Sundar Pichai said he was still wondering about certain decisions made by Google – one of them being that the company has never acquired Netflix.
The CEO of Google granted a large-scale interview on the “Podcast All-in”, which published on Friday. At the end of the conference, host David Friedberg, a former Googler himself, asked Pichai about his proud moments – and the biggest regret.
“We debated Netflix at some point, super intensely inside,” said Pichai.
Pichai, who has worked in the company since 2004 and became CEO about 10 years ago, said that acquisitions like Netflix were “debated” and that the company “was close” to the agreement. He then specified that the decision against an acquisition was however not a “regret”.
In 2014, the technological research company based in the United Kingdom CCS Insight predicted that Google would acquire Netflix in 2015, but there were no general reports on acquisition discussions.
Since kicking up its global expansion in 2016, Netflix has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry and has reached more than 300 million subscribers. While Google has entered the television space with its Smart TV platform, Google TV, and its live streaming service on the Internet, YouTube TV, it has never completely burst into the traditional streaming space like Netflix.
Google has a long history of eating competition thanks to high -level acquisitions, but Netflix is one of the biggest names that the technology giant has revealed that it had planned to buy. Over the years, Google has successfully acquired a certain number of companies that have become at the heart of its product range like Waze, Wiz, Nest, Fitbit, Android Inc. and YouTube.
Pichai added in the interview that he was proud of the fact that Google has pushed the limits of technology. He said that there were not many companies that earn Nobel prizes and conducting research and development that lead to business creation.
In 2024, the CEO of Google Deepmind Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the Development of Alphafold, an AI system which predicts the 3D structure of proteins. The technology giant also has departments like Google Research, which has invested in a wide range of subjects and has transformed its results into real products such as forest fire detection technology and flood forecasting.
“I think we have done an extraordinary job to that, and we aspire to do so,” said Pichai in the podcast, adding that it is a unique aspect of Google.
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