Ted Sarandos’ High-Stakes Gamble to Save Netflix

The chief content officer of Netflix is an atypical Hollywood player. He’s 47, gregarious, polite, well liked, and shy about dropping names. But as Netflix has grown from a fledgling DVD-by-mail service into the largest streaming video platform on the planet, Sarandos has become the single largest buyer of movies and TV series in Hollywood. What brought him to the office of David Fincher last March was a desire to start making his own programming from scratch.