Well, yes. In a certain way, everything is tech. Tech != computers/engineers/algorithms/robots/HAl/whatever. But even in the popular understanding of what a te

Well, yes. In a certain way, everything is tech. Tech != computers/engineers/algorithms/robots/HAl/whatever. But even in the popular understanding of what a tech company is, Netflix more than many others DOES have historical and current tech bonafides. 25 years ago during dot com mania, there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing about whether WebVan or Pets.com or Amazon or whatever were tech companies. It was accepted that e-commerce WAS tech, even if it was different than DEC/Compaq/HP or Sun or Microsoft or Apple or whatever. And Netflix operated from a website, used technology for its logistic and delivery system (much like other e-commerce systems)and had a recommendation algorithm (that they had a contest to improve, because they saw that good recommendations reduced churn) and a focus on UX to keep the product good. It took them more than a decade, but the goal of delivering video via the Internet was always there. Roku, which in its original incarnation was simply a Netflix streaming box, was originally ideated and developed at Netflix before the company decided it didn’t want to be in the hardware business and so the head of the project and the engineers left to make Roku. Netflix has done as much work as any single company except perhaps YouTube to optimize and pioneer how to effectively serve large swaths of video to users across the globe. The problem with Ben Evans’ piece is that he misunderstands that Netflix has always been a tech and a content company. Even when it was a rental company with more tech and no original content, the recommendation algorithm and the dedication to buyers and curators who would make the decisions about what DVDs were purchased (eventually customer signals played into this too) always had a very strong content focus in the product. That’s the reason Netflix works. It was the first media company to really innately understand both tech and content. Disney and HBO (WarnerMedia, whatever) have great tech stacks too (especially Disney), but Netflix was the first and is still the most successful.