Bela Bajaria has moved on from Netflix’s failed attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
As the ink dried on the Paramount-WBD deal, and the newly-formed Skydance formulated its approach, the content chief backed his boss Ted Sarandos, saying that WBD “is always good at a certain price, it doesn’t have to be at any price.”
“We were never going to [spend over the odds],” he told an audience at MIPCOM. “We are fiscally disciplined. We knew what we had and what the opportunity was.”
She was, of course, referring to Netflix’s failed $83B bid to buy the historic studio that spawned Skydance, which it sold to David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance for a much higher $110B.
Bajaria said Netflix is now focused on the goal of “keeping 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 still plenty of room to grow, he said, adding that Netflix takes up about 5% of global viewers’ TV time, leaving a bigger slice of the pie.
Bajaria was speaking in Cannes about Netflix’s global strategy, which goes beyond big hits la casa de papel And Squid game. “There are a lot of titles that go around the world,” he said, pointing to the Canadian original. Below Currently number one in over 80 countries including France.
Bajaria did not address reported layoffs at the streamer, but said Netflix would continue to “expand,” which it has always done despite opposition from competition.
“When others pulled back at different times, we continued to invest and grow our investments and expand what we do,” he said. “That’s the most important thing to me.”
She was also strong in responding to the notion that there is too much content out there.
“We can see on Netflix that our members watch a lot and their moods and tastes are very different,” he said. “We don’t make programs for a narrow demographic. We see that audiences want diversity.”
Bajaria was speaking at MIPCOM on the same day as the likes of Jeff Zucker, Marco Bassetti, Pedro Pina, and Kate Phillips.