Netflix Exec: 'We’ve Now Talked to Every League, Every Athlete, Every Team'
My chat with Gabe Spitzer, Netflix’s head of nonfiction sports, at the Netflix Slam tennis event reveals the streamer's sports ambitions keep growing
Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz are about an hour and forty-five minutes into their match at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay — and things are getting intense. We’ve arrived at match point for Alcaraz in a 10-point tie break. Never mind that they’re playing an exhibition on the Strip, next to blingy drive-thru wedding chapels and grandmas parked at slot machines. For a moment here, some serious tennis is happening.
Alcaraz pulls Nadal wide, but the 22-time Grand Slam champ chases down the ball and whips a down-the-line forehand that sears past the younger Spaniard, landing in the corner. The sellout crowd of 9,489 people in the Michelob Ultra Arena erupts. We’re all on our feet.
This may just be a glorified warmup at a Vegas hotel before the higher-stakes Indian Wells tournament nearby, which kicks off today. But with both stars coming off injuries — the hip that has troubled Rafa for the past year, Carlos’ recently rolled ankle — both of these guys have something to prove.
As does the title sponsor of this made-for-TV sports confection: Netflix. The service is the host of the grandiloquently named Netflix Slam, which it streamed live from the desert Sunday and into hundreds of millions of homes across the globe. If you opened up the app yesterday afternoon, the Netflix Slam commanded prime real estate, with a big red watch live button where the “Play” one usually resides. (Click in early and Netflix showed viewers a carousel of its sports docuseries alongside a countdown clock.)
In the span of a decade, Netflix has helped decimate linear TV, not only gobbling up series that once would have anchored a network lineup but also taking discarded network series — from You to Manifest— and making them hits. That’s left traditional TV clinging to live sports like a life raft: 98 of last year’s top-100 broadcasts were sports (overwhelmingly, NFL). Now Netflix appears to be coming for them, too.