HBO Max taking on Netflix with human curation instead of relying on algorithms
theverge.com
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I'm sure Netflix has piles of data that shows this is the best strategy. It just seems like a differentiated curation strategy doesn't matter that much in this battle. It will come down to who is producing the most popular original content most consistently.
It's also good that market forces are driving content-creation.
Edit: cut extra word
Not when they compete with exclusive content.
It would be good if they had the same content but compete with the UI (in such case Netflix would win, and HBO would loose, as they have the worst possible UI), streaming content etc.
I suspect the pendulum will swing away from exclusive content for television shows. Producers might make more money up front from the deals, but the long game favors those who establish brands with broad market appeal, and the way to do that is to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible.
The Switch may be the most popular console, but it's install base is a small fraction of PS4+XBone+PC+Switch. So even Nintendo exclusives purchased by the majority of owners can't sell as many units as the latest Call of Duty. Heck, even the The Witcher 3 has sold more units than the best selling Switch game.
Ff7 remake is coming to pc, they just haven't figured out when.
There is only so much one can stand. If the market is spread to thin then pirating content will be less frustrating than getting it on streaming service (if you have to subscribe to 8 of them).
Personally I try to keep the number of services I'm subscribed to to a sane minimum.
I would prefer the competition to not be content but on UI, speed, downtime, viewing suggestions, etc.
The best part of cable was that you could get any channel regardless of your provider. You could have Spectrum, AT&T, Direct TV or whoever and get any channel you wanted.
The problem was that you usually could not do al la carte and when you could it would not be cheap enough to justify losing all the other channels.
Imagine if you had to pay for Time Warner cable to get CNN, AT&T to get HBO, and Comcast to get NBC.
Now you can get HBO a la carte, NBC prime time either for free on their website or with no commercials or with Hulu for $12.
Really there is little on network TV that I care to watch anymore. Between Netflix ($5 with Tmobile), Hulu w/ no commercials, Amazon Prime, AppleTV+ (free for now), and Disney+ (Mostly for the kids), I have plenty to watch. I sign up for other services (Starz, CBS, DCUniverse) occasionally to binge and then cancel.
When you pay for Spectrum you get TBS, CW, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, etc. When you pay for AT&T you get the same channels. It doesn't matter your cable provider, you would have access to pretty much any channel you wanted.
With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, etc you have to pay for all of the services to get the content you want. This is beneficial for people who only want shows on a few streaming services but bad for people who now have to pay 10 different companies.
Ideally all the content creators would work together and make their content available to all of the streaming companies at a reasonable price even if they had their own streaming product. Paying for Netflix would provide the same shows as paying for Hulu.
Each of the streaming companies would then allow you to pay a set price for all the content like a traditional cable company (and their current business model) or allow you to pay for the shows you want. If you only want 5 shows you shouldn't have to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu and Disney+. You could pay Netflix and get all 5 shows instead of paying 3 different companies. Since you don't care about the other shows you shouldn't have to pay for the streaming company to obtain / keep the rights of those shows or to pay for them to create content you don't care about.
This is a pipe dream and will likely never happen.
If you would have said one individual's taste is subjective or subject to more variance I might be able to agree, but with more data points it seems humans are able to more or less define good from bad objectively. Anything with 10,000 or more votes on imdb is likely within 5% of its final value with very few exceptions.
Personally I find anything over 7.4 on imdb watchable, over 7.8 quite good, over 8.4 incredible, and if it hits 8.9 or higher it's likely one of the best movies of all time.
So my definition of "good" is somewhere above a 7.4.
Netflix has done decent drama along with some terrible reality shows (the one where men compete to impregnate one woman is notable https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/may/21/labor-o... ).
I remember watching duck dynasty, great kids show and I loved it, but I doubt it holds up for adults. Batman beyond on the other hand won an Emmy and still falls into the "kids show" genre but is very watchable for adults who can appreciate animated content.
So to answer your question, Netflix needs both as they represent very different audiences.
A few other exceptions that I didn't mention are comedies and horror. Ratings for these skew lower than average as they aren't meant to compete with Shawshank for greatest of all time, simply to entertain or scare. As such neither of these genres tend to attract serious directing, writing and acting talent and in turn, audiences tend to view them more as "fun" than serious.
You or I might love to watch pineapple express, hilarious comedy, but still vote it as a 6.9 because it doesn't hold a candle to Shawshank.
Duck Dynasty is a reality TV show, not a kids show.
I can't tell if you know that and are making a jab at them or not. If you are, then I think you're proving the point well, because you think it's clearly not a show for adults, while it was the most-watched nonfiction show in history. Clearly, tastes vary widely.
Some of will be bad, most average and a tiny bit will make huge piles of money (bring new users).
If most of the time when I tried something new it was good I'd probably do it more often.
As it stands I hardly use Netflix anymore.
Last movie I saw and liked at Netflix was The two popes. Netflix doesn't carry top series like
- Exit https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9612102/
- Le bureau des légendes https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4063800/
- Okkupert EDIT was/is available https://www.netflix.com/title/80092654
In the US & Canada Netflix has Babylon Berlin https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4378376/ but IMHO it is not up to above three.
Looking forward to be able to watch hbo-europe.com documentaries like
- The Other Side of Everything https://www.othersideofeverything.com/
- Lessons of Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM-wAlSFHZQ
For me they have that: Dark. It is top of the top, just like first seasons of Lost.
They also have Luter, Sherlock. Both of which are pretty good.
Couldn't agree more. Thanks for the tips. Watched all trailers, not my cup of tea.
This directly contradicts my experience.
I just checked my shows tracker and I have watched 32 shows (no movies included) that I would consider to be of some entertainment value and/or quality. I've discussed at least half of those with people, if not closer to 75%. I'd be happy to drop some recommendations if you give a genre or some preferences :)
It's fair to say our individual viewing habits are vastly different to the others. Maybe if there was more overlap you might not notice any difference with the recommendations.
Most of the stuff they produce are super political when they don't have to be, very bad writing or acting often with a great base story that could have been something great but filled with characters doing completely stupid things.
Some also have a really fucked up message due to the extreme woke-ness like "In the Shadow of the Moon". A movie which starts of pretty good and interesting and then quickly enters a downhill path to the extreme ideologies that seems to fuel companies like Netflix.
Try watching a bunch of Bollywood, K-drama or anime and you’ll see that the recommendations change drastically.
But yeah, they aren’t exactly trying to challenge their viewers to try something different.
But it doesn't actually work that way, 4 star uber drivers get kicked off the platform, 2 star Amazon products suck, 2-3 star movies suck. 4-star movies are okay.
As such, I think we can conclude that people don't actually know how to use a star rating system and we should just get rid of it.
HBO Max I'm on the fence about. I really like HBO but not sure I need or want everything that comes with the Max flavor.
Did everyone just forget about the Netflix Prize? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize]
There was a brief time when they had the absolute best recommendation algorithm on the planet. It was intentionally replaced by something utterly different which is geared to simply steer everyone to IP that they own. It is not remotely similar. I have absolutely hated every change they've made to their UI since they ditched the old ratings system, too (forces you to use the mouse and sets you up for fumbling what should be clear actions, so you spend more time browsing - which costs them almost nothing - and less time watching). My guess is, research indicated they'd make more money with these changes than by licensing content audiences actually prefer and building a sane interface.
As it turns out, the Netflix golden age was a short-lived anomaly if not outright farce. If you want decent curation of content and also to be able to watch it, you will have to pay through the nose or pirate. Same as it ever was. It's consumer hostile, but the system is working as its overseers intend. Whether it's really the best long term strategy is still an open question in my book.
On the flip side, Netflix is creating their own content. People have no idea what content is on Netflix. They have to try really hard to push content and generate engagement. I've never heard of Outer Banks, but they keep pushing it to me and so I saw the pilot and now I'm watching the series. I watch one comedy show and now they keep throwing comedy shows at me so I saw and enjoyed another. Their need to create is different.
Even knowing what they have across brands is nontrivial.
The most straightforward example of this is for curation candidates to be proposed by algorithms, and then finalized by humans.
That approach works really well for things like creating digital maps from signals, and is employed pretty extensively by mapping companies as productivity multipliers.
Or even more familiar, it's what's behind things like smart select and magic wands in image editing tools.
OTOH take 5 people selecting 15 movies every month https://cinetree.nl/over-ons: excellent selection, no algorithms. Or every week 1 or 2 top movies at https://www.vrt.be/vrtnu/a-z/#filter=categories%3Afilms. Or idfa.nl, etc, etc. None proposed by algorithms, only humans.
People who are in the curation business (critics, reviewers, etc.) tend to favor things that make themselves look good to other people in the curation business. That is often opposite what the "unwashed masses" of people enjoy.
Prime example - Michael Bay movies. Michael Bay makes big, loud, entertaining movies with lots of explosions, bright lights, shiny objects, violence, and sex appeal. A "curator" is usually too snooty to recommend a movie like that.
An algorithm doesn't much care if a movie is artfully crafted, it only cares if people watch what is recommended. In the long run, an algo is more likely to give people what they want than a curator is.
If anything, curators over the long term seem to make a living telling people what they aren't supposed to like (or have access to).
ok so how do I know which human's taste is the same as mine. If only there was a recommendation engine for that.
HBO has human defined categories that makes sense.
Only problem I see is it might end up being just marketing and they'll just use the celebrity name and dump the films they want to push.
Here's a crowdsourced list:
https://letterboxd.com/peterstanley/list/1001-movies-you-mus...
I imported all of Roger Ebert's reviews:
https://letterboxd.com/re2/films/reviews/
His 381 "Great Movies":
https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-movie/films/
A list of obscure films:
https://letterboxd.com/offensivename/list/official-top-50-na...
Listed tagged with "top ten":
This is super simple stuff.
Their overall quality feels like it's gone down and their non-netflix content feels incomplete (many movie series are only partially available). In that way Netflix has replaced basic cable for me.
Whereas HBO and Amazon Prime still produce shows that have a certain wow factor in terms of quality.
HBO is operating on a much more tractable problem. Human curation may work better here.
As an avid music fan the ways I've sought out new material go as follows: - Originally, recommendations via trusted outlets / forum members - Not so long ago, Spotify algorithm recommendations - Currently, curated recommendations via trusted outlets / social media posters
My anecdotal experience between Netflix/HBO follows a similar pattern:
I tend to first go to a provider like HBO when seeking out new content, assuming quality is higher than whatever Netflix is pushing on me these days.
In contrast, a roommate of mine almost exclusively uses Netflix. She is more of the put on whatever, maybe pay attention maybe not type of viewer.
I guess summed up the main difference FOR ME between the two is HBO: "I need something good!" and Netflix: "I need something new!"
No one has found the "page rank of movies/series" yet, so I think HBO has a better chance here.
I'm not so sure -- I think the problem is no one has deployed it.
As a consumer, what I want is: based on my viewing history and/or shows I've said I like, show me more shows/movies I'll like.
What I currently get is: shows/movies that are in a similar style and genre to what I've watched or liked. The algorithm doesn't seem to take into account "good" vs "bad" movies.
The result is if I just randomly pick some movie from Netflix's "Because you watched.." recommendation, there's a very high chance I'm going to end up watching something I don't like because it isn't good.
As a concrete example, I just went to Netflix movies. "Because you watched Avengers: Infinity War...". There are 6 movies on the first page, 2 of which I've seen and have high Rotten Tomato scores (they are both Indiana Jones movies, with 88% and 85%). The other 4 have RT scores of 31%, 27%, 12%, and 3%. (Don't get me wrong, there are movies I do like that have low RT scores, and there are movies with high RT scores that I don't like, but generally a bad movie is a bad movie and more often than not there's a correlation with RT scores.)
Even if I could filter by "RT score > 60%" that would cut down on a lot of garbage, even if it means I might miss a couple movies/shows I'd actually like. This would change my personal perception from "The vast majority of content on Netflix isn't really worth watching" to something more positive. Note I still subscribe despite this -- there's still ample worthwhile content. I just don't watch things based on Netflix's recommendations alone.
Certainly it is possible to come up with something better than that blunt filter. So the question is: why don't they?
HBO has IMDB.
I assume it's counterproductive to the goal of capturing eyeballs for as long as possible.
Relatedly their tvOS app gets laggy after just tens of seconds of browsing and it's been like this for over a year, how can they not fix it?
But currently the vanilla version we have up now, I've found, has provided really solid results.
Similar to Youtube recommendations and how they are simply videos are most likely to watch through.
Recent PM interview question I've been using: You're the PM at Netflix handling the home screen. How do you determine how shows get promoted editorially vs algorithmically recommended? Walk through metrics/principles/trade-offs and how it impacts various parts of the biz.
My personal stab at this: this is really a strategic question. What are Netflix's long term goals? To be seen as HBO is, as a content-creator, or merely a content-provider? Both? What are the typical engagement rates for Netflix content vs purchased? What is the real, intangible (unmeasurable) objective we are maximizing for? Total hours watched? Or perceived value by consumer? Someone spending 25 hours a week with Netflix on still might perceive it as lower value than HBO that they spend 2 hours a week watching (and thus be more likely to cancel). Some forms of entertainment are easily substituted, as someone who uses TV for background noise wouldn't particularly mind to use Hulu for that purpose instead of Netflix. But a "must watch" show on HBO is just that, a must watch. Which customer do we want more of? More "background noise" customers implies a marginally higher infrastructure cost, while a more content focused strategy implies a higher cost for content production (and possibly a much more variable revenue stream, as people subscribe/cancel as their favorite show starts/stops airing). Maybe we want both, and we want to identify what kind of watcher a customer is, and then tailor their home screen to suit. Maybe one person has 90% Netflix Originals and the other has 10%.
If there is an answer here, it's to carefully weigh these strategic objectives and only then make changes to show promotion. Even then, it would be important to have some system of monitoring in place that allows you to confirm your changes are actually making measurable impact the objective in question (this may be very difficult, given an intangible goal of something like "increase Netflix mind-share". Probably a lot of marketing surveys and focus groups.) Straight-up engagement rate is just one of the many things to track here, and increasing it at any cost might not even be in Netflix's long term best interest.
Do you work in this space? It seems like you have a lot of context around OTT/streaming.
Your answer also brought to mind this podcast episode I came across this morning: http://investorfieldguide.com/shishir-mehrotra-the-art-and-s...
It introduces a nice concept of "marginal churn contribution" framed with bundling, but I think is also relevant to this discussion. Maybe more on the content sourcing/production side, but bleeds over into long-term goals (reducing churn/maximizing ltv/etc).
Thanks for the podcast link, it looks very relevant and will give it a listen. I see insurance is even explicitly addressed @ the 23 minute mark.
And from looking on Twitter, it's confirmed, imo, it's a bad question:
"As a lot of you have figured out instantly - this is really a iceberg question. Looks like a simple UX problem but is really about trying to understand Netflix as a system and as a business."
Why doesn't that make it a great question? A PM should be trying to do exactly this, yes?
Another problem is that if I watch 2 episodes in a row and I bookmark the page of the 2nd episode to finish it later, the URL in the address bar is actually still the URL of the 1st episode.
Same with Netflix, in my experience they truly know what I will like to watch, they seem to know what shows I'll love and what shows I won't love but will help pass the time, and seem to show it to me just when I want it.
I imagine it takes a lot of time and lots of past history and data on users to create those algorithms so when starting out the human curation method is required. And for companies like Apple, may be the long term strategy because the alogrithm method that YouTube and Spotify comes at the cost of potential tracking and privacy concerns.
Wow, I'd love to live in that world. Once Netflix abandoned their 5 star system their recommendations really tanked for me. It feels like it's recommending more based on outrage & "engagement" than enjoyment for me. Meanwhile MovieLens [1] consistently guesses what I would rate a movie within +/- half a star, I think I'm using their Warrior recommendation algorithm. The tagging features on MovieLens help - apparently I most enjoy "visually appealing surreal mysteries".
But I absolutely agree about Spotify. Spotify seems like its actually learning from my Liked tracks, curated playlists and behaviour, and picks up on when my tastes shift to wildly different genres for a while.
It might be because of the service balkanization, but in the past I was able to find hidden gems on netflix, the same afterwards with prime video, but nowdays not only I have to browse in the text catalogs you might find online to quickly search among all the stuff I don't like, to find something I might enjoy that would certainly be buried in netflix UI. And even worse, I find myself rewatching my favorites instead of being able to find something different than blockbusters in the platforms.
Similarly, if I liked The Witch and Hereditary then top recommendations for me must be $5m budget cash grab teen slashers and haunted webcam gimmicks.
I think random selection would be more effective for me than the current Netflix algo(s).
Netflix bothers me because they have a marketing bend that creates your tunnels for you.
The article literally makes the point that Spotify's system is much more human curated than Netflix because it heavily relies on human curated lists that are shared between users.
My kids used to laugh at Villager News, a dumb but occasionally funny skit show using 3D animation to copy Minecraft. Amazon Video now runs the show on its streaming service.
Basically YouTube became a method to make pilots for tv series.
Imagine all the weird but low cost documentaries i try and find on YouTube - Tods Workshop, Primitive Technology. There will be a thousand such people in thousands of niches.
Google could just flip on a content arm and hand each channel a producer and a decent camera and just own half the content. The other half is documentary / reportage rather than essays.
Honestly thinking of content as action shows or sci-fi 100 episodes is missing the point entirely. Content here on in is still high quality but aimed at a 100,000 people not 20 million.
In that scenario you're competing against YouTube, a place with abundant content with very different expectations for quality. People already go to YouTube for this content.
Its obvious HBO Now could be merged completely into Max since you get access to both if you have Now but the fact they still keep Go around still is a joke.
That said, I'm curious how the future will play out. I already have Hulu, HBO, Disney Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. The cost and variety is getting out of hand, and I don't even have time to watch them all(I use Hulu the most, and Amazon the least, fwiw). Are we going to soon see reconsolidation of services, back to the cable model?
It wouldn't surprise me if we see more of a trend towards content curation that isn't based on AI recommendation engines, but rather humans who are either friends or celebrities/experts.
Some ideas: * My friends are watching this * Martin Scorsese's film influences * Cinemassacre Monster Madness watch list
Filter bubble is the term for when algorithms select the content you watch instead of you.
Filter bubble https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
Am I the only one that is completely confused by their apps branding?
> The biggest difference is what you can stream. HBO Max is a stand-alone streaming platform where you can stream all of HBO together with even more of your favorite series and blockbuster movies, plus new and exclusive Max Originals for everyone in the family.
> HBO NOW and HBO GO are your options for streaming all of your HBO favorite series, plus hit movies, specials, and more. HBO GO is a streaming service included with your paid HBO subscription through a TV or mobile provider. And HBO NOW is a stand-alone streaming service that lets you stream all of HBO without a TV or mobile package.
Hope that they catch up eventually else it's gonna be hard to compete solely based on content.
My family's viewership of Amazon Prime Video is severely limited because they refuse to add Spanish audio to their content. They have a few Spanish-language shows and movies but it's slim pickings.
HBO has no excuse on this, imho. I _know_ they have Spanish audio for every single one of their shows and movies - when we had cable TV we could switch language track in seconds, and this is not counting their Spanish-language channel that played in Spanish by default.
Regardless, do Netflix, Apple and Disney have better engineers than HBO (and Amazon)? Do the latter two not care about offering Spanish (or non-English)? Do they have some contractual obligations to not offer the options online?
Turns out I don't care what the reason is. They don't offer extra language options, so I don't subscribe.
Walmart (active merchandising) > Amazon (passive SEO)
Mutual funds (active picking) > ETFs (passive baskets)
It seems like a one directional shift. Every time I see human curation, it just ends up being long term worse.
It seems like to me that they use analytics to inform what kind of content to make but there are humans making decisions.
If I need curation, I'll check the movies on IMDB first.
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/why-hbo-max-not-availa...
As much as people complain about Apple’s 30% cut, Apple doesn’t get a cut of third party content apps if a user subscribes on the providers website.
No, Apple doesn’t force content app makers to offer payment through Apple - see Netflix, Spotify, Hulu Live TV, Sling, ATT Now, etc.
Compare Disney Plus's launch with any streaming product ATT launches is day and night. One is all about the consumer experience while the other is all about penny pinching and tons of red tape/too many cooks in the kitchen. They already destroyed Direct TV with their stupidity next is HBO.
Yeah because netflix loves those robots it serves. At least netflix doesn't have a name problem... Three different HBO products... yeah that's gonna work. /s