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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if now is a good time to short some Netflix stock.

That depends on whether you think Netflix has successfully transitioned into a network. They release a huge amount of original content now. If I had any apple devices, I would be more likely to drop HBONOW or Hulu than Netflix, and since I pay for all three I'm sort of the target audience (except for the whole no iPhone/iPad thing, which is also probably something they should think about).

Anecdote of one: I have all three as well. As the days go by, I find myself questioning if Netflix is still worth it as I'm not necessarily a big fan of a lot of their original content and think HBO seems to do a better job in licensing the movies I'm interested in (to say nothing of their amazing original content). I think at this point I only keep Netflix around out of habit as it's something I share with family and will myself occasionally indulge in some older licensed TV programs not on Hulu.

HBO has some big-ticket items, but Netflix is more consistent in dropping new series for me to try. It's still my go-to place for content since there's more than I have time to watch. I just looked up their list of original content[1] for refresh my mind, and quite a few were extremely good in my opinion.

- House of Cards: I only got a little into the second season before I got busy, but what I saw was high quality and interesting.

- Orange is the new Black: My wife still loves this series

- Stranger Things: An honest to god phenomenon. The second season was weaker IMO, but I'm not sure how it could be as good as the first. That's a high bar to hit.

- The Crown: I caught a lot of it as my wife watched. Pretty good, even if a blond Doctor Who was somewhat distracting.

- A Series of Unfortunate Events: The kids liked this, as some of them are going through the books.

- Altered Carbon: Refreshingly good science fiction. Main character casting a little odd, since it's more obvious now than it was when I was younger how odd and slightly off-putting it is to cast someone with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a science fiction lead. At the same time, it's now fitting (or a trope) because of all the science fiction he helmed in the 1990's.

- Lost in Space: Interesting, but ultimately spoiled slightly by the contrived plot. Better writing and this would have been extremely good rather than worth watching, but slightly disappointing.

- The Haunting: A nice interweaving of stories, and creepy series. I liked the ending. I have friends who didn't.

That's just from the drama section of the list. There's plenty in the other sections too, such as Maniac and Russian Dolls which I watched recently that were good, and documentary section has a bunch of good things I've seen as well. Some of he Marvel series' were pretty good too (season one of Jessica Jones was excellent on so many levels).

That's a small fraction of what they released. Looking at the list now, there's no way I would cancel Netflix before Hulu, and probably HBO also. There's things I want to watch on those (for different reasons), but now that I examine it, it's clear that I use and value what Netflix is giving me way more than the other two.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...

Netflix is much more bang for your buck. But I think HBO has a much better signal to noise ratio. Also HBO has some all time classics, which netflix lacks. I think Netflix has a lot of B+/A-, but it's missing an A or A+.

A lot of Netlix's new content is downright bad.

A lot of my friends and family are ready to give up their Netflix subs. We've seen most of what interests us. Apple on the other hand has unlimited supplies of money and more power to make deals with content providers.

> We've seen most of what interests us.

What about all the original content?

TBH a lot of it isn't that good. We also like watching a lot of reruns or series that we already care about.

No you should short the companies that can't hack it in a DTC world. Netflix isn't a good a target for that. Both Netflix and Apple's service will grow for a long time to come.

Dangerous. OTOH if someone did the "buy the day after the dip" and "sell the day after the next peak" then they'd bought Netflix stock on Dec 27, 2018 at 250.11 and sold at Jan 09, 2019 at 317.71 -- it's 25% in two weeks...

How would someone actually do that? The only way to identify the dips and peaks is N days afterwards, where larger N increase the confidence of that it really was the max/min.

Yes, both Netflix and Spotify are in a tough position where their rivals (Apple and Amazon) have a much larger war chest to chip away at the market leaders of both movies and music streaming.

Spotify is in a much worse competitive position than Netflix. Nothing separates Spotify from Apple Music. Any competitor can license music from all of the music providers. There is no reason for most people to keep both Spotify and Apple Music.

Netflix has spent years negotiating TV rights to third party content and releasing its own. Apple has a long way to go.

> Any competitor can license music from all of the music providers. There is no reason for most people to keep both Spotify and Apple Music.

Android is 81% of the US market.

Unless Apple Music comes to android, I don't see Spotify being threatened.

Done

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

Android may be “81%” of the market but then you have to subtract China and you have to take into account where the paying customers are.

Apple has more than half the number of paying customers with a much smaller phone market share (https://www.cultofmac.com/605166/spotify-now-has-96-million-...)

It’s well known that Android users don’t spend nearly as much as iOS users.

Consider them threatened. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

Apple Music is available on Android and the web. It’s not a “walled” service like iMessage or FaceTime is.

> It’s not a “walled” service like iMessage or FaceTime is.

Steve Jobs promised that FaceTime would be open source… eventually: https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...

Any time now.

It’s walled because of patent litigation with VirnetX, not because Apple wanted to keep it walled.

> _Nothing separates Spotify from Apple Music._

Does Apple Music have something similar (or as good as) Spotify Discover? That's a differentiator for sure.

I think Apple Music is good for discovery. Probably not as good, but for many of us it hits the "good enough" mark. I confess I'm an Apple Music subscriber mostly because I'm just in that ecosystem, and it's relatively low effort; I'm also a Tidal subscriber because it was the only service integrated with Roon (a music server package I use), although I'm still debating that one.

Something similar. Yes. I’ve heard that it wasn’t as good. But is that something you would want to base your company on?

It’s just like Facebook stopped the growth of Snapchat just by introducing Stories.

There are literally almost two decades of failures in the streaming subscription music space. Like Jobs said about DropBox. Streaming music is becoming a feature not a product.

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