House of Cards, How Netflix broke the TV pilot mold (video)

Ken Auletta on how Netflix broke the TV pilot mold:
 When House of Cards came -- Kevin Spacey and the producers came to them with the idea of House of Cards they said, "We will give you a commitment without doing what every other TV network does which is insist on seeing a pilot, testing it and letting it compete against others. We will give you a two season commitment." Not just a one season commitment which only very few get a full season. We'll give you a two season commitment. And so people said, "How would they dare risk a two season commitment without seeing a pilot, without, you know, without testing it."

What people missed which is something they miss what Netflix actually did. What Netflix actually did before Kevin Spacey and the producers came -- and David Fincher came to them -- they looked up and they saw Kevin Spacey movies did very well on Netflix. David Fincher movies that he directed did very well. Political dramas did very well on Netflix. They had a built in audience for all of those three. And the British series that ran earlier than House of Cards had a lot of popularity on Netflix. And Netflix was saying, "If we could combine those four audiences together, we've got a show that's gonna do very well, particularly when you've got Kevin Spacey fronting it, you know, as an actor."

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House of Cards Used Big Data to Guarantee Its Popularity

For ‘House of Cards,’ Using Big Data to Guarantee Its Popularity - NYTimes.com: " . . . already the most streamed piece of content in the United States and 40 other countries, according to Netflix. The spooky part about that? Executives at the company knew it would be a hit before anyone shouted “action.” Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of “The Social Network,” from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of “House of Cards.” With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming. Big bets are now being informed by Big Data, and no one knows more about audiences than Netflix. A third of the downloads on the Internet during peak periods on any given day are devoted to streamed movies from the service, according to Sandvine, a networking provider. And last year, by some estimates, more people watched movies streamed online than on physical DVDs. . . . " read more at link above

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