How many big show cancellations have recently resulted in massive blowback from huge swaths of fans? As much as those might seem like petty complaining from overly enthusiastic watchers, I think that Netflix should be more cautious.
It’s caused me to get MUCH more skeptical about ever starting watching a show on their service, because I’ve see lots of times where the story never gets to see a conclusion. Netflix used to be a “no way I’m canceling this ever” thing for me. It’s not even close to that anymore. My intuition is that lots of people are the same. That should be concerning for Netflix investors.
They also just recently spent $200M to hire the two people behind the catastrophic final season of Game Of Thrones. Game of thrones fans are numerous, and lots of them HATE that duo right now. That’s another huge group of people now actively looking for a reason to cancel.
It feels like for a long time Netflix didn’t really have to care about customer experience or PR. They could do universally hated things like force auto playing previews on their interfaces, and basically nobody would leave because they had nowhere to go.
Now: users are forced to use an interface which seems to actively make them upset while using it, to navigate through a bunch of options which might never actually have conclusions. That doesn’t sound like a good long term customer retention strategy.
And then here comes Disney, with their MASSIVE catalog of shows with conclusions, for cheap. It’s not just Hulu vs Netflix anymore.
Netflix: fix the interface and stop canceling shows without at least giving them conclusions. This stuff matters a lot!