Netflix and Amazon are struggling to win over Indian viewers
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
There was one Indian movie from 2004 that was controversial because it featured a lesbian couple. The movie had the typical bollywood love triangle, except the guy was ANGRY that the beautiful woman wanted to see another beautiful woman, along with seeing him. He expressed his anger and was trying to break up this "unholy arrangement" and correct the one woman into loving a man, and exclusively.
I'm more used to men expending all of their energy trying to get into situations with two beautiful women, and then accepting the improbability of two equally attractive and bi-sexual women existing.
So this movie was pure comedy to me, as well as the Indian state's extreme response. Just india things.
It is hard to understand the ideological assumptions of that pervasively conservative but kinda-wannabe-westernized society.
A good first level manager in my opinion should remain a strong individual contributor to the team. It's important to have prudent knowledge of the system and continuously develop your decision making basis. On top of this, a good manager should be directly recruiting and hiring talent (i.e. talent agencies and recrutiers are not good ways to build a team). And you should finally and most importantly be an advocate for the individuals on your team (compensation, basic empathy around life events etc) and the output of the team (vendors, other teams, etc will eventually try to undercut you knowingly or not. If the work is meaningful, and you are doing well, you must generate positive news about it). Done well, it's not an easy job.
I'll give this simple example as a call to action. Schedulers of any kind, say the one that puts threads on to CPUs, are open-ended problems. If you co-design a system with hardware and software, it is highly likely you can get a 20% speedup in a system by manually emplacing different workloads (i.e. NIC interrupt handlers, application threads). In TCP, this same kind of thing applies. If you run Linux, there are a lot of things in the Documentation/ directory of the kernel that are worth reading and tuning. Selecting a congestion control, and tuning buffer sizes is very much "working on TCP" and could benefit any company using TCP. It's also something anyone with a few years of general development experience shouldn't feel intimidated to do! The most critical skill isn't any particular technology but learning to measure and confidently make and deploy changes. Likewise, there are very few things on computers that can't be improved. This can range from tuning general settings to a particular workload or change of underlying hardware, to algorithmic advances.
Some time back (last year or so), they were showing IMDB ratings for their content, but not now (maybe a falloff with Amazon since it owns IMDB). Now they try to find similar to what I've already watched, which IMHO does not make sense most of the time. I am here to find something new, not exactly same to what I've already seen. Moreover, I first look up the rating on IMDB of whatever I want to watch, and these days it mostly hovers around (5 or 6) out of 10 for almost all of their content.
PS: IMDB isn't silver bullet, but the user reviews are quiet spot on.
Coming back to the topic, Netflix sorely needs an actual rating system, either like IMDB or something built in-house.
Hotstar has a huge user base mainly because it offers a lot of content for "free", and this is something Netflix and Amazon don't do. If someone were to get the revenue numbers from paying subscribers, I'd bet on Hotstar being far behind the others.
As someone who has used these three services, my ranking of Hotstar would put it way below Netflix and Prime Video. The Hotstar app is quite primitive and is probably two or three years behind Netflix. It doesn't even have lists, ratings, profiles, etc., leave alone features like skipping title screens and others. Hotstar is also restrictive for paying customers since it allows only one screen at a time. Like Prime Video, Hotstar is designed for individuals, not families. For a family of four, if they wanted Hotstar's paid content, it would cost the same as Netflix's highest tier. This is subjective, but it'd most likely be a poorer deal for many.
Those who want high quality content and don't mind paying would go for Netflix. People also share subscriptions with their friends or family members to defray costs. Those who don't want to pay a lot would go with Amazon Prime.
What Netflix and Amazon need to do to grow their subscriber base would be to license a lot of local content (the latter is doing well on that), like movies and TV serials in different languages. They should also look at providing English and other foreign language content voice dubbed in Indian languages. Hollywood movies have long been released in India in English and local languages. The same goes for many English shows too.
Netflix and Amazon will hopefully figure things out, and I'm confident that Netflix is here to stay as the leader in quality on multiple fronts. The rest of the players may replace cable but remain ad supported (like 20 minutes of ads in an hour of content) and kill each other with their "free" and partially free offerings. They're more of a threat to each other than to these two behemoths.
If it's the former, let's hear your thoughts.
Fair point. I wrote the story. My thoughts are in the story. I don't generally submit my own stories, but I genuinely want more people to see it. (There is no traffic incentive or anything.)
Given that HN is more and more the target of subtil PR teams for big players, I wish this kind of thing would be taken more seriously.
It's getting harder and harder to trust anything online, and HN is one of the last place where I get decent content. But the quality is dropping, diluted in well disguised advertisements.
So when a reader says : hum, this is suspicious, instead of downvoting, I wish for the mods to investigate.
If it's genuine, good.
In terms of quality dropping, one thing you can do is submit some high-quality stories or, if you notice one on HN that you think is particularly good, email us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can put it in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there).
We don't let people use HN solely for promotion. If you saw how many accounts I banned for that last night, you'd not think we don't take that seriously! But it's more complex when it comes to genuinely good articles. Of course some of those have a promotional purpose, but if the article is genuinely good and interesting to the community, no one would win by not having it here. So the quality of the articles comes first.
Since you mention big players—my impression is that big players who create content for HN aren't doing it to acquire customers so much as to attract potential hires. That doesn't have to be a problem, since the best way to do that is to interest people, and that's the same thing that makes HN good. There are subtler issues, though. First, many people don't know that all they need to do is just interest people, and in their efforts to be promotional they end up creating something less interesting, something they imagine will persuade readers but in the end only bores them.
Second, it is a lot of work to repeatedly create interesting content, and big players have resources to spend that no one else has—so there's a rich-get-richer effect. We try to mitigate that by giving higher priority to obscure and personal sources over well-known corporate ones. But there are only so many of those, so there are limits to what we can do.
1. slow to load the main screen
2. slow to resume a video
3. quality is very low, both streaming and downloaded
4. many videos cannot be downloaded
5. sometimes the playback won't start and I have to force stop the app.
6. the app cannot be minimized to a window
7. seeking is slow and buggy
8. many shows have only old series, for example, expanse
These comparisons are with youtube. All in all, it feels like a single sprint effort to me. Guess they are spending all their money on content.