DEATH BY EGO
How Hubris & Greed Killed Big Media
Happy Monday Peaceniks. Let’s look back in anger.
In 2010, a bunch of executives from AMC Networks, including myself, trekked to Philadelphia to meet with the programming team at Comcast. We came bearing a warning and a proposal: Netflix was offering big money for the rights to stream Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Portlandia, and a slate of content from our company, so we offered Comcast the opportunity to match (not beat but simply match) that offer. You see, if we made the deal with Netflix, they would control the “stacking rights” to these shows (the right to offer all seasons of a show to users at any time), precluding Comcast and other Pay TV platforms from getting these rights for their subscribers.
This meeting was with the most senior people at Comcast. Even Brian Roberts stopped by for part of the conversation. In the end, Comcast’s response to our warning and proposal was, ostensibly, “You are out of your fucking minds. Cable TV will be the dominant TV platform for the foreseeable future, and this streaming platform will not amount to anything more than a glitchy version of DVDs.” This conversation was repeated between cable programmers and network executives all over the industry that year.
In the summer of 2011, Breaking Bad premiered on Netflix, and television changed forever.
In the fall of 2011, I went to the senior team at AMC Networks with another warning and a new proposal: Netflix was charting the future of TV viewing and if we kept selling them our best stuff, they would eventually crush us - luring audiences into cutting the cord in larger numbers every year.
I proposed a plan to transform IFC and Sundance TV (which I was running at the time), from cable television channels into streaming only services, reinvesting profits into a new infrastructure. While my bosses at the time did hear me out, in the end, their response was approximately “you are out of your fucking mind.”
In 2012, in a new job, I wrote a piece in The Huffington Post warning the industry that despite their blasé attitude toward cord-cutting, it was very much real, and that younger generations would abandon Pay TV in droves for streaming. The C-Suites and power-brokers across the industry, once again, scoffed.
“CORD CUTTING IS NOT HAPPENING!”
In 2015, I was working at Comcast, inside NBC, creating a new streaming service for them. I convinced my new bosses that we needed to take The Office (the most popular streaming show in the world at the time) off Netflix for our new service. Instead, Comcast took a $100 million payout/bribe from Netflix to leave the show on Netflix.
I warned my bosses, including Brian Roberts, that this would come back to bite them in their asses, bigly. Shortly later, they fired my ass. Yet, four years later, Comcast wound up paying $500 million to get The Office off Netflix for their very-late-to-the-game new streaming service, the still-to-this-day underperforming Peacock.
This past week, I was asked, “do you rail so publicly against the Big Media Bosses because you believe they are, as you say, greedy and misguided, or is it simply good for your personal brand to be the one taking on the powers that be?”
My answer was “why can’t it be both?”
Then, this well-traveled Media exec, who now works on the new media side of the Media Universe, discussed with me all the wrong-headed and disastrous decisions we had seen the big bosses of Big Media make over the last twenty years. Later in the week, I shared a similar conversation with a prominent Media guru in the UK, in which we compared notes on why such well-paid and well-educated men (almost always men) continue to make incredibly wrong-headed decisions for their massive, multi-billion dollar companies, often at the expense of the long-term prospects of those very businesses and almost always at the expense of the rest of the people who work there.
The answer: Greed and Ego.
Look, I understand that I sit well-removed from the pressurized environment of publicly traded Media conglomerates, casting stones in retrospect at choices made by those on the inside. I readily admit that it is far easier to see the pitfalls from the bleachers, after the car crashes.
But I have been in these rooms when many of these terrible decisions get made, trying to offer alternatives, then watching as the bad choices get chosen, for all the wrong reasons. I have also spent a great deal of time and energy the last half decade, looking at the data surrounding these businesses and their bosses, sounding alarms to them about what I see.
When you look back at the history of Media these last 50 years, you see a more specific answer about why these men (almost all men) seem to get so much wrong, so often, about the enormous businesses they run.
