Can you imagine a music industry where, in order to listen to new releases, you are required to go to "listening parlours", or wait for radio, CD, streaming release|?
They no longer listen to customer feedback. Their categorization and search get worse by the day. They refuse to add an option to disable the autoplay previews that no one likes.
That'd all be ok, albeit disappointing, if they were still charging $8 a month. But they keep raising prices like Comcast or AT&T each year while the quality declines or stagnates.
(1) Start as a service provider, brokering sales from legacy producers who don't yet have distribution through this new market, (2) pivot to original supply, as legacy producers recognize how much money stands to be made and stand up their own distribution channels, (3, optimistic case) become so large that producers are forced to renegotiate with you, from a weaker position, because they must have distribution on your platform.
I don't think they're going to corner the market like Amazon or Apple did, as they lack the moats (respectively a hyperscale logistics system and first party hardware).
I'm kind of surprised Netflix isn't cross-licensing their back catalog to alternate channels. E.g. trading rebroadcast rights to the first season of Stranger Things to Comcast or a cable network in exchange for {insert popular program}.
That feels the most like an analog to Amazon Marketplace (context: remember, there was once an Amazon without third-party sellers).
https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/17/18187400/netflix-vs-fortni...
They lost all the big catalogs and deals as Fox, Disney etc. ended their licensing deals. And even though they’ve pumped billions into original content, this can’t make up for the hundreds of titles they lost.
So, the new UI is meant to make you overlook all that and make you watch Netflix original content. To quote myself [1] their selection is ridiculously tragically bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dmitriid/status/11204104799549931...
I'm not sure how this is the Apple playbook, unless you count podcasts (which they've never had an option to charge for) as Apple original audio content, or the upcoming Apple TV+ as a 15 year gap between selling third party video content and providing their own.
And I cannot begin to fathom why.
Fortunately, there is flixable.com for Netflix browsing. But why doesn't Netflix itself do that? IDK.
You aren't wrong though.