Ted Sarandos Quotes

Somebody once told me - and I could be wrong about this - that The West Wing was, on any given episode, $300,000 over, on average. Now today, if you were $10,000 over budget, they would cancel you. For sure.

The television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.

You know, dramas are much more expensive to do than say a comedy, so any kind of deficit like that is picked up on when it comes time for them to pick up new shows.

I definitely applaud Netflix and all of those guys, whether it's Hulu or whoever, for doing original programming.

Television is growing. It is a huge market for great content.

There's so much great TV and I always thought it would be such a fun little sideway to make money and then not have to worry about my films making a lot of money.

Initially, the television was seen as the devil incarnate by people that worked in the content industry. Now over time it turned out that that was one of the best things that ever could have happened to a content creator. I think the Internet is no different.

I think the biggest issue for legacy media - both TV and film - is that it just costs too much money to develop a TV series or movie. And most of them don't work. Then the one that works has to pay for the rest.

The lifespan of any show is to end in cancellation.

I mean, all the ratings wars are silly. But, I mean, someone has to be concerned about the ratings because it means, you know, it translates into revenue.

Good television people have a sense of what television people relate to.

I honestly believe that TV generally is obsessed with the ratings battle to the point of cutting its own throat.

Television is a service, but it's also a business.

My kids watch everything downloaded; they have no idea what the numbers or the names of the channels mean, except, 'FX makes the show that I see on my computer.' So it's harder to get a show on the air, but at the same time, there are a lot of terrific shows.

What I didn't want to do is get into a ratings race with television because really, for them, it matters. For me, it doesn't.

And the consumer doesn't care. They don't watch networks, they watch TV shows.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.

We in the independent sector more than anybody need Netflix, because they care about what we do.

A lot of times, us within the industry, we can put this bubble around ourselves and create what a show is supposed to look like and sound like, and we're seeing so much content. The best compliment is, 'I finally found something to watch with my family,' or, 'This is how I really feel, and I can't believe they're showing this on television.'

I just wish I got a quarter every time someone clicks on 'Little Women, Big Cars.' We had a 125-page script for this show. We used the creator's house to shoot. But it's expensive to do these shows. They're eventually not going to be able to get the quality of actors.

I knew from being on 'The Shield,' and having some experience in the financials of all of it, that after seven seasons, the production model changes and reverts back. It becomes a much more expensive show to do, and perhaps the economic feasibility of it somewhat goes away.

I miss 'Mad Men,' but I can't complain because I got a lot of public awareness from it, and it led on to film offers such as 'Sherlock.'

When I was making short films, I didn't see a way to give them a wider reach or earn revenue out of it.

I am here to tell you, TV is not dead. Rather, it is constantly evolving as we are. My view is that we are in the next Golden Age of content. If AOL, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Yahoo felt TV was dying, they would not be so eager to play in our sandbox. It is, after all, TV content that's driving their business.

It is a golden age of television, with Amazon, Sky, and Netflix. They give opportunities to people to develop their own projects together. So much stuff has to be made. There has to be more opportunity.