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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

"The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."

- Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer

Which has always seemed like a _gross_ misunderstanding of what people enjoyed about Netflix from the very beginning. If Netflix launched with Orange is the New Black, Luke Cage, and Daredevil, would they have even a tiny fraction of the user base they currently have?

My Netflix hours per month has dropped to well under 10 hours per month these days. There's just not much content on there that interests me. I see more use out of Amazon because, even though it's comparatively expensive at ~$5 per rental, when I feel like sitting down and watching a movie, it's nice to actually have a catalog to browse that's not 90% garbage.

I think they've figured out that the people who subscribe and stay subscribed are people that binge watch tv shows, not people who sign on every once in awhile to watch movies. I don't think they're interested in competing with the PPV movie market.

In terms of jumping back to Netflix at the "beginning" the streaming library was incredibly shallow. Netflix during the DVD days was another matter. Yet Amazon has been pushing video searches which are available for stream back to DVD/Bluray results ; has anyone else noticed this? I haven't been able to figure it out.

"If Netflix launched with Orange is the New Black, Luke Cage, and Daredevil, would they have even a tiny fraction of the user base they currently have?"

I think there's fairly strong evidence that the answer would be "yes" to that question. More people have signed up for Netflix since the release of House of Cards in Feb 2013 than signed up before then. IIRC that it's right around that time that the Netflix movie catalog really started to shrink, and also the time when Netflix started to have attractive original content.

    I think there's fairly strong evidence that the answer would be "yes" to that question.

I doubt that. Netflix didn't start with original content. They had to spend many years acquiring their substantial member-base before they started experimenting with the original content. If the company literally launched with House of Cards with no existing members to speak of, it would have been much tougher for them to convince people to pay them money and watch their as yet unproven original content.

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