Netflix with the Dub

Plus: reactions to Google's AI Overviews and the China chip blockade

September 05, 2024

Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Netflix is back at it again with the white vans their push to leverage international content!

Apparently, they’re hiring students and contractors globally to dub South Korean reality shows, in the hopes of building global audiences for them.

This is so friggin’ smart on so many levels.

To start, they’re using their scale to do a hard thing. Netflix can afford to spend whatever it takes to break through and dial-in this process. We talked about this ability to outspend everyone in the context of the streaming wars… so this is just the same muscle put to a different use.

But it’s even better, because if they can get the process perfected, they have an enormous catalog of shows to re-purpose/re-market internationally. And that enormous catalog is growing. 5 years ago, 70% of content was scripted and 30% was unscripted (aka reality TV). Now, those numbers have flipped.

Plus, they can amortize the already lower-cost unscripted content over an even larger global audience, generate more global viral TV moments (cough, Squid Game!), and so on.

The only surprising part of this dubbing plan is that Netflix isn’t using AI to do it (the way Roblox is).

Google’s AI Overviews launched in May 2024 and are hated/feared  by news outlets. This article from Nieman Lab had spicy takes from a few of them.

There were humble-brags, like this one from the Washington Post…:  

“It is our mission to provide our audiences with original, rigorously reported news, analysis, perspectives and service journalism to help them understand the world. It is not often that a zero-click answer will be enough for the audience’s we are trying to engage.”

…and there was some actual humility, like the small publication from Vermont that said they weren’t even big enough (yet!) to have their IP “borrowed” for the AI Overviews…

But my favorite take was from New York Public Radio’s spokesperson, who basically said this is reason 1,001 why you need to nurture direct relationships with your customers (i.e. app downloads), rather than just relying on organic discovery from Google. 100% agree.

China is putting tons of pressure on Japan and the Netherlands.

But why?

Because they are among the US allies who have been helping restrict China’s access to chips. As a reminder, from a prior post:

“To make the best chips, you need US designs, Japanese materials, Dutch equipment, and Taiwanese manufacturing, which is ultimately packaged and sold as an Apple chip.”

So after the US introduced export controls on China in 2022 to curb their chip-making capabilities, the US then turned to allies, and asked them to restrict trade too.

The Netherlands and Japan agreed.

But this latest report from Yahoo implies that China might escalate/retaliate – restricting key auto inputs – if Japan goes any further.

And the CEO of ASML (company behind Netherlands’ world-class chips equipment) was in the press earlier this week complaining about the US approach. He said the US’ original national security justification is evolving into a purely economic one.

So it seems the US has found (or is near) a pressure point, and China is taking steps to relieve the pressure. I’m curious to see who (if anyone) changes strategy here soon.