Live stage Music by Rony Ahmed

Sep 10, 2016 - 06:44
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Brandon Riegg has spent the better part of a decade trying to make live TV happen at Netflix. He joined the company in 2016, after stints at NBC, ABC, and VH1, where he’d worked on shows like Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and America’s Got Talent. All those shows were the kind of unscripted reality fare he’d been hired to bring to Netflix, but they also incorporated things like live voting to make the whole thing feel more urgent and interactive. “I just felt like, if we’re really trying to be the preeminent entertainment service in the world,” Riegg tells me, “we should have all the tools at our disposal.”

So Riegg and Bela Bajaria, another longtime TV executive who joined Netflix around the same time and is now its chief content officer, began making the case around Netflix for why it should invest in the tech required to make live content work. Over and over, they got the same question: What do you want to do with it? And for years, Riegg says, they didn’t have a great answer. “I’d go, ‘Well, I don’t have something specific right now, but I want to be able to jump on things that require live capability if those things come up.’” 

For years, that shrug of an answer didn’t work. But somewhere around two years ago, the energy shifted. “We were continuing to talk about how we wanted to have something for everyone,” he says, “and there’s a requirement of live for some programs. For us to do those things, for us to buy those things, we need to have that functionality.”

Netflix has spent the last two years slowly learning how to do live programming and live streaming. It started with a Chris Rock comedy special last March, which was a technical success and a cultural hit. A few weeks later, it did a live Love Is Blind reunion show, which was such a spectacular disaster that the reunion wound up being filmed and released later. Then there was a live feed of baby gorillas at the Cleveland Zoo, a strange golf event that teamed Formula 1 drivers up with PGA pros, the SAG Awards, a tennis exhibition, a roast of Tom Brady, and John Mulaney’s slightly unhinged late night show Everybody’s in LA.

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