The Morning Download: Live on Netflix

What's up: Apple partners with Google on AI; Google-parent Alphabet becomes newest $4 trillion company; Meta's strategic AI hire; AI gets healthy.

Good morning. Ask any CIO and they’ll tell you that even in this era of “vibe coding” and AI agents, technology implementations are still hard.

They’re not alone.

Apple helped define the modern expectation of seamless technology, yet it has struggled to integrate AI at scale. On Tuesday the company announced that it would rely on AI models from Google, which itself only recently seems to have found its AI footing. More on that below.

The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette tells a similar story of complexity at another tech giant, Netflix, which has been taking on live TV, a format nearly a century old, but still brutally unforgiving in the streaming age.

Since March 2023, Netflix has aired more than 200 live events. Many have gone smoothly. Others haven’t, including a November 2024 Jake Paul–Mike Tyson bout plagued by streaming failures.

“We’re still learning a lot,” Netflix Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone told Isabelle.

Sticking to the original programming. Even as Netflix cements its status as an entertainment powerhouse, including a recent bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the company remains, at its core, a technology company.

Isabelle reports on how getting live right—where it either works or it doesn’t—required more than better infrastructure. It required a culture that rewarded stress-testing ideas, surfacing problems early, and learning quickly from mistakes.

“I didn’t quite grasp the complexity,” said Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s vice president for nonfiction series and sports, who began pushing for live programming after joining the company in 2016. “It quickly became apparent just how much of a lift that was from both a resource and an expertise and execution standpoint.”

Read on to see how what Riegg calls Netflix's culture of 'candor and feedback' helped propel its efforts.

Riegg sat down with the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette to talk about how he navigated Netflix’s culture of “candor and feedback,” and ultimately turned live into one of the buzziest parts of Netflix’s content portfolio.

WSJLI: Did you have a sense of how challenging this effort would be when you started out?

Riegg: I didn't at first, and that was more my naivete over being at a streaming service versus a linear network where I worked previously. So I didn't quite grasp or comprehend the complexity. It was sort of building a whole other foundation that we were then attaching onto the streaming foundation.

WSJLI: How was your working relationship with the Product & Tech team throughout the process?

Riegg: I like to consider myself one of the content execs that is more proficient in speaking tech or engineering with our P&T teams. Definitely, we have a culture of candor and feedback here and I would sometimes be the sole content exec in these big P&T meetings. And I got a lot of edgy questions and things that they wanted to challenge me on.

WSJLI: What were you most challenged on?

Riegg: They would ask ‘why?’ a lot. One thing that had gone around that I addressed head on with everybody is they said, ‘this is requiring a lot of manpower and resources for something that at best is probably 1% of our output.’

WSJLI: How did you respond to that and get them on board?

Riegg: And I said, look, that's fair. I go, ‘but if we do our jobs correctly, that 1% can be bigger or more impactful than the 99%’. That was the thesis. But, when it comes to the creative, you can never have 100% certainty. We got off to a good start with the Chris Rock special, but I'd say the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight was the real tipping point where I think the people that were unsure of the initiatives suddenly realized the impact live programming could have.

Riding the success of its Gemini 3 model and a just-announced deal with Apple, Google parent Alphabet’s value topped $4 trillion Monday, WSJ reports. Four tech companies have traded at market capitalizations of $4 trillion, and now only Nvidia is still above that mark.

A recap. Google pulled ahead in the race to develop AI with the recent launch of its Gemini 3 model, which earned praise for its speed, intelligence and creative capabilities. Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly users, up from 450 million last summer.

Also Monday, Apple announced that it will lean on the internet search giant for its AI foundational models, CNBC reports. “These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year,” Apple said.

With the deal it looks like the sluggish effort to upgrade the first-mover assistant for the post-ChatGPT era might become a reality, raising the question of what happens with OpenAI. The startup’s chatbot is integrated with Siri to tackle more complex questions.

The announcement should not come as a complete surprise. The two companies have been longtime partners, with Google providing the default search engine for Apple’s Safari web browser for years.