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This week's guest was Rich Greenfield, partner and media and technology analyst at LightShed Partners and a general partner at LightShed Ventures. He started covering this business at Goldman Sachs in 1995 and has spent three decades calling the big shifts early and saying so out loud. We taped the day after Netflix reported earnings, so he had plenty to say.

Rich said something early that I haven't been able to shake: nothing on television has created a real viral sensation this year. Netflix, the rest of streaming, linear, all of it. Movies have had their moments. TV hasn't.

That matters because a year ago Netflix had the biggest title in its history. KPop Demon Hunters was on repeat in every house with kids, topping Spotify, selling Happy Meals, and according to Rich, nobody at Netflix had it on their list of big bets at the start of 2025. His point is that hits have never been predictable, and a dry year can come from the content cycle as easily as from a broken machine. HBO had stretches like this too.

Investors aren't extending that patience. Netflix's Q3 revenue grew 12% year over year, in line with its forecast, and the company now expects 2026 ad revenue of about $2.7 billion, down from roughly $3 billion (Netflix Q3 shareholder letter). The stock fell anyway.

Rich calls it a show-me story, and he's specific about the test. Netflix has to prove one of two things: that it can still make a breakout hit, or that it can keep growing revenue at double digits even as viewing per household slips. He also added the context the earnings coverage mostly skipped. Nobody else in traditional media is growing at that rate, and nobody else reports engagement at all.

If you're a CMO: Netflix's ad business is roughly doubling this year and still running behind its own plan. That's a buyer's market. Negotiate your 2027 commitments like it.

Netflix laid off about 1,000 people, its biggest cut to date, and replaced chief content officer Bela Bajaria with Peter Rice, the former Fox and Disney television chief (Variety). Rice took over on October 26.

Rich likes the hire and is honest about the timing. Most of what Netflix streams in 2027 was shot last year, so Rice's own slate won't show up until 2028 or 2029. He also pointed out something Hollywood does all the time: fire an executive, then enjoy a great twelve months built entirely on that executive's work.

What could show up sooner is sports. Rice added Thursday Night Football at Fox on top of the Sunday package, and Rich has a clear view on which rights a Rice-era Netflix goes after next. I'll let him tell you.

Paramount closed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and named the combined company Skydance. It now has a $6 billion cost-savings target and roughly $80 billion in combined debt (Reuters).

Rich gave both sides. The upside is real: a young CEO backed by one of the wealthiest families in the world and three sovereign wealth funds, which means patient capital that can take a long view most media companies can't afford. The concern, in his numbers, is that Warner Bros. Discovery started life at four times leverage and Skydance starts at seven.

His sharper argument is about what the money bought. Rich says almost every TV show you've loved, from Friends to Stranger Things, came from an original idea rather than an existing franchise. If he's right, a deep library is worth more in film than in television, and the industry is pricing it the other way around.

YouTube is reportedly offering millions of dollars to popular channels that upload exclusively for a set period, and has told creators who release videos on Netflix at the same time that they'll be less likely to be featured in YouTube's marketing and events (Bloomberg via Fortune).

Rich's read is simple. Creators have more buyers than they've ever had, and YouTube's checks exist because Netflix and Disney showed up. He also thinks YouTube is overreacting. When you're the only platform that can take a creator from nothing to famous, you shouldn't care who else is shopping.

He does think the real test is coming. His prediction is that within a year, someone takes a very large exclusive check to leave YouTube, the way Shonda Rhimes left ABC for Netflix. He told a story about a famous director he once asked whether he'd take Netflix's money. The four-word answer is the best clip in the episode.

If you're a creator: before an exclusive offer arrives, know which platform your audience would actually follow you to. Rich's advice is to take the big check only when that audience comes with you, and to be careful with money from a platform where your fans don't already spend time.

Five days after we taped, Instagram made the move that tests Rich's thesis most directly. On October 26, Adam Mosseri and VP of product Tessa Lyons announced Features, a format for horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, testing first in Brazil and with a small group of US creators (TechCrunch). Mosseri opened the announcement by admitting he'd been against long-form video on Instagram for a long time. The same week, Instagram's TV app landed on Apple TV. Creators can also link up to eight short clips to a single long video, so every Reel becomes a trailer for the full episode. And Instagram is expanding a test of a profile home for episodic series like Subway Takes and Brooklyn Coffee Shop, which I brought up with Rich as an example of creators building IP they own.

Rich told me only two companies own a daily video habit, YouTube and Netflix, and that every legacy media company has failed on the phone. Instagram owns the phone habit, and this week it started walking toward the living room, using short clips to pull people into longer shows. In two-clocks terms, the company that owns the ambient clock is trying to build an appointment clock. It has tried before. IGTV launched in 2018, never caught on, and shut down in 2022 (Engadget).

The money is the most important part for this audience. Mosseri said on The Colin and Samir Show that creators on Instagram primarily get paid by brands, and that scaling the platform's small performance-based payout program doesn't make sense because it already loses money (Later). YouTube pays creators a share of ad revenue. Netflix pays licensing fees. Instagram is telling creators that brands will pay them.

If you're a CMO: Instagram just named you the business model for its long-form push. The first brands that fund creator shows there will have a lot of say in what those shows look like and what the deals cost.

Here's the original thought.

Sumner Redstone said content is king, and for most of the last century he was right. Making things was expensive, so whoever could finance production held the power. Rich made the point that in 1995, and still today, the studio's core job is financing. The Odyssey cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Someone has to write that check.

Now take away most of the cost. Rich expects one of the biggest bursts of content creation in history, driven by AI tools that let creative people make work close to TV quality. He floated a near future where every creator can match MrBeast's production value. Executives from the vertical drama companies told him their AI-assisted work is already outperforming, because it lets a small budget do things a small budget couldn't.

When supply explodes, value moves to whoever owns the daily habit. Rich says exactly two companies have that habit: YouTube and Netflix. Instagram spent this week trying to become the third, coming at the TV from the phone instead of the other way around. Scale is what makes their recommendations work. A service where everyone watches the same show gives an algorithm almost nothing to learn from.

This is the two clocks idea. The appointment clock is what we make time for. The ambient clock is what we pass time with. A studio library is an appointment-clock asset. The daily habit belongs to the ambient clock, and platforms own it. Rich's evidence is the licensing deals: studios still send Top Gun: Maverick, Twilight and Fast and Furious to Netflix, because if you want people to show up for the next sequel, they have to watch the old ones somewhere, and that somewhere is Netflix.

That leads to his most contrarian claim: Netflix may have won the Warner Bros. bidding war by losing it. Skydance spent $110 billion on content. Netflix kept its money and its habit.

During the taping I put it as “the dumber the pipes, the smarter the strategy.” Rich corrected me, fairly. The platforms need very smart technology. What they don't need is to own the content. Own the habit, rent the library.

Instagram's bet is the cleanest test of the idea. It owns no library, has the biggest phone habit in the business, and is now asking whether that habit can follow people from the phone to the TV.

The honest hedge is that this depends on AI doing what Rich expects. He doubts AI writes the next White Lotus, and if the best storytelling stays scarce, a library full of it holds its value. That's the bet Skydance made, with patient money behind it. We'll find out who read the next decade right.

We closed with a lightning round. He named the most overrated and most underrated companies in media, and gave a yes or no on whether an AI-generated series cracks Netflix's Top 10 by 2028. Go watch.

Web Summit Lisbon (November 9-12, Lisbon)