I think it would likely depend on the distribution of labor and expenses within the organization. Early on, Netflix (ignoring pre-streaming, mailed-DVD-movie da

I think it would likely depend on the distribution of labor and expenses within the organization. Early on, Netflix (ignoring pre-streaming, mailed-DVD-movie days which I'm sure was an entirely separate metamorphosis) didn't produce any content but merely delivered existing content, leveraging technology to do so. I imagine the vast majority of the org and the expenses were on engineers and engineers' salaries. In that sense, certainly I think we can agree it'd be defined as a tech company. Now, I'd be very much interested to see how the expenses and org makeup has shifted. I'd predict that much of their budget has been shifted to purchasing and producing content. The question then is, how much of their actual org is doing that work? Is that work outsourced? Are they merely spending money on contractors and production teams in LA/etc? Or is it in-house? If they're outsourcing the actual content production, then I imagine it requires a small subset of the org to lead acquisition and curation of this content. Thus I'd lean towards saying they're still mostly a technology company. But if the vast majority of their budget is spent on content acquisition, then maybe it's more of a media production company at that point. Another good heuristic for deciding what a company "is" is to look at the part of the business that once removed would redefine or cripple the business the most. What seems more valuable? A Netflix that only produces content that is then streamed through someone else that handles the technology? Or the Netflix of old that only streams content they had no hand in creating? Whatever's more valuable is most certainly the direction the business will go, and consequently gives you the framing for how the company would define itself.