Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) was under the scanner again as the media titan and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOX) CEO , Rupert Murdoch expressed his feeling that all the media companies should fight back hard and strong in response to the streaming service. Murdoch was attending a WSJ tech conference at California during which he expressed that every other media company should follow HBO and CBS by adopting streaming service of their own. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Paul Sweeney talked on Bloomberg TV about Murdoch’s comments and the television industry.
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) and few other streaming services are pushing a number of consumers to adopt cord cutting and migrate towards online television. This might hurt all the television companies including Murdoch’s news foundation in the future. So he insisted that the television companies should respond ‘hard and fast’ to Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX).
“[…] He (Murdoch) was at a conference yesterday and he was pretty strong saying that the big media companies will have to embrace this new way the consumers are consuming a lot of their contents. They are not just relying on their cable TV package or the satellite package. They are getting it direct from the internet and so we saw it just in the last couple of weeks, HBO and CBS say that they are going to launch a streaming service over the internet to provide their programming, much like Netflix type service. So Murdoch was saying the industry has to do more of this,” Sweeney said about Murdoch’s comments.
Almost 4 years back Jeff Bewkes called Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) as ‘Albanian army’ and stated that this could not end the cable industry and cord cutting was never a concern. But Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)’s tremendous growth has impressed many over the years including Bewkes. Murdoch feels that all the media companies are on the same page and are ready to drive changes in response to Netflix’s growth. But will the ego between the big media companies let this happen?
Sweeney feels that it is going to be very difficult for these big companies to come together and drive the change. He feels that the existing system in the media companies is working very well for them and generating revenues. He feels that to move away from the traditional model and transform into streaming might break the original business which is still providing a lot of money for Murdoch’s company. But he added that the big media companies have to recognize the fact that the consumers are migrating towards streaming and need to react to the changes.
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