The CEO of Fox-owned Red Seat Ventures, a podcast and digital video company that is home to sports hosts like Robert Griffin III and Craig Carton as well as top news commentators like Tucker Carlson, is pouring cold water on Netflix’s efforts to become a podcast distributor.
In an interview this week on Vox’s Channels podcast, Red Seat CEO Chris Balfe said he “hates” the experiment for the creators who host these shows as well as Netflix’s long-term outlook.
“I hate it. I hate it for creators, and I hate it for Netflix,” he said.
“For creators, the whole appeal of the creator economy is controlling your own destiny and distribution in the way that you want to. And I think that … asking people to come off of YouTube, which there’s no reason to believe if you have 10 million YouTube-channel subscribers and you come off, when you go back on, that channel will still be active, I think you’re taking a huge risk there.”
Balfe added that the deals are antithetical to the creator economy’s business model, with hosts ceding not only the distribution of podcast video episodes but also ownership of their audience.
“With Netflix, if my deal is up and I don’t like the renewal terms, they’re going to take away my audience,” he explained. “That’s absolutely antithetical to everything that we have been building in the creator economy. It’s going back to a TV model in all of the ways that are bad, in having a gatekeeper and all of those things.”
While Balfe acknowledged there is little data available to evaluate these deals and said it is too early to determine whether rumors that engagement on these podcasts has been low on Netflix are true, he doesn’t believe the company will add value for subscribers by taking content that was previously free and placing it on the platform.
“I also think it’s bad for Netflix,” he said. “Because ultimately, they’re in a little bit of a race with YouTube, or they think they are, but I just don’t see how taking something that was free on YouTube yesterday and making it paid on Netflix today creates any value for subscribers.”
These comments should be taken with a fair bit of caution given that Red Seat is owned by Tubi, which is owned by Fox, both of which are effectively competitors to Netflix. While Red Seat’s clients do not exclusively distribute content through Fox’s owned platforms, it is not in Balke’s interest to fluff up a competitor and a buyer too much. Still, Balke said Red Seat has recently begun doing more deals with Spotify for video episode distribution, so it is not completely opposed to such partnerships.
Though clearly lucrative, the Netflix model, in which creators give up control over their distribution feeds and are subject to a platform’s business whims, is simply less desirable for Red Seat and its clients.
That is different than what Netflix’s biggest new partners have said. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons claimed Netflix was more interested in innovating and forming a true partnership than YouTube, while Barstool’s Dan “Big Cat” Katz said he believes podcast consumption will, in fact, migrate to Netflix in time.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.