Would Netflix make a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery? Comments from co-CEO Greg Peters suggest not, though he left the door open to a potential deal.
Peters was interviewed during the Bloomberg Screentime conference Wednesday evening, where interviewer Lucas Shaw pressed him on the report that Netflix might be interested in WBD, or at least the company’s studios business post-split.
“We come from a deep heritage of being builders rather than buyers. I also think that one should have a reasonable amount of skepticism around big media mergers, they don’t have an amazing track record over the history of time,” Peters said, before adding that “I would say it’s our responsibility to evaluate all our options.”
“Our job is to figure out what’s the best way to grow our business?” he continued. “And we have to think really carefully, how do we invest our capital, our time and our attention, and if that’s the best way to do it, great, and if it’s not, then we should do something else.”
One area that the company is investing in is games, and Peters announced Wednesday that Netflix would launch family party games for TV sets in the coming weeks and months, including LEGO Party!, Pictionary: Game Night, Boggle Party, Tetris Time Warp.
Peters also commented on the fact that Netflix’s engagement has been somewhat flat, even as the largest streaming platform, YouTube, continues to grow month after month.
“I’m not happy with the fact that we’re not growing engagement,” he said. “We should grow more engagement.”
But that doesn’t mean the company is interested in getting into the user-generated content business.
“I think the dumbest move would be to try and match them in every way,” he added. “Because I think you have to really know what lane you’re operating in, and then you try and be excellent at that and then defend that lane. What do we do? We invest with creators so they can tell their stories in really, really compelling ways, in a way that the YouTube model doesn’t really allow them to go do. So we want to work with the best creators on the planet. Some of those folks are going to come from YouTube. They’re going to come from TikTok.”
