Ah, nothing like a clickbaity title to nerd-snipe us the morning after a holiday! > Like Sky, Netflix has used technology as a crowbar to build a new TV busine

Ah, nothing like a clickbaity title to nerd-snipe us the morning after a holiday! > Like Sky, Netflix has used technology as a crowbar to build a new TV business. Everything about how it executed that technology has to be good. The apps are good, the streaming and compression are good, the UI is good, the recommendation engine is good, and the customer service and experience are good. Unlike American cable subscribers, Netflix subscribers are generally pretty happy with the tech. The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV... It used tech as a crowbar, and the crowbar had to be good, but it’s actually a TV company. By this logic, Google is less a tech company than an advertising firm that used tech as a crowbar! Microsoft is an office supplies manufacturer! Which seems absurdly reductive. In my mind, if you're scaling customized services for individual users far beyond what a team of top-tier customer service professionals could do (or you're cyborg-izing those service professionals!), you're a tech company. Plain and simple. And Netflix fits this bill because part of its approach to content creation is that programming choices should be driven by quantitative insights about individual users - it's just a very, very long iteration cycle on the optimization algorithm.