Farhad’s Week in Tech: Netflix Gets a Star, and Google’s Conflicted Ad Blocker<br />The cord, the familiar cable bundle of yore, required paying a whole lot for a bunch of bad TV you’d never<br />watch, just so you could have very convenient access to the handful of shows you sometimes did watch.<br />An absolutely gigantic one, to be exact — roughly $300 million over five years, besting<br />even the $100 million deal that Netflix made with Shonda Rhimes last year.<br />But the YouTube expansion shows that cutting the cord keeps getting easier,<br />and the Netflix deal shows how non-cable services keep getting more attractive.<br />Then along came DVDs and the internet, and now you could unbundle — you’d pay a<br />lot less for just the things you really wanted to see, provided you were O. K.<br />hazarding some minor inconveniences.<br />But as Netflix keeps driving trucks of money to TV’s top producers — it plans to spend $8 billion on new content this year — the script has flipped.
