On bbc news. Anger as Scotland Yard asks the media not to publish leaked government documents. The warning follows the resignation of the British Ambassador in washington. It cannot conceivably be right that newspapers or any other Media Organisation publishing such material should face prosecution. The floodgates have been closed in new orleans in preparation for Tropical Storm barry, storm surges and heavy rain are expected later. Facebook is reportedly fined a record £4 billion to settle an investigation into violations of its users data privacy. At wimbledon, Serena Williams is chasing her 24th grand slam title she faces simona halep in the womens final. The match has attracted a royal audience the dutchess of cambridge and sussex are among the spectators. I wonder who they are behind. More on those stories at the top of the hour. Now on bbc news, amol rajan meets ted sarandos arguably the most powerful, creative figure in modern television, whose vision for netflix has revolutionised the way we watch tv. When ted sarandos left college in arizona, he got a summerjob in a local video store. He watched a lot of films and became a big player in the world of video distribution. Then he met a visionary computer whiz called Reed Hastings and together, they would change the world. Their story, netflixs story, charts the revolution in our film and television industries, and today, sarandos is the most powerful creative figure in global media. I asked him why he is investing in shepperton, these legendary studios in britain, and why britain is a growth market, when i sat down with him recently at the bbc. Ted sarandos, thank you so much for doing this. Id like to get a sense of your own background, who were the sarandos family . The sarandos families are. My grandfather was alex sarandos, he came from greece as a young man, he left home, in search of what he thought was a realjob in america, which was to be a trial cook, because he used to read cowboy novels all the time and he thought that was going to be a realjob he could do in america. He went to new york and became a cook, but not on the trail, in a kitchen. And from there, eight kids, and he made one vacation in his lifetime, which was to go to arizona to see a rodeo, and talked about it until the day he died, and the day he died, all of his eight kids, almost in tribute to him, moved to arizona, so i was raised in phoenix and ive been in la now for about 20 years. Its a classic immigrant story, isnt it . Of extremely hard work, extremely determined and ultimately, driven by the power of a story, which is the story of an american promise, right . Yeah, pretty much. And what did your parents do for a living . My father was an electrician and my mother was a stay at home mother. Five kids, very young parents, so we had a real chaotic home, so my escape and my sense of peace was television. Did you watch a huge amount as a kid . A huge amount, a reckless amount of television. Laughing its not a great act of parenting to allow me to sit in front of the tv and watch that much. I think it worked out in the end. How would you characterise the era of american media, the era of american film and tv that you had as a kid . I think it was probably the best time, if i think about television, how enduring those shows were from the 705, mash for example, the shows that had been enduring the culture of today. But i think whats interesting about that time and what was interesting for me, was that i was very aware of things that happened in the decades before. Unlike young people today, who i think know very little about television in the 70s and 805, i knew everything about tv from the 50s and 60s, because it was on, and i would. I was never much of a sleeper, so i would stay up late and watch the Dick Van Dyke show, the Andy Griffith show, the jack benny show, burns and allen. I know ive seen every episode of every one of those shows over the years. So you were Binge Watching back then . 0h, forsure. You went to Glendale Community college in phoenix, arizona, did you have a sense then of what you wanted to do with your life and career . Yeah, but i was totally wrong. I think when i was about 12, i had an influence from television, i was sure i was going to be a journalist, and thats. Why would you do anything like that . Laughing we would have had to switch seats. Yeah, we could switch round, id be very happy to. And i worked on the high school newspaper, worked on the college newspaper, spent all my academic time on the newspapers, instead of getting good grades, and i realised after two years of Community College that i was a horrible writer and i was probably not going to be a professionaljournalist, and i really didnt have a plan b at that time, and my Part Time Job during that period was working at a video store. And i wound up taking that on as my full time job while i figured out what i was going to do next. So did you end up working in a video store because you were a film fanatic orjust because someone said, there are some shifts going, do you fancy a go . A little bit of both. There was a stroke of timing that the second video store in the state of arizona opened up in my neighbourhood, it was a few blocks from my house. And my parents, they were young, they were not responsible with money, so we sometimes would not have electricity, not have water or gas or the phone, but we always had whatever that thing was, we had a little dish to get hbo, we had a vcr, which at the time, i say it like this, because they were big machines back then, and it made no sense that we would have this luxury item. This was your passport to another world, though, wasnt it . Yes, definitely. And having the store open, i was able to roam into the store and walk the shelves and read the boxes and talk to the owner about films. Did you binge watch then . In the downtime, did you get through 900 films . I definitely did. When youre working in a video store, the beauty of the store is that its empty all day. Laughter so, they do all the business in the last two hours at night, so you can watch everything, and i did, i. There were probably 900 films in the store when i started and ifeel like i must have seen every one of them. Would you say that yourjob then was to have the knowledge and dare i say it, the data, to be able to say to customers, if you like that, youll love this . Which is kind of what netflixs algorithms do now. It kind of evolved to that because having been able to see everything, i was able to make natural connections in the patterns, i didnt know at the time what it was, but when people would come back in and say, theyd return something and say, i liked this, and id say, well, if you liked that, youll love this. It was a very organic, natural thing. But now, when i think back on it, there would be queues of people waiting to check out and waiting for me specifically so they could ask, what do you suggest . They wanted teds take . Yeah, and i didnt realise that was all happening, except it was a more informed guess. But it did tell me a lot about what people really value in their choice. It felt really good to be the one that helped them find something that they loved. For some people, and they have found their favourite movie for the rest of their lives from that suggestion, who knows . Thanks to your recommendation. So you rose up the chain of that company and worked for a few different distribution companies. How would you characterise. Say this is the 805, going into the mid 90s, how would you characterise the distribution bu5ine55 that you are in then . There was a lot of turmoil, and at one point, you had to go around the country putting people out ofjobs, making people redundant. The company i worked for was the distributor that serviced all the blockbuster stores, and they put the videos and every store around the country, around the world, and we wound up. Eventually, blockbuster went direct with all the studios and we were this billion dollar business that became a 600 million business overnight and had to adjust to the new reality. Because the guy who did this College Project on how to make the most efficient distribution and worked out the way of doing it was a guy called Reed Hastings. How did you first come across him . Back in the distribution days, one of my clients, who became a friend, named mitch lowe, was working with reed in the early days of netflix, when we were doing dvds mailing around. And reed is a really brilliant man, in terms of an engineer, writing code, and just a real visionary. So, this was 1999, and mitch said, you should meet ted, he knows all about home video distribution, so i went out. My very first e commerce transaction was buying a ticket to go up to see reed, and we met in 99. He described netflix almost exactly like it is right now. What did he say it was . What did he say it was going to be . We talked about downloading instead of streaming, because streaming literally did not exist at the time, but the internet would be the vehicle that all film and entertainment would get into the home. Not satellite or cable, which in 1999, that was a very crazy idea. I did think he was a little nuts when he was talking about it. Because he approached you a few times, didnt he . He offered you a job a couple of times and you said no. What turned the no into a yes . Again, his sense of incredible clarity. So, when i said to him. When he offered me thejob and i said i had ajob, i was running a retail chain at that time, this was after the distribution days, and we had a 400 store chain and a national chain, and we were talking, and he said, why dont you come and do this . And i said, well, im already doing this, and that chain i worked in was kind of a mess. One company had bought another company, they were both in bad financial trouble, so it wasnt like they were going to get together and be a giant, there were just trying to get together. And i basically had to renegotiate all the deals and renegotiate leases and it was a busy time in my life, professionally. And he said, why dont you come and join netflix and we can get this thing going . And i said, ive got these deals and this and that, and he said, oh, it sounds like they need you. And i go, yes, they need me. And he goes, well, dont they need you in some country to feed starving children . And i said, yeah, maybe. He said, why arent you doing that . So, it was just a sense of logic and clarity that made me laugh and i said, i want to be. I dont know what reed was, i didnt know if he was going to do something that would change things as much as netflix has, but i knew he was going to do something amazing. Congratulations. Applause this is going to be a big year for us. House of cards was a moment that you made yourfirst big bet, and you made it based on data, because you look at the fact that house of cards had David Fincher, who had an extraordinary pedigree, kevin spacey and robin wright, it had a very good writer, and you liked the original Michael Dobbs house of cards, which was a british production. I only knew of it because of that video store. Because i was able to rent it beforehand. Most people, when commissioning Something Like house of cards, would expect a pilot, they go through many layers, you commissioned it without a pilot, you put down a reported £100 million, what made you confident that was a bit worth making . A bet worth making . There was no real data, meaning there was no data that would tell you yes or no or this or that. It was mostly the real human intuition. About being able to say, this is a pedigree, a Television Show with an incredible pedigree, David Fincher directs, robin wright, kevin spacey, Beau Willimon wrote three amazing scripts that were almost shootable at the time. So if there ever was a project that you could just add water, this was going to be it. And i felt if we were going to get into original programming at some point, then lets do this in a way that we cant look back and say, maybe we didnt try hard enough, maybe it wasnt big enough, maybe it was the wrong shot, and this was the clearest shot to try this. To tell you something about the culture of netflix, i told reed about the deal after we did it. What was his First Response . I remember six months earlier, we had just told wall street that we would never do that, so when he said, basically, why would you do that . I just said, look, if we are wrong and the show doesnt work, we will have terribly overpaid for one show. And if we are right, then it could fundamentally change our business. And he said, oh, thats a good risk reward, so that was a good trade off. And as your companies evolved, how is the balance between those intuitions and hunches and the raw data that you have now . How has that changed . Because there is the interesting question, which is more than just semantics, but whether you are an entertainment company, which is how you class yourself, or a technology company, we will talk about how that technology is investing in places like britain, but you have got extraordinary troves of data now. Have you found that human intuition is taking a bit of a back step and data is taking a forward step in how you commissioned things . If anything, the opposite. I think the instinct of a company born in tech would be to let data drive everything. And so when you bring in new people, they are concerned all the time that may be the data is the thing that you have to justify or you have to figure out, and the truth of it is that human intuition, the one that can recognise that this is a great story and a great storyteller, and this is a great world, there is no data that can tell you that. There is an argument which some people at the bbc put out that there is a danger that if film and television around they will become dominated by a few companies, based on the west coast of america, even if they are international in outlook, you get the kind of homogenisation, you get a kind of like it worldview, which is filtered through a californian mindset. Have you got any time for that argument . No, mostly because our shows are being produced by local storytellers all over the world. Here in the uk, ourfilms and Television Series commissions, those decisions are made in the office in london, just a few blocks from here, and local production and local crew, local writing, local producers, and increasingly more and more infrastructure being built for us right here in the uk to produce those shows. And do you think being invested in local communities, locally embedded with local teams will eventually make its way into sports rights . I dont think so. I dont mean never. Have sports never attracted you . People like amazon getting it into a big way, why do sports not strike you as a huge opportunity . Its not that its not a huge opportunity, its is it the next best opportunity . I think about this as the way that when sports, if sports, i look at it as when it is the next best way to invest 10 billion. Because i think that is a cost of doing it right and doing it in a way that consumers care about it, and to look at that and say, have we maxed out what we can do in the world of television and film and documentary and stand up comedy and all those things . When we get to that number, you would say, well maybe the next best use is to do a big league deal. But until then, i dont think we are anywhere near that yet. Notoriously, netflix doesnt release viewing figures for its shows. What is the reason behind that . Is it because you have not wanted to give an indication to competitors as to whats popular . 0r because you genuinely dont know that viewing figures are particularly useful . I dont think they are particularly useful in the way that they are reported today, meaning the driver of it is mostly for advertising sales, so live, live plus seven days, live plus 30 days, those are all advertising measurements and we dont have advertising. So we do have value and when people watch, not in the moment, but in some time periods. So what people watch in the first month does give us some indication, the first month that they join, it gives us an indication as to why theyjoined. So some people may have joined to watch a movie or watch a tv series that we have, that helps us understand the value of that show. We will increasingly give out that information more frequently. First to our producers, then ultimately, to our members and to the press, because i do think there is some real value in being part of the global conversation about something. Just to go back to the bbc and your investment in britain, what is your relationship with someone like the bbc like . Is it ultimately a competitor or is it a supplier . Both. And i think what is important that i really want to make sure that they know that we are a good partner for them, we are a good partner for them as a licensor of their content, we are a good partner as a co producer, right now, we are in production on dracula, which is a very big project, we did bodyguard most recently and watership down, where we came in as a Co Production partner, helps raise the budget of these projects, so they can make even more ambitious projects. But a raised budget works for you because you are rich and you have a growing subscriber base. The bbc has got a finite ish income from the licence fee, and that inflation might work to your advantage over them, might it not . Like i said, they get the advantage of it here in the uk by having the first window for that project in the uk. The more we are producing our own british programming, the less dependent we are to have the first window on everything, so it makes us a very good partner in that way. I also want to make sure we are a good partner when we compete, and that we are always competing fairly with local broadcasters. What does that mean . Be a good partner when you compete . I mean, if you bid better and higher . To understand that there are things are important to them, there are things that are important to us, but also, to know that one deal doesnt change the dynamic for everything else. That is interesting, because our planet and David Attenborough was seen by lots of people, it was a huge moment, that was seen a5 a mega moment for the bbc, because attenborough, who is a bbc name, although he has done stuff elsewhere, was making a big segway to netflix. Is that a strategic move by which you want to encroach on other peoples tariff . Is it a wa