I definitely see Netflix as a Media Company, much like Disney. Disney and Pixar have great tech too, but they are not tech company in any shape or form.
How Netflix got lumped into "FAANG" aka Big Tech is still a mystery to me.
How Netflix got lumped into "FAANG" aka Big Tech is still a mystery to me.
In some sense, I agree - Netflix, Disney, and Pixar are media companies that use technology to distribute, to recommend, and to produce their content.
But in the same sense, Google is an advertising company that uses technology to sell and to show their ads (and they have a few loss-leading tech ventures like search, mail, a phone OS, and a browser - all of which they give away to more effectively show those ads). Facebook is another advertising company, they happen to show and profile their ads using their social network tech. Amazon is a retail sales, warehousing, and product distribution company that happens to use a lot of technology. They also have a "tech company" division that sells web services, but that's only 13% of their revenue.
Similarly, Walmart is a retail sales and warehousing company (as well as product distribution now, but most recognizable by their brick-and-mortar stores) that uses technology in every aspect of buying product, shipping it to stores, deciding where and how much of it to stock, how to price it, and when to restock it, just like Amazon. There was a time when Sam Walton walked around, squinted at the shelves, and made notes about what and how much to order on a clipboard, but that's long past - it's all tech now. Automotive manufacturers are other very big tech companies, they build and sell automobiles but every step of that design, fabricate, market, and sell process uses technology.
Apple, at least, sells technology hardware. Microsoft also sells technology hardware and software, but they did so before FAANG were big so they're not in the list either.
The list is arbitrary. Software and technology is eating - has eaten - the world, and management of it is critical to every business.
A critical question is, how and how much do they pay their developers (and other tech folks)? I believe Netflix compensates their tech workers more richly than the average media company. I am certain of it if you take an average over the past 10 years.
The other argument is, when we say tech, we really mean qualitative innovation. Did Netflix disrupt an existing 800 pound gorilla using technology? The answer is yes, they killed Blockbuster by embracing tech.
Before their original content I seriously considered shorting their stock. Their business model without original content was structurally flawed. They effectively had a maximum profit they could earn. Literally anything they did to increase their profit would be taken by the content producers they were forced to buy the licenses from.
Creating original content was a necessary step to survive just like pivoting from their original DVD mailing business to streaming. They're still a technology company though.
Jim Cramer announced this on Friday.
RxJava was opensourced by Netflix, the defacto standard for reactive programming in Java. They also open sourced a lot of their work for working with avif files, which has managed to find its way into Chrome, among other projects.
Among other things.
Otherwise it would be a slur.