Price Point 033: How to run a global streamer
New employee welcome letter
Google has released its AI, Bard. I asked it what the best Substacks were for people interested in entertainment and technology and Price Point was at the top! Now that’s an AI I can get behind!
With the strike on and everyone off to Cannes, I thought I would zoom out and ask: what does the head of a streamer (or the head of content at a streamer) actually do and how can you do it well?
TO: New Head of Streamer
FROM: RP
DATE: May 12, 2023
Re: Your Task
Now that you have proposed the business plan, recruited the engineering team, and designed and built the service, it is time to start with the actual content!
Your job is to ensure that the service has great content and that it has enough content, or, the right content, to define its personality.
Your team must deliver ~50 seasons of television per year — Japanese originals, Indian originals, German originals, US tentpole series, other US series, cartoons — plus 12 or more theatrically distributed films (Netflix does ~50). Then you are also driving major licensing deals and output deals with content owners around the world.
Don’t start a start up, start a movement. Get employees excited. Get customers excited. And how else can you impose form on a global organization that is pumping out a TV season once a week except … through culture. We all have to enthusiastically share a point of view. About a brand. Otherwise, one gets randomness.
Every rock band should be a religion. Every streamer should be a vibe. It should own that vibe in the culture. When you join the team, you should be joining the movement.
So you will need a vision. Everyone will look to you for it.
At Amazon Studios, we had almost no regretted personnel turnover for years. It was a movement, and that, I suppose, is the essence of what I am proposing as a North Star for everyone.
Let me walk through the issues in running a global streamer. The creative part is near the end if you wan to skip to it. But everything starts with the math.
THE FUNDAMENTAL MATH
So. It’s day one. You’re the global head, or the global head of content, for a streamer. Congrats. What to do?
Fundamentally, you have to ensure that our understanding of what we are doing and why is correct and rigorous. If we don’t understand our key levers, we can’t make good decisions. This is mostly a question of audience insight and math. If you get this part wrong, you will certainly fail.
What metrics should we focus on to understand how we are doing and what we need to change? Usage by time cohort? Days per month per time cohort? Hours/mo.? Which of these correlate most strongly to retention? These have to be determined with rigorous regressions.
What are our high potential audience cohorts for customer acquisition? For retention? Why? What do they watch? How does this vary per country?
With what audience segments are we over and under indexing? Why and how should we respond?
Build an internal model sophisticated enough to contemplate marginal what if scenarios — what would happen if we moved $100MM from originals to licensing? What about from content to marketing? Or US to ex US? This requires sophisticated statistical analysis (which also has to be paired with a knowledge of what deals are actually available in the market).
Make sure you have systems that will track what shows are bringing people in the door, what seasons customers watch all of and what shows appear to be causing people to churn out. And that identify show traits that correlate to enthusiasm or churn, such as IMDb ratings.
Etc.
Intuitively, you will come to find that if customers use the service more than 3 times a month, or for more than 10 hours a month, they tend not to cancel, and that shows that get an 8 or above on IMDb tend to attract customers whereas shows that score below 7 tend to drive them away. You can use these conclusions to model how many shows you need.
Once you have a model and metrics and a sense of who is out there, and who might like you, — in LA, Dallas, Munich, Tokyo and Bangalore — you have to pair that with your and your team’s knowledge of content to figure out what content, what creators, what tone, will help you most, and differentiate you most, delight the market the most. Setting your fundamental framework, building a strategy out of it, and building the team are critical levers. Once you have done these things, you have largely determined whether you are going to wind up with Wednesday, Queen Cleopatra and Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (Netflix) or Transparent, Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon).
By now you should have answers to 4 questions:
What is our opportunity?
How will we measure our progress?
What kind of content should we make?
How can we be the best at making that kind of content?
TEAM
Almost all goals must be accomplished by the team, not by you directly. You will need a great team in several offices around the world.
When I started Amazon Video in 2004, the team was of course one person, me. Then it’s a small group. Then you occupy half a floor of a building. One day, you’re not in every hiring loop and you don’t know every name. There is something special about that moment when there are just a handful of you. But of course it never lasts and isn’t meant to.
Jeff Bezos once said that a career progresses through three questions:
How to do it?
What to do?
Whom to hire?
I think that’s right, though you never of course move on from “what to do?”
Amazon had and has a clear set of Leadership Principles by which all employment candidates were judged. They can be found here (though they were slightly different at the time). These were important. I recommend them to everyone. They may not be perfect for every company, but they worked well for Amazon.
With respect to recruiting the content development team in particular, 4 points.
On the creative side, what’s professionally helpful is not distinguishing bad material from good, but knowing the difference between good and great and being able to actually overcome the million hurdles to getting anything great made with a fully realized vision. This is not common. There are some people who have never been involved with a great movie or show. RED FLAG. If they’re so great, by this point they should have developed something great, and that should have happened consistently. Be honest about who is tier A and who is not. There are many nice and smart people who are not tier A development executives.
Don’t overweight popularity. You need people willing to be contrarians, which does not always maximize popularity.
Find the smartest people you can and have the smallest teams you can have.
Most people do not “get” every genre and that’s ok. Comedy and genre (scifi/fantasy) especially tend to have specialists.
Everyone who starts should be set up for success and should receive detailed guidance on expectations and people they ought to know in the org.
Annual reviews should reinforce Leadership Principles and stack rank the team into cohorts with 5% being Outstanding. Honesty, objectivity, and rigor are key here. Double down on the Outstanding team members.
Sadly, if you aren’t topgrading (letting go) a certain percent of the team each year (when I was at Amazon the target was 7%), you’re pretending that 100% of hires were good hires and you’re probably kidding yourself about that. It’s not a family. It’s a team. Like in the NFL. We are looking to win, which requires consistent high performance. If you know that someone is the weak link on the team and you let it slide, you are letting down the other members of the team.
ALLOCATING YOUR TIME
Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook. - Peter Lorre, Beat the Devil
In the beginning it is not at all like this, but in the fullness of time, if you have success, there are thousands of people who want to meet with or talk to the studio every day. They would all be happy to speak to you. You have to be selective and move most people on to the appropriate department.
When you’re in town, you’re in meetings for 7 hours a day plus you often have a lunch and a breakfast or dinner. It’s only 7 because you block off time to read and screen things. Early mornings are for Europe calls. Night time is for Asia.
Creative Outreach
Who is running your shows and directing your movies? Nothing matters more. Putting together a fabulous slate is like putting together an electric, global party — find the smartest, most entertaining people in the world and try to get them to RSVP.
Your interaction with the creative community should be proactive, not reactive. Make a list. Go after them. Try to build up a critical mass of the top people in whatever creative zone you have decided is important for your brand.
With very talented creators, you want to cultivate them and be in business with them over time. Not every single movie is going to be a hit. But if you’re there for Swiss Army Man, you get Everything Everywhere All At Once. Be there for Chiraq; stay for BlackKklansman.
Current Programming
You have a team. And shows have producers. Just dip in if there is a problem. At Amazon, if I personally met with a specific show about a current episode, that meant there was a serious problem. Generally, let the teams do their jobs and convey any feedback through them.
Pitches
Major people want to meet directly with you. Mostly you don’t go to pitches, but if Joe Cohen (head of TV at CAA) goes to a pitch, you also go. If a star goes, you go. It has to be symmetrical. If they go, you want to go. It’s competitive and you want to show enthusiasm.
Appearances
You are the public face of the service and its chief spokesperson. Oddly, I was the second most covered person at Amazon (not that it was close). It is in the interest of the service to be in touch with industry leaders around the world and to raise the profile of the service in the media and with both customers and industry leaders. Therefore, there are a lot of conferences, events and travel.
Some of this public diplomacy effort will depend on the stage of development of the streaming service. If you are already a mature and successful service, you don’t have to convince Hollywood that they should do business with you. Believe me, we did! Starting a service from scratch is totally different from inheriting one. Today, because Netflix and Amazon did it, people believe that new streamers can make good shows. But at the time, it took real convincing. You have to earn your way to even get a look at the biggest shows and big talent by making strong shows early and also through personal outreach. To understand how people felt about us in the beginning, you’d have to imagine if Ross Dress-for-Less or Saudi Aramco decided to start a TV network today.
At the large agency meetings, you’ll go into a conference room, explain your plan, have a Fiji water and meet people. They want to know what you want to buy, so you should communicate that. Whatever you say will immediately be reported to the press, so this has to be treated as a public press conference. If you had a meeting at Microsoft or Apple, absolutely nothing would leak to the press, but there you go. Welcome to showbiz.
You are in both the movie business and the TV business and you are in it as a studio — a producer — in the US, Europe and Asia. Of course, you distribute everywhere. This means that your calendar as a whole looks something like this —
Sundance (January)
The Globes + 5-6 associated events (January)
BAFTAs (February) [LONDON]
Corporate Annual Planning (March) [SEATTLE]
The Oscars + associated events (March)
WGA Awards (March)
MIP TV (April) [FRANCE]
Corporate Board Meeting (May) [SEATTLE]
Cannes Film Festival (May) [FRANCE]
Annecy International Animation Festival (June) [FRANCE]
Television Critics Association (July)
Edinburgh TV Festival (August) [SCOTLAND]
The Emmys + associated events (Sept)
Annual Corporate Planning (Sept) [SEATTLE]
MIP (October) [FRANCE]
Medientage Munchen (October) [GERMANY]
Annual Performance Reviews (October)
Gotham Awards (November) [NEW YORK]
I am leaving a lot out. In addition: premiere events for many individual shows and films, mostly in Los Angeles. A couple of foreign press events per year. Meetings with the various Europe and Asia teams a few times per year (hopefully coordinated other events in Europe and Asia).
So you must frequently travel, and you have events or dinners at least a few times a week. And at Amazon, let’s be clear, when you fly, you fly coach — even to India.
Set Visits
You will also want to visit and show support for shows in production when possible.
Part of what you’re doing with all of this physically going to awards shows and productions is simply being supportive. We care. If there is a problem, you can reach out. It’s a big investment of time but you should do it.
You know, technically, talent works for you. In reality, you work for them. Your job is to make it easy for them to do their job.
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
It would be nice to know how customers feel about an idea or even about casting. We created Amazon Preview and recruited top customers and IMDb contributors to this large but private group where we could bounce premises off of people, test premises against each other, test longer formats, and test casting ideas. (Turns out Samuel Jackson is very popular!)
Anyone could do this with an NFT-gated Discord with polls now. It’s helpful. In the beginning, we also produced full pilots. Ultimately we felt they were a competitive disadvantage and took too much time. Probably can’t do pilots today, but having a large group of “advisors” can be helpful.
WHOM TO SPEAK WITH
You cannot speak with everyone who might like to speak with you, even within your company. Moreover, it wouldn’t be appropriate. Your head of film has a mandate to develop film. Your head of TV comedy has a mandate to develop comedy. If agents know they can just go around those people to you to get things done, then they’re undermined and it’s chaotic. No one knows who is in charge. You can’t undermine them. Net net, if any major talent wants to speak, you speak with them. You wind up speaking with a select group of agents and managers, and the producers who are working for you. Internally, you talk with your reports in regular 1:1’s, talk with business affairs, legal and finance, and occasionally meet with whole teams or have skip level 1:1’s. But, to be clear, you should not be the contact point for very many people or you are a bottleneck. Give your reports ownership and let them get things done.
HOLLYWOOD ETIQUETTE
Hollywood etiquette is that any call you receive will be returned that day. You will always pass explicitly and with a reason that makes some sense. You will go to lunch with anyone you are really going to be in business with. These are good policies. They worked for Lew Wasserman. They worked for Brandon Tartikoff. They will work for you. These standards must be ingrained in the whole team.
In finance, if people don’t want to do a deal, they just ghost you. In Hollywood, that’s not the case because if someone got to you with a proposal, they will probably have 50 others down the line. If you ghost someone, you’re saying “I am betting against you and I don’t care to ever speak with you again.” You would very rarely do that in Hollywood because you want to maximize dealflow.
Be respectful and polite. When you meet with people, be familiar with their work. Respect their achievements.
How do you pass on a show? As discussed, if a show is not a hit and its view through % isn’t great and it isn’t in the awards discussion and maybe it isn’t very efficient either, then it is reasonable to believe that a new show would beat it. You personally should call the showrunner and perhaps some of the actors to deliver the news. They’re not going to love it but it’s the only way.
TEAM CULTURE
It’s important that the team has a culture, a mission, and esprit de corps. The mission must be clear. The style and standards must be clear. Everyone must be 100% on board. There are very nice people who are also competent who aren’t aligned with your vibe. They should find their ideal home elsewhere.
Aspiration and Motivation
I have heard, in discussions about team formation, that what people want is safety. This isn’t the post office. What they want is an ambitious goal and a shot at achieving it. As Antoine St. Exupery said, “if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Communicate the yearning for the vast and endless sea with a regular cadence of team emails, all hands and today I would just do a Monday morning Loom. What are we doing? How are we doing? What are our dreams?
Frank Feedback
Open, honest feedback is essential for high performance. The point of this is to help everyone continue to get better.
Speed
One aspect of team culture in a large org must be speed. One thing that you in your role can do is make decisions and make things happen. Particularly where a decision is not a high stakes one way door, decisions should be made quickly. If you can greenlight a movie over text rather than having a meeting, just do that. It’s fine. Skip the ceremony.
Shonda Rhimes recently said in an interview with Vulture, “ABC was a very powerful, storied institution. There’s a ton of bureaucracy. The process was you get answered ‘no’ initially and then you have to find your way.”
Be the opposite of that.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
“Amazon is willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” - Jeff Bezos
When I left Hollywood to go work at an online bookstore in Seattle to get them into video, people thought that was a ridiculous idea. At Amazon, when I proposed that we would need original content, most people (at Amazon) thought that was a bad idea. When we released TV series with a drop of three episodes at first and then weekly episodes, everyone knew that was stupid. When we decided to theatrically release all of our films because, in the eyes of customers and critics, that made them real movies and a bigger deal, everyone knew that was stupid, too. Most of these decisions now are regarded as good and correct, or even obvious.
You have to be the sort of person who will believe that something is correct even if no one else believes it. Easier said than done. But do it. Conventional wisdom is good at predicting the past, bad at predicting the future.
THE CONTENT ITSELF
This is the most important thing and is ultimately, rightfully, what you will be judged on! You know who you’re trying to reach. You know what sort of thing you want.
Turning this plan into shows and movies is the thing and, while you do the million other things, it is very important to return often to the original content and why we are unique and different. Let me emphasize that your job is to deliver the best content. Not “ok” or “good” content because no one cares about that and it makes no difference. Create multiple content explosions per year.
I have discussed development in detail previously.
But 4 issues:
To produce a slate that is better than average, you need a point of view and a sense of where culture is, isn’t, and will be. You cannot fake it.
There cannot be all powerful committees trying to meet in the middle and there cannot be a ton of rules. Compromised material feels compromised to the audience. The main reason people often produce mediocre shows is that they are untalented. But the other reason is that they have 15 rules and priorities. You can only have one priority: make a great show.
As discussed, you need top talent. Be proactive.
And finally, new talent: be open to it.
Where you and the team make the most difference is in ordering shows in their first season, greenlighting a movie, or making an overall deal. My policy on these with respect to department heads was that we had to agree. If we don’t agree, we aren’t going to do it. Generally this worked well.
“It’s possible for me to make a bad movie out of a good script, but I can’t make a good movie from a bad script.” - George Clooney
When a pilot script comes in, you read it with hope. Try to put that out of mind and read it objectively. You know in your heart (if you’re good at this) when something is great and on the other hand when it is just pretty good and you are hoping for some magic to happen on set to make it better. That magic rarely happens. Things rarely come back from production more emotional and better than the script. If the pilot script is good and you think the show has great potential and you’re hoping your way to a green light, the script for episode three will almost always be flat. If the pilot script isn’t sizzling, — if you didn’t laugh and cry — don’t bother.
Similarly, like baseball players, writers are as good as they are. Don’t greenlight something hoping that someone is going to have a “career year" and be better than they’ve been before. There is no cast so talented, there are no costumes so fabulous, that they can overcome scripts that are merely ok or good. I have tried it. Doesn’t work. Yes you have goals. You have an open slot next year. But it is better to produce nothing and miss your output goal than to produce something that is just ok. Really, it is. This is why we develop a lot of projects.
Everything militates for your approval. If the exec didn’t want to make the show, the script would not have come to you. You like the writer and they want to make the show. You like their agent, who wants the show to be made. Your enemy here is goodness. Goodness can lull you to sleep. There are good things about the script. It’s not not funny. That scene is good. That character is fun. There are some stakes. I love that actor. The easy thing is to say yes.
It’s literally your job to say no. Wait for great.
Re-orders are a group decision and finance weighs in heavily.
You will spend a lot of your time here ensuring that your team and the actual creative teams — the writers, directors, producers, etc. — are unblocked and have all the resources they need to be successful. Happily, I think most or all of our productions had great experiences and felt fully supported by the studio.
HAZARDS
“I never liked you. And I always will.” - Samuel Goldwyn
There are some hazards that do not exist in other industries or in other countries. But they exist here, now, for you. So they are worth getting into.
People who don’t like showbiz
If your company is not a media company — it’s Apple or Google or whatever it is — there will likely be some people who don’t like showbiz and are uncomfortable with the speculative nature of original content in particular. These people may attempt to create barriers to getting annual funding or may create inordinate hurdles for day to day funding of projects. It is your job to assuage the concerns of these people with data that illustrates that original content on the whole is a mandatory product element and that individual projects are being selected with a rationale that is as objective as possible. Pilots can be helpful here. Something like Amazon Preview can be helpful. Sometimes you are going with your judgement of the quality of the material and the talent of its creator, but you will help yourself if you can ground that in something objective, too. At minimum, create projections that identify “comp” projects and suggest that outcomes will be within a range of comparable projects.
People who don’t like you
We can’t ignore that the rules in Hollywood have changed in important ways — some of them great! But as I mentioned before, people in Hollywood are unlike people, say, in tech, in that, if you do not do what they want from a business point of view, such as re-order their show, or order their show to begin with, or if they just don’t like you for some reason, they will think about it for a frame or two, as a Santa Ana breeze ruffles their hair, and then they will try to hurt you personally. This can be part of a thought out plan to get someone else in your job or it can be less strategic, just getting revenge over slights – which makes Hollywood people sound petty and psychotic, but it often happens. These schemes can be incredibly elaborate, involving real estate transactions and planted articles in magazines, and can play out over years.
In the current context, you should be careful about being alone with anyone at any time. Any 1:1 conversation can be characterized in any way at a later date. Don’t casually create that opportunity. Have people around you, in meetings, at lunches, at parties, always. And do not joke around. Everything you say will be taken literally, as if you are a US Senator. If you have ever wondered why senior executives often seem robotic and boring, this is why.
Even having people around you may not be enough. If you are accused of making an off color remark or comedy flub that you did not actually say, you can (a) deny it, (b) have a witness saying you didn’t say that, (c) have your company investigate it and find for you, and (d) keep you on for years without event, but if a newspaper decides to spin it in a negative way, you will be generating too much static and you will be out. That is, in reality, the standard we have embraced. Which creates delicious opportunities for people.
Parties should probably evolve. In the meantime, you will have to be careful about how you spend your time and with whom. Are there people who might be happy to see you go in a couple years? There certainly will be.
Avoiding one-on-one situations is not new. Lew Wasserman always had someone (referred to as “The Ear”) who attended all of his meetings. Jay Kanter and Jerry Gershwin filled this role at different times. Wasserman also tended to leave parties early and quietly. This is all highly advisable in the current environment.
Within a couple years, with disclosure, I suspect we will all be using rewind.ai to record 100% of our conversations and this issue will go away. It will seem perfectly natural, like recording a Zoom or Twitter Spaces.
The Press
One thing to know about the press, and a view that is ingrained at Amazon, is that you’re never as smart as they say and you’re never as dumb as they say. The press like to write hero stories and villain stories and usually have to cheat a bit to write either one. I suspect the Amazon attitude came from this story.
There are some people I have come to like in the press so I will say upfront that there are exceptions to every rule. And a lot of the press are very smart and interesting, of course. That said, unfortunately, most would love to take your words out of context or catch you in some misstatement or gaffe. Stay on message. If possible, do all interviews as recorded Twitter Spaces.
Most senior execs in Hollywood have off the record relationships with members of the press. I have that now but didn’t then. You’d get fired if you did that at Amazon in 2017, at least if you ever said anything interesting. Execs were trained, when speaking to the press, essentially just to repeat the material in the press release. I think in retrospect that this policy, for senior leaders, at least in entertainment, was a mistake and I would not advise it. It is not what journalists expect. It annoys them very much. Competitors don’t do it. You get much worse coverage.
If there is one thing we have learned in recent years, it is that the press tells the story they want to tell, which is often false or heavily spun. In the fullness of time, the truth becomes more apparent, but by then it doesn’t matter.
The press you will get will be dependent on whether the press favors you and your company. The press really disliked Amazon in the late teens. I don’t want to keep repeating this but at Studios we won 6 Best Series Globes and Emmys and 6 Emmys for Best Series in animation, the first Best Series for a streamer, the first Oscar for a streamer, and successes such as The Boys, Maisel, Fleabag, etc. But we got raked over the coals in the @wsj when we didn’t win an Emmy in 2017 (we won Best Comedy Series in 2018 and again in 2019). Was there a retraction later? Nope.
Meanwhile, if you are favored, you can go a half decade without a single award and having zero strong shows and no paper will have a single issue with that. That’s Jedi level PR.
I’m not sure what to advise on PR strategy. In 2016, Jim Rutenberg said in the NYT that journalists “have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.” Maybe we should throw the textbook back in?
ZOOM OUT
What is your mindset?
I mentioned that one reason people make boring shows is that they are tracking 15 rules and priorities. But there is one more thing. If you are tired and distracted from 20 years of battling over the 405 and fighting for your job and the divorce and the press and trying to lose the weight and the kids not getting into Harvard Westlake and everything else and you just aren’t that into it anymore, I mean at a fundamental level you are not excited and you care more about who wins the presidency than what movie is number one at the box office next weekend, then … it’s time to go.
Look at all the nostalgic and political and boring big budget movies that bombed last year in Hollywood. This fatigue malady, I think, is not rare.
A famous and successful director once said to me, “you don’t have to be bitter and alienated or unhappy to be an artist.” And you know what? True. Good advice. But you can’t be boring and unfun, either. You personally are leading a huge art project. You have to be into it. You have to be excited to read the next script and excited about the next thing, looking forward to the serendipity, discovery, tragedy, hilarity, and the exquisite details of the next amazing idea. Every day has to feel like Day One. And that means you have to be open to life. You have become Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, here to put an end to the creative Kali Yuga of our time. And if you’re not, what’s the point? We should find someone who is.
Oh, and finally – with so much travel, it helps to just wear t-shirts and jeans. They fit easily into a backpack!
Good luck!
RP
Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.
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