it's the clothes, it's the geography, it's the rhythm of this amazing country that keeps bringing me back. So I love being here.
And so we're here because 10 years of Netflix in India this year. So congratulations for that.
10 years of Netflix India. That's a huge achievement. You've got a big film, a big series coming out also I think tomorrow. And so we'd love to kind of talk about Netflix in India, all the things that have to do. But I think maybe it'd be fun to just kind of start on the global side. Please, I'm just going to share some numbers, guys. So we're saying 10 years of Netflix in India, but let's first start 10 years of Netflix globally. 10 years ago, $6.3 billion of revenue, $120 million profit, $50 billion valuation. That was in 2015. Today, Netflix in 2025, $45 billion of revenue, $1 billion of profit, and a $400 billion valuation.
Yeah, it was good. Been a good decade.
It's been a tremendous decade. And, you know, the fact that this happened in entertainment is quite special. You know, you're different in so many ways, right? Like on the one hand you're different because I wonder, you know, you never really had a right to win, right? You guys started by — I was in college when I was ordering DVDs on Netflix. It would come in the snail mail, and then you kind of —
It was cutting edge technology back then though.
No, it came fast, it came quite fast when you — after you order it. I was in LA, was a film sort of, you know, everybody loved film. My roommate was a film student so we would keep, you know, a lot of stuff would keep coming. So you would send email — you would send DVDs on mail. You had no production. You had no distribution. You know, Amazon had distribution. Apple had distribution. Disney had production. You know, you really had no real right to win. So, but yet you had a conviction. Reed had a conviction. He got you to kind of buy into.
No. A very clear vision way before anybody else did around what the possibilities of the internet would be for entertainment. And so when I — I've told the story, but the short version is when we met in 1999, he said all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And at this time no entertainment came into the home on the internet. It was too slow, it was too expensive, there was no reason for it. And we were talking about the future being downloading movies because streaming didn't even exist at the time, right? But it was very clear that that's where this was going. And mailing DVDs and managing people's queues and all these things was all about managing customer relationships, managing credit cards, managing taste preference so that you can use the power of the internet to help people find things in a world of almost infinite choices.
Right? And that the unique thing that the internet would bring to entertainment is something that can — how do I find things? Like at the time you'd say the only thing worse than a list of a hundred movies was a list of 10,000 movies because you never know what to find. And so there's something very human about trying to find something great to watch, right? So I would think that from my earliest conversations with Reed, the problem we were solving was marketing, not distribution, not production. It was mostly how do you get something, you know, right in front of the right person so that you don't have to advertise to the entire country for a relatively small niche film to find the handful of people who are going to love it.
Interesting. So you thought your differentiation was the marketing piece.
Yeah. At the time when you think about it, you'd say like in the days of big theatrical distribution, you'd say, well, the cost of moving prints around was very low. Cost of production was high, but it was for everybody. But the cost of marketing — if you could actually make that system more efficient, you could change the P&L of a studio.
Very interesting. And when you, you know, when you started off, you had to, I assume, say provocative things like, you know, the theater business is not going to work for very long. And you've said that in India as well. Every time a film does well in theater, do you feel like you kind of get a target on your back on social media or from production houses or?
The funny thing is we're not in the theatrical movie business. So it's not — every single time that I've had anything to say about the theatrical movie business, it's most — it's an observation of stats, figures of behavior that is happening. But what I think has been great is that people on Netflix love movies. They love to go to the movies. They love to watch them at home. Our average member — this is a global number — but I say our average member watches seven movies a month on Netflix and sees one or two every year in the theater. So that's just the reality. I'm not saying one's better than the other. It's a beautiful rich ecosystem and I want our members when they want to go out at night to go to a movie because it strengthens the relationship with movies and so that's a real benefit.
So you don't use competition at all?
Not at all. No, no, more so than anything else for time for sure. But what we compete with is screen time. Reed kind of famously said for most — like I said, when you sit down, you pick up the remote, you push a button, we want it to be Netflix. And we do that by every time you do that, you have a great experience and you watch something you love and you want to come back for it. And we do it often enough that you expect it every time. So we become that first place you check for something great to watch and the last thing you'd ever cancel.
One of the interesting things that Netflix is different — when you say you're competing for screen time, you're competing with I guess YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and anything that's kind of not Netflix which you're looking at on a screen.
Yeah. And I'd say I'm not thinking that we compete with YouTube and TikTok and everybody on phones because what people are watching on phones tends to be much more short, vertical, and free, right? So we're not necessarily in those businesses. But when you get onto the screen that is, you know, in your living room, right? That's the screen time I'm talking about, right? But YouTube is on that screen too.
YouTube's on that screen too. Connected TVs are a big part of the Indian ecosystem today. And Netflix is also aggressive in India on mobile.
This is a very mobile forward market for sure. So but one of the things that again Netflix I feel is a little different from the platforms that we're talking about is that we associate — one problem of society today we associate with is polarization and we keep saying that algorithms are polarizing, you know, the bias, it kind of reinforcing a particular bias, whatever it is, it doesn't have to only be political, it can be anything. Netflix has somehow not been mentioned in that list of platforms that kind of is sort of polarizing. Is that?
No, we do a very different thing. When we're trying to find a movie you're going to love, I'm not trying to trick you into pushing play. In fact, I think that's quite bad for our business if we trick you into pushing play on something that you don't want to see or something that you're ultimately not going to like. So really what we're trying to do is match something with you that you may not have thought you were going to love and turns out that you did, which gives us this amazing opportunity to tell the world stories around the world because the biggest barrier to someone in Iowa watching a Bollywood movie is they've never seen one before, right? So if we can get them over the hump by saying with great confidence, you're going to love this movie, wait till you see this, you're going to love this series, wait till you see — I know you've never watched one before and then you watch it and then the self-reinforcing thing is I did love that and I want to see more and it opens the door. So we've had an Indian movie or series in the global top 10 every week since 2024. And this is the result of an algorithm that helps me find things that it's unintuitive that I'm going to love. So in that number we have three and a half billion hours of watching Indian content on Netflix around the world this year.
Fantastic. Is it — isn't it though skewed to Indians abroad? As one of the things we keep hearing is that it's actually the Indians who live abroad who are watching. Indian content really hasn't crossed over or done what Squid Game did for Korean or so many other things have done. But Indian content — has it really traversed? Dhamaka was the most watched non-English movie in the world. I'm saying it wrong. I've been saying it all week.
Sorry, I'm sorry, apologies. But that is the most watched non-English movie in the world on Netflix this year.
Okay.
So, bigger than every other language and second only to the US and the UK in terms of watching. Okay, super. I'm gonna go one just one step before we get into —
I think that really is kind of worth like really hanging in for a second because I think I hear a lot when I travel around the world, particularly in India, is like because of what happened with Squid Game or what happened with La Casa de Papel, when is India going to have that moment? And I'd say India has that moment all the time. And it's much more likely to be in cinema I think right now because there's this enormous beautiful rich long history of movies in India. And I think when we came in and made Sacred Games, it was a kind of a whole different kind of television. So it's where most of the history and all that — that's coming through is likely to come through in the form of cinema.
Okay. You know, we — I mean, yesterday we were at a small dinner —
I'm sure you had an excuse for that because they've done really well. I mean, they've just changed the whole game here. No, but yesterday we were at a small dinner and there were a lot of parliamentarians and they were — I think the one refrain that they kept giving to you was, you know, tell more Indian stories and get more of India's stories out there. And something very special about India is that we have always been a country of ideas. There was a Sanskritization of all of South Asia that happened from Kandahar to Singapore — Gandhara, Singapura — all of this happened only on ideas, never on any military conquest. So it's always this DNA that's kind of pushing for our stories. And you know, you pick up any newspaper — the best one is Indian Express, but you pick up any —
The first one you check. You pick up any newspaper, I always feel there are like three Netflix films or series in the paper today almost every day, which — you know, there's so much richness and so much hierarchy, there's so many changing dynamics, there's just so much color here, so many stories to explore. So have you scratched the surface in India? How happy are you in terms of how deep you've gone here?
Well, look, we're thrilled with our success in India. We've been at it for 10 years. Still growing every year, every month, every quarter. And I look at it, what we have to do is have the stories that you love. If it's a film, if it's a series, if it's unscripted, if it's scripted — everything that you're used to watching when you sit down with your family, turn on the TV, you be ready to watch. So what we have to do is continue to do that. And with a population this size, with a population that has an enormous appetite for entertainment — this is what I love. This is one of the great storytelling cultures in the world. So being able to — I'm constantly learning about India. So I've never — believe me, I speak with no authority here, especially with this incredible audience. But what I know is that it's dramatically underscreened. Meaning there are fewer movie theater screens per person than any country in the world and the country with the biggest appetite to see movies. So the beautiful thing is we're living in a time where we can solve that problem with screens like that and screens like this and all kinds of screens that we can tell those stories to audiences that want them and otherwise didn't have access to them. So I'm — and we know that this is a long journey. India is a long journey. And every time I think we crack the code, we keep challenging ourselves to do better and to do bigger. We're very proud that we brought India the first Academy Award for Elephant Whisperers. And it's very strange I think to do this in the same company — to also win the International Emmy, be nominated a couple of times actually — Vir Das, the great Indian comedian, for one, and for Delhi Crime. But also to win for best Hindi film at the National Awards as well, all under one roof. So that's a hard thing to do. But Monica and her team, the content team in Netflix here in India —
Is the reason that that can work —
Because when we decided we wanted to be in India — I think many American companies particularly have failed at this because they think they understand India because they made a movie that worked and turns out there's a lot more than one India. The multiple — so even to be successful locally you have to travel just across India, and if you could do that you could probably travel across the world. But we have to do it by coming back over and over and over again and doing that over and over again. And we don't do that from California. We do that from Mumbai. So for us I think it is that intense desire to be deeply ingrained with the entertainment community, the entertainment ecosystem, and the entertainment economy of India. But most importantly with the entertainment fans of India. And we have to do that with Indians. So that's what our office in India — these are people, a couple hundred people who love Indian movies and television more than anyone in the world.
And how do you actually do that? Like if you unpack that process from your perspective, because it's so complicated to just run a —
Production house only in India by Indians in itself. Now you're doing a global operation. You've got an Indian office in India. You've got offices like that in every other market that you're operating in. How much of it is a formula? Is there an algorithm? Is it some kind of a secret thing that goes behind greenlighting something? How much of it is just gut and instinct of the local team that you kind of empower them with?
I always refer to it as very informed intuition. So, there's no data in the world that could tell you to make this and don't make that. You will be wrong all the time. Because really the data only tells you what worked before and what do audiences always looking for something they never seen before. So when you...
Is that audiences are always looking for something they've never seen before?
I think they're always looking to be surprised, you know. So there's some things where you can spend some time because it's comfortable so you can spend some comfort watching. But for the most part what really moves the needle for a fan is something like oh my god I've never felt this way before. I've never laughed that hard. I've never cried so much. All those things generally don't come in some rhythm or some formula. And you definitely can't reverse engineer into it. It comes from a great idea, a visionary storyteller, the resources to bring that story to screen, a little bit of kismet because you've got to be able to, you know, it's all in execution at the end of the day like everything else. Execution, I remind, breathing is execution dependent. So yeah. So when you look at all those things that have to come together you can get a lot of false security by looking at the data. But I think where we always win is when we have creative executives who have such keen instincts and such courage that they say I know what the data says. I'm telling you that's wrong. This is going to work.
I'll give you, we mentioned Squid Game earlier. Nothing in the data would say to make Squid Game and certainly not for a global audience. It was developed as a movie for many years, 12 years. Kept trying to sell it, kept trying, it got turned down everywhere. The director, Hwang, knew we were making series now and he knew some people who worked at Netflix and they started talking about what about adapting this into a series and did it. Now people look at it in hindsight and go of course it was amazing. It was scary. It was, you know, I hung off every cliffhanger. But the truth of it is it was twice as expensive as any hour of Korean television ever produced. So, the team believed in it deeply that it was going to be big. No. Did they think it was going to be that big? Probably not. Did they think it was going to jump borders? Probably not. But that's that magic thing that happens on Netflix. We have about a billion people watching Netflix. And this thing with the algorithm that people like to say is bad, which here's where it's great. That weird thing where people started watching a Korean show that they've never seen before and then sticking with it and watching a second episode and a third episode and a fourth episode. It's constantly informing the presentation to each of our members around the world and it starts seeing, hey, there's people watching this who have never watched it. Then there's an entire country of people watching it that never watched this and started pushing it out and pushing it out and over about 3 days it was being presented to everyone in the world and people who pushed play just loved it and they kept getting reinforced. So I think that's this interesting thing is that what we have, yes we have access to data, yes we have data, if anybody made big creative decisions based only on data that would be a fool's errand.
Okay, that's interesting to learn. I would have assumed that everything is data driven for every decision that you make. But that's interesting to look at.
I think what the data can very much help us to determine is that if this show is executed as beautifully as the pitch was. If it's written as great as the idea. If it's acted as well as we hope. If it's shot as beautifully as it could be. All those things. If all those things happen, how big could it be? And then you have a lot of history to tell you that there's deep intense fandom for certain things but that never gets out of the niche stage. So and this is going to be something that's going to live in the niche stage. So we can help us inform the economics of how much to invest in that.
I see. That's important.
And what about the role of the star right? Like how much of that in India I assume it's disproportionate in terms of the success of anything entertainment. This is not something that I look, I study very closely but I assume it's, do you factor that in that the star in India is much more important?
Absolutely the star is very very important.
And not just, but it's the star and it's the star in the vehicle that you're talking about, you know, because a lot of times you can't just put the star in and they're doing a role that people don't necessarily want to see them in or some other way that it's, then you're just starting from scratch.
The surprise element is gone. If you want to see the star in a particular role that you expect to see.
No, it is. You just can't count on it. But often if they, again back to the if it's shot beautifully, if it's acted brilliantly, if it's written flawlessly, all those things, you can do whatever they can do whatever they want.
But does it give you a friendly an open door? It gives you a reason to check this out.
And some insurance for the production budget that there's a star. So we know that it's going to have a certain amount of...
It helps for sure. It helps for sure. You had a very famous offsite in India about five or six years ago. I think you and Reed you had a big strategy meeting where you got onto the Palace on Wheels and you guys spent three or four days in a train discussing India strategy.
Yeah, it was longer ago than that. It was early in our India days and we really wanted to expose our senior executives to India and we came to India. We got on the train in Delhi.
So but you haven't shared what came out of that strategy meeting. Is it long enough to tell us what came out of the strategy meeting and are you on track for that strategy meeting?
It was the same meeting that we do at that time. We just did it far away this time.
But it was basically we're just talking about I'm sure a lot of things that we were, some that we were right about, some that we were wrong about. But it's more, it was a, we wanted to orient the team that this is going to be, this is a global business and you need to know the world.
So one of the things that I don't know if it's unique...
By the way I think what I loved about that trip by the way it was for me it was a very fast kind of crash course into this is there...
Well there's not one India we would go to sleep in one part of India and wake up in another and it's like you've landed on another planet and you never left India and it's just so dramatically different from the place we just came from. Yeah.
And it's just to, and so I always think that trying to go to anywhere you go in the world, you never, no one ever gets to spend enough time to truly understand it unless they live there.
And which I think by the way that was one of the things that reinforced for all of our executives the importance of having great local presence when you're going to make creative decisions for a market. Understanding that local culture is unbelievably important. And I'm shocked at how many companies think they could do it from LA.
Yeah. So one of the things that you know I think it's a maybe a uniquely India kind of a thing is that you can kind of put all content here people classify it in a spectrum of massy and classy.
Um, I love that phrase. I'd never as a...
Is it, have you thought about that because when Netflix launched in India right you had Sacred Games that kind of was this big very intelligent, you know, exceptionally produced well told story that was early days of Netflix in India and today we're talking Lock Upp, we're talking Kapil Sharma, we're talking, we have to ask you about how you put Laughter Chefs on Netflix, you know, going on YouTube as well. So do you see the spectrum as two different like massy classy and is it a constant move to...
So you were one of the DVD users? Was anyone else here ever, no folks who were using the DVD service? So we never were able to do it outside of the US because the US post office was kind of unique. We were able to do things like help them with automation so that the disc didn't break in the mail and all those kind of things. At one point at the peak of that DVD business, you could go into the post office and there'd be a special box just for Netflix DVDs. It was that popular going in. But what was cool about what we got to learn about that was we had over 100,000 titles and everything ever published on DVD you could have access to with that subscription. And what we learned was that people's tastes are remarkably diverse. Every year you go back and run the reports, one of those titles, one of them shipped every time. Nothing didn't rent. People wanted to try different. Some people come to Netflix because I love documentaries. I can't get them in my town. I only like foreign film and I can't get foreign films in my town. In fact, one of the big challenges in early DVD days was the piracy of Indian movies on DVD, with Bollywood movies on DVD. We were trying, we thought we were buying them legitimately all the time and it turned out the source was, but so it was a hard work but well worth it to make sure that we were serving at that time what probably the diaspora was trying to find these movies.
So you're saying that accidentally Netflix was buying pirated DVDs and renting them out and when you had the mail list...
I'm no, you know it was people, every one of them turned out to be legitimate. Everyone had, multiple companies had exclusive rights to the same movie. So it was complicated. It was complicated but in truth what it did, what it taught us then was if you want to serve the world, you want to entertain the world which is our mantra, then you have to have something for everybody and I don't think people think about that like classy and massy. I think it's maybe we, maybe thought leaders think about it that way, maybe executives think about it that way but consumers they don't love their massy choice any less than you love your classy choice. So we've got to serve both and we have to be able to do both. Now when we came in you have to start somewhere. So in the US or globally we started with one, you know, arguably high-end scripted series with House of Cards. And think about from that day forward we moved into doing television shows. We moved into original movies, documentary, stand-up comedy, competition shows, unscripted shows. We do everything that you want to watch. And so I felt like it was never like we started here and we're moving here. It's we're doing all of those things. So we had to be classy and massy. And I think when you can get the whole country right now in India, you've got people who really love Lock Upp right now. It's enormously popular. Everyone's talking about it.
I'm not, I didn't, I'm not judging. I'm not judging. I think it's quite classy in fact. Okay. But then you've got like, you know, Mismatched which is a beautiful deliberate love story with beautifully shot landscapes much more what you probably would say classy right? But they sit right next to each other serving gigantic audiences okay and that's what we have to do we have to do both.
So this is one of the things that you know at one point India was four broadcasters right? TV broadcast you had Zee TV, Colors, Sony, Star, four big broadcasters.
And if you asked anybody who kind of liked watching TV a lot. Like you take a few seconds of anything on these channels, hide the logo and you could tell whether this was on Zee or on Star or on Colors or on Sony just because of what it was.
The type of programming or the way it was executed?
The type of programming, the whole thing, the production, all of it. And so there was a differentiation even such a large market for big broadcasters, they differentiated themselves on the content. That's not what you want to do as a streaming platform. No, like I said, I think the worst thing we could do is have that dynamic where you've got a lot of people trying to do the Netflix version of something.
Do the best version of that. And I feel like our real differentiator is no different today than it was 25 years ago. Mailing disc, our differentiation is personalization.
So, and to do that, you can't be narrow and...
You have to be broad and broad of content.
For sure. For sure. Sure. And I think what you see is compared to many of those brands you just talked about or other brands around the world, Netflix was always a general entertainment brand because we used to carry 100,000 titles. We were definitely a general entertainment brand. So it made it much easier for us when we were trying to, when we're doing this in streaming that we've always been that way with the consumers. Very hard for a company, you know, a documentary company to then broaden out and do other things if they're established as a premier documentary company. It's the blessing and the curse of a strong brand.
Right? And one of the things that you've decided, your interview yesterday, you pretty much said that you're not going to get into sports in India.
No, I said we have a global live strategy that includes sports. It doesn't include league sports like the whole season of anything. Yeah. Because what we've been fortunate enough to do is to build a pretty large business without a loss leader. And I think for most television seasons of sports is a loss leader. They bring audience, you can pivot off of that viewing into something else. But very difficult to make any money or profit on that league sports because it's very expensive and it's expensive for a reason. They deserve it. They built a brand that people really love. And where if that thing moves from this service to this service, the audience is going to go right with it. So, they get all the margins. Which is understandable but since we were able to build the business without a loss leader I think this would be a bad time to introduce one. So for me what...
You've got 11 billion dollars of profit.
Well what I'm looking to do though is...
Say what, how do I differentiate? And you talked about differentiation. If I don't really differentiate for the league, if I just buy their season and move it from one network to another, so again, I get no credit for that, I get no margin for that. But what we do is find within the season of a sport, is there something that we can do to eventize something that otherwise wouldn't be an event to bring a different audience to that sport that otherwise wouldn't watch at all?
So I think like in the case of the NFL, we do, we are a Christmas Day football games. We do a Christmas Day double header. We do a big Beyonce halftime show. We make it into a real TV event.
We do for Major League Baseball, we do the home run derby. We do opening day. Opening day baseball in the US has always been a big day in the park, but never particularly a big TV event. And we're gradually turning that into a TV event. Things that are uniquely Netflix and an event and something that we can bring value to for that league.
So, if we get into just buying out the whole league, the whole season from them, I don't think we do that special thing for them.
Yeah. But again, in India, you know, you aren't the largest by subscriber base. I don't think you are, at least in India. And if you just pay half a billion dollars you get IPL, the huge top of the funnel, and you've got, so you got exceptional user experience, you got exceptional personalization, you got exceptional breadth of content, you would have been able to retain a lot of those customers to stay on longer. Obviously, you know your business best. I'm just trying to understand, was there no temptation at all to kind of do that one magic bullet to kind of just catch up and or just get those subscriber numbers?
Look, I think like I said, we were able to do this without.
And I do think you, a lot of great companies including you, look at all the way through, I think a lot of great companies were born on those investments early on, right? And then eventually they get squeezed out.
And we didn't want that kind of dependence on any one thing.
So one movie, one show, one sport.
Okay. Okay. So what's next for Netflix? Ted, what's, I know you did, gaming was a big part of what next was.
Look, I think right now there's so much headroom in what we currently do. What's left, what's next is, you could have asked me that question a year ago. You would have asked me that question two years ago, we'd have been completely wrong on a bunch of things that happened over the next two years. But we're in a constant, constant drive to entertain the world. And that could be something like adding new content, new types of content on Netflix. That is certainly upping the game all the time for an audience that expects it. And you have to continue to do that. I think, you know, you'll see tonight we have a premiere for, and it is, I think when you see it, you'll see what's on screen is amazing. It's first, it's a beautiful historic story, very inspiring. The special effects are off the charts, right? And in terms of our commitment to production, you look at this and say, you know, I think you'll see it on screen, but this is, you know, $24 million of economic impact from the production of just that one show.
$24 million of economic impact. What does that mean?
This is the production of the show. This is the 800 vendors that we worked with in nine different cities during the course of the 115 days of production. This is 200 local cast and crew and 4,000 hires across this production in nine different cities. So that is one show.
Is that the most expensive thing you've done in India?
Well, we can't talk about that.
But I would just, you can't blame me for asking.
But I'd tell you what, what's next for Netflix is more, is holding our own feet to the fire to be more and more ambitious and surprise the audience all the time. And those stories come in all different shapes and sizes. This one again, we're particular. It's uniquely Indian. What's really cool about it is we filmed at 16,800 ft. I'm sure that's the highest altitude production we've ever been involved in.
So, but again, I just say it's the kind of thing that I want people to come to expect from us.
Super. Um, I just, a small aside, Gupta is one of the most read and toughest film critics in India. She's ours.
And she says a faith saga is good. I think she's seen the first episode. I don't know what.
So obviously so all that money spending.
You got Shra to.
So you said you want to keep surprising the audience and one of the things that I find surprising is the impact of things like Dubai Bling and Bollywood Bling and that kind of, you know, the passive entertainment kind of stuff. We hear that there is even this strategy that you are commissioning content where you want to write it in a way where people can watch it as a second screen, as in they can be doing something else while they are watching, that they can be doing work, emails, they can be doing scrolling on Instagram while watching, just seeing good images.
No, I know that people say that. It's definitely not the design. We want you to be as engaged and connected to the content as possible watching on Netflix. You know, this is, in some of the markets around the world, we have an advertising business and in there what they find is that the Netflix audience is far more engaged than the audience on broadcast or any other OTT service because the thing that they're watching is this thing that they came for or the thing that they discovered on Netflix, they're all in. And actually, I think of course you probably do want something to do when you're folding laundry and those things, but that's not what it's designed for. And there's no unique, I think it's quite the opposite. You try to do in programming like that is really hook the audience because you want them to come back and you want them to leave and go to the coffee shop and talk about what just happened and they can't wait to see the next episode. So I actually think those shows are much more deeply engaging than that.
And you have to tell us about the decision on Lalettan because that's the one thing that my social media got flooded with when I posted about this event that first time in the history of Netflix it's the same content that's gone on YouTube and Netflix. Are we going to see more of that?
Yeah, look, the only thing I think about for YouTube is it's a, sometimes you use, YouTube becomes a place to discover things no different than a film festival or film school or open casting call. So in this, the team was very excited about the show, had a, came with a very big built-in audience for it, a very, very popular host as you know. So it had all the elements that people I think wanted and we were able to bring it, so we're excited about it.
And just more on what's next for Netflix. Obviously the big news, you were trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, it didn't happen. The guys who said they're going to win it, that's still not gone through as well. Is that, are you going to keep looking for vertical integration like that, buying distribution, buying production, or?
Our growth model has been and continues to be for organic growth. We look at all those opportunities when they come across and believe me, everyone brings us all of them and you'd be crazy not to look and kick the tires and figure it out. But what we're looking for, we have a very strong organic growth model.
What we don't have, you were pointed out earlier that we had no right to win at this.
We don't have 100 years of IP like a major studio has.
Is that a handicap or is it a blessing?
I think it's a blessing because it's forced us to make some of the most original, you know, creative stories on the planet. And also things that you don't get trapped in IP like because we own this we have to make a movie on this world every year and sometimes they don't work and then you kill the genre for five years then you try again. Like when we just keep everyone focused on telling great original stories, that's been a big help for us. So I look at that, we looked at the Warner Brothers deal as at the right price, it was a very nice to have thing. It would have accelerated our business model a little bit. But at the right price and when it no longer became the right price, we were fine to walk from that. And it was a very unicorn-like offering, a media company that had none of the things, you know, that you didn't want. It was just the things that you were looking at. So it's, but it isn't, I wouldn't look at it as a sign of doing more.
Okay. But build versus buy, you're on the build side.
The build side. We've always been builders from the beginning.
Absolutely. AI, it's a big topic now. Controversial also, but how should media ecosystem think about AI? How are you thinking of AI?
How you think of dealing with the controversy around AI. That's the part.
Well, look, I would say what's really been fascinating on this trip particularly is the embrace of AI from Indian creators has been much more aggressive and fast than anywhere in the world. And I think it's because we believe that AI is a creator tool. And I think what Indian storytellers get excited about is the opportunity to bring very ambitious projects to screen when the resources aren't always there. So they're looking at this as a tool to do things on screen that you otherwise couldn't do.
Okay. So that movie would not get made without AI. That, you know what I mean? That's the opportunity.
So we have about 300 productions. Glory was one of those 300 that used AI tools to help the production along. We do things like previsualization. So it gives the director the opportunity to lay out and design a very complicated or sometimes a very dangerous shot to make sure you can film it faster, safer, and or, you know, less takes on the same thing which is really helpful. We use a lot for post-production and VFX. It's really been a game changer how fast those tools are developing. But I look at it as a great opportunity to tell bigger, better stories. But they have to be better. So if it's a cost-saver, it's fine, but it is not going to change anything. In fact, it may be harmful if it doesn't make a better product. So if it gives the director the opportunity to tell a better story than he could have otherwise, even better if it's a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, but at the end of the day, if it's not better, those things don't matter.
Okay. So advertising will be revenue growth. AI you're not considering as cost-saving yet. It's just one of the things you use as a tool.
I anticipate there'll be some cost savings likely it runs up getting reinvested into not just on the screen but on the screen for that project.
So one of the things I think when you make a TV show or a film as much as 20% of the entire budget is spent doing pickups and re-shoots. So you make the whole movie, you watch it and go, 'Oh my god, we didn't, there was not a scene that made it clear that, you know, who did it in the first act.' So when you know who did it in the third act, it doesn't make sense to anybody. So they called everybody back, they build new sets, they get the actors back. Sometimes these actors now have gained 40 pounds and shaved their head and it's very difficult for him to come back. So what this enabled, like right now, this, Inner Process is an AI tool that we purchased with Ben Affleck and we partnered with him to bring this tool to scale.
But it enables a filmmaker using just the data of the film that they made and the AI is kind of trained in film school, not necessarily trained on everything ever made, and is able to do that quick pickup shot in AI as almost like a visual effect. But it can't, you know, the audience can't be taken out by this thing that all of a sudden doesn't look right. It looks right and it works and it's really amazing. I think again that if you can know that with great confidence that you can get it in the allotted amount of time that you've set aside to shoot the movie and if you don't you have this as a fail-safe, that's a great savings.
Yeah. I'll just get into the rapid fire soon but just to kind of end the early part of the conversation, is there anything for the future in India, Netflix's role in India, anything else you want to share with us about what your plans are, you know, beyond just looking at us as a market, is there anything that you kind of want to share and, you know, anything you want to tell us about your meeting with Modi yesterday? How did that?
It was very nice actually. That's the first time I met him so it was really great.
Okay, the first time you met him.
Did he change any plans that you had?
No, he had, he actually had some very interesting ideas. He was very, very helpful. It was a very nice.
Are you going to execute any of the things that he asked you to execute?
They were very executable ideas. I can assure you. But I tell you what, one thing we're looking forward, our economic impact in India, you know, is to date up to a couple years ago is already over two billion dollars from our productions of Indian originals. We have 200 local originals in India so far. When I look at the rate of acceleration in the last five years over the 10 years, it's unbelievable the opportunity that's coming to us and to India. When I look at that and say what do we have to do to be ready for that, we have to invest in India in skilling programs to be able to make sure that the talented crews are here to make these projects that we're excited to be thinking about in the next year, 10 years to come. So we have a project, we did a project with the Indian Institute of Creative Technology to sponsor 100 scholarships for new students to come in to be able to learn the crafts they need to be able to move this initiative forward.
In Indian institutes, the scholarships are in Indian institutes.
And it's under an umbrella of a group of these kinds of things we've been doing for the last 10 years. You know, the Indian Storytelling Initiative, that is being able to make sure that the next generation of storytellers are ready to go to work to tell these great stories. So India has no shortage of great stories. And I think we're going to have to continue to invest in the workforce and continue to invest in the infrastructure to be able to bring those great stories to screen.
Super. You know, I wanted to bring on one issue that I learned in my research that you actually always wanted to be a journalist.
That was my, as a young man. Yes.
You wanted to be a journalist. You looked up to Walter Cronkite.
And has it ever in your mind, have you ever felt like that side, the idealistic journalist heart has ever come into conflict with the $400 billion CEO of a media company's, you know, business instinct?
I'm going to, I found as a young person I always thought that journalists were heroes. I grew up in, yeah.
These are journalists. You're at the Indian Express, so you're going to get a few people clapping on that.
And you don't feel so now?
No, no. I absolutely do. And I tell you, I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. There was an investigative reporter in Arizona. His name was Don Bolles. I was very young, 8, 10 years old maybe, and he was investigating a story about organized crime in Arizona. And he was blown up and killed in his car. And I remember at a very young age puzzling like that's all he had to do was not tell that story and that wouldn't have happened. And I just thought it was such a heroic thing and it inspired me to want to be that. Now I went, we grew up not of means, I should say we were poor. I couldn't afford, you know, my parents couldn't afford to send me to university so I went to community college for a couple years. I was the editor of my high school newspaper and then the editor of the college newspaper. I was a horrible student and it turned out I was not a very good writer. And I knew this because I was trying to put together a scholarship application so I was pulling out all my clippings together and I'm reading them all and I started realizing wow if I didn't write this I would not read this like this is not good enough, this is not good enough, I'm not going to be a professional journalist. And at that time I was working part-time in a video store to pay for school and that was the aha moment for me which was like what did I love more than, as much as journalism, movies and television. And in the early days of working in a video store, they were empty all day. So you got paid to sit there and watch movies from all over the world every day all day. And it just, I just fell in love with this idea of creating and there I was exposed to the filmmakers from all over the world. And on home video was, you know, the cost of one tape you can open the door to the world. And so for me it was like these things all did come together because my desire to be a journalist exposed me to out of town newspapers and in Phoenix at that time was a very small, it was a small town. Phoenix grew 4% a year for 40 years. So when we moved there it was a pretty small town and what you didn't have there was independent cinema. You didn't have foreign language films in the theater anywhere. There was one theater in all the entire city that was about an hour and a half bus ride for me to go see a documentary or foreign film and all of a sudden a video store opened up and it democratized this kind of storytelling. So there is a thread from journalism to video to entertaining the world that I experienced that brought me to this. And what I think is interesting about it, I think from the journalism part of it, what's in the DNA is the curiosity and knowing that the more, what I always found every time I sat down to interview somebody as a journalist, the very bad amateur journalist, I liked them a little more the more I knew about them, more I liked them a little bit, just a little, or I understood him more. I was like sometimes I'd walk into an interview with somebody who has guns blazing and at the end I go, 'Oh, now I get where he came from. I get why that happened.' So I thought that entertainment and journalism has the ability to make the world feel smaller and safer. Movies and television have the same opportunity to make the world feel a little smaller, a little safer by introducing us to each other.
