THB #167: The Sagansky Thing...

Jeff Sagansky (former President of CBS, Sony Pictures, and Paxson Communications) riled people up with his NATPE speech last week.

Let me simplify it for you. He doesn’t like the buy-out system that Netflix pioneered when they started making their own shows and has now become a new normal. The system has, with variations, expanded out to almost every other streaming company… which is now, pretty much, Netflix and every full-service legacy media company but Sony.

He feels, correctly, that the major financial upside for producers, along with the risk, has been eliminated by this system.

Quote: “This should be the greatest time in the history of our business to be a producer, (but) in my 47 years in our business I don’t think there is a more rotten time to be a producer in terms of being paid fairly for the work you are doing…. We are in a golden age of content production and the dark age of creative profit sharing.”

True. Can’t argue.

Except… remember the “along with the risk” mention a co…