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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

> Netflix is a single platform but arguably every piece of content is its own product.

That's the problem. As time goes on, all the really popular shows will have left Netflix (Friends, The Office, Frasier, Always Sunny, etc) and all that will be left are Netflix Originals.

The vast majority of those are not premium shows like The Crown, You and Stranger Things, but straight-to-DVD caliber bilge that will initially entice users because of the netflix branding, but turn them off once they realize it's low quality. You can't keep commissioning new programming forever while keeping the price at $12.99/mo. or whatever.

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> The vast majority of those are not premium shows like The Crown, You and Stranger Things, but straight-to-DVD caliber bilge that will initially entice users because of the netflix branding, but turn them off once they realize it's low quality.

How many shows does NBC have each year? How many are still around the next?

Netflix does the same thing as all the other Networks. The difference is, since it's all on demand, they can just keep their low quality stuff around for the few people who actually enjoyed it, making their service appeal to a broader base.

Netflix's goal isn't to have only mega-hits -- it's to have enough different stuff to keep all the subscribers happy.

There is a very small Venn diagram of people who like Stranger Things and that new Goop show, and that's just what Netflix wants.

> How many shows does NBC have each year?

People don't pay $12.99 for NBC each month.

Not sure how that's relevant. Given this is a discussion about company viability, you could say no one pays Google for anything.

But they do, by viewing ads. They pay with their attention. That's how they pay NBC too.

Programming has a fixed one-time cost to produce while subscription revenue scales with number of subscribers and is recurring. This means that as Netflix grows, they can keep producing more expensive content and grow their catalog faster. There is a feedback loop here:

The same money spent on content has higher ROI the bigger the subscriber count is -> the more/better content they produce, they more subscribers they can get -> the more subscribers, the more money they get to play with.

The mix of lower and higher-end content probably makes sense because the low end content is cheap to produce and caters to people with niche interests, or people who watch constantly and just want something new to watch.

This assumes the Disney back-catalog strategy makes sense in the digital age.

Pre-VHS, Disney would re-release movies in theaters. They could re-release Fantasia, or Cinderella, or whatever, and still make money in theaters in the 1970s.

But, there wasn't that much content to watch at that time. You had live TV or movies. That was it.

Today there is more on-demand content out there than I could watch if I lived a million years. Do you think "Bright" will keep subscribers 10 years from now for Netflix?

Just as an example: "Band of Brothers" and "The Wire" are two of the best things I've ever watched. Would I _keep_ an HBO subscription forever after I've watched them? No...

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