Netflix’s Movie Blitz Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Heart
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So far piracy is still more convenient and accessible even if I am willing to pay for movies and TV shows. Good thing it's legal in my country.
On Netflix Germany (the only Netflix I can get since they banned VPNs) I can't watch most animes in Japanese with English subtitles.
On Prime Video from Amazon.de, they often don't bother to even license the OV audio at all.
So, yeah, not really a solution...
Jeez. Extrapolate much? A few things are siloed. Almost everything is available at both Apple and Amazon.
There is a lot of content out there now for almost every demographic on each of these platforms so finding something to watch is rarely a problem. But that doesn’t mean silos aren’t real.
Hollywood movies are available on any rental service. But not all good movies are made/produced by the big studios now. So they remain unavailable unless you subscribe.
Seems pretty reasonable to me to be alarmist.
Personally I’ve found the netflix mail service to be the best for scratching the itch of arbitrary movies, if you can be patient.
EDIT: also, TV shows are clearly siloed, but I was under the impression you were referring to movie rentals.
And of course I meant now, and in the US.
In the US. I.e. for roughly 10% of the Internet-connected population.
EDIT: I originally wrote "1%" which was correctly pointed out to be wrong. I meant 10% (the US population divided by 50% of the planet), just did an off-by-one-zero error.
1%?
> nearly 290 million internet users as of 2016
According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...
> almost 4.2 billion people were active internet users
The US is roughly 7% of the Internet connected population.
In order for commercial content to be produced, consumers have to pay money somehow. TV stations preferred an ads model.
When you pay money as a consumer, you pay to a commercial entity.
Therefore a single fee you’d pay for watching all the content you want has to go to a monopoly. Whether that’s a state agency that handles the collection and distribution, or whether it’s a natural monopoly that destroyed its competition, it really is the same thing.
That we’ve got “silos” can only mean that we still have competition in this space.
I would be more afraid of a future where there’s only one commercial entity left. Which sounds good in the same way that communism sounds good.
Exclusives are by definition anti-competitive. Some sort of compulsory licensing might work. Or it might lead to no-one producing anything...
And I disagree that exclusives are anti-competitive.
If Netflix can create value using its own money, they should be allowed to establish whatever licensing terms they want, including none other than streaming to its own subscribers. If that's anti-competitive, then the definition is broken.
Exclusives serve only the producer. They are terrible for consumers, as the orignal commenter lamented. Perhaps "anti-competeitive" is the wrong word, since each channel can compete at having the best exclusives ... probably "anti-consumer" is what I meant.
But there's an argument to be made that the producer is incentivized to produce content by the prospect of making a profit. And that ultimately this benefits consumers too.
Would Game of Thrones exist if HBO wouldn't be allowed to have exclusive content?
I don't think so. And personally I'm seeing the quality of these shows from HBO and Netflix going up, versus the experience we've had on TV where the shows are optimized for serving ads. I also don't think anybody would pay for an HBO subscription without exclusive hits such as Game of Thrones.
> "Recommendations and reviews for example, customer service, price, outages, video quality"
There's not much customer service to be had. I never interacted with the customer service of HBO or Netflix. Not much on video quality either IMO, there's basically HD and the ability to stream HD over mobile data connections and that's almost a solved problem.
Also on recommendations or reviews, that's ultimately a natural monopoly. Think of how Amazon is thriving due to having the best product reviews, which can't be migrated and any newcomer in the market starts at a serious disadvantage due to not having reviews.
If anything I believe it is review platforms that should be made a shared resource, part of "the commons", like highways.
What about a limited period for exclusivity? Do you think, say, 3 years would work? I would be happy to wait that long... in fact I only just recently watched Person Of Interest on Netflix and that has been out for ages.
As to other differentiators like quality of service, I think there is a lot of scope there but channels currently have very little need to innovate because the issue of what content they have dwarfs all other considerations.
Movies today are $12/movie. Netflix is selling you any movie for ~$10/month. Not just crap movies, Cuaron! If you’re not watching a movie alone, it’s a better deal.
Cable would cost you $75-$100/month. Now that service included with your movies.
You could buy 5 of these services and it would still be cheaper than it cost you 15 years ago to see similar content. Most people only buy 1 and share accounts with their friends.
Renting movies is easier than ever and still a great option. You don’t even have to leave your house. Previously you would drive to the rental shop and pay $4. Or waited in line at redbox and pay $1. It’s true that you can’t always rent, a lot of times ive tried it’s for purchase only.
The silo doesn’t make sense though when you compare to the price of buying movie tickets, or the cost of cable TV, or even the cost of renting. It’s way cheaper today than it used to be.
are you talking about their streaming options or dvd mail service? their streaming service has very limited options for good movies. and the good ones are ones i have usually already seen (and yet netflix's machine learning "experts" constantly recommend them to me, i.e., they have nothing else to offer or they aren't experts). netflix is pushing their own content more and more, which i personally find not good. they also tend to oversell their role in production. it's gotten to the point where i watch maybe a couple of good things on netflix a month, and so the price no longer makes sense. i'm personally thinking of going back to their dvd mail service or just canceling it all together.
many of these services are now not worth the $10-15 a month. for example, for hbo go or now, or whichever is the streaming only option, i just pay when i am ready to watch some tv series for a month or two and then cancel it. it's akin to renting. it isn't worth it to pay year round, although i would say their movie options for streaming are probably better than netflix's, they're just less in number.
That was never the case for TV, and never will be.
Taking 2 minutes to switch from Netflix to Amazon to watch a 2 hour movie is no big deal. Taking 2 minutes to switch from Apple Music to Spotify to listen to a 4 minute song completely recks the experience.
Consider the model of monetary distribution based on actual watching of content. If you're a movie library owner, with a catalog of 1,000 mediocre quality studio movies to offer up to a streaming service, are you going to take close to $0 from Netflix based on few people watching the content there, or will you take a lot more from a competitor that needs filler content to take on Netflix? Due to this effect it's impossible to distribute the majority of movies on streaming services based on how often they're actually watched (the demand for them). There will always be some other service willing to bid the bottom quality 3/4 of movies up.
If all of their customers globally were actually willing & able to pay ~$22 per month for Netflix streaming, they could probably technically afford to give you access to nearly all movies ever made at today's licensing rates. Hollywood won't comply with that however, not under any circumstances. Netflix can realistically never afford to pay Disney enough to not launch its own competing service.
That's just a back-of-the-envelope estimate, but yeah, I'm absolutely confident that there are over a billion people right now who already pay $10/month for entertainment media.
As an industry development Netflix and Amazon Prime have been great. The problem with Hollywood was not the price, but the fact that it was releasing total crap. The streaming services have created real competition on that front.
Big movie business needs to die, and fast.
And at the end of the day, it's all just entertainment. The market is structured to give people what they want, what's wrong with that?
For a newer example, Primer was made on a tiny budget and it's great. I like films that aren't just yet another CGI blowout, and I'm not alone.
Big budget cinema could die off today, and we would be better off.
When GP said "I'm again left choosing between movies I don't really want to see" those are the movies he was talking about.
Netflix “beat” the iTunes ala carte purchase model the old fashion Silicon Valley way - by subsidizing an unsustainable provision of services with very foriving capital markets. No it was never realistic to fund all the content you wanted to see for $12 a month.
Now everyone wants their own streaming service which just means we end up replicating the old bundled cable model. It’s funny that this is happening without the actual technological reasons that original cable model existed in the first place.
I do think this (unfortunately) ultimately leads to greater piracy. I don’t see streaming services 6-20 getting a place on the average consumer’s monthly spend.
Right now you can still buy a physical DVD/Blu Ray which can be ripped into a digital format of your choice. You still have control. You still only have to pay once. You even have the ability to re-sell it as a used product.
That's going to change once studios decide physical media isn't worth it anymore, and so if you want to re-watch something, you need to have a subscription, or need to re-join the service to watch.
Netflix is good at making shows that are satisfying to watch, but hardly interesting or innovative. It's like ordering fast food. Hope they don't do this to their movies.
Quality-wise HBO is still the best.
Which is true for all content out there. The crap people willingly watch on TV astounds me.
As they grow, it's only natural to produce mediocre content that will still have a large enough audience.
Not everything can be a high quality hit show (and most aren't even supposed to be).
A little OT but how do you find the great ones? Netflix teasers just don't cut it and in most cases make things worse.
Surely people craft reliable curated lists... somewhere?
While Netflix's original content initially yielded huge hits (House of Cards, Narcos, Stranger Things), it's purely a game of quantity over quality now.
There is also the risk of Netflix falling into the same trap that Spotify is in now, being pigeonholed as focusing only on a certain type of "chill" music because that's what listening data points to. Netflix's selection would be awful if they created long-term commitments for shows that reflect today's tastes, and not necessarily what tomorrow will bring.
Netflix is just a search bar for movies where 90% of searches yield no results.
The larger concern still is every large content producer wanting to have their own streaming service and not wanting to sell content to others. It’s bad for consumers, and it will turn out to be bad for the streaming companies too, because consumers will balk at subscribing to several individual services and just go back to pirating content. Add the so-silly-we-still-have-this-in-2018 geographical content restrictions, piracy is still the viewer’s best friend.
Comparing a prestige TV series to a feature film may be apples-to-oranges, but it's hard to miss the contrast between a show that seemed to be triangulated from the successes of other networks' prestige dramas and a film that really has no popular successes to support it (apart from Cuarón's pedigree).
Roma is the kind of personal, auteur work that algorithms work against. It's an incredible credit to Netflix's new content strategy that it was produced, and furthermore, promoted.
House of Cards did a lot of things right (granted, I haven't watched their latest season). First and I think most important of all it informed the general public about what politics really is, i.e. a social activity involving very enterprising men and some women that more closely approaches the works of Machiavelli than those of Rousseau.
In other words, it made us aware that we live in the world of Putins, Bibis and Trumps and not in the world of Bill Clintons and Obamas, the latter's world being better described by a show like "The West Wing", which looks totally passé right now.
In house of cards, it gradually becomes impossible to emotionally invest oneself in the welfare of any of the characters, or any any outcome of the meandering plot.
I totally agree, which probably means that public life has become a lot less enjoyable to watch since “West Wing” used to air. As they say: ars imitatur naturam.
I've been assuming that most politicians are basically behaving the same, but that public sentiment about politics has taken a turn for the worse.
House of Cards was made because its based on an excellent BBC series(and book before that) from 1993, is directed by david fincher, and has Kevin Spacey in it.
With that combination they could have made a clone of the big bang theory a success.
There is nothing data driven about getting Cuarón to make a movie. He's an oscar winner, with a load of nominations as well.
What is different is that Neflix has a boat load of cash, and will, within reason, give people a free reign. This is basically what miramax did in the 90s when they had cash from disney. I hope that unlike unlike miramax its not run by sex pests.
Ultimately, I think feelings like this will degrade and leave those unwilling to change to be forgotten. Art, in particular, is interesting to see how it adapts to those who consume it. This puts Netflix and artists in a unique position to make art that can entirely utilize this medium of delivery. Whether or not this makes better content is to be seen, imho.
Personality marketing on social media might be an art in itself, but it sure isn't pretty up close.
2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix.
3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage.
5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman.
6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.”
7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of.
8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to be alive.