Bela Bajaria has moved on from Netflix‘s failed attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
As the ink dries on the Paramount-WBD deal, and the newly-minted Skydance plots its vision, the content chief backed up her boss Ted Sarandos in saying that WBD was “always a nice to have at a certain price, not a must have at any price.”
“We were never going to [spend over the odds],” she told an audience at MIPCOM. “We are financially disciplined. We knew what we had and what the opportunity was.”
She was of course referring to Netflix’s eventually failed $83B bid to buy the storied studio, which ended up selling to David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance for a far superior $110B, creating Skydance.
Bajaria said Netflix is now focused instead on the goal of “keeping doing what we’re doing with the same investment, keeping our eye on the ball, making great things that people love around the world.”
And there’s plenty of room still to grow, she added, pointing out that Netflix occupies around 5% of global audiences’ TV time, leaving a huge slice of the pie.
Bajaria was in Cannes talking up Netflix’s global strategy, which goes well beyond huge hits like La Casa de Papel and Squid Game. “There are so many of these titles that go all around the world,” she added, pointing out that Canadian original Below is currently number one in more than 80 countries including France.
Bajaria didn’t address the reported layoffs taking place at the streamer but said Netflix will continue to “expand,” something it has always done despite opposing moves from the competition.
“When others have scaled back at different times we have continued to be consistent and grow our investment and expand what we do,” she added. “For me that is the most important thing.”
She was also robust in responding to the notion that there is too much content out there.
“We can see on Netflix our members watch a lot and they have lots of different moods and tastes,” she added. “We don’t programme for a narrow demographic. We can see that audiences want variety.”
Bajaria was speaking at MIPCOM on the same day as the likes of Jeff Zucker, Marco Bassetti, Pedro Pina and Kate Phillips.