'"The goal," says Sarandos, "is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." '

That was Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix in 2013, so they 'realized' at least a decade ago.

They've really pivoted amazingly from dvds to streaming other folks content to creating their own in the last 20ish years.

Yeah, a lot of people seem to be defaulting to "Netflix didn't see this obvious thing" rather than "competing with Disney is ridiculously hard even if you have the smartest executives on the planet".

Investing in their own content would not support them being a technology company.