How Hollywood Is Racing to Catch Up with Netflix | Hacker News Reader

How Hollywood Is Racing to Catch Up with Netflix

variety.com

35 pointsyarapavan35 comments

Given that direct-to-customer is pretty much a done deal, my interest is what will happen to the advertising space given that they will have much less primetime exposure. Cord cutters with Netflix aren't going to be exposed to ads. Yet as the world becomes more competitive, brands need advertising more than ever. Is all of their budget going online? But even online they are facing pressure - privacy, adblocking, Apple, etc.

Lets say I only view Netflix, I run an adblocker and use an iPhone. What are the opportunities of a brand to reach me now? It's pretty much limited to Facebook or Google at this point. Then consider that the person profile I just described is probably a high earner with significant spending potential.

On the flip side with less points of entry to your mind the ones that do get presented have less competition for your consciousness.

They will embed advertising in movies. It's already happening in the web with native advertising. Or they could propose new payment models, say 50% off of subscription price for more ads in your program.

> They will embed advertising in movies.

FWIW, native advertising has long been part of film as a medium.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#Movies_and_t...

Ads on YouTube, sponsored videos, shill review videos, product placement on YouTube and Netflix, ads on billboards, ads on busses, ads on taxis, ads on train station gates and platforms, ads in magazines and newspapers, direct mail, ads on pub coasters, ads on bathroom doors, ads on parking tickets and theatre tickets and event programmes, ads on receipts, ads in your amazon orders...

Anyone who thinks we’re living in an ad-free age hasn’t been to a major city recently :)

YouTube is Google, Instagram is Facebook. So we're left with these two, online. Magazines are dying.

Ads on billboards/buses/taxis are pretty much the same thing, but they are limited to specific content (mostly still images, no video or sound).

TV was the king of advertising mediums. It was the place where a brand can get captive attention, with sound and a 30 seconds clip. You can't skip and most likely won't go anywhere. The only downside is that it's an open loop mechanism - you don't get very good feedback on the effectiveness of your ad, and that the call for action is weak (you can't click into the brand page).

Sports broadcasts still bring in live tv viewers in large numbers They have ads on the pitch side, player kits, ads on screen during play, ads during breaks, stadium naming rights, stats brought to you by some company or other, the league itself has naming rights and the broadcast has naming rights.

That's a very large, but very very specific, demographic. A lot of people just plain aren't reached by live sports broadcasts at all.

True but sometimes it can be very large indeed.

Nearly half the population of the UK watched the England vs Croatia world cup semi final.

Previous we had nbc, cbs, abs. Now we have two big networks.

You can pay to remove ads on Youtube.

>"Cord cutters with Netflix aren't going to be exposed to ads."

Netflix is adding advertisements now (random source): https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-turn-off-netflix-ads-...

Common, stop it with that. They added skippable quick trailers of other shows you might like when binge watching one show to a very select number of users. They quickly stopped that experiment few weeks ago.

Never saw anyone call "featured playlists" or "you might also like" sections on spotify to be ads.

There are still posters everywhere, obviously, and they've increasingly become animated screens here. But the only time I see video-with-sound ads now is at the cinema.

My tolerance has dropped enough that it's becoming a significant disincentive to going to the cinema.

Advertising is zero sum for advertisers, if you make it harder for everyone to advertise, no one loses.

It may be true in some cases of the strongest brands with entrenched habits, like Coca Cola; but even they would like a channel to their current and prospective customers to let them know there are new products or just to keep the branding alive.

If you look closely, Netflix shows a ‘this tv show contains product placement’ sometimes. This will probably become a lot more common, and it’s not blockable either. I’m ok with subtle versions of it (a laptop on a desk that shows the Dell logo), but there’s also very blatant ways to do it. In Designated Survivor, there’s a scene where one of the protagonists stands in front of her car, starts it with the Ford™ app (panning inside shot of the Ford that shows it starting/booting), she and the passenger get in, talk for 5 minutes and then drive away. It was extremely shoe-horned.

I personally think there are 2 really difficult pills that the incumbent media giants need to swallow:

1. The younger generation (myself) does not like commercials, and are willing to pay a subscription fee to remove them (ie Pandora one, Hulu+, Spotify Premium.) Either the commercials pay for the content, or or the consumer pays, not both!

2. The less popular networks/channels will have to either have revenue/funding cut substantially, go elsewhere (to Youtube for Facebook,) or out of business. Most of us simply don't care and don't want to pay for it. This bundling of unpopular networks with really popular ones is costing the cable companies too much money that they're trying to pass onto the consumer. Customers are sick of paying for it.

Streaming services are delivering content, while removing the waste of time and attention spent watching commercials, and the waste of money spent on programming that the majority of the viewer base could care less about. It's not rocket science, it's just trimming the fat from the old way of doing things.

> 1. The younger generation (myself) does not like commercials, and are willing to pay a subscription fee to remove them (ie Pandora one, Hulu+, Spotify Premium.) Either the commercials pay for the content, or or the consumer pays, not both!

We say this, but then we endure the ads on Amazon Prime Video. But how do we cancel Amazon Prime Video without canceling the rest of our Amazon Prime subscription? Prime is like the cable bundles - how long until we cut our tether?

1 hr of TV on a public broadcast network (ABC, CBS etc.) has 30% of time i.e. 20 minutes for commercials. This is up from 13% in 1952 (http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm).

Maybe you're talking about something else, but Amazon Prime Video has, occasionally, a few seconds of cross-promotion for their other shows, not 20 minutes of commercials for diapers.

Not even remotely the same thing.

"Hour-long" television programs have been 42 minutes since I was a child.

Amazon's ads are at least 1 minute long. How soon until they're 5 minutes?

Netflix originals are a form of bundling too. There are many in completely different genres now, with very different budgets. It's unlikely a particular netflix viewer will want to watch most of them, nevermind the back catalog.

And yet, a netflix subscription is 1/4 the price of a typical cable package, with no ads, on-demand for everything, and a better discoverability process. If that were the experience of cable, people wouldn't mind the "less popular" things.

Think of Netflix more like a channel, in terms of TV. You get a series of shows/movies on that channel, and the programming is expected - you aren't going to expect to see HBO shows on there or Comedy Central shows, but when it's there, it's one of those re-run things.

Think of Netflix more like a channel

What sort of channel? For example, would Netflix ever produce something like "Blue Planet" (eponymous or 2). Probably it would eventually but I can't help feel that there is a place for the likes of the BBC to keep the rest on their toes. I pay a decent amount in TV license fees to fund the BBC (currently about £150 per year). In return I expect that the BBC will respect the wishes of the UK elected govt - sadly that involves respecting the wishes of my country's elected govt. I'm also happy that anyone should be able to view the BBC's output for a reasonable but ideally a minimal fee.

They can't catch up because nobody is going to pay for 'another netflix'.

One of the things classic hollywood media was built on, was lock-in, control, ads, locality. None of that applies to the Netflix space of things. You get no control, you don't get to dictate when and why and how someone consumes content, and you don't get to schedule yourself between everybody else. Unless you have good, accessible, quality content, people are going to ignore you (and they should). It's why piracy exists and will exist as long as people attempt to force lock-in by making their media exclusive to one service or area. People don't want it and will find ways around it, forever.

These are all good points, but if Netflix's content quality continues to erode (licensing expirations, crap original contenT), people will leave Netflix and use that money elsewhere.

I'm not so sure about that. No other international content provider is available is most of Europe. Even HBO is only available in very limited packaged versions (which every one hates because we don't want packages).

I have more than one service, at the peak I had 5: Netflix, HBO Now, Amazon, Hulu, and Acorn. Also maybe BritBox (not sure if I ever started paying for it).

I subscribe / unsubscribe as interesting shows come out.

Youtube Premium, and paying some of those people again on Patreon. Also, Crunchyroll.

Cable bundles range from $50-$150. So there's definitely room for 4-10 profitable Netflix competitors that compete for around $100 of disposable income beyond the base cost of Internet.

People prefer free but they're clearly willing to pay. And expecting a single all-inclusive bundle for $15/month is not realistic or even desirable IMO.

I don't think people pay for cable bundles in that price range because they chose those bundles, but because that is what was available. You want one specific thing yet you have to pay for all the nonsense as well.

There is no technical or customer-oriented reason why it was/is that way, and it was only kept in-place because of politics and lack of competition (before Netflix online came along).

Holy Wood has created some pretty far out stories in its time and in some cases bent and twisted history to fit a story or advertising margin.

Back in mid May a lass from CA married a bloke from UK and became a Princess. OK she actually became a Duchess (generally considered a pretty good result as well around here) but around two billion people who watched the ceremony will swear they saw a Prince and Princess get hitched on that day.

I think that reality in this case has trumped any story that Hollywood has managed so far: "The Californian Princess" (RLY? she's from a Republic FFS)

Hollywood is racing to catch up with reality, let alone Netflix (who haven't even learned how to shave yet)

"Those movies — including “Captain Marvel,” “Dumbo,” “Toy Story 4,” “The Lion King,” “Frozen 2” and a new “Star Wars” installment — will now be key selling points for the new service Iger has referred to as “Disney Play.”

Sounds like the successor to DisneyToons, the crap sequel division of Disney. Should be called "Disney Replay".

Meanwhile, Amazon is coming out with new stories.

Does anybody else fins that netflix is more about quantity than quality?

On top of that, and their movie catalog is a little slim.

They gotta fill the whole spectrum of people, I suppose. As long as there is something for me, I am satisfied and I do find a gem of documentary once in a while or an old movie, I didn't watch for a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com