Neil Hunt on Netflix and the Story of Netflix Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Neil Hunt on Netflix and the Story of Netflix Streaming

internethistorypodcast.com

140 pointsjedberg24 comments

Somewhat unrelated, but I've been listening to older episodes of the Internet History Podcast for the last few weeks. It's quite good! My favorite episode so far is the one about Bill von Meister, who started the company that formed the basis for AOL: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/04/chapter-3-supp.... Von Meister was a very clever entrepreneur, and the podcast talked about some of his pre-AOL ideas, like offering free long distance calls at restaurants (in modern parlance, the free calls were basically the acquisition cost of getting a restaurant diner). Both that specific episode and the entire podcast series in general are a fun listen -- especially if you're in your 30s like I am.

Early 30's as well. After picking and choosing random episodes I went back to the beginning to listen chronologically. Agree wholeheartedly about von Meister.

Something I've been thinking about lately stems from Chapter 2 about Microsoft and the Internet: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/podcasts-by-chapter/

It's the distinction between terms like "Information Superhighway", which was to be TV enabled Internet controlled by the telecoms and the World Wide Web, which is the browser-based world that Netscape brought us controlled by no company. I didn't have this historical perspective before the podcast.

Now I'm wondering, With the FCC's moves to eliminate title II net neutrality, what will the future Internet look like? If the Internet is a pendulum with "Information Superhighway" on one end and "World Wide Web" on the other, my gut feel is that removing net neutrality will swing things in the direction of the "Information Superhighway" where big co's have more power over what the Internet is.

This wasn't the case. Maybe in his head it was, but Information Superhighway and Internet were synonyms for the same thing. I lived through this period and most used them interchangeably. Multimedia was a big thing during this time, so people were excited about the tech advances in media, but Information Super highway was never used to describe web TV.

There was also Internet versus internet. Today, we call one of these a LAN.

Time to queue up the old AT&T commercials? It's amazing how much they went from a position of dominance to...today.

Thank you for the recommendation. I've been looking for some good technical podcasts. Would there be any others that you would recommend?

I've only listened to a few episodes, but Software Engineering Daily seems to be pretty good. (https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/)

Thank you!

I still think the breakup from Netflix to Netflix+Qwikster (or whatever was the name) would be the right move back then.

Maybe it was too soon and poorly communicated, but they were right 6 years ago that streaming was the future and DVD lending was the legacy product.

Anyway they survived that PR blunder, luckily.

edit: and it seems they separated the DVD subscription anyway, to DVD.com. Well that makes sense.

The DVD subscription service is still far better than the streaming service if you actually want to watch recent or not-so recent Hollywood content. The streaming service has lost most of its mainstream catalog, in favor of original content.

The physical disc catalog seems to be culled as well by not replacing lost/broken discs. My saved queue seldom gets any smaller.

People ask me why I still get discs, and the answer is "guaranteed bandwidth". I get no blockiness or drop-outs when watching. :)

I don't get blockiness or drop-outs either via streaming. My ISP forced Netflix to pay their peering tax, though.

Yeah it became one of those cliches everyone repeats about it being 'the Qwikster debacle'. Complete nonsense. They discounted streaming to move their customer base into it, and that created a deficit when they had to charge for it. There was gonna be pain. If you look at the numbers, they had returned to full growth and higher subscriber numbers within 9 months but now completely butterflied into a streaming company ready for the future.

Only thing I think it might have hurt a bit is that Netflix remains too low a price IMO.

Around eight years ago, there was an internal slideshow Reed Hastings put together on the future of Netflix as on-demand streaming that leaked, amazingly prescient. Netflix is a firm that has had the right vision & execution.

Entrepreneurs are often discouraged seeing tons of competitors...but if none of them has a lot of traction and you have a vision of the future and can implement that product, go for it.

One could have been bothered by the proliferation of streaming companies 10 years ago (as Dropbox could've been by all the storage companies).

"There were so many other streaming experiments around that time, like MovieBeam, Movielink, you know, Unbox or something, I can’t even…there was dozens of ’em. There were so many other streaming experiments around that time, like MovieBeam, Movielink, you know, Unbox or something, I can’t even…there was dozens of ’em. And iTunes Video Rental starts to come out around the same time."

I'd be interested in seeing that slideshow if anyone has it.

I member Graboid

the days of limewire and myspace

edit: though graboid may have been for downloading

The very next quote debunks the interviewers statement that you've quoted.

When Netflix moved into streaming there were not competitors. Lots of people saw a market there, but companies didn't start popping up until Netflix showed it was actually possible.

An interesting quote about using data to tailor their original content:

"And so, using the data to make funding decisions is a different game than using the data to tune the story, which we don’t do."

So, he's saying they won't allow data to influence a script once written, but they won't buy or fund that script if it doesn't fit the data. I'm pretty sure two things tend to the same outcome. In ML, you'd be accused of letting the model train on the validation set. Bad stats.

I think he's just saying they will use data to determine which type of show gets funded, but will not to use it in ways that affect the internal logic of the show. So they may fund a show whose main character often goes to a coffee shop because viewers appear to enjoy that, but they won't change an existing show to make its main character go to a coffee shop because it might not make sense for the character to do that in the context of the given show. And since those involved with the data and funding process will naturally have less understanding of the show's characters than the writers, they won't attempt these changes even when they appear to make sense for a show. Of course, writers could adapt and force things to happen in a show that wouldn't otherwise, but I don't think funding certain types of shows is equivalent to changing existing shows to fit a mold.

I mean they still have plenty of data on shows that aren't original content, so I don't think it's really the same as training on the validation set.

Ho hum. Statisticians have dealt with endogeneity problems before.

I switched from Blockbuster to Netflix specifically because of their extensive back catalogue. There was an old movie that I wanted to watch that no Blockbuster carried, and it was $30 new. Once I signed up for Netflix I (almost) never went back to Blockbuster.

I'm still kind of surprised that Blockbuster didn't see it coming until too late.

(Edit) I also canceled Netflix for a month because I'm an Amazon subscriber, but it was Netflix's recommendations that brought me back.

Now bittorrent has one of the greatest catalogues of films available to the public. You can find many rare and obscure films that are unavailable elsewhere.

For example, I heard that Stanley Kubrick's student war film he made was actually pretty good. But it wasn't available for sale or stream from anywhere. I found it almost immediately on a (public) torrent site with a decent quality. I've had this experience on a couple of occasions.

It's too bad that Netflix doesn't keep a backlog of old films plus a rotating selection of newer films. But I guess their licensee's business models comes before their customers wants.

I firmly believe that one the best things we could do for copyright (besides shortening the terms) would be a use it or lose it clause, where a product loses its copyright if its not available to the general pubic in a meaningful way after 5 or 10 years. AKA, the copyright owner doesn't want to go to the effort of digitizing that movie and putting it on amazon/itunes/whatever, then it becomes public domain. Of course there needs to be a way to avoid the problem of the million dollar movie domain, where you can view the movie/book for some amount that results in 0 sales per year.

The idea is great, but such a radical change it probably has no chance of being realized.

Perhaps a less disruptive change would be to maintain copyright protections the way they are, but attack this at the penalty level: basically enshrine the idea that

> "X was not available for purchase or streaming in a DRM-free format in my country at the time I got a copy of it from a torrent."

Would be a valid defense for personal use, capping penalties at 1$ or so, without opening the public-domain box and opening the field to companies instantly cropping up to snipe a 5-year-old TV show the day it goes free, and resell it.

That's a good idea. Similar to 'probable cause' but from the citizens perspective or the various legal tests created by courts to ascertain guilt.

Basically that the consumer went to reasonable lengths to purchase the product legally and wasn't able to as a legal defense. If the owner doesn't make the content reasonably available than they have no claim that it shouldn't be consume by other grey-market means.

As easy as torrenting is, it's still not ideal to just watching it one Netflix or Prime. There are real incentives to not pirate assuming the content creator utilizes these (mainstream) options.

This creates market incentives to maximize the return on the copyrighted content and still forces the bigger distribution platforms to follow the rules.

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