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Built to win: On board sailing yacht Comanche with Jim Clark

Software mogul Jim Clark wants yacht racing line honours. But does his new radical supermaxi sailing yacht Comanche have what it takes to go up against the best? Marilyn Mower finds out...

Comanche is a superyacht that belongs at the front . The image below shows her tearing along – ahead of Sydney Hobart legend Wild Oats XI , a feat that surprised everyone watching. It was an advantage the brand new 30.5 metre Hodgdon speed machine was able to maintain all the way to the Bass Strait during the 2014 Rolex Sydney Hobart. But when 30-knot winds failed to materialise, the more slender Wild Oats slipped past Comanche and into the lead, a position she held all the way to Hobart for victory and her eighth line honours . Second place is never going to be good enough for Comanche ’s owner, software mogul Jim Clark, but it was a minor miracle his yacht was there at all. She was only launched in September , so the famously brutal race represented a kind of masochistic shakedown for a yacht designed for one thing – to win.

Think Laser dinghy or 49er morphed with rocket ship and you’ll get some idea of the qualities of Comanche . At the yard, the racer was partially hidden behind two larger yachts with immaculate pedigrees, Meteor and Artemis , but Comanche ’s square bow and carbon sprit jutted out beyond them, drawing the eye away from the varnished teak of her neighbours to a lean sailing machine intended to go as fast as possible powered only by the wind.

Sailing legend Ken Read, who also happens to be the president of North Sails, managed the project from day one for Clark. Built at Hodgdon Yachts in Maine, Comanche had a hand-picked design and engineering team of international experts. It also had a construction schedule that raised eyebrows from the first day Clark talked to_ Boat International_ about the radical project during the America’s Cup Superyacht Regatta in San Francisco, September 2013.

Comanche launched one year later and after stepping the mast in Newport, Rhode Island, and just two weeks of sailing trials, including a 600-mile qualifying sail to Charleston, South Carolina, the boat was packed aboard a cargo ship and sent to Australia to compete in the Sydney Hobart, which starts each year on Boxing Day.

Clark and his Australian wife, Kristy Hinze-Clark, met the boat in Sydney for its short re-commissioning, Hinze-Clark racing aboard the boat in a harbour tune-up event on 9 December 2014, where the yacht placed second despite poor conditions. The tabloids had a field-day, captioning photos with, “The supermodel and the supermaxi” and “She’s got legs” in reference to Hinze-Clark’s modelling career. These days she is a businesswoman, director for the Australian Nature Conservancy and the mother of two girls.

In our exclusive interview with Clark, shortly before the race begins, we ask simply: “Why?”

“It’s a hobby,” he says, “I like the supermaxis, they are like Volvo 60s on steroids.” Clark appears to be done with the J Class – his 42m Hanuman is up for sale – and is not a huge fan of what he calls the “multihull phase” of the America’s Cup with its reduced crew numbers. “The old sailing community is in monohulls and it’s nice to keep the guys engaged – there are lots of good sailors in the supermaxis and the guys are a lot of fun.”

When Clark decided on a supermaxi sailing yacht, his plan was to go for line honours rather than wins on corrected time, and speed/distance records that could be set for yachts with human powered winches. “I don’t want any of that record stuff with an asterisk that says push-button winches,” Clark scoffs. With this target, Clark and Read embarked on a “design experiment” for a yacht that could sail 30 knots or more on a broad reach. The experiment pushed them to some extreme stats, which Clark says were run through CFD tests and simulations time and again.

“The 25-foot (7.6 metre) beam saves weight,” Read says. “By going wider, we can have less weight in the keel to keep the same righting moment, thus we will go faster.” This thinking is carried over into the keel itself, which is solid stainless steel and not welded. With a 6.7 metre draught, the keel can be two tonnes lighter than a comparable keel on a boat with half the draught. The governing factor was the depth of Rhode Island’s Newport harbour where the boat will be based when not chasing records. “With the keel canted to one side we can just get to our berth,” Read says.

The downside to beam is increased surface drag when sailing flat in light air. “Being considerably wider than other boats, we need to be heeling at 11 to 13 degrees to present the same beam,” says Clark. “In light air, we are at a disadvantage. When the wind cooperates, there is no question the boat is explosive.”

Hodgdon, the oldest boatbuilding business in the US, might seem like an odd choice if you don’t know that part of the yard’s annual output is high-tech military vessels and another part is carbon fibre limo tenders. In fact, Hodgdon is quite skilled at innovative construction techniques and when Tim Hodgdon agreed to build an oven to cook Comanche ’s carbon fibre hull, the deal was struck. The yard’s location also made it a good gathering stop for its far-flung team.

Some critics have said the superyacht is too extreme and too powerful to handle, but Clark just laughs at this and suggests we “ask Kenny”. “Yeah, it’s still an unknown but I’m not overly concerned,” he adds. “The hull is well baked and it’s been ultrasounded and X-rayed. There is a fuse in some of the loads so that nothing super bad can happen. But you can’t have a fuse in the rigging… Some of those termination points on the rig are kind of scary,” Clark says.

That rig, which rises 47 metres above the waterline, is more than 50 per cent of the length aft from the bow, a surprising configuration but based on model testing for best all-around performance with the foil and appendages.

Also innovative are the daggerboards outboard of the mast and slightly forward of it. By canting the keel and putting the lee side daggerboard fully down, the boat generates enough lift to keep the angle of leeway to a minimum or crab up to a mark.

The wide cockpit, full of grinder pedestals, hydraulic sail controls and sophisticated LED panels, gives the impression of a workhouse with modern instruments of torture. In a way, that is what they are. Grinders will work these six pedestals to turn the Harken winches. The only push-button winch on board is used to raise the mainsail. Once that sail is up the halyard is locked off and the winch isn’t used.

The winch pedestals are set slightly inboard and Read explains that when sailing on other 30 metre yachts he found that waves coming inboard at 30 knots or so would sweep the helmsman or winch grinders off their feet. “I have fetched up in the corner of the cockpit with pieces of steering wheel in my hands,” he says. Thus, by having 10 feet more beam than other 30 metre boats, there is space to put people and gear in a safer location with the added benefit of space for sails to be temporarily stored outboard of the pedestals on the high side.

Another interesting option is set right into the deck. Small black plugs cover screw holes that allow a dodger to cover both hatches. “On long distance races, we wanted the option to erect a dodger to keep the crew safe when on deck,” Read says. A slot in the cockpit sole just aft of the dodger allows the steering wheel to be moved forward, allowing the helmsman to stand behind the dodger for more protection.

Step below the superyacht's deck and you can see how much weight has been saved. The single-skin carbon fibre hull and foam cored framing is fully exposed. It is mostly black with white non-skid patches. The forward end of the vessel is totally open, to store sails. Directly under the cockpit on either side are the crew berths, which keep the crew centre of gravity aft, close to the position they would be in when on deck; thus the trim of the yacht is not affected by off-watch crew moving around.

Directly under the cockpit sole is the navigator’s area with barely space to sit up. “The only requirement that navigator Stan Honey had was that we made the navigator’s seat 1.8 metres long so that he didn’t have to fight the crew for a berth,” Read says.

Talking to Read one gets a sense he is completely at ease with a project of this magnitude and the commitment it will take to sail it to its potential. He has sailed around the world with several of his present crew and all had input into the new boat’s design. That counts for a lot of experience, in addition to the French design team of Guillaume Verdier and VPLP (Marc Van Peteghem and Vincent Lauriot-Prévost). “Without the designers we would probably have built a far more conservative boat,” Read says, “but with their help we have taken a leap forward.”

On deck, Comanche is also radically different. All halyards go to the masthead, where they are locked off in the same style that was pioneered in the 12 Metre Class. But on Comanche, tension is applied on the sail luff by hydraulic rams mounted on the foredeck and by pulling on the sail at the tack. “It reduces weight aloft,” Read explains, “and allows complete sail adjustment from the [safety of the] cockpit.”

Another advanced feature not often seen on smaller sailing craft is that the jib tracks run transversely instead of fore and aft. “The clews for each headsail are in the same place and we might use the same sail for going hard to windward and when easing off onto a reach. With this arrangement all we need do is ease the track car to leeward when coming onto a reach. This enables us to keep power on without altering the shape of the sail when changing course relative to the wind,” Read notes.

The deck-stepped carbon fibre mast has swept spreaders to eliminate the need for adjustable running backstays. In some ways this is a disadvantage in that the masthead cannot be moved fore and aft when sailing up and downwind, but it eliminates the need for checkstays and runners. The masthead position is controlled with backstays to each corner of the transom and lines that are led into the mast from the backstays to control the rig bend.

“I started this boat thinking I could race it,” says Clark wistfully. A degenerative condition in his ankles that makes standing uncomfortable has recently cropped up in his wrists as well. “They made a seat for me where I can drive it,” he says, but he opted out of the Sydney Hobart to make room for America’s Cup-winning skipper Jimmy Spithill to assist Read on the helm.

“I feel confident we’ll start getting line honours and next summer we’ll do the transatlantic race and see how that goes,” promises Clark. “I’m optimistic.”

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The fabulous life of billionaire Netscape founder Jim Clark

Source: The Almanac

Clark is a high school dropout from Plainview, Texas. After getting his GED, B.S. and ph.D., he went on to become a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. He founded visual effects company Silicon Graphics in 1982 and Netscape with Marc Andreessen in 1994.

Source: Forbes

With the success of Netscape and its incredibly popular Navigator browser, Clark and Andreessen became the first to capitalize on the World Wide Web. Clark's wealth grew after the company's extremely successful IPO in August 1995. He later became a billionaire thanks to timely investments in Apple and Facebook.

Source: Daily Mail

Clark has developed a number of expensive hobbies in the 20 years since Netscape's IPO. As a former Navy man, sailing is perhaps his number one passion. His latest watercraft is the new 100-foot monohull sailboat he named "Comanche." Though he hasn't shared how much the boat cost to build, he told the Australian Associated Press, "Boats of this type are sort of like building a Formula 1 car. They are expensive."

"Comanche" faced its first test in December, when Clark's crew competed in a 630-mile race from Sydney, Australia to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. Though the boat finished second in the race, Clark has big plans for the next few months. "I do think it will break quite a few records," he said to the Australian Associated Press.

Source: Wired , "The New New Thing"

Clark's first yacht was "Hyperion," which he customized to essentially be a computer on the water. The 157-foot J-class yacht, which has since been sold for an undisclosed amount, has 22 touchscreens and a total 40 miles of wiring.

Source: Wired , "The New New Thing"

Source: Forbes , Yachting

He also owns two other J-class yachts: 136-foot "Hanuman" and 295-foot "Athena." He listed them for a combined $113 million in 2012, though the listing price for "Athena" recently dropped from $95 million to $75 million.

Source: Palm Beach Illustrated

Clark has been married four times. He married current wife Kristy Hinze in an exclusive ceremony on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands in 2009. 35-year-old Hinze is an Australian model and TV personality who has appeared in Sports Illustrated and the Victoria's Secret catalogue. The couple has two young daughters together.

To celebrate Clark's 70th birthday last year, Hinze threw a three-day party at the luxurious Casa de Campo resort in the Dominican Republic. The soiree included a live performance from Jason Mraz.

Source: TIME

Clark's family has many connections to the tech community. Kathy Clark, his daughter from a previous marriage, is married to YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.

Source: The Cove

Clark is also well-known in some Hollywood circles. He was the executive producer of "The Cove," a documentary that exposes secret dolphin-hunting practices taking place in a hidden cove in Taiji, Japan. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. Here he poses with actor Ben Stiller at a special screening of "The Cove" in New York City.

Click here to see the townhouse »

Clark certainly has the real estate portfolio you'd expect from a billionaire. He recently paid $37 million for the Upper East Side townhouse that previously belonged to Listerine heiress Bunny Mellon.

Click here to see the townhouse »

Source: New York Post

And last month the New York Post revealed that the Netscape billionaire was the mystery buyer of Ron Howard's Armonk, N.Y. home, which he paid $37.5 million for in July 2014. The home has plenty of luxurious amenities, including a pool, sports facility, barn, greenhouse, and observatory.

Source: New York Times , Palm Beach Illustrated

In 1999, Clark paid $11 million for the opulent Il Palmetto estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Originally built in 1930 by noted architect Maurice Fatio, the mansion has been extensively renovated by Clark.

Source: Business Insider , Miami New Times

He also previously owned a 6,200-square-foot apartment at Miami's posh Setai Resort and Residences. He sold the penthouse for $21.5 million in 2011.

Source: Businessweek

Though he spends much of his time in Florida and New York and on the high seas, he previously made his home in the ritzy Silicon Valley town of Atherton. According to local legend, Clark once had to come up with a creative solution when he discovered that his neighbors could see directly into his home. He wanted to build a taller fence, but since that would be against Atherton zoning rules, he brought in enough dirt to build a hill in his backyard, raising the height of the fence.

Source: Sotheby\'s , Sotheby\'s

But homes aren't the only things this billionaires collects. A longtime wine connoisseur, he has a collection that's rumored to contain as many as 40,000 bottles, mostly from the Burgundy region of France. "I may have gotten overly enthusiastic about it," Clark told Sotheby's. "I have more wine than I can ever drink." In November 2014, he sold a selection of wines that fetched nearly $2.6 million at a Sotheby's auction.

Source: Sotheby's , Sotheby's

He also has an extensive art collection and is rumored to own pieces by such big names as Monet, Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

Source: Daily Mail , "The New New Thing"

He owns a Gulfstream jet, which he uses for both business and pleasure.

Source: Daily Mail , "The New New Thing"

Source: "The New New Thing"

According to a particularly memorable account from Michael Lewis' book "The New New Thing," Clark owned a McDonnell Douglas helicopter that he learned to fly himself. According to Lewis, Clark loved the helicopter so much he had considered buying the company that made it.

Source: "The New New Thing"

Source: Stanford News Service

Clark is a noted philanthropist as well. In 1999, he donated $150 million to fund a biomedical engineering center at Stanford. That donation remains one of the largest gifts the university has ever receieved. He also makes yearly donations to New York's Perlman Music Program.

The fabulous life of Notch, the hard-partying founder of Minecraft »

Now read about another wealthy tech founder..

The fabulous life of Notch, the hard-partying founder of Minecraft »

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Yachting World

• Digital Edition

Comanche, Jim Clark’s 100ft super maxi, smashes the transatlantic record

• Toby Hodges
• July 28, 2016

Comanche, the 100ft maxi racing yacht built to break records for Jim Clark and Kristy Hinze-Clark, has set an astonishingly fast new transatlantic record

In making the crossing in just  5 days, 14 hours, and 21 minutes Comanche has knocked over 24 hours off the prized record held by Mari-Cha IV for the last 13 years (subject to ratification). She sailed the 2,880 nautical miles at an AVERAGE speed of 21.44 knots!

Comanche, sailing without her regular skipper Ken Read due to America’s Cup World Series commentating commitments, was on standby for the record attempt since the end of June. She departed on the evening of the 22 July from New York – and crossed the Lizard finish line at 1145 today, 28 July.

Comanche was built precisely for this purpose: to break records. She set a blistering new 24-hour distance record for a monohull during the Transatlantic Race last year – 618 miles, at an average speed of 25.75 knots. But this Transat record is arguably the big one.

Comanche’s owner Jim Clark said: “The guys have once again powered our fantastic fat-bottomed girl to another title. I am so proud of the entire team and everyone involved in the entire program from top to bottom, the best in world, getting the best out of Comanche. Perfect harmony, and Kristy and I are over the moon.”

Speaking ahead of the departure, Comanche owner Jim Clark stated “Comanche has already proven her potential in major events all around the world and this looks to be a great opportunity to continue her legacy…The crew is made of some of the best sailors in the world who all have great pedigree. I have a good feeling about this attempt.”

Clark, the Silicon Valley magnate and founder of Netscape, has owned a number of high profile yachts that includes the groundbreaking 90m schooner Athena, and the J-Class Hanuman.

North Sails President Ken Read, the former Puma Volvo 70 skipper, has been helmsman on Hanuman and collaborator on Clark’s recent projects. “This latest record is testament to Jim and Kristy’s vision,” he said. “This is the culmination of six years of hard work and a huge team of experts offshore and onshore all working as one.”

For this crossing, Comanche’s rockstar crew, some of who sailed with Read on the Volvo Ocean Race, was led by Casey Smith, and included regulars Tony Mutter, Richard Clarke and navigator Stan Honey.

Honey picked the ideal weather window, ahead of a front, with flat seas and steady winds from a favourable angle. Following Comanche’s progress on the Yellowbrick tracker it was amazing to see how consistently she remained in the mid 20-knot bracket.

Stan Honey pours over his routeing at Commanche’s navstation

Crewmember and photographer Yann Riou described it as a weather pattern that only happens a couple of times a year. “In front of a low pressure system, moving at the same speed as we do… south-westerly wind, flat sea, all the way through – on the paper, this could not be any better.” In reality there was more thunderstorm activity than the crew had anticipated which enforced a couple of slower gybes.

In comparison to Mari-Cha’s historic ghost trail however (in white above), Comanche was able to sail a much more direct route. (It makes the 2003 record all the more impressive – see more details on MCIV below). The last 50 miles to the Lizard involved a comparatively slow hitch south of the Scilly Islands.

Comanche sailed with ‘only’ 17 crewmembers who used manual powered winches and hydraulics for this record attempt.

Antiguan Shannon Falcone, an America’s Cup winner with Team Oracle, prepares freeze-dried food during Comanche’s record crossing

Named after a native American tribe, Comanche is so beamy she was dubbed ‘the aircraft carrier’ – see our full tour of the yacht here

Designed by VPLP and Guillame Verdier, Comanche involved 15,000 hours design time plus 150,000 build-hours at Hodgdon Yachts in Maine ­­– in less than a year.

In comparison to Mari Cha IV, Comanche is 38ft shorter, but with only 5ft 5in less beam. Her 31 tonnes displacement is 25 tonnes lighter, yet the two yachts have similar keel draught. This all equates to Comanche boasting significant extra stability and righting moment – and consequently the ability to set vast sail area to help produce the extra power and speed she consistently shows. See what she’s like to sail onboard with our video here

It’s a long way down from the leeward rail – the formidable beam of Comanche

Stan Honey: “There are only about two weather windows a year where a monohull can make it all the way across the Atlantic in one system, and we found one of them. Beating this record by more than a day is above my expectations and I am delighted.”

Mari Cha IV

Mari Cha IV – by Thierry Martinez

Mari-Cha IV, the 42.32m ketch designed by Philippe Briand, was built by JMV Industries in 2003 with an aim to be the fastest monohull for offshore courses. She certainly achieved that when she set the Transatlantic Record on the year of her launch, making the crossing in 6 days, 17 hours, 52 minutes, at an average speed above 19 knots. Her best 24 hour run was 525 miles. She has since been completely and stunningly refitted by Royal Huisman and relaunched this year as Samurai.

The fabulous life of billionaire Netscape founder Jim Clark

Silicon Valley legend Jim Clark made it big when Netscape, the web browser company he founded with Marc Andreessen, went public in 1995.

Twenty years later, Clark is  worth an estimated $1.5 billion , thanks in part to large timely investments in Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.

Clark lives the life one would expect of a billionaire, with multiple mansions, racing yachts, private jets, and a model wife. 

Clark is a high-school dropout from Plainview, Texas. After getting his GED, B.S., and Ph.D., he went on to become a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. He founded the visual-effects company Silicon Graphics in 1982 and Netscape with Marc Andreessen in 1994.

Source: The Almanac

With the success of Netscape and its incredibly popular Navigator browser, Clark and Andreessen became the first to capitalize on the World Wide Web. Clark's wealth grew after the company's extremely successful IPO in August 1995. He later became a billionaire thanks to timely investments in Apple and Facebook.

Source: Forbes

Clark has developed numerous expensive hobbies in the 20 years since Netscape's IPO. As a former Navy man, Clark is perhaps most passionate about sailing. His latest watercraft is the new 100-foot monohull sailboat he named "Comanche." Though he hasn't shared how much the boat cost to build, he told the Australian Associated Press, "Boats of this type are sort of like building a Formula 1 car. They are expensive."

Source: Daily Mail

"Comanche" faced its first test in December, when Clark's crew competed in a 630-mile race from Sydney to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. Though the boat finished second in the race, Clark has big plans for the next few months. "I do think it will break quite a few records," he said to the Australian Associated Press.

Source:  Daily Mail  

Clark's first yacht was "Hyperion," which he customized to essentially be a computer on the water. The 157-foot J-class yacht, which has since been sold for an undisclosed amount, has 22 touch screens and 40 miles of wiring.

Source: Wired , "The New New Thing"

He also owns two other J-class yachts: 136-foot "Hanuman" and 295-foot "Athena." He listed them for a combined $113 million in 2012, though the listing price for "Athena" recently dropped to $75 million from $95 million.

Source: Forbes , Yachting

Clark has been married four times. He married current wife Kristy Hinze in an exclusive ceremony on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands in 2009. Hinze, 35, is an Australian model and TV personality who has appeared in Sports Illustrated and the Victoria's Secret catalogue. The couple has two young daughters together.

Source: Palm Beach Illustrated

To celebrate Clark's 70th birthday last year, Hinze threw a three-day party at the luxurious Casa de Campo resort in the Dominican Republic. The soiree included a live performance from Jason Mraz.

 Source: Daily Mail

Clark's family has many connections to the tech community. Kathy Clark, his daughter from a previous marriage, is married to YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.

  Source: Time

Clark is also well known in some Hollywood circles. He was the executive producer of "The Cove," a documentary that exposes secret dolphin-hunting practices taking place in a hidden cove in Taiji, Japan. The film won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2009. Here he poses with actor Ben Stiller at a special screening of "The Cove" in New York City.

Source: The Cove

Clark certainly has the real-estate portfolio one would expect from a billionaire. He recently paid $37 million for the Upper East Side townhouse that previously belonged to Listerine heiress Bunny Mellon.

Click here to see the townhouse »

And last month the New York Post revealed that the Netscape billionaire was the mystery buyer of Ron Howard's Armonk, New York, home, which he paid $37.5 million for in July. The home has plenty of luxurious amenities, including a pool, sports facility, barn, greenhouse, and observatory.

Source: New York Post

In 1999, Clark paid $11 million for the opulent Il Palmetto estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Originally built in 1930 by noted architect Maurice Fatio, the mansion has been extensively renovated by Clark.

Source: New York Times , Palm Beach Illustrated

Clark also previously owned a 6,200-square-foot apartment at Miami's posh Setai Resort and Residences. He sold the penthouse for $21.5 million in 2011.

Source: Business Insider , Miami New Times

Though Clark spends much of his time in Florida and New York and on the high seas, he previously made his home in the ritzy Silicon Valley town of Atherton. According to local legend, Clark once had to come up with a creative solution when he discovered that his neighbors could see directly into his home. He wanted to build a taller fence, but because that would be against Atherton zoning rules, he brought in enough dirt to build a hill in his backyard, raising the height of the fence.

Source: Businessweek

But homes aren't the only things this billionaire collects. A longtime wine connoisseur, Clark has a collection that is rumored to contain as many as 40,000 bottles, mostly from the Burgundy region of France. "I may have gotten overly enthusiastic about it," Clark told Sotheby's. "I have more wine than I can ever drink." In November he sold a selection of wines that fetched nearly $2.6 million at a Sotheby's auction.

Source: Sotheby's , Sotheby's

Clark also has an extensive art collection and is rumored to own pieces by such big names as Monet, Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

Source:  Forbes

Clark owns a Gulfstream jet, which he uses for both business and pleasure.

Source: Daily Mail ,  "The New New Thing"

According to a particularly memorable account from Michael Lewis' book "The New New Thing," Clark owned a McDonnell Douglas helicopter that he learned to fly. According to Lewis, Clark loved the helicopter so much he had considered buying the company that made it.

Source:  "The New New Thing"

Clark is a noted philanthropist as well. In 1999, he donated $150 million to fund a biomedical engineering center at Stanford. That donation remains one of the largest gifts the university has ever received. He also makes yearly donations to New York's Perlman Music Program.

Source: Stanford News Service

Now read about another wealthy tech founder.

The fabulous life of Notch, the hard-partying founder of Minecraft »

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KILGORE, Texas--( BUSINESS WIRE )--Yamaha U.S. Marine Business Unit announced today the appointment of John Clark to the position of General Manager, Skeeter Boats. In his new role, Clark will provide the overall direction for the company, guide business operations, promote company values, and develop and deliver high quality products to customers.

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Clark joined Skeeter in 2006 in the accounting department where he focused on improving budgeting and forecasting abilities to assist in management planning. Clark also served in various roles within the company including Quality Assurance Manager, and Director of Quality Assurance and Customer Relations where he expanded Skeeter’s customer service skill set and tools through new software solutions, warranty management systems and the launch of Integrity Services. Prior to his current role as General Manager, he held the position of Assistant General Manager and his responsibilities included managing daily operations, staff, facilities as well as Skeeter’s long-term vision.

Clark reports directly to Ben Speciale, President, Yamaha U.S. Marine Business Unit.

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Skeeter Products, Inc., a Yamaha boat company and leader of performance fishing boats, is proud to support America’s fishing consumer since 1948. Skeeter is the recipient of 22 consecutive NMMA ® C.S.I. Customer Satisfaction Index awards, and its boats are certified to meet strict U.S. Coast Guard, NMMA ® , and American Boat & Yacht ® Council standards.

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The Future of Streaming (According to the Moguls Figuring It Out)

Who will survive? Die? Thrive? And how? We talked to nearly a dozen top media executives and asked them to predict what lies ahead.

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By James B. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin

• Published June 22, 2024 Updated June 24, 2024

When the media titans Brian Roberts, John Malone and Barry Diller cast off in early February on Mr. Diller’s 156-foot, two-masted yacht, named Arriva, the waters off the coast of Jupiter, Fla., were placid.

The same could not be said for their sprawling entertainment businesses.

The three men meet occasionally to discuss the state of the industry, and lively disagreements have a been a staple of their discussions. But by the time they met on the yacht, they had all agreed that the money-losing status quo in the streaming business was unsustainable. The old cable model was a melting ice cube.

But what will take its place?

“There was peace in the valley for a period of time,” Mr. Malone mused in a rare recent interview, recalling the days before video-streaming upended the lucrative cable business. “Now, it’s quite chaotic.”

That is likely an understatement: The once-mighty Paramount, which owns the famed Paramount studio, CBS and a bevy of cable channels, recently replaced its chief executive and failed to sell itself after months of negotiations. Warner Bros. Discovery is frantically paying down its $43 billion in debt. Disney laid off thousands of workers and pushed out its chief executive as streaming losses mounted, and had to fend off a proxy contest from the activist investor Nelson Peltz.

The stocks of legacy media companies are a fraction of their former highs: Paramount is near $10 a share and Warner Bros. Discovery is hovering around $7, both down drastically from levels reached during the past year. Even Disney, at about $102, is down more than 16 percent from the price reached in March.

No wonder: Paramount, the media empire controlled by Shari Redstone, lost $1.6 billion on streaming last year. Comcast lost $2.7 billion on its Peacock streaming service. Disney lost about $2.6 billion on its services, which include Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. Warner Bros. Discovery says its Max streaming service eked out a profit last year, but only by including HBO sales through cable distributors.

At the same time, shares of the disrupters — Netflix and Amazon — are close to record highs.

Mr. Malone, Mr. Roberts, and Mr. Diller all came of age during the golden era of television. Mr. Malone, 83, clawed his way to a multibillion dollar fortune by building a cable empire, and is an influential shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery and a longtime mentor to its chief executive, David Zaslav. Mr. Roberts, 64, succeeded his father as chairman, chief executive and the most influential shareholder of Comcast. Since then, he has transformed Comcast into a broadband giant and, by acquiring NBCUniversal, into a media powerhouse. Mr. Diller, 82, is chairman of IAC, the digital media company, and a veteran TV and movie executive. His long and successful tenure in entertainment and media has earned him a position as one of the industry’s most sought-after senior statesman.

By comparison, the heads of the disrupters, Netflix and Amazon, are younger, brash newcomers, with little attachment to Hollywood’s golden age.

Ted Sarandos, 59, co-chief executive of Netflix, worked his way up through the now-defunct DVD industry before going straight to Netflix when the company was still renting DVDs by mail. Mike Hopkins, 55, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, was steeped in digital as chief executive of Hulu, the pioneering streaming service owned by Disney, Fox and NBCU, before joining Sony as head of its television unit in 2017. He came to Amazon in 2020 and reports to the company’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, 56, who has no professional background in entertainment.

Over the past five months, The New York Times interviewed those three older executives, and the two younger ones, as well as numerous other owners and senior executives of major media companies to assess the problems facing the industry and what the future landscape could look like.

Rarely do these executives speak so candidly, on the record, about the challenge in front of them. And the meetings on the yacht aside, rarely do executives in that stratosphere get together to discuss strategy. Not only are many of them fierce rivals — Mr. Roberts famously drove up the cost of Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets by bidding against Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger — but meetings among direct competitors might attract unwelcome attention from antitrust regulators.

In our conversations, there were still plenty of disagreements, but some consistent themes emerged as well — all with major implications for investors, advertisers and audiences.

The Magic Subscriber Number

Streaming has long been hailed as a promising business, because companies like Netflix can add additional subscribers at little extra cost. The more paying subscribers a service has, the more the company’s costs can be spread out over a large base, lowering the cost per subscriber.

But those subscribers want lots of options, and the costs of making enough programming can be enormous. As a result, a streaming service’s profitability depends in large part on how many paying subscribers are needed before those TV shows and movies become cost-effective.

There was a time when industry executives hoped that number might be as low as 100 million.

But now the consensus among many of the executives interviewed is that the number is at least 200 million, and possibly more.

“If you’re going to be a full entertainment service with live sports and tent-pole blockbusters today, 200 million is a number that can give you the scale with the hope for growth over time,” Mr. Hopkins of Amazon said.

Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive until 2022, also agreed that 200 million was the number that meant “you’re big enough to compete.”

Netflix has reached that, and then some, with about 270 million paying subscribers. Moreover, those subscribers pay an industry-leading average of more than $11 per month.

Netflix is highly profitable, with operating margins of 28 percent. In the first quarter of 2024, Netflix reported revenue of $9.4 billion, and $2.3 billion in net income. No one else comes close.

Disney and Amazon are the only other streaming services with more than 200 million subscribers. While Amazon doesn’t disclose the number of its Prime Video subscribers, Mr. Hopkins said the number was well above 200 million and growing. Disney+ and Hulu, which is also owned by Disney, have just over 200 million subscribers combined.

In May, Disney said its entertainment streaming services eked out a small profit. Amazon doesn’t disclose profit margins or losses, and streaming is embedded in a package of Prime services. But Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, has said that Prime Video will be “a large and profitable business” on its own.

$50 Million an Episode, Over and Over

The costs of attracting — and keeping — those millions of customers is no cheap feat.

Overall, Netflix has said it will spend about $17 billion this year on programming, about what it did before last year’s Hollywood strikes depressed production. That level of spending has produced a golden age for A-list writers and actors, many of whom are flocking to the company. A new series, “3 Body Problem,” debuted a few months ago on Netflix at a reported cost of about $20 million per episode. It spent more than $200 million on “The Gray Man,” starring Ryan Gosling.

“It’s a tall order to entertain the world,” Mr. Sarandos of Netflix said. “You have to do it with regularity and dependably.”

For Netflix, $17 billion represents only about half of its total revenue. But almost no competitor can match that spending level, the executives said, except for maybe Amazon. Amazon spent $300 million for six episodes of the spy thriller “Citadel,” or $50 million per episode — one of several major bets it has made.

Not all of those pay off. But when they do, the impact can be huge, like wildcatters when they hit a gusher. Amazon paid $153 million for one season of “Fallout,” a series based on the popular post apocalyptic video game. In April, “Fallout” was the top streaming title, racking up over seven billion viewing minutes, according to Amazon.

Mr. Sarandos held out the company’s recent “Baby Reindeer” series as a prime example of why companies have to keep spending: because viewers expect a nearly endless supply of options, or they will hit the unsubscribe button.

“When you finish ‘Baby Reindeer,’ there’s something else just as good,” he said. “I worry that this notion of these other services, that they have nothing to watch problem, and that once you do a show and then you drag it out over 10 weeks or doing one episode at a time, you still end up in the same place, which is there’s nothing to watch after it.”

The data appear to bear him out. When cable TV was in its heyday, 1.5 to 2 percent of subscribers churned monthly, abandoning or suspending their service. The average churn across all streaming services is more than double that, according to data from analytics firm Antenna, with the churn rate of some smaller streaming services, like Paramount+, as high as 7 percent. Only Netflix has a churn rate below 4 percent.

Some executives who oversee rivals to Netflix and Amazon say their companies can reduce spending by only producing hits. But that’s been the holy grail ever since Hollywood was created, and no one has succeeded over the long term. Even Disney’s Marvel franchise has stumbled at the box office lately.

That means streaming services need the resources to invest in a wide variety of projects, knowing there will be some, even many, relative failures for every hit. (“Citadel” is a case in point — it never made Nielsen’s top 10 streaming shows.)

“It’s still more art than science,” Mr. Sarandos said.

Adding to the cost pressure, the executives said, is the soaring cost of sports programming. Even in the bygone era of traditional television, the broad appeal of sports was obvious. The big networks paid billions for must-see events like the Super Bowl and the N.B.A. Finals and much of what was left over went to Disney and Hearst-owned ESPN, one of the most lucrative cable franchises ever created.

But that was before streaming and the arrival of the deep-pocketed tech giants. Amazon now offers football games from the National Football League, NASCAR races, the W.N.B.A. with its newly minted star Caitlin Clark, the National Hockey League in Canada and Champions League soccer in Germany, Italy and Britain.

Apple TV+ also features Major League Baseball, as well as Major League Soccer.

Alphabet’s YouTube offers N.F.L. Sunday Ticket, a lineup of out-of-market football games. Even Netflix, which long shunned live sports, announced in May that it would stream N.F.L. games on Christmas Day for the next three years.

The appeal of live sports is both unique and twofold: They attract new streaming subscribers and reduce churn since viewers want to watch sports live. It is also a big draw for advertisers as streaming services look to grow their ad businesses.

It may not be an overstatement, the executives said, to say that a streaming service can’t survive as a stand-alone business without sports.

Comcast’s Peacock scored a huge success in January with its exclusive N.F.L. playoff game between Kansas City and Miami. The game was the biggest livestreaming event ever, with about 32 million viewers . (Comcast’s NBC network pays $2 billion annually for a package of N.F.L. broadcast rights.)

“Sports seems like the simplest and most interesting thing,” Mr. Malone said.

The result is bidding wars unlike anything experienced before in the media industry, currently on display during the protracted negotiations for a new 10-year N.B.A. rights contract. The rights, which are now shared by ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Turner cable network, are being chased by NBC and Amazon, as well as ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery.

While ESPN, Amazon and NBC are finalizing deals for their packages, Warner Bros. Discovery is seen at risk of being outbid, though executives at Warner Bros. believe they have the legal rights to match Amazon’s bid. Many in the industry expect that the final deal will be more than triple the last N.B.A. contract.Which raises questions that executives didn’t have a clear answers to:

As the cost of rights soars, will the streaming services actually make money on them? Or will marquee sports events function as loss leaders, drawing viewers to other fare, as they once did for the old broadcast networks?

Advertising to the Rescue?

Wall Street analysts and investors in streaming once fixated entirely on the number of subscribers, ignoring losses, in the belief that prices would someday rise substantially. That changed with dizzying speed in early 2022, when Netflix announced it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade.

It’s now clear that price increases won’t be the answer to streaming profitability for most services, the executives said. Netflix is the industry price leader and has pushed its monthly fee in the United States to $15.49 a month without ads. Few believe the monthly fee can get much above $20 a month for the foreseeable future.

After years of championing an ad-free consumer experience, Netflix introduced an ad-supported subscription in 2022 at a steep discount of $6.99 a month. Disney+, Hulu, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, Peacock and Paramount+ all offer cheaper, ad-supported subscriptions.

“It’s a nice way to get price-sensitive consumers,” said Mr. Chapek, who introduced an ad-supported tier while running Disney. “Heavy users will still come and pay the higher monthly fee.”

Mr. Chapek acknowledged that advertisers covet — and will pay more for — mass audiences. As a result, the streaming services have a strong incentive to produce programs with broad appeal instead of more niche content, including some of the kind that generates critical acclaim.

Netflix shocked many in the industry last year when for the first time it revealed its most-watched programs over the prior six months. At the top were “The Night Agent,” an action-thriller, and “Ginny and Georgia,” a comedy-drama about a mother and daughter trying to forge a new life. Both shows were snubbed by Emmy voters, with a lone nomination for a song from “Ginny and Georgia.” (“Squid Game,” developed in Korea, is Netflix’s most-watched program ever.)

Advertisers, the executives say, also like that streaming services can target ads to specific users and demographics.

The results have been explosive. Netflix is on pace to generate roughly $1 billion in advertising revenue this year, according to estimates from eMarketer, and Disney has already generated $1.7 billion this fiscal year.

That kind of success suggests that streaming ads are here to stay. And some of the executives said streaming services predicted that companies would raise prices aggressively on ad-free tiers in an effort to drive consumers to ad-supported versions.

Who Will Survive?

How many streaming services will consumers support? That was one of the great mysteries of the nascent streaming world, and the answer is coming into focus: not very many.

“Can your current business be a successful player and have long-term wealth generation, or are you going to be roadkill?” Mr. Malone mused. “I think all the small players will have to shrink down or go away.”

A recent Deloitte study found that American households paid an average of $61 a month for four streaming services, but that many didn’t think the expense was worth it.

That suggests the once-unthinkable possibility, many of the executives said, that there will be only three or four streaming survivors: Netflix and Amazon, almost certainly. Probably some combination of Disney and Hulu. Apple remains a niche participant, but appears to be feeling its way into a long-term, albeit money-losing, presence, which it can afford to do. That leaves big question marks over Peacock, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, and Paramount+.

Peacock, with just 34 million subscribers, isn’t trying to be another Netflix. By focusing on North America, and not trying to be all things to all customers, Mr. Roberts believes Peacock can achieve success on its own terms.

Peacock also has the advantage to being embedded in the much larger Comcast, with its steady cash flow.

“We all have a different calculus to define success in streaming,” Mr. Roberts said. “As online viewing increases and internet usage skyrockets, I believe we have a special set of assets that put us in position to continue to monetize and more importantly innovate as this transition happens.”

The Bundling Conundrum

After years of go-it-alone strategies, “bundling” — offering consumers a package of streaming services for a single fee — has become the latest strategy for reaching profitability among the smaller services.

In May, Comcast announced it would offer its broadband customers a bundle of Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ for $15 a month. Disney has bundled Disney+ and Hulu, with Max to be added this summer at an as-yet undisclosed price. Venu, a new sports streaming joint venture from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, is planning its release this fall.

However innovative the arrangements, the executives said, the economics of bundling are complicated. Participants need to attract consumers who wouldn’t already subscribe to their individual channels at full price. They must also puzzle through how revenue should be divided among bundling participants of unequal stature.

It’s also unclear that bundling will achieve the scale that participants may be hoping for. Many customers already subscribe to one or more of the bundle options. So it’s not a matter of simply adding up subscribers. And if multiple subscriptions are offered at a discount to attract customers, the average revenue per user declines.

Jason Kilar, the founding Hulu chief executive and former chief executive of WarnerMedia, has called for an even more radical approach than bundling: a new company that would license movies and TV shows from the major studios and pay back close to 70 percent of the revenue to those studios.

“I’ll call it the ‘Spotify for Hollywood’ path, where a large number of suppliers and studios contribute to a singular experience that delights fans,” Mr. Kilar said. “The studios would be the ones that would be taking the majority of the economic returns from such a structure.”

Media companies have started to embrace licensing deals after a period of avoiding them. During AT&T’s ill-fated ownership of WarnerMedia, the company insisted that its content be shown exclusively on its Max streaming service. Disney pulled back on licensing deals when it started Disney+ in an effort to force fans to subscribe. Before he returned to Disney, in 2022, Mr. Iger compared licensing the company’s franchises to selling nuclear weapons to “third-world countries.”

But AT&T subsequently abandoned streaming, merging WarnerMedia into Discovery, and Mr. Iger has since embraced the nuclear option. Both Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are again licensing their content to rivals Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Sony Goes Another Way

One company embodies the embrace of the licensing strategy: Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sony, the studio behind “Spider Man” and “Men in Black,” rejected general entertainment streaming services years ago. Tony Vinciquerra, the company’s chief executive, instead adopted what he has called an “arms dealer” strategy, selling movies and TV shows to companies like Disney and Netflix.

The exception is that Sony operates a niche streamer, Crunchyroll, that focuses on anime, Japanese-style hand-drawn animation. Its success suggests that a small (more than 14 million subscribers worldwide) and low-cost operation can be profitable without going up against Netflix.

Mr. Vinciquerra pointed out that Sony’s rivals running big streaming businesses were losing money on those services while at the same time seeing their traditional cable networks in decline.

“I’m still scratching my head wondering what these companies will do here,” Mr. Vinciquerra said, referring to the declining cable networks. “They all have these massive albatrosses around their neck that they can’t do anything about right now.”

So far, Sony’s strategy appears to be working. Sony’s Pictures Entertainment generated almost $11 billion of revenue in 2023, a 2 percent increase from the same period a year earlier, according to filings. In 2021, Sony struck deals to license movies to both Netflix and Disney worth an estimated $3 billion annually. Profits were roughly $1.2 billion, 10 percent lower than the previous year because of the actors’ and writers’ strikes.

Unlike Paramount or Disney, Sony Pictures is part of a sprawling global consumer electronics conglomerate. Sony recently teamed up with the private-equity giant Apollo Global Management to make a $26 billion bid for Paramount. But Sony is interested only in Paramount’s film library and characters like SpongeBob SquarePants and has contemplated selling the rest of it — including the Paramount+ streaming service. But Sony has since backed away from its offer.

That’s just the latest indication that expectations for merger deals have faded. Paramount is still looking for a buyer after months of tortured negotiations and is revamping its streaming strategy in the meantime. So far as is known, no one is pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery, free since April, to buy or be sold under the terms of its separation from AT&T. Potential buyers like Comcast are understandably wary of their decaying revenue bases in cable. And Disney is shackled with its own cable issues and is loaded with debt from buying 21st Century Fox.

The End of a Golden Age

All of these changes have had a big upside for viewers.

“It’s been a golden age, even with prices rising,” Mr. Chapek said. “You get entire libraries built over decades plus all this new content, and you watch at your leisure.”

But a change is underway, he said: “Now we just have to make it viable for shareholders.”

That will necessarily mean higher prices for customers, more advertising, and less — and less expensive — content. That’s already happening. On average, consumers spend 41 percent more on streaming than they did a year ago, according to the recent Deloitte study, while satisfaction has declined. While some of that may be because of the limited new content offered last year during the Hollywood strikes, Disney and pretty much everyone except Netflix and Amazon have vowed to reduce spending and produce less new content.

The rise of advertising may be a windfall for streaming services, but the quest for the mass audiences that advertisers seek risks turning the streaming landscape into a sea of police procedurals and hospital dramas punctuated by major sports events and blockbuster concerts. Ironically, that’s pretty much the old model once dominated by the four ad-supported broadcast networks.

Netflix and Amazon executives acknowledge the risks to high-quality programming but promise that won’t happen on their watch. They contend they have enough scale that their prestige programs can be profitable and reach a vast audience — even if it’s a small percentage of their overall subscriber base.

“We can do prestige TV at scale,” Mr. Sarandos said. “But we don’t only do prestige,” he added, citing popular shows like “Night Agent.”

Mr. Hopkins of Amazon said “procedurals and other tried and true formats do well for us, but we also need big swings that have customers saying ‘Wow, I can’t believe that just happened’ and will have people telling their friends.”

“We want rabid fans,” he said.

Bryan Lourd, chief executive and co-chairman of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, said media executives needed to put aside financial engineering and remember that creativity — and entertaining customers — was the only way to win in the long run.

“The task at hand is to keep the customer at the front of your brain,” Mr. Lourd said. “When people stop doing that is when things start to go wrong.”

And Yet, Continued Optimism

On Mr. Diller’s yacht that day in February, Mr. Malone’s advice to Mr. Roberts was simple: In light of the challenges facing the industry, Comcast should continue its current strategy of investing in other areas like theme parks.

“Now, are they large enough to be the biggest?” said Mr. Diller, speaking generally about streaming services besides Netflix. “No, that game was lost some years ago. Netflix commands not all the territory, but they command the leading territory right now. They essentially are in a position of dictating policy.”

But Mr. Diller, like many of the other executives interviewed for this article, sees a path forward for streaming companies once they stop trying to be Netflix. (That’s the strategy already adopted by Mr. Roberts of Comcast.)

The focus, according to Mr. Diller, needs to be on what “has been true since the beginning of time.”

The business, he said, “is based on hit programming, making a program, a movie, a something that people want to see.”

James B. Stewart has been a reporter and business columnist for The Times since 2011, focusing on the human drama of the business world and the struggle for corporate power. More about James B. Stewart

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

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