Netflix loses subscribers for the first time in 10+ years
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I do wish they'd pick up a few more good Sci-Fi shows and then cancel them to confirm my personal grudge. It's so hard to waste my time on today's Sci-Fi...get off my lawn, etc, etc.
It wasn't just the analysts. Netflix itself missed big in their forecast.
From the article, fyi.
> slowing at a rapid pace because of increasing competition from Apple, Amazon, Disney and HBO.
I don't doubt that but I do suspect other services will see some slow down too as a result of general bullshit and uncertainty in the economy. It's never really just one thing.
Then again...yeah Disney+ is a really good deal. And Amazon's numbers are inflated from other Prime stuff. I'm just an old man yelling at a screen from his arm chair because I can't trust anyone.
How can anything slow at a rapid pace?
Rapid deceleration. Just because a car is still moving, doesn't mean it's moving as fast as it was 1 second ago.
I predict Netflix will change two things business wise: 1. Ads. 2. No content dumps, instead 1 episode/week.
Ads and high price is why everyone cut the cable in the first place. (And poor content)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/netflixs-ceo-says-hes-...
because of increased fragmentation, torrents are becoming a big competitor again?
I'm already paying for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max. Sharing those with friends, and receiving Disney+ and Hulu in return. We're back to where we started, with everything dashed across a bunch of different 'networks', and I left entirely because of the steep cable bill.
Like hell I'm going to add even more services, like AppleTV or Paramount+.
Torrents are too complicated for most people, compared to the ease of buying an 'Android TV box' at a cell phone store, Craiglist or flea market, and paying $15/month for cable channels and TV/movie streaming. The UI is relatively good, worlds apart from the 2010 era when finding shows and episodes required going through a list of gorillavid.com links.
As recently as Feb., mgmt was forecasting 2.5 million growth. (much lower than 7 million consensus)
I'm sure their inability to forecast isn't helping.
It's going to be mentioned in every earnings call from now on, and it's almost always going to be a bogus excuse.
The important part is subscriber loss in other countries and the projection that over 2 million more subscribers will be lost over the next quarter. Compared to a previous estimate that the company would see a net increase in subscribers by 2.5 million last quarter, that's a big letdown and the market's reaction would have been the same even if the Russia numbers weren't bad.
'Smoking' is really good (not sci fi, though, but I recommend it to everyone). Old Enough has been thoroughly charming as well.
In doing so, they could get huge brand loyalty from bilingual folks, plus more content for people willing to watch with subs. My wife's mom watches tons of dramas on youtube, we'd get her a netflix account in an instant if we thought she would use it - UX watching shows via youtube is abysmal.
Pay for dubbing once a show proves itself without and 'relaunch' the branding to wider audiences. Netflix should have very solid stats on which users are willing to watch foreign language shows with subs, so they can do targeted homepage advertising to test the shows easily.
Dev lift should be light, really just need to add a search filter for original language/country of origin.
As the average quality of their English language has, imo, decreased, the fact that I can easily find good content in other languages is a big selling point.
I'm conversational in Japanese, and I'd love to see Japanese variety/game shows on netflix. There are thousands of hours of content that have never been available to the US market afaik - I think I've only seen them on youtube or dailymotion when not in japan.
I wonder what the expense of subbing these shows would be. Perhaps they could do a non-exclusive licensing deal where they contribute the sub IP back to the IP holder for an even-further-reduced rate.
I think they are doing that right now with Nippon TV’s Japanese show about toddlers running errands “I’m old enough” which started in 1991.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/old-enough-on-net...
Would suggest: Katla
Ad Vitam
a throwback not on Netflix rn: Continuum
Yeah but Netflix is the one that most frequently gives me hope before smashing it. Ha ha, I got to get out of these abusive relationships.
Another pet peeve is the grouping of sci-fi with fantasy or horror. There are few cases where there is sufficient science in the fantasy or horror that obeys some premise (e.g. differing physics) but mostly the grouping is noise.
What Netflix really needs is genre search that respects "-" as in "sci-fi -horror -fantasy".
Management's loss "reasons" all seem valid, but don't forget the production aspect (which is much closer tied to competition)
> "In an effort to continue to gain share in the market, Netflix has increased its content spend, particularly on originals. To pay for it, it’s hiked prices of its service. The company said Tuesday those price changes are helping to bolster revenue, but were partially responsible for a loss of 600,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada during the most recent quarter."
My observation is that they are selling attention addiction like Facebook without caring about quality content recently. Ex: Korean copycat shows and "documentaries", just because both categories tend to rate higher on IMDB. Seems like a decision a PM will make, based on metrics to improve profit, not quality - i.e. give users what they want, even if it is bad for them (or the business) in the long term (as seen with competition's content quality)
PS: Similar thing happened with Facebook back in February. The point is it might take years, but eventually the bs will catch up.
Their desperation is starting to show with the exploration of potential "low hanging fruit" revenue sources like ads instead of new growth markets (games) - as is happening with indirect competitors (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, FB); and direct competitors (Hulu, Disney and HBO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101175
The thing about public companies...is that most eventually fall into the pressures of "consistent growth" by stockholders, following the pack mentality (profit at all costs), even if sorting to unethical means.
The selection of older content on Netflix is really weak on the whole and their original content is getting worse and worse.
There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours in series it really is awful tv and watching the writers struggle to spin tires to drag it to 10 hours is exhausting. Not to mention the executive meddling is extremely apparent in many of their scripts where you can tell whole sections were added at exec request because the story goes off at a tangent and then when it returns the stakes are exactly the same as before the tangent.
I'm not playing the game of subscribing to different services just to get particular content, because I don't watch things often enough to justify the effort or cost. Plus this way all my physical media comes into the same library as rips, and PlexAmp is a pretty good music player, too.
Jack Reacher. 80 minutes would have been just right.
Being able to just grab whatever movies I have in my list of things to watch, and play them, locally, without having to scroll through the apps has been quite the relief. Occasionally I use HBO Max still because it has some decent older movies, but I'm pretty much only using my HTPC now, and with Plex, I can watch my library across the network at home via Apple TVs in the bedroom.
The nonsense original content Netflix throw out is awful.
Having to watch 6 to 10 hours of a show riddled with plot holes, long drawn out rubbish narrative, and social justice content just to cloud it further. It's not great.
On top of that they simply switch off all other content if you are using a VPN, even legitimately in your own country, it's rubbish.
PC under the telly is roaring back into fashion.
Who wants to pay umteen subscriptions for bad content anyway?
Now that they are planning on cracking down on password sharing, good riddance
It isn't that difficult and doesn't involve any technical innovation whatsoever.
Just stop being assholes.
They made record profits during the COVID era, seeing huge subscriber increases during lockdown and work-from-home.
So they increased prices. And nickel-and-dimed customers. And got rid of the best parts of their catalog. And threw a fit about sharing passwords.
Geez. Hey I'm stuck several states away from my family for two years but God forbid we try to connect by sharing our movie and TV watch lists. Meemaw can't watch Peppa Pig with her grandson in person, so we'd better watch out for her wanting to check out his Netflix Kids list and try to connect with what's interesting him.
Netflix used to be great. Now they're just jerks with mediocre content that charge 3-4x what Discovery does.
That’s something Disney and Apple are both embracing with shared viewing sessions. It’s an excellent feature and it has been so much easier watching Disney content together than trying to count down and sync pause/play of content, so guess where we go when it’s remote movie night?
On AppleTV you need to be on a FaceTime call.
I'm not sure they have much of a choice in the matter, given the remaining movie producing companies are trying to fund/build alternatives. Netflix would gladly host all the latest Disney movies, but they aren't allowed to anymore.
Netflix was well aware of this several years ago and leaned into it, but failed to focus on quality.
They need to think like a Hollywood studio, and less like a Video Supermarket. You need to be a Disney or PBS , Universal or MGM, and the subscribers will pay for high quality content.
The only notable Netflix content seems to be the one purchased externally. Internally developed content, tends to follow a common amorphous pattern, that becomes very predictable as it gets extended into multiple episodes of the same script.
They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
Of those, the very clear ordering in terms of taste and vision is: Disney+, Apple, HBO >>>> HBO, Hulu.
Apple is the most amazing one to me - they came from nowhere, and are bringing original content like CODA or Severance after only a few years.
Maybe it's because Apple - the largest (tech) company on Earth still has at its core the idea of beautiful things designed by humans, and Netflix never has.
Netflix used to be that way too. But now it is trying to play moneyball.
How fair is that though? Who's to say that we wouldn't find the quality of content of CBS/NBC/ABC to be equally as bad if we had it comprehensively laid out in a nicely engineered UI like in Netflix? In the previous model, most of us didn't watch TV for huge chunks of the day and simply weren't around to see if the television was good during those chunks.
I think the exact opposite: Ozark was great, because it is basically a rip-off of Breaking Bad, which was made by a mainstream TV network (which has a lot of experience and research about what kind of stories people do like). The "risky content" from artists that were "set free" is a recipe for disaster: you spend a lot of money to produce a show that only appeals to some exotic audiences. Netflix has some examples of that. Only once in a while you'll hit the jackpot and have this risky content make you a lot of money.
Netflix are going to end up with lots of content but very little original IP that people are seeking out.
One of the issues is how much Netflix content just reflect whatever crap is a fad in California politics. I am not even from US, I don't want to hear about Californian political themes in the media I consume, SPECIALLY when it is a remake of something from a country that has nothing to do with California culture! (like... Japan, or Poland...)
That said, political content is pretty popular with a big chunk of their subscribers. The rest of us lose out because of it, unfortunately... I don't even know if I would call it political, more just forcing in bits of virtue signaling where it doesn't make sense.
Edit: typo
You’re right, it’s infuriating but not limited to Netflix unfortunately. Look at Picard… a total cringe-fest. That said, I did randomly watch an Israeli TV series about the lives of ultra-orthodox Jews, Shtisel, and despite the lack of CGI and all that, I found it an interesting watch.
What are some examples of this? Of all the issues Ive seen people have with Netflix, this is definitely a very new one.
As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
edit: another thing I just remembered, Netflix removed what is probably the best episode of Community from its catalog because of a blackface character, despite the fact that the character is explicitly used to address racism in the fantasy genre.
You write this as if the same questions of racial and gender politics are not also significant in other parts of (a) the anglosphere (b) western europe.
The one character that outright critiques the practice still ends up revolving around a guy that "she chose" but is lower class. Why did she need a man?
Not only that but the show is all about 15yos marrying 20 something dudes? Just creepy.
On the other hand I thought sex education was great with how it deals with social issues surrounding sex. I do enjoy the aesthetics of it, never really found it weird but its definitely an "american 80s" aesthetic, though that is also how young people are dressing, at least over here.
Personally I dont see an issue with exploring social questions at all, but it does most of the time a superficial analysis just ends up ignoring too many things to be of any use and ends up simply as a performative action. I think this is the case for Bridgerton but not Sex Education.
In any case, what angers me with Netflix is the way they cancel shows without giving them a way to wrap up their stories in a final season. Sure, if you have 2 seasons and you were planning 5 it might be difficult to wrap everything on a third season but it is surely better than simply leaving the story open.
I mean how do you say any of this is American politics and not British/Western European politics? Racial inequality, women's rights, and class structures are not just American things.
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
Yes, like most American content sources, the content tends to be flavored by American culture.
> As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
I would say it has fairy tale versions of racial and gender politics (which are not, insofar as they connect with real world versions, any less connected to British than American ones) bolted on to a weird fairy tale version of early 19th Century British aristocracy; it's very American, but less in the politics than the style of romance story for which the setting provides the context.
Hard to say Netflix is worse for this than various other Hollywood studios tho.
(to clarify in anticipation of downvotes, I welcome and enjoy some of the media about trans people etc, I am just answering your question, to elucidate this issue with the services' content that some people have. Definitely not a rare or new issue, I've been listening to people go on about it for years)
I dont see how stuff like this is complained about though, especially since most shows dont actually have more than token representation anyway. Whats the actual complaint here? That the average cast of a show is slightly different now than it was 10 years ago? People complain about "woke" themes but I hardly see concrete examples of them, and explanations as to whats wrong or what should be done differently.
And fwiw I think using Star Trek as an example is funny* since the show has historically been based on diverse groups of people.
In Star Fleet the fact that someone happens to be a polygamous tri-sexual trans-species cat person should pass mostly without comment.
But modern sensibilities set up a dynamic where nobody is just a character.
Everyone is seen as representing "their team" - a race, or a class. This is a big responsibility, so everyone has to take themselves super seriously.
I think we're in a transitional phase for TV. Representation is a priority (great!) but the industry isn't fully confident with it yet. It's OK, TV has always been about the zeitgeist as much as the show.
Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
> Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
This is the answer. Seems like just a bit more time is needed for things to find less wooden footing.
Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order:
Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story).
Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity.
Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior.
Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows.
As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination.
An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue.
No one complains about the fresh prince of Bel-Air having a 100% black cast. But I doubt you wouldn't mind if a reboot was made with 80% white cast because it's a show "from 15 years ago".
What many people hate is the lack of creativity and the "corruption" of already-existing shows for ideologic views.
I would however, pay good money for "Star Trek: all David Bowie edition" where an entire starship is crewed with David Bowie clones.
Thanks for the bigman comeback earlier too, you phrased it better than I could have.
The complaints about CA politics in Netflix are new complaints to me.
...what?
(It doesn't help that they drag their customers into their fight with Apple by not integrating with Apple TV. Given their quality now I don't open Netflix by default and now that they don't integrate my global queue I legit forget to resume a show.)
Speaking as someone who knows Netflix producers, they very much do...
Speaking as someone with the misfortune to still be holding the stock, down 25% after hours, right now.
Netflix isn't doing any of that. It isn't going for the best and brightest it's going for the best and brightest, and "murder shows", and crappy reality shows, and cooking shows, and, and, and: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/11561544/netflix-doesnt-want-t...
-First the intersectional genres became harder to find, or create.
-Then the reviews were wiped.
-Then you see the same content you actually watched as recommended and often
Yes, it is crazy, in part because "the algorithm" (how i hate this term) really derives most of its power because it represents huge numbers of human beings making choices. The store clerk may have been an excellent recommendation engine for you, or they may not have been, but they almost certainly were not equally good (or bad) for most people.
Independent video stores are not so tightly tied to one distributor, so yes, a clerk that takes a few moments to hear what movies you like could point you in the right direction....even if that direction is to go a different store entirely.
Ozark seems like a directly bad comparison because it appears to be one of their last big content swings/risks (and is ending soon) from the first few years where they seemed to heavily curate their projects and who the creators were and who the talent were and give them enough seasons to tell the full story they were hoping to tell. (Ozark is one of the very few and seems one of the last to get its full number of seasons expectation and will get to tell a "complete story".) Ozark is not quite as successful as benchmarks like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, but it fills a niche and gambles on good talent pulling off a tough tightrope of "bad people doing bad things but you root for them in spite of themselves", which is still a very risky niche even with big "Prestige TV" breakouts such as the aforementioned benchmarks. (I've only finished the first season of Ozark because I have a hard time watching this "cringe" genre, but I recall it was very well made and I enjoyed it for what it was.)
Since Netflix ordered Ozark they have indeed seemed to move their Originals content much more to a algorithm-generated "shotgun" approach: building lots of single season shows (or maybe if first weekend and only first weekend views are high enough, or so it seems, they will get two seasons) and seemingly designed overall to take fewer risks (on creators, on talent, on genres). There's definitely a lot extremely generic or at least extremely low risk programming coming out of Netflix's shotgun at this point. Some of it has still been entertaining.
But calling Ozark out for being a product of the shotgun and "low risk" seems backwards when it seems so much more emblematic of riskier Netflix Originals projects than current ones.
Killer Clowns From Outer Space
But the way their UI/UX is built, it is not conducive for exploring. They've taken so much control away from me. I have to rely on what IT thinks I should be watching.
I know one of the reasons why they do this is because they don't want people to easily see and track of how small their content library is, and how frequently content disappears.
I usually google for "best movies netflix april 2022" (or shows) and look through rotten tomatoes, metacritic, etc to see if that is something worth checking out.
I don’t think they want you exploring too much. It would expose how little content they actually have.
Not sure who else feels this but for me:
There's a lack of "regular tv shows". I knew it was over when they got rid of The Office, that was pretty much the only reason I kept Netflix.
HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video, AMC (temporary) all have the shows we regularly go to. Sopranos/Frasier, Simpsons/Star Wars/National Geography, The Office/Friends, Breaking Bad/Better call Saul (just need to see how it all ends).
Heck even Prime managed to bag many of the shows that used to be on Netflix. Aliens, Tora Tora Tora and even Independence Day is on Disney Plus. Lot of movies outside Netflix.
Netflix just has these one off good shows that frankly doesn't attract across the demographic. Sure there's something for everyone but its lacking those "must have and easy to access binge reruns".
Netflix was great for about 10 years when it's only competition was Hulu. Now everyone has yanked their content off of Netflix and put it on their own streaming platforms.
When Netflix had ALL of the streaming videos, it was amazing, it was the Video Supermarket as you say.
Now Netflix makes it's own content and I hear nothing but bad things from other people and my own experiences of their programming is that it's substandard to what they could get from other studios.
They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.
Given that, how is this:
> They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider,
even possible?
A perfect example is Scorsese's "The Irishman." That movie could have easily been 2-2.5 hours yet it came in at over 3 hours. It was a detriment to the movie rather than a positive. Yet, I bet Netflix loved the extra content even though it was not a good thing for the movie.
And what’s wrong with Ozark? I thought it’s one of the better shows on Netflix.
In my view they need more creative risky shows like the OA, Altered Carbon, Love, Death & Robots, Dark Mirror and more old HBO style content… quality and like you said not this mass produced stuff trying to satisfy the lowest common denominator, because then you will satisfy no one.
Maybe they have good shows I just don't know about. Their recommendation system seems to be crap. I browse for 20 minutes and then give up frustrated, because I can't find anything interesting.
I was just looking to downgrade my plan. Basic only gives you SD quality, which I'm OK with but only allowing one device at a time is taking the p!ss.
My limited experience working at a public company has seen tons of employee turnover, especially in this extremely hot job market. I'm considering shopping around as well, but my TC has been going up through promotions, which relieve the pressure to look around a bit.
To answer your question, using Meta as an example, nothing happens. The employees are exposed to both the upside and the downside of RSUs.
If Netflix is like most companies, they’ll start reining in spending. In fact, that’s exactly what was reported a couple weeks ago: https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/netflix-executives-hiring...
https://jobs.netflix.com/work-life-philosophy (See Finances section)
https://graystoneadvisor.com/blog/netflix-supplemental-stock...
If I’ve recently watched a movie or series, don’t relentlessly show it in the “recommended-content-looping-screensaver”. I know it exists, because I’ve watched it. And you know that too.
The upside is that you always have your account "active" and ready to go. There is no friction to playing a video, browsing the catalog. Just hitting play and you are a paying customer again. If you are going to be charged for two years there is definitely incentive to cancel your account, adding friction to any decision to resubscribe.
The downside is likely that it adds mental friction to that first video every month. It takes it from "well I already paid" to "is it worth it? I'm going on vacation for 2 weeks and won't watch much, maybe I'll skip this month" which negates the mental relief that "unlimited" monthly subscriptions rely on.
They act like they’re “Netflix, king of the hill, above all others and different from wannabes”. Like HBO vs basic cable. Like it’s 2014 still and all the other services are jokes.
It’s not. The others have caught up in many ways, or surpassed. With MUCH better prices. And the Netflix crap ratio has gotten out of control.
One huge hit every few years won’t save you. Apple TV+ is firing on all cylinders. HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney all nice have originals and great back catalogs for nostalgia.
If I could find Apple TV+ quality on Netflix I’d be happier. But I can’t. And I pay 4x as much for that privilege thanks to 4K.
Of course, Sturgeon's Law is still in effect, so 90% of everything will be crap. But producing non-crap for smaller audiences builds loyalty, which is worth something in the subscriber model.
Or at least that's my read of their strategy. There's a real discovery problem that comes with it that I don't think they've solved. But overall it's an interesting approach.
Of course, they also license content but that's just about spreading around the dollars from a bag of money.
Personally, I find Netflix to be worth the subscription at the moment. But there are a ton of other streaming services and I'm not going to subscribe to them all. And, while I have gone in and out of Netflix' DVD service, the back catalog has sufficiently rotted I don't find it worthwhile.
But Netflix isn’t trying as much stuff as network TV. They seem to be trying as much as all of cable.
The problem is at a certain point you ruin all discovery. There is no way to find something new through serendipity. It’s gone next week from the promotion so they can promote 8 other new shows.
But that means even if you find it and it’s good it won’t get and audience and will be cancelled. Unless it gets big from something outside Netflix (social media with Squid Game or some other popular but not mega hit shows) it’s a goner.
So… why even look at all that stuff? It’s not worth it.
When I look back at a lot of my favorite TV shows, many of them took a while to hit their stride. Even universally liked TV shows will have rough starts where people will go, "Yea, you can just sorta skip season 1."
Over time you just get used to thinking, "oh, this is a Netflix original on Season 1, I'll wait and see if they make more content" which probably fucks with the viewer numbers and they cancel it.
No, it's objectively crap. I hate romcoms or horror movies but I can distinguish between the quality that was put in making them (objective) vs how much they affect me (subjective). And even nostalgia aside, they produce only crap. Nearly all Netflix production is low quality.
As for the "many niches": well they all are sub-niches of the same small niche(s) because I don't see any show or movie that is not either targeted for teens, women or some (usually the same) ethnic group.
But nothing new is replacing them. So over time Netflix is becoming irrelevant to me.
I’ve subscribed since early 2000s pretty much non-stop. But I’m about to pull the trigger.
Netflix still produces some interesting shows and I especially like the anime that they are bringing on like Thermae Roma (sp?) that was recently released. I don't think I'd ever see that on Apple TV + which is a big disappointment.
But this is why I also don't invest in Netflix. Missed the boat on growing to get here.
I think it's mostly because they compete with HBO and IMHO aren't really there just yet, but definitely getting there.
Hopefully Apple TV+ can re-create some of that magic.
Is Apple TV different in the US than Canada? ‘Cause either I am using it completely incorrectly or they don’t have very much content up here…
I signed up for awhile and watched stuff like Ted Lasso and Foundation and it was good and then I cancelled.
I'll probably sign up again next winter to watch whatever new content they've got (and rewatch Lasso) and then probably cancel again.
It isn't a marriage, you can bounce in and out of it. Play the field.
They’re doing the HBO thing but are only 2 years old.
I never would have signed up for them if a subscription hadn't come free with my MBP. Now that the machine is a year old, the free subscription has expired, I cancelled it. I'll pick it up again in a few months when there are new seasons of what I watch.
It's not their IP so one has to wonder how long it's gonna take before we see the obnoxious "last day to watch on Netflix" message.
I didn't subscribe to Netflix so I don't sure what Anime are being offered right now. With the recent deals (HF, Zero's Tea Time), I would have missed/skipped them, even though they are the series I liked. Maybe I will subscribe it once all episodes are shown so that I can watch it and forget it, but I won't subscribe to it long term.
You can browse their list of supported devices from LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Amazon, Playstation, Xbox, Sony, Vizio, Roku. And then any devices without the app that support AirPlay 2 will work from your iPhone or iPad.
They also refuse (or are unable) to add support on Apple TV for their interactive titles. I doubt anyone really cares, but it surprises me, and not in a good way, when I bump into it.
This is honestly the key for me. From Vulture's piece on the cancellation of Babysitters' Club (a good series, by the way):
"As far as I can tell, everything Netflix does is based on how it’s driving subscriber growth.
The truth is that when your show does very well in North America, as ours does, as far as Netflix is concerned, pretty much everybody who’s going to have Netflix [in North America] has it. They’re looking to drive subscriber growth in other parts of the world where this IP doesn’t have much recognition."
https://www.vulture.com/article/why-the-baby-sitters-club-wa...
If you're a subscriber, fuck you. Give us your money, shut the fuck up, you aren't getting any series you care about. You don't count for anything.
Hence most series get one or two seasons, get cut of with no warning - a shitty way to treat the people working on them - leaving unfinished stories for viewers, because being a subscriber makes your opinion and interests worthless.
Whereas if you are buying individual pieces (for example purchasing episodes from Prime or buying comic books, etc) they need to keep you hooked.
Used it to watch Ted Lasso and Foundation, and the browser experience was _terrible_ for discovery and had lots of bugs and counterintuitive things. And it was Windows+Chrome, so no excuse for having such a terrible interface.
Now I don't even care about it, and find it easier to just open netflix or youtube or something else rather than to waste time and brain cells dealing with their crap.
Sure, but that happened years ago.
I don't think most people care about 20$ vs 10$ for a monthly subscription. For people who do care, they just pirate for 0$.
The people who do care - they will pirate anyway. You don't even have to pirate - aren't there just websites that play pirated content like it's youtube?
Also, isn't youtube just free? Not having Netflix is not like not having a TV, it's more like not having the fancy cable channels package.
I really, really think you're wrong. The median household income in $67,521. That's not even close to "$120 isn't a big deal" territory, and half of households have less. More than half of American households have netflix, poor-ish people aren't just pirating the content. Smart TVs and chromecast like devices make pirating more difficult. Many people don't want to mess around with casting stuff to their TV from their computer.
My biggest gripe is that've cancelled a lot of things without seeing them through to completion. Prime and SyFy have done this a lot too.
1. The auto-play preview feature is incredibly annoying and there is no way to disable it. If I want to watch a preview, I'll click the damn button. Let me read a description in peace.
2. The overt propaganda makes watching any new content all but impossible for me. It seems that this is not unique to Netflix, but they are the worst in my opinion.
How to turn autoplay previews on or off https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
Yes, every service is a Clockwork Orange reeducation campaign any more. It gets old.
if they had an option to browse movies with high def posters instead it would be beautiful.
If you have kids, one of those has to be Disney. Somehow they make some great movies, with incredible longevity. Very good songs, and you might not know it but the songs are sung in dozens of languages, and translated well, by local stars. Good, modern storylines too, and nothing awkward. Plus your kids will want to watch the movies over and over, so Disney is a must have.
If you're a sports person, maybe you go for Sky Sports or BT Sport or whatever the old dinosaur is in your country. It's expensive and you aren't going to watch all those games, but a fair few people will go for it.
So what have you got left? One or two slots maybe? Between Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, that documentary one that doesn't spend enough on ads targeted at me, and probably some others.
It's hard to see how to capture that last slot, for anyone. Amazon already has a foot in the door of course.
So it's going to be a big dogfight in this space. You'll get occasional winners in terms of content but what could ever last as a permanent advantage?
My kids beg to differ.
But Amazon prime video? Fuck that and fuck the morons who add crud on their catalogue and don't even bother adding subtitles? Grossly insulting to an avid deaf viewer.
They literally just have to hire one person in Serbia and pay them 1000 EUR a month, maybe another one to validate.
It used to be that I’d binge most originals - but no more.
Example is Altered Carbon. First season excellent. Next season almost unwatchable because of “the message” above story quality. Same with Witcher.
I mostly keep it around for the “Netflix and Chill” dates.
But what's really interesting, maybe related to "the message" you mention, is that critics were the complete opposite of the audience and liked the second season even more! There was an article on HN recently about how critics seem out-of-touch with the audience. This was quite the glaring example.
Season 1: 70% critics, 90% audience: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/altered_carbon/s01
Season 2: 81% critics, 37% audience: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/altered_carbon/s02
Witcher was entertaining in a sort of Xena the Warrior Princess way, but it's hard to call this good television...
Most originals were shit. I cancelled.
I get Amazon Prime for free/quick delivery + music.
I found Bosch in it. Really high quality stuff. Good TV.
But then "The Message" took over in the second season.
It no longer was funny. No longer interesting. Writers were only concerned about politics and no longer interested in story. It became crap.
Those young characters could have rode along for another 4 seasons because of the excellent premise. But now....
At $8-10/month it was an always have whether I watched it or not, particularly before all the "me too" balkanized streaming platforms limped into existence.
I understand that in this changing world, Netflix needed to produce original content. IMHO how they went about it was completely wrong: they just threw money at the problem and that's just not a way to effectively create good content.
A really hard problem to avoid is to have all your content feel a bit "same-y". Netflix has this problem. They have a proclivity for one-word names (some executive think sthey'l be easier to remember), for example. Your favourite restaurant can get this way too.
Here's what they should've done: create studios to make independent localized content for particular languages. Have a studio in Spain (and probably Mexico) producing Spanish-language TV aimed specifically at Spanish speakers. The indepedent part cannot be ovverstressed.
But here's where scale comes in: for content with wider appeal, you dub it and push it to a wider audience. Some of Netflix's most interesting content has been foreign language (eg The 3%). So Netflix is doing this to some degree but it's not their core strategy. Instead they're seemingly spending most of their money on big-budget productions. Movies in particular are a loser (IMHO). Theaters is what makes movies profitable.
For some reason the voice actors that end up getting used for dubbing are (IME) universally terrible and it seems to be like the same 8 people. They're awful. This could be done so much better.
The point here is that lower-budget locale-specific content is likely to be more appealing and what becoems popular is a good indicator of what might have wider appeal.
But anyway, Netflix is now $15.50/month for HD (who is going to pay $9.99 for 480p?!?!? Or $20/month for 4K?!?!). That's more than HBO and HBO is still way better at producing original content and has a much deeper library of such content.
Personally I'll now just sign up to Netflix for 1-3 months a year to catch up on things I care about instead of having it all the time.
(Not sure what video rental prices were globally.)
That's what they did. Although I don't know how independent the Spanish studio is.
> News of expansion at Netflix’s Madrid studio complex, launched in April 2019 as its first European Production Hub, comes just a week after Netflix held an online roadshow to unveil seven new projects – movies, series and reality shows – including “If Only,” a Spanish adaptation of the canceled Netflix Turkish original. Covering the next few months, the new project announcement suggested that Netflix has now achieved an unprecedented level of production in Spain that makes it one of the biggest investors in Spanish series and films in the country. Netflix has released more than 50 titles made in Spain since 2016 and participated in more than 70 films from the time of its first original movie, “7 Years,” released in 2016. It has worked with over 35 independent production houses and has created 7,500 jobs for casts and crews. This year’s current productions are expected to hire over 1,500 professionals and create over 21,000 days of work for extras, Netflix estimated.
https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-spain-stud...
That’s a big turn off and another reason to axe it.
> HBO is still way better at producing original content
Netflix can't even compete with AMC. AMC has Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire, The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul. Even USA Networks has Mr Robot. I can't name a single Netflix show that remotely comes close to a premium tier show like Mad Men. Not Stranger Things. Maybe the first season or two of House of Cards. If you forget the later seasons exist.
Shouldn't the cost be per profile, not per distinct physical address?
Trying to limit sharing is basically pointless, make it a bit harder perhaps but those extra viewers probably weren’t going to subscribe anyway.
EPS: $3.53 vs $2.89 expected.
Revenue: $7.78 billion vs $7.93 billion expected.
Global paid net subscriber additions: A loss of 200,000 compared with 2.73 million adds expected.
Stock down 23% after-market
Netflix seems to have the best general collection for my tastes - genres, various countries, etc. I read about things on other services, but I am not subscribing to everything.
If I want to watch a show/movie (like Jackass Forever on Paramount+) I'll subscribe and then immediately cancel it. This gives me 1 month of the service. If I want to keep watching something on that service, I'll just resubscribe once it runs out.
Some services like Netflix and Hulu, I know I'll get enough value out of them so I don't usually bother canceling.
I hear friends complain about having to sign up for so many things to watch all the shows they want, but Apple makes this so easy I don't really think much about it. Back in the pre-streaming days most everyone wanted a-la-carte channels and that's exactly what we have now.
If I really like a movie I watch it in the cinema
if I were extremely lazy then Plex share, see r/plexshares for Netflix like experience
there is also r/televisionsuggestions if you don't know what to watch
20 PE in 8% inflation environment implies -3% return, ignoring growth.
However people tend to refer to the 10y breakeven rate for forward inflation expectations as CPI is backwards looking. Forward long term inflation expectations are around 3% atm, per the bond market.
And the reason -3% is preferable sometimes, is because you would have lost 70% buying NFLX a few months ago. Overvalued companies aren't a very good inflation hedge when discount rates increase dramatically, despite the common narrative
That’s why you subtract inflation from cash but stock assets are mostly inflation resistant.
People can tend to do whatever they want, it doesn’t make it correct. Last year, the 10y was like 1.2% while inflation turned out to be 8.5%. Clearly the 10y is not a good reliable indicator of inflation.
Ya -3% can be preferable to a stock going down 70%. But that’s not the reason to own stock assets. You could of also owned Netflix from 2019 to 2021 and been up 250%.
What matters is the true value of future expected earnings of the company, compared to what the value is now. By my estimation, Netflix is trading well below those future earnings in this inflationary environment, even with hefty interest rate hikes that bring inflation down, simultaneously shrinking stock premiums from both sides. I wouldn’t be surprised if Berkshire bought in at this level.
Equities are not immune to inflation as you say. Inflation affects different companies in different ways, and also leads to higher discount rates which hurts longer duration and higher multiple assets the most.
The nature of the inflation matters too. Only wage inflation is generally good for earnings, unless you're a commodity provider. Consumer spending power declines with anything that's not wage inflation
An overvalued stock is a worse inflation hedge than cash in a rising discount rate environment.
Netflix could be a good investment, or it could be terrible if its earnings start to decline. A company with declining earnings is even worse than a bond of the same yield
Yes, fluctuations from CPI occur due to front loading expectations, velocity, potential from M2, interest rates, productivity growth, and macroeconomic environment. All those are different forces applying pressure at various times, but they’re orthogonal to limited company ownership chased by an inflating currency.
It’s much more certain that company value be retained independent on inflation than the 10y will predict it.
This is 500k net new subscribers globally. But Netflix doesn't break down into how many were new customers and how many existing customers they lost. If you could see these on a graph, you would likely see that their loss of existing customers has been climbing and their new incoming customers has been falling. Forecast this outwards, and the curves will cross resulting in a net loss of subscribers.
This is why they are introducing the advertising-subsidized tier. To stop the bleeding of customers and return to growth.
So what does Netflix have to offer that is unique in today's world of streaming? Not much.
Remember when the selling point of cable was commercial free?
In fact I rarely open Netflix unless I’ve already heard about something I want to check out. I really don’t like wading through their recommendations.
With the frequent price increases, it’s getting harder and harder to justify.
Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.
Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.
How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ran... they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.
They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.
I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.
And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.
Of course it is a zero-sum game, really just the consumers lose. (I guess some very popular content may "win" as the can demand huge exclusive prices instead of smaller prices from all providers. But that averages out across all content)
This company has been long heralded for its engineering, contraptions and its overall technology, but when it comes to competition, subscribers, pricing increases and its content it is not good enough and with the increase of prices on consumers everywhere, Netflix is one of the first unnecessary things that they will cancel.
That is even before I even mentioned the competitors like Apple, Amazon, Disney, etc, eating their lunch as a side project.
A side project of Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney. Netflix is proving to be suffocated by them and they are struggling. It's stock performance is quite woeful and has crashed 58% from its high since it was found to be inflated with hype during the 2020 lockdown gains.
A crash like that in its price is due to the hype and speculation around its slowing growth and opportunity to find any remaining lucky pumps in the stock price.
Now it's found to be in survival mode torn apart by its competitors and customers cancelling their subscriptions. It's not the end of the world when they cancel subscriptions with their competitors, but for Netflix, it is more than the end of the world. In fact it is the end of the universe and movie streaming subscriptions is their whole universe.
Microsoft is more than worthy of this 'group' rather than struggling 'Netflix'.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-faang?op=1
>FAANG actually began as FANG. The origin of the acronym has been attributed to Jim Cramer, the financial TV host and co-founder of The Street.com. Known for his slangy abbreviations and catchy phrases, Cramer coined the term in 2013 to represent four tech stocks with outsized market appreciation. Cramer believed that these companies belonged together because they are all high growth stocks that share the common threads of digitization and the web.
>Cramer's original term was just FANG — it didn't initially include Apple. The company joined the ranks in 2017, reflecting the growth of internet services (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay) to its revenues. So the acronym became FAANG.
>And it's remained so, even though Google's official corporate name is now Alphabet.
https://fortune.com/2021/10/29/faang-mamaa-jim-cramer-tech-f...
They know that Netflix is a side project compared to the likes of the MAMAA companies: Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, where 3 out of 5 of them are already competing against Netflix through their own side projects.
Netflix doesn't stand a chance if they continue to keep raising prices.
I respect those who enjoy this, but that's not me.
Then, every few months hbo or Hulu comes out with a show we want to watch but then once it’s over we default back to Netflix. Again you can argue that the content is crap but people have demonstrated they prefer quantity over quality. The strategy is something like a hub and spoke. Create a handful of high budget shows that are spaced out to keep people interested then fill the rest with crap.
As an aside I’ve never paid for Netflix because we’ve had my wife’s account that’s linked to her parent’s for several years. It’s borderline ridiculous they’ve allowed password sharing as long as they have. If Netflix forced the account to be split we’d pay Without a second thought. I suspect most are like us despite all the cynicism.
I think once they start instituting that change alone the sub base will expand rapidly.
I’m very bullish on Netflix after this decline.
Netflix -> 103 Apple -> 39 HBO -> 24 Disney -> 19 Amazon -> 14 Hulu -> 5
Im pissing in the wind, but at some point you just have to go.
Think outside the box please.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/netflix-q...
Speaking of "perhaps you would like," what do you call it when someone flashes something poorly targeted, unwanted and irrelevant in front of your eyeballs and pushes it a bit too hard? I call that an ad. I'm paying for advertising. Or rather, I was.
Things like https://smile.amazon.com/Animated-Feature-Films-Vol/dp/B00MI...
In fact, it's barely half of Costco.
Its valuation multiple is 2x GOOG
I bet a lot of other people did the same thing.
Different people have different amounts they are willing to pay for content, and there is zero marginal cost to serve it to them for the content's owner. The question is how can the content owner get the most each individual is willing to pay for the same content. Bundling it with infrastructure like mobile network is a good way, as well as subsidizing it with credit card offers, etc.
Price hikes, lack of quality content, and increased competition are going to hurt Netflix in the long run. I find myself watching quality shows on Apple TV+ and HBO Max.
"Earn free movies with every purchase!"
"$10 off 3 pizzas with Grubflix"
Yeah, raise prices, sales go down. It works like that.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.