Netflix rented every show it streamed. Its landlords were about to evict it.

Rent the shows and the landlord can starve you. Climb a floor, make your own, and there is no landlord left.: their studios · they can shut this · Netflix, downstairs · the studio, in-house · catalogs leave, intact · no landlord left

Netflix streams to more than 325 million households. For most of its life, it owned almost none of what it showed. It paid Hollywood studios billions to license their movies and shows, renting its entire catalog one contract at a time.

Then the suppliers turned into rivals. Disney, Warner, and the rest launched their own streaming services and started pulling their catalogs back to stock them. The studios Netflix leaned on could starve it overnight. So Netflix climbed its own supply chain and became a studio. It financed Squid Game outright, so Squid Game can never be yanked. There is no landlord left to yank it.

Buy your way up the supply chain, and the supplier who could starve you becomes you.