(His co-founder, Mark Randolph, has said that the story, like most marketing spin, is only “emotionally true.”) But in 2007 the company introduced the nascent technology of streaming for certain titles in the Netflix library-initially about a thousand and, soon, many more-users on their home computers had the novel option to “watch now.” In 2010, the platform offered a digital-only subscription and Hastings told investors, “Three years ago, we were a DVD-by-mail company that offered some streaming. Users would subscribe to the service online and receive DVDs through the mail, a concept that Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings liked to say he came up with after borrowing “Apollo 13” from a Blockbuster store and incurring a forty-dollar late fee. When Netflix was founded, in 1997, its ambition, almost quaint in retrospect, was to overhaul the movie-rental business. But it’s about recognizing that people like having more.” “Oh, in France?” Bajaria said approvingly.Īt the end of the meeting, she left the team with a blunt exhortation to continue scaling up: “It’s not a science. “France is also making a telenovela, and we’re supporting that.” “Yes, Egypt is working on ‘Who Killed Sara?,’ and they are doing ‘Dark Desire’ in South Africa,” Ramos said. Bajaria asked the Latin American staffers whether they were “working with the Middle East” to remake some of their more popular shows. But the decentralized system offers opportunities for what Bajaria calls “cross-cultural learnings.” Under her leadership, Netflix acts like a universal power converter, plugging in and adapting successful show formats to different parts of the world. According to the company, there is no master list of all the “local-language originals” in progress at any given time. Another executive described “La Flor Más Bella,” a comedy that would feature a spirited morena girl navigating a high school full of “Whitexicans.”īajaria’s job isn’t to decide which shows get made. Ramos boasted that a true-crime series about a Mexican kidnapping scandal had generated so much interest that “even the President talked about it for four days in a row,” and that in Colombia, where Netflix was filming a big-budget miniseries adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” they were working to secure permission to transplant a rare chestnut tree onto the set. of Latin American content, pointed to a screen at the front of the room and said, “We are taking the next step, because our competitors are going to be where we were five years ago.” In the following hour, the executives ran through some two dozen projects. “Is there anything you still think we need to do in terms of making a bigger bet, or a fresh swing?” she asked.įrancisco Ramos, the natty V.P. Although she is ceaselessly on the road for work, she says that she never experiences jet lag, a claim corroborated by her invariably peppy demeanor. Valley Girl,” contributes to the impression that she’s younger than her fifty-two years. Her voice, which she joked is classic “L.A. A onetime winner of the Miss India Universe beauty pageant, Bajaria has glossy black hair that she often pulls into a high ponytail. “It’s been a lot of learning for other countries to do the type of very commercial things that this team did early on,” she said. “Next time, I’ll get to stay for a week, so I won’t have to eat twenty-four tacos in twenty-four hours, like last time,” she said to the room of assembled staff members.īajaria told me that the ideal Netflix show is what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a “gourmet cheeseburger,” offering something “premium and commercial at the same time.” She praised the Latin American group for its recent track record of making slick telenovelas that draw large audiences outside Spanish-speaking regions. On an afternoon not long ago, she was kicking off one such meeting at the company’s Latin American headquarters, inside one of the tallest skyscrapers in Mexico City. She wears her favorite “travel blazer,” a designer jacket bejewelled on the breast pocket with the words “Art is truth.” And, though she often stays “in country” for only a day or two at a time, she likes to schedule a “slate meeting” so that the local development team can fill her in on upcoming programs. She checks in and furiously answers e-mails from Los Angeles until it’s time for a breakfast or a dinner or a midday meal with executives and creators. A black car brings her from the airport to a luxury hotel, perhaps the Four Seasons. Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s global head of television, follows a similar routine whether she’s visiting Mumbai or Berlin or Seoul or Stockholm or any of the company’s twenty-six foreign outposts.
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