Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Wednesday, January 2nd 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Roku is quietly a major combatant in the streaming wars. Tesla is slashing prices. How many

cameras can we fit on a smartphone? How much would it cost to convince you to quit Facebook?

And why Bandersnatch might just be the beginning of the

Choose Your Own Adventure Trend. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Odd little bit of executive musical chairs here. Netflix confirmed this morning that

it has hired Spencer Newman as its new chief financial officer. Newman was the CFO most recently a video game company

Activision Blizzard. Now here's where it gets funny. Activision Blizzard apparently fired Newman just this past Monday saying

Newman was fired for cause but for reasons not related to the company's

financial performance.

So that's a bit odd, firing someone because they're jumping ship to another job.

Recode is reporting that Activision Blizzard is pissed that Newman was poached while he was still under contract

at Activision Blizzard. Poaching is something apparently that Netflix has been known to do in the past. In fact, Netflix has been sued

over that very practice by both 21st century Fox and Viacom.

At his new position at Netflix, Newman replaces David Wells, who held the

CFO role at Netflix for 14 years. And obviously the CFO role is super

important at a company like Netflix that is trying to balance the cash flow

and billions of dollars of debt that it has taken on in order to finance the 12 to

13 billion dollars it is plowing each and every year into the development of exclusive content.

Goldman Sachs projects Netflix could spend as much as $22.5 billion on content production

per year by 2022. Note that this year, 2018, Netflix will probably only do a

little under 12 billion in revenue. So there is some juggling for a CFO to do there.

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