It just goes to show that a lot of these guys who have been involved with running the show have no idea what they're talking about.
He's apparently not a student of the film/tv/video rental industry because his analogy is for shit.
It's also worth noting he was at PlayStation for all of 4 and a half years.
Blockbuster was never analogous to HBO. Two completely different businesses.
Even HBO was not analogous to Netflix until pretty recently when a few key changes happened
- HBO got into streaming and separated itself from cable packages, initially with HBO Go (2010)
- Netflix began creating original content (2013)
What's important to know about these dates? Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, before either of the above things even became established.
You might as well compare McDonalds and John Deere...
Microsoft is attempting to become Netflix, but they're largely failing to do so. They have fewer subscribers than Sony does with PS+. And I can see why he would say Nintendo was Disney because of the IP, but this is also a poor analogy. He thinks Sony is HBO because HBO is known for its premium content, but HBO is not the market leader in streaming.
The only thing Microsoft has in common with Netflix compared to Netflix's competitors is its size after buying ABK and Bethesda, but do you know what Netflix doesn't do? It doesn't put its shows on other networks/streaming services. Why? Because Netflix didn't capsize their business by taking on more operating costs than they could afford to sustain with their business model.
If Netflix went out and bought Paramount and Universal, they'd have to immediately jack up their prices or they'd have to start putting their content elsewhere, because the subscribers of Netflix alone wouldn't justify the cost of the entire enterprise. Everyone currently consuming Paramount and Universal content wouldn't immediately subscribe to Netflix and there would also already be overlap, so you're spending more money on the same customers.
It's such a surface level comparison that it's actually embarrassing that someone like him would say it.
Finally, the reason why this is such a poor thing to compare is that software is inherently different than video, that wasn't always true. Before home video and cable, the only way to see movies was in the theater and specific movie studios owned the theaters and the movies you could see. TV was technology that changed that just like how streaming could change that in video games.
Netflix works on every tv, laptop, cell phone e.t.c. The platform doesn't respect hardware exclusivity, but the platform itself is exclusivity. Microsoft is in a chicken and the egg situation where no one is going to follow them by putting their games exclusively on GamePass and certainly not exclusively on Xbox anymore. The only way for Microsoft to bend the industry towards GamePass is to buy all the publishers.
