Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix

Description

The first comprehensive account of the biggest wake-up call in the history of the entertainment business: the pivot to streaming. Go inside a disparate group of media and tech companies -- Disney, Apple, AT&T/WarnerMedia, Comcast/NBCUniversal and well-funded startup Quibi - as they scramble to mount multi-billion-dollar challenges to Netflix. After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade's head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges. The battle for streaming supremacy may end up having more than one winner, but the cost and disruption to decades-old business models have also produced a lot of losers. Binge Times reveals the true costs of the vision quest as companies are turned inside-out and repeatedly redraw their org charts and strategic plans. Stretching from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Wall Street, it is a mesmerizing, character-rich tale of hubris and ambition, as the fate of a century-old industry hangs in the balance.

Dade Hayes has specialized in entertainment business coverage for the better part of two decades as a writer and editor at Deadline, Variety and Entertainment Weekly. At Deadline, he writes about a range of financial and corporate news along with streaming, film, television, technology and advertising. Hayes has written two previous books. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Canada's Globe & Mail. He has also appeared regularly on media outlets like American Public Media's Marketplace, the BBC and CNN. Dawn Chmielewski is a Los Angeles-based senior editor for Forbes, writing about the companies and people behind the biggest disruption in entertainment since cable TV: streaming video. She has spent more than 20 years covering the intersection of entertainment and technology. Her work has appeared in some of the nation's most prominent publications, including USA Today, U.S. News & World Report and the Los Angeles Times. As a senior editor at Recode, she won awards for coverage of the devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.