Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Netflix CEO: $200 Million to Renew Starz Deal “Wouldn’t Be Shocking”

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings won’t say exactly how much it’s going to cost his company to renew its 2008 licensing deal with the Starz cable network. Speaking with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, he declined to say much about the state of negotiations between the companies. Asked to confirm the speculation of analysts that it might cost as much as $200 million, he said, “We haven’t done the deal yet, but that wouldn’t be shocking.” At $200 a million a year, that would amount to a little more than 6 percent of Netflix’s forecast 2011 revenue. The original deal cost $30 million.

Earlier, Hastings said Netflix will be fine if the cost of content roughly parallels subscriber growth. He said Netflix currently has 23 million subscribers versus 14 million last year.

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If I had to guess, one of the reasons they couldn’t sell it is that a lot of that technology is being used in other products that Cisco needs to create.

— Flip founder Jon Kaplan on why Cisco killed the Flip instead of selling it