They'll likely mostly turn into another studio with a streaming platform.
Features such as only using company generated ratings, aggressively cancelling shows, and the lack of ability to browse/sort/filter the catalog, in favor of Netflix pushing the recommendations they choose on users, is probably great for quarterly KPIs but bad for long term customer satisfaction.
Netflix is of course already a behemoth and not going anywhere but I expect their future to be much more of a generic media company than an elite tech company.
- Disney has Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and a long tail of childhood classic films. - HBO has Warner Brothers, DC, Cartoon Network (including a nostalgia back catalog), the best TV shows made in the 00s, and a long tail of adult films. - Netflix's largest successes in the last two years are Tiger King, Squid Game, The Witcher, and a long tail of shows cancelled after Season 1 and short-run miniseries.
At this point, Netflix is a last-resort source of entertainment for me, even after (ad-riddled) YouTube. I mostly only use it to watch their weird reality shows (Blown Away, Sugar Rush) and check out shows friends recommend. I suspect even Paramount+ has a larger selection of TV shows I'd like to watch compared to Netflix.
I think all of those companies fall into common problem of falling deep into A/B test local maximum. It's impossible to rework entire site at once, especially for an A/B test.
Ha, that is so true. Netflix is infamous for this. It’s to the extent that I cannot start watching a Netflix production unless I know it’s finished or if it’s a big hit from day one (so I know it won’t be cancelled, like The Witcher). It’s odd, because Netflix’s reputation for prematurely cancelling content without resolving their endings has extended to beyond just youth-dominated social media. For example, my parents of all people who cannot use a computer nor the internet, don’t like investing in new Netflix content because they’ve been burned too many times from incomplete series. That’s just like me. It’s sad because Netflix dared to create decent and interesting content, but now it would be hard to escape their infamy.
People don’t want to watch shows in case it gets cancelled early. Then Netflix cancels the show early because there wasn’t enough interest.
If they didn’t have the reputation people would watch the shows and if it’s good tell their friends. At this point it seems like everyone just stays away though.
They could always just keep making new seasons to add to their catalog and eventually people might watch it, but it seems risky to spend the money.
Following in the footsteps of that other company starting with the alphabet G where products are in perpetual beta?
Is it on the discoverability side or the watching side?
Watching is a seamless experience IMO - It really does just work, all the buttons and responses are perfect.
It constantly recommends the same stuff over and over despite the fact that I never click on it because I don't want to watch it.
It doesn't notify me when there's new episodes or seasons to a show I've previously watched (a year is a long time to wait for new episodes).
I'm not a fan of the UX.
Somethings are much better for everyone to have a common experience without it being unique.
Your second and third point though are accurate for me too. Thanks for explaining.
The UI constantly shuffles around, having to hunt for my list or currently watching shows is particularly annoying.
Incessant autoplay that couldn't be disabled for years, and still can't be in all cases.
Awful controls for browsing content. The categories are meaningless and constantly changing.
There's no way to find new shows I'm likely to like within the app. They refuse to have any sort of objective ratings and the custom ones are unbelievably bad, even after years of watching. I have to go to outside sources any time I want to find a new show.
I could go on. Prime gets a lot of criticism for their UX but I actually much prefer it to Netflix's. At least with Prime the ratings have some signal and the layout is simple and consistent. It's not pretty but at least it doesn't go out of the way to annoy me, which is just fine with me. Amazon has probably spent far less on their UX but has a better result.
Even so much so I can’t find shows I saw ads for in 2017 or 2018 even existing because they were so bad. It makes me feel the Mandela effect is happening.
Plus I hate their way of trying to soup up stale content by making various sexy versions of cover art. Like The Net with Sandra Bullock. A long forgotten, mediocre, and comically out-dated tech thriller. People were wandering right past it on Blockbuster Video shelves. That’s how old and stale it is. Yet Netflix goes and sources these sexy shots of Bullock in an attempt to get me to watch it. I find the whole thing very insulting.
It's an acronym specifically for those companies, which is why Microsoft was excluded.
(And TBH, it had been a surprise to be FANG, not FAMG to begin with)
Works for me.
Although back in 2013 the criteria was: "totally dominant in their markets". AFAIK, Microsoft dominates only two markets (OS and office suites) and it's only if we limit ourselves to desktop; even then, it's not a total domination.
> Cramer expanded FANG to FAANG in 2017, adding Apple to the other four companies due to its revenues placing it as a potential Fortune 50 company.
Today, especially with Netflix being less unique technically (they did a lot of early out-of-the-box stuff like going all in on AWS and microservices), they're pretty much an outlier from the other companies although as far as I know they still pay very well. As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier.
Microsoft certainly has more in common with the others, but their stock (as well as the company generally) was out of favor when Cramer coined the term.
A poll about FAANG with netflix and excluding microsoft seems simply like a poll about a group of companies that a tv show host made a catchy acronym about, rather than a poll about which of the big tech companies today is likely to decline or not.
also, as they invest in developing proprietary production software they could get an advantage over other studios.
And Netflix themselves has released a fair bit of code as open source.
MAGMA: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon.
I regularly see comments like: "The public clouds providers like Amazon, Google, and I suppose even Oracle".
It's kind of hilarious to see people just skip over the second biggest company in the world like it doesn't even exist in their minds.
But I don't actually see Netflix programming as aiming to make, e.g. reality TV drek. Most of their programming does seem to be aiming for midbrow quality although it often doesn't hit it.
I dropped them in 2020.
Let this be a lesson. Data and fancy algorithms can NEVER replace a smart human who cares. Data and algorithms can enhance and expedite humans - but if your humans are stupid, you will just make stupid decisions faster
If the Netflix recommendation engine is the result of any data science then obviously they have no special knowledge from their mountain of data because the engine is worthless.
Netflix originals are available everywhere, the licensed content is far more restrictive. On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals. Hulu won’t even let you log in if you’re outside the US. For whatever reason, legacy media decided they don’t want the rest of the world to be fans of their content and give them money for it. Disney is an exception since they’re starting to expand Disney+ overseas.
No, legacy media has distribution issues which they address by licensing distribution geographically before release, and once those rights are divided it's very hard to reconsolidate them.
Movie theaters and broadcast/cable are still a thing, and still an important component of how legacy video makes money on content. And the geographic distribution issues there still exist. And for them to work, geographic exclusivity can't ignore streaming, either.
You can't convince me that, say, Warner Bros doesn't have sufficient leverage to wrest their online streaming rights away from some Bulgarian movie theater chain or whatever. I mean, come on.
This is not always true, and it depends on the nature of the “Original”. There’s really two classes: Originals fully owned by Netflix, and ones produced in partnership with a traditional TV network. The latter are branded as Netflix Originals everywhere except their home country (where they are carried by the local network instead).
> On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals.
This isn’t true; the UK also has a lot of licensed content, if you have Prime in the UK. My understanding is they do in other markets where they offer Prime as well, but you only get access to the full library when you’re in the region where you have Prime, unlike Netflix.
That may be part of their content licensing, but that could also be a commercial decision by Amazon. (eg I also don’t get other Prime benefits from Amazon.de with my .co.uk Prime subscription.)
But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?
Even in music--where everyone actually has a pretty complete catalog--recommendation is pretty bad.