Binge Times

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.

“This book was better than anything I’ve read in detailing how this new era of streaming evolved so quickly. Filled with colorful details and insider stories, Hayes and Chmielewski chronicle how the media landscape arrived at the ‘binge times’ we’re all living in and why the biggest players in the business made the choices they made.”

Autorentext

Dade Hayes is the business editor at Deadline. Along with two previous books about entertainment, he has written for the New York Times, Variety, and the podcast Business Wars. He lives in Larchmont, New York.

Dawn Chmielewski is an entertainment business correspondent for Reuters and was previously a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Recode, and Forbes. She lives in Southern California.