Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…But there’s regulations in every country. You need to tailor to the home market, it’s not so easy. Television markets are often quite local. American programs don’t export easily. That’s what they did when they started. When they started in a lot of countries, they didn’t even have an app in the language of the country they launched in. You downloaded the English app. They localized the vast majority of them by now, but when they did that very dramatic “We’ve gone from 10 countries to 160,” or whatever it was, a lot of it was literally just flipping a switch, and “You can now download our app and sign up.” There was no real localization effort, and it was almost a flexing of “This is what we can do, and this is why we are competing asymmetrically with the traditional networks, which are focused on a single market. And they’re focused on monetizing up front, whereas we’re thinking about the entire world and monetizing over many years.” It’s also more a demonstration of how their business model was different and why they could invest at the rates they do, as opposed to necessarily being a viable product that would get a lot of subscribers in all those countries. I think that’s actually been more the last couple years, they’ve actually fleshed it out to being more accessible. Several years ago, you wrote about TV advertising’s surprising strength. What’s your update on this topic?…

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