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So have you ever seen one of those old school kung fu movies? Maybe you were into those or maybe you caught a scene while you were channel surfing. But either way, you probably remember that they weren't filmed in English, which meant that you saw them with really bad dubbing. You bums obviously don't know me. Oh, I know you. You're one of Lou's men, the one they say can kick like a mule.
Bad dubbing used to be a staple of a certain kind of foreign film. You know, the ones where the characters finish their sentences and their mouths keep moving. But now I'm watching stuff that's dubbed and it's good. And I'm watching it on Netflix, which takes dubbing really, really seriously. It's a big part of their plan for the future. So right now I'm going to call my colleague and co-host Ronnie Mola, who's going to help us understand why that is.
Ronnie, hello. Hey, how are you doing? It's awesome to see you. It's weird to see you not in a podcast studio, though. This is my new podcast studio. It is my home. So, Ronnie, before you had a baby and before a pandemic stopped everything, on one of our reporting trips, we went to L.A. and you got to sit in on a Netflix dubbing session. Yeah.
I took like a little side trip and went to Culver City. I went to see a dubbing session of La Corazonada, which is this crime thriller that was originally in Spanish language. And does this look like you and me recording a podcast or do they have special cool tech involved? Yeah, there's all sorts of screens and gadgets and video players. Okay. You need another one? You good? Yeah.
So there's two rooms. The producers and the director and me, we're all sitting in one room. And across the way, facing us with a glass partition, are the actresses. They come in one by one, sit down in front of a microphone, and look at a video screen. On the screen was the original scene playing. They'd watch that a couple of times, and then they'd read over it in English. So it's supposed to feel true to, you know, the emotions that are captured in the original. So one of the producers told me the point is to get this as natural as possible. It's
It's also supposed to look as though that those words are coming out of that person's mouth. So we want it to look and sound like the original. Like you're not feeling like there's anything different between the original creator's intent and what we produce at this facility. And give me a sense of sort of how much work goes into a dubbing session. So the scene I was watching them do is really over the top, like detective-y thing. And she's trying to match the emotion of the original. Why did you kill him?
I still can't believe you could kill Patricio like that. You have a lot of input from the director being like, you know, say that a little higher, be a little more emotional. The beginning was great when she pulls the gun. I feel like you're holding back a little bit. Let's try another one. I believed you, but you are a murderer and a traitor. And so what's the point of it, right? I get that they dubbing. I get why you want to dub a thing. Why are they dubbing everything?
everything. Netflix sort of sees their content as international and universal. And so by dubbing it, that allows more subscribers to be able to watch and enjoy that content. And what about subtitles? Couldn't you just do all this with subtitles and you wouldn't have to pay an actor to do it? So you can do this all with subtitles.
A lot of different cultures and people just like don't like subtitles. It doesn't feel as immersive. You can't multitask while you're doing it. Netflix says a lot of its most popular titles, people prefer the dubbed version to the subtitled version. Do we know if this is working? Yeah, it's absolutely working. At this rate, the consumption of dubbed content is going to be equal to non-dubbed content in two years. So Netflix is saying in two years, half of what gets streamed on Netflix will be dubbed?
Yeah. So remember Money Heist, the one that was recommended to both you and I, but they showed me different images? They were really pushing Money Heist, right? Right. So this is a show that was originally from Spain. It was done in Spanish, but the dubbed version of it has been one of the most popular titles on Netflix. ♪
So Netflix is now making content in more than 30 countries and it's dubbing into more than 30 languages. They are still recommending that I watch Money Heist. I have not given in yet. Maybe it's time for you and maybe baby Rio to watch it. Yeah, that's what I'm going to show my baby, Money Heist. Ronnie, thank you. I don't want to go, but I got to go. We got to finish this episode. It is our last episode of Land of the Giants. All right. I'll talk to you later, Peter. Bye. Welcome to Land of the Giants. I'm Peter Kafka.
Netflix likes to show off the work it does on dubbing, which really is pretty cool. But it isn't investing in it for PR reasons. Dubbing makes Netflix content work in hundreds of countries because Netflix wants to be something we've never seen before, a global TV network. You know those streaming wars you keep hearing about? They're for real. But Netflix is fighting a different battle than everyone else. While the HBOs and Peacocks are duking it out in the U.S., Netflix wants to take over the world.
Netflix started streaming in the U.S. at first, and now so are all of its competitors for a very understandable reason:
Americans love watching video. The enormity of video appetites globally, but especially in the United States, is huge. Matthew Ball is a media investor and former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. The average American is watching 150 hours per month of television. That's more than five hours per day. And many people watch more than seven or eight hours per day. Just as important, not only do Americans watch a lot of stuff, we're often willing to pay for some of it.
And crucially, Netflix has shown the rest of the media business how and why to do this. So the streaming war, in one sense, Netflix already won. Lucas Shaw covers Netflix and the media business for Bloomberg. Their vision for the future was right. People watched less and less TV through a traditional cable or satellite package and watched more and more online.
And one by one, the largest technology and media companies in the world copied the Netflix model. Apple, Amazon, Disney, Comcast, AT&T, all trying to be Netflix. Let's quickly run through some of the huge players who are in two camps.
First, there's big tech. Apple and Amazon are world beaters, and that should scare the crap out of everyone else. Except for them, while video services could be really interesting businesses, they're also fundamentally sidekicks. Apple is still mostly in the iPhone business. Amazon is in the sell you anything and get it quickly to your house business. So video is just a little something extra, which is why both companies are kind of sort of giving away their programming.
But these companies are so huge, they can still spend a ton of money on new stuff, which means at a minimum, they're raising the price that Netflix has to pay when it competes for projects. Amazon is spending hundreds of millions on a new version of Lord of the Rings. And last year, Apple reportedly paid Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon two million bucks per episode each to star in The Morning Show. Because guess what?
America loves me. So that's big tech. And then there's big media. These are the companies that really have to make this work because it's the future of their business. The main question is how fast that future is going to come. Or another way of putting it, how long do they think their existing cable TV business, which makes most of the money right now, will survive? Comcast, for instance, is being cautious. So Peacock, its streaming service, mostly brings you old Universal movies and NBC TV shows.
AT&T, meanwhile, paid a ton of money for HBO, and now it's trying to supersize it with HBO Max. Then there's Disney, which has made the biggest bet with Disney+.
Beyonce just dropped Black is King, her new visual album, exclusively on Disney+. And Disney Plus also has The Mandalorian and Hamilton and all the movies from Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar. It's fun to speculate about which companies are going to win and which ones are going to fizzle out. But for now, they're all serious and they're all most definitely competing with Netflix for talent and shows and movies and most of all for eyeballs. In the U.S., that is.
Most of Netflix's competitors also have some kind of international plan, or at least a plan to move into the rest of the world eventually. But for Netflix, international is the plan. It first started venturing out of the U.S. in a serious way in 2011 when it moved into Latin America. But at the beginning of 2016, CEO Reed Hastings said Netflix was going everywhere. Today, I am delighted to announce we switched Netflix on forever.
in Azerbaijan, in Vietnam, in India, in Nigeria, and in 130 new countries. By the way, Hastings is a guy who joined the Peace Corps after college, but here he's kind of giving me cut-rate Bond villain vibes. Today, right now, you are witnessing the birth of a global TV network.
Now Netflix is in nearly 200 countries, and it assumes that a lot of people in those countries want to watch the same shows and movies that people in the U.S. watch. But Netflix also believes that people around the world are interested in shows from around the world, even if they don't know they're interested in them. It thinks that if it can put the right show in front of the right audience with the help of dubbing and subtitles, something popular in Spain might also do well in the U.S. or France or India.
Before she became vice president of indie and documentary films, Lisa Nishimura helped Netflix with its international push. It was this incredible sort of wonderful experience of testing and saying, OK, if you lower the barriers of entry, meaning if you lower the friction to put a Bollywood film in front of an American audience or an anime or stand-up comedy in front of somebody who might not go out to clubs, will they watch it?
And it was a resounding yes. Dear white people creator Justin Simeon was surprised to find audiences who liked his show in places like Brazil. We tended to do well internationally in places where there was a discussion about race, but there was no cultural debate.
Eastsiders, a comedy series about a gay couple in L.A., found a fan base around the world. This is Kit Williamson, the show's creator. It was just this huge...
deluge of comments and messages. And it lasted for about a month where every five to 10 minutes we would get a message from somebody in a different language. It was in Arabic, in Turkish, in Chinese, all kinds of different messages from people in places where honestly it's inhospitable or even illegal to be LGBT. Netflix is also spending a lot of time and money trying to make shows for individual markets, particularly in places where it sees a lot of potential for growth.
And Reed Hastings has high hopes for India. He thinks it could generate 100 million subscribers there alone. Here he is being interviewed in India. So what else is unique about the Indian market from a Netflix perspective? Wow, to have a billion people who love television. That, of course. That, of course.
We're still just a very young player. We've only been two years here. But we're going to be doing more and more new shows and new movies, not only for the Indian market, but also for the whole world. Now we're really focused on the expanding original content, like this great new series, Sacred Games, that we're producing here in India. This is my story. Everyone has a part in it. It's my job to bring everyone together.
Sacred Games is a crime drama about a lowly police officer's struggle to bring down an organized crime syndicate and save Mumbai. It's set and filmed completely in India, and for Netflix, it's a hit. Bella Bejeria is in charge of all of Netflix's non-English original programming. You know, I think many people imagine that it's when you see, you know, American productions that shoot in Madrid or, right, we're shooting in Mumbai, but it's, you know, an American production and we go somewhere and we shoot there.
That's not what we do. We have local offices with local talent and executives in many of these countries. And we make a show with above-the-line, below-the-line, creative, every craft from that country. But Netflix says its local market strategy is also a global market strategy because shows that are made for a very specific country or region often resonate around the world. Where we start first in all of these countries is...
what is the vision of this creator and what is the most authentic version of this story? And we back that. And what we really find in that way is if the story is very specific, in turn, it feels really authentic. And when it's authentic, it feels actually more universal. When you try to over-manufacture something, you try to make a show for everybody, I feel like you end up making a show for nobody. ♪
For Sacred Games director Vikram Matwani, authenticity meant letting characters speak in the languages they would actually speak, and not the ones that would appeal to the largest audience. That was the first question I asked him, and that was my yes or no point, because genuinely, I just feel that
That would have been a complete disservice to, you know, the kind of characters you have in Sacred Games, who are these cops who, you know, live in slums. They would never speak English. Like, never. India has 22 official languages and thousands of dialects. Sacred Games tries to capture some of that mix. The show is maybe 80% Hindi, and then there's like 10% Marathi, and another 5% Punjabi, and some English in this.
But it's genuinely authentic. And that seems to have worked. Netflix won't tell us how many people watch the show, but Matwani has his own metrics. I mean, the amount of people who come and told me like, you know, it's, oh, for the first time there was such an, there was an Indian show that we were proud of and we love watching it and it really made us proud. And I've had a lot of people tell me that.
Netflix does say that Sacred Games has traveled. Its audience outside of India is twice as big as the country it was made for. But making a show for an Indian audience or any audience in any country is only part of Netflix's global challenge. Up next, what Netflix has to get right if it wants to win the world.
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Okay, so we know Netflix wants to stream all over the world. Let's talk about what it needs to make that happen, starting with infrastructure, figuring out how to get streaming video to people who want to watch it. That may be a little confusing for audiences in the U.S. who've come to expect instant streaming wherever they want it. In other parts of the world, though, reliable broadband is harder to come by, so Netflix has to adapt.
In India, for instance, many people don't get their internet from a wired connection at their home. They get it on their phones. So Netflix created a cheaper mobile-only plan for that market. It also let users download movies and shows so they don't have to eat into their mobile data plans to watch them. But in other developing parts of the world, Netflix concedes, streaming is still just a work in progress.
And even if the tech infrastructure is there, Netflix gets the programming and production right overseas, it has other challenges, like competition. Netflix was early to streaming in the U.S., but in India, it's found a crowded marketplace. It's not even the only big U.S. company there. Constantinos Papavasalopoulos is from Omdia, a market research firm. What we have now in India, obviously,
We have a very interesting and dynamically growing market with over 30 players. India is a huge market that's been on the radar of American companies for a while. So Netflix has more competition there than most places. Amazon Video, for example, is a much stronger Netflix competitor in India than in America.
And while Disney is trying to catch up to Netflix in the U.S., it has a huge lead in India. That's because it recently got its hands on Hotstar, an India-based streaming company which features live sports like cricket, as well as comedies and Bollywood films. Some critics are skeptical of Netflix's 100 million subscriber goal in India. They think its content won't appeal to mass audiences there. Netflix is producing what we call high-brow, premium-quality drama and movies.
very expensive productions. It's pretty much the same playbook Netflix used when it launched originals in the U.S. Make stuff that feels like capital Q quality, HBO kind of quality.
But that strategy might not work in India. This is addressed to the very, very top end, to the high income 20, 25 million of the population of India. It's not the kind of content that the masses would like. The masses would like something lighter, something around the Bollywood type of content.
more music, more singing, more dancing, more easy to understand stories and things like that. Netflix disagrees. Here's Bella Bejeria again. I think that was an early criticism of the first, of a first few things in that slate a couple years ago. In
In the last two years, Netflix has released dozens of originals in India. If you look at kind of now how the whole slate has filled out and getting kind of more shows in the pipeline and doing, we're also doing unscripted locally. So what is your expectation for your life partner? Somebody who's got ambition, not too dark, you know, like fair skin. And then someone with strong family values. Like one of its most recent shows, Indian Matchmaking. It's a reality show aimed at audiences in India and the U.S.,
The show is getting mixed reviews, but it's also generating buzz and a lot of binge watching. But Netflix's challenges aren't just finding stuff customers want to watch or getting streaming tech right. It's also about making sure government regulators in a couple hundred countries around the world are OK with Netflix.
Most of the time, they are. But China, for instance, won't allow Netflix in the country at all. And sometimes, other governments have a problem with a specific program. — Now, if you've been watching the news, then you know that Saudi Arabia has been engulfed in a massive diplomatic crisis over the gruesome killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. — Most notably in 2019 with Hasan Minhaj's comedy and news show Patriot Act. — Because ultimately, MBS is not modernizing Saudi Arabia.
The only thing he's modernizing is Saudi dictatorship. The Saudi government told Netflix the episode violated a local cybercrime law, and they ordered the company to stop streaming it in the country. Netflix complied. In case you don't know the full story, back in October, we did an episode about the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and his involvement in the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Kingdom of Israel.
Wasn't thrilled. Netflix's cave-in generated blowback from Hollywood, journalists, and human rights groups.
As the New Yorker put it, "Money mattered more than murder." — Let me be absolutely clear. I am not a victim here at all. I'm lucky, okay? I have the freedom to call Saudi Arabia the boy band manager of 9/11. I can criticize my own government without any fear of repercussions. This is no joke for many Saudi activists. — Netflix has taken down shows at different governments' requests before, eight other times since 2015. But the Patriot Act episode was by far the highest-profile example.
and it illustrates a problem that isn't going away. Netflix is gonna continue to get demands like this, and it's gonna continue trying to balance the desire to let people stream whatever they want with Netflix's desire to do business around the world. But you get a sense this is something Netflix isn't completely comfortable with yet.
Here's Andrew Ross Sorkin from The New York Times asking Reed Hastings about the incident. By making the episode unavailable in Saudi Arabia, Netflix has become complicit in pervasive censorship that artists, entertainers, journalists, and regular citizens have long had to deal with in the Middle East.
What do you think of that? I think the New York Times wrote it. I mean, you know, you guys are a truth-to-power brand. That's what you stand for. So it would be terrible for you guys to wear an entertainment brand. And so we don't feel bad about that at all. What we want to do is create room for all of our entertainment to be able to be seen around the world. Hastings, who likes to say what he means, can't really articulate Netflix's position here. Maybe because Netflix doesn't have a position that's really set in stone. If
If Saudi came to you and said, "Look, you've got to take down half the shows." No. Then what happens? If they came to us and said, "You can't have gay content," we wouldn't do that. We would not comply with that.
The thing was, this was a truth to power. Hassan's, you know, enormously funny, interesting. And he's, you know, one more fairly quite justified critique of MBS. But that's just like not our core brand. That's a news kind of thing. And, you know, it's tough if you want to be a news brand, then you have a different set of things that you do. Can you understand the distinction between refusing to take down gay content, but agreeing to take down content critical of a government? Me neither.
Lucas Shaw Bloomberg says this confusion is kind of baked into Netflix's strategy. It's going to have to make this stuff up as it goes along. In the case of Hasan Minhaj, they sort of tried saying, well, we're not a news company, but that's a really hard position to take when you're one of, if not the biggest funder of documentaries in the world. I don't know what the answer is for them because I understand the need to comply with
local laws. It's one thing to say, well, why doesn't Netflix just get kicked out of Saudi Arabia? How many customers could they have? But if you take that a policy and then you start withdrawing from 5, 10, 15, 20 different countries, it becomes a problem. This kind of conflict has become super standard for big internet companies like YouTube and Facebook, who are used to taking down posts and videos when various governments complain. But those companies are platforms, which means they generally don't take responsibility for the stuff their users put on their sites and apps, which means taking it down is less of a big deal.
Netflix, though, is a programmer. It owns or pays for everything it streams. Figuring out how it can do that around the world while also pleasing regulators around the world is uncharted territory. There are a lot of things that are unique about Netflix. It's internal culture, the way it upended the media business, its pivot from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. But it's really Reed Hastings' ambition that makes the company distinct. In his words, he wants to create a global TV network.
And we've never seen that before. We've never seen anyone try to make stuff and deliver it to everyone everywhere, which is what they're trying to do. And right now they're way ahead of everyone else.
Netflix still has to do battle day to day with Disney and Apple and everyone else. But Reed Hastings says he's really worried about a different kind of competitor who's not even in the streaming wars at all. Many people love video gaming instead of watching movies and TV shows, or they live on YouTube instead of watching movies and TV shows. So our goal is to be the best in the world at movies and series.
And the danger for us is that these other things become highly more relevant for people. You can think of it as, you know, 100 years ago, we might try to be the best in the opera and the novel. And then those turn into very small art forms today because television became so much more compelling. So we have to watch out for those substitution threats. So forget about video games, uploading cat videos, theme parks, sports. Netflix hopes that if it stays focused, you'll continue watching.
That's probably going to work for a while. It's very hard today to see TV shows and movies becoming the next opera, but the people who put on operas didn't see the end coming either. And if that happens, someone else is going to have to make a podcast about the thing that blew up Netflix. All right, that's it for Land of the Giants, the Netflix effect. We are officially done. This podcast is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Many, many people worked on this show. We're going to thank them all now.
starting with my producers, Richard Armstrong and Zach Mack, our editor, Charlie Herman, our engineer and composer, Gautam Shrikashen, our executive producer, Nishat Kerwa. More thanks to our friends at Recode and Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network, Sam Altman, Brandon Santos, Ode White, Lauren Katz, Marika Baldomberg. And I want to thank you, the listeners, for sticking with us all season. We had a great time making the show. We hope you liked listening. And if you liked it, help us out.
Help us get the word out. You can rate it, you can review it, you can share it with a friend. Last, not least, I want to give a big, big, big, big shout out to my co-host, Ronnie Mola, who reported this season with me while extremely pregnant. She worked up until the moment she went into labor. Good news, she had a healthy baby boy. Thank you for all your help, Ronnie, and good luck to you, Rio. And for Land of the Giants, the fine folks at Recode and Vox Media are already hard at work on the next season, so stay tuned for more. I'm Peter Kafka. Thanks for listening.
