‘We came close…’ says Sundar Pichai as he reveals Google nearly bought Netflix

Netflix

Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged that the tech giant once seriously considered acquiring Netflix — but ultimately walked away.

Speaking on the All-In Podcast, Pichai opened up about some of the company’s biggest internal debates during his tenure. One that stood out: a near-miss acquisition of Netflix, long before it became the global streaming powerhouse it is today. “We debated Netflix at some point, super intensely inside,” Pichai told the hosts, including former Googler David Friedberg. “We came close.”

Though he stopped short of calling it a full-blown regret, Pichai did suggest it’s a decision that continues to linger in his mind — especially as Netflix now commands more than 300 million subscribers worldwide and has become synonymous with streaming.

Google, for its part, never fully captured the subscription video market in the same way. While it runs YouTube TV and offers Google TV as a smart TV interface, it hasn’t made a Netflix-style play in original content or global entertainment dominance.

Interestingly, in 2014, UK-based CCS Insight had predicted a potential Google-Netflix deal for 2015, though no concrete evidence of advanced talks ever surfaced publicly.

Over the years, Google has grown through a string of successful acquisitions — YouTube, Android, Nest, Fitbit, and Waze, to name a few. But Netflix, it turns out, was the big one that got away.