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Watch out HBO: Netflix hopes to produce five new series per year

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According to a recent GQ magazine article, Netflix is looking to produce as many as five new shows a year going forward. It seems the company is fully committed to stepping into this new arena and – considering the seismic shift it induced in the video rental industry – the networks can’t afford to ignore the move.

Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, sees the irony in the company’s current initiative, and told GQ that its goal is to “become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” Sarandos is referring to HBO’s recent decision to throw its full weight behind HBO GO, the premium channel’s streaming service.

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Netflix’s first original series was Lilyhammer, a dramatic comedy about a New York City wise guy who’s relocated to Norway. Clearly the effort didn’t sour the company on the idea of creating its own content. It has followed its initial effort up with House of Cards, a David Fincher-directed, Kevin Spacey-starring drama scheduled to debut February 1, 2013. Industry insiders will no doubt have their eye on the show, as it will be an early bellwether that could help assess the viability of Netflix’s new strategy.

By next Summer, the company will expand its TV offerings further, adding three new exclusives to its lineup. Each of the new series will be available to stream in their entirety upon release. Netflix Founder Reed Hastings told GQ that releasing series all at once and allowing viewers to watch them whenever they please is a strategy meant to counteract TV’s culture of “managed dissatisfaction.” He believes that people are accepting imperfect alternatives mostly due to a lack of superior options, options which Netflix plans to provide.

Whether the one-time upstart can compete with the likes of HBO remains to be see, but it’s hard to believe that the idea behind Netflix’s approach to television won’t catch on somewhere else, even if it fails. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 100 times: The times they are a-changin’.

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The streaming landscape is growing at lightspeed, making it more important to know what each streaming video service offers and how it compares to the crowd. One of the latest services to be announced is HBO Max, which promises to offer more than 10,000 hours of content from Warner Bros., HBO, and various other movie studios and television networks under AT&T's WarnerMedia banner.

Although the service has an official name and a launch date of spring 2020, there's still a lot we don't know about HBO Max. Here are the biggest questions we have about this new Netflix challenger, and the answers we'll need to get if we're going to invest our hard-earned money on another streaming platform.
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The first, unconfirmed report about the cost of HBO Max arrived in June 2019, and indicated that WarnerMedia was planning to charge between $16 and $17 for its then-unnamed streaming service. Subsequent, official announcements from AT&T and WarnerMedia -- including the announcement the  -- didn't offer any confirmation of that price point.

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Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke, who has had the job for a year now, recently shared that Amazon will be stepping up its content competition with Netflix, but with a more conservative approach. "We don't want our customers to have an endless scroll," Salke told The Hollywood Reporter, in a jab at Netflix's seemingly boundless budget for original productions. "We want to be much more curated and pointed about what we're putting up on the service, what we're putting out theatrically." Curated and pointed or not, the approach is still going to yield an impressive number of titles -- as many as 30 per year, at a cost that definitely feels Netflix-esque.

Amazon Studios reportedly spent $47 million at the Sundance Film Festival this year, to acquire just five movies, including Late Night, Brittany Runs a Marathon and The Report. It's an investment level that catapulted the studio to a record for a single company at the festival, and more than doubled the amount attributed to Netflix's purchases at the event.

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