A new book co-authored by Deadline business editor Dade Hayes will be the first to explore the media and tech sectors’ headlong rush into streaming.
Binge Times: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix will be published April 19 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Hayes, who is based in New York, co-wrote the book with the Los Angeles-based Dawn Chmielewski, a media and entertainment correspondent for Reuters and a former Deadline editor.
The book focuses on the 2019-20 stretch when a major new entrant launched nearly every month. In addition to in-depth portraits of Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, Quibi and HBO Max, it takes readers inside established streaming entities Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. The book examines a series of consequential decisions and developments in media and technology since the birth of the internet that have led to the current obsession with streaming.
Deadline readers know the basic outline of the tale. As the internet achieved broadband speed and direct-to-consumer streaming became possible in the 2000s, few players took it nearly as seriously as they eventually would. Traditional media companies were cashing eight- and nine-figure checks to license their shows and movies and were content with those proceeds on top of a still-growing pay-TV ecosystem and movie box office. Only a decade later, after witnessing the wages of cord-cutting and the vulnerability of movie theaters did a flock of companies all decide to enter the streaming game.
Even then, just as the multibillion-dollar derby was heating up, along came Covid, a true black-swan event bringing both positive and negative consequences. The pandemic offered a short-term stimulus to streaming in general, but it also posed stiff challenges to production, product engineering, marketing and many other areas.
The authors are repped by Daniel Greenberg at Levine Greenberg Rostan. Mauro DiPreta, SVP and executive editor at William Morrow, edited Binge Times.