Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
Automatic previews
Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on
Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy.
Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting
Signing and hiring ex politicians
Searching is a chore and recommendations are nearly never useful. (Just to have some toggles around metadata like language/genre/public rating and a text box to fuzzy search through titles and descriptions?)
I cancelled my subscription a few years ago and I get more mileage and enjoyable content out of free apps like tubi, pluto, vhscast and peacock than I had in a long time with netflix.
This was across a few platforms, had to really dig.
Not covering a recant and pertinent fact is also an agenda.
There is more to environmentalism than just climate change. I am obligated to point out that climate change will also change habitats, which will negatively impact many bird populations.
You can come up with negativity about how X is being ruined or is awful in some way or another for every X.
The almond milk in your coffee uses scarce California water supplies, cows are mistreated and use water and produce methane, coffee farmers are threatened by global warming and have these other environmental concerns, Starbucks employees are mistreated and have these union issues, you drove a car to get coffee and emitted this much carbon, coffee is addictive and has these awful side effects, strip malls and big corporations ruin local economies... and on and on and on. Pick a topic and you can ramble on about awful things as though being "woke" about it and mentioning it at every opportunity makes anything better.
It's cheap proselytizing for a certain morality and doubtful actual impact of mentioning it over and over in shallow ways that don't actually explain much to people who mostly already know. It's pointless and should be avoided. If you want to make a documentary about destruction of habitat, go do that, people will watch. But maybe stop trying to shoehorn it in at every possible opportunity.
These things are critical topics necessary in order to understand a topic. It honestly feels a bit like you would prefer a space where the downsides or costs are not mentioned - I prefer to not elide the uncomfortable.
Edit - maybe it’s like a dinosaur documentary not mentioning their extinction? I could understand that, if it were a matter of prioritizing based on available time. Still, it does seem like the meteor event is pretty important when talking about dinosaurs. I guess we just see things differently.
:(
I know this is a tangent but it’s always sad to see representation treated as inherently political. Like this is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen mainstream shows portray wlw relationships. Or shows portray the reality of how common and casual sexual assault is. Or characters that that struggle with depression as more than just an emo/goth archetype.
I get that in some ways people tune into media to escape from all that but they become a comfort when they show your struggles and it turns out okay in the end.
Netflix has many problems, the big ones being that they lost old shows like The Office and Friends, which hurts retention. And they also kill off promising new shows after 2 seasons to save money on renegotiating cast contracts.
If you read comment sections however, you'll get a very different idea. The problem is that Netflix is "too woke" and consumers are revolting. Never mind the fact that Netflix is a global network with millions of customers around the world, and thousands of shows from multiple countries.
> brainwash
This has been going on forever. Check out "The Brady Bunch". Every episode revolves around a heavy-handed moral lesson. Go back even further and you've got the Hayes Code. Hollywood has always seen itself as morally superior to the rest of us, and hence entitled to preach to us.
Though with all the scandals emanating from Hollywood, one wonders how they hold on to that moral superiority.
They all seem to have their own personal Reality Distortion fields
Quality (UK) Vs quantity (US) eh.
"The great news is in every single other major market, we've got the flywheel spinning. The thing that frustrates us is why we haven't been as successful in India. But we're definitely leaning in there,"
The general opinion in India is that unlike Prime Video India and Disney Hotstar (Disney Plus' Indian avatar) which created a lot of good local content which served the interest of masses and hence achieved success, a lot of Netflix' local content mostly served the tastes of a sub-segment of the well earning, well traveled elite crowd (read "woke") from the bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Apparently this was because the local producers came from the same group and were not tuned to the tastes of the country at large (or even the affluent segment at large). Many of them have since been fired and Netflix India has also gone ahead and reduced monthly subscription for the standard plan to only INR 199 and a new mobile only plan for only INR 149 (~ USD 2). Has not made much of a difference in the past few months though.
Ref :
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60108294
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/netflix-slashes-i...
In large part thanks to representation in shows and movies.
The us is rapidly diversifying too in terms of race, yet still even more under represented in media.
Glaad says only ~10% queer characters on broadcast, and was a decline from previous study.
Specifically comparing streaming netflix had 155 queer characters and HBO max 71. You do the math on the massive amount of original content on netflix compared to hbomax.
The world doesn't look like HN's demo.
[1] https://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD%20202122%20W...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/arts/television/tv-lgbtq-...
And the point about Gen Z is that this is where we’re heading. Millennials are 10% lgbt and growing, Gen Z is around lgbt 20% and growing. My all time favorite concert was Girl in Red who sold out a 5000 person venue in less than 30 minutes packed with young queer women in a red state. This is way way bigger than casual experimenting in college.
If you want a less niche example my hometown’s pride used to be less than 1000 people in the 80’s and now is half a million.
Sorry this thread is swinging so hard between folks who clearly have an axe to grind with the lgbt community and people who are shocked it’s still this bad in 2022 that I’m just defensive by default.
Yeah I just went to read comments (of course more crazy replies) after posting in the ACLU thread.
I was shocked again at the crap people on this forum are writing in that thread too.
Maybe you're right I shouldn't be shocked anymore. I've always known, but ben lucky enough not to have to experience very much, of the hate.
But it just feels so much worse. Not just on queer ness but on anything not white-male christian.
Or at least it's more vocal. Like why do these people feel the need to write this stream of crap on hacker news....
I can't decide which or both of these: - Emboldened by leaders & media to allow them to speak out already held beliefs (the silent majority except that's a euphemism). - This craziness has actually shifted, been created, and or amplified. Not just on LGBTQ issues. look at the ACLU thread (re lots of white males talking about overt discrimination because of diversity inclusion training and even more crazy q stuff like fbi false flagged jan 6 wth).
I think it's both.
On this topic for instance I very much doubt people knew let alone cared about trans girls playing on their high school sports team before we made progress to the point there were out trans high school girls and then it became a political punching bag. And now as a result some states and politicians are emboldened to pass dangerous laws that will cost even more lives.
1. You cannot just decide you want GRS. Not only is the process itself expensive and long, even starting the process requires two separate psych evals and a doctor sign off and you have be fully socially transitioned for at least a year.
2. The people who make it through the process commit suicide less.
> Those who wanted, and subsequently received, hormone therapy and/or surgical care had a substantially lower prevalence of past-year suicide thoughts and attempts than those who wanted hormone therapy and surgical care and did not receive them.
> Those who had “de-transitioned” at some point, meaning having gone back to living according to their sex assigned at birth, were significantly more likely to report suicide thoughts and attempts, both past-year and lifetime, than those who had never “de-transitioned.” Nearly 12 percent of those who “de-transitioned” attempted suicide in the past year compared to 6.7 percent of those who have not “de-transitioned.”
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/suicidal...
We have differing standards of backwards, wrong , and dangerous. Are either of us right? I think we are right in our own heads because we are individually seeing different perspectives. But the important part is to not silence one’s ability to discuss such ideas.
It's because people are more supported and more able to come out.
More people aren't gay. More people are able to live their truth publicly.
* and based on your comment I will leap that you aren't a part of this community. The ugly truth is it is still very hard to come out for way too many. And dangerous. Look at the attacks on trans kids and talking about gender in schools.
I don't care why people do anything and I'm generally happy to let them do it, but come on. We have no idea what causes any given person's sexuality or identity to develop in the way it does. The most you can do is point to some correlations. Definitive statements like that are overconfident.
We've also become far more interconnected in the last 20 years, which plays a large part - whereas before people may have kept quiet because they thought they were the odd one out they now know they aren't.
I could agree that modern technology and the industrial revolution are very similar. But even with that it has taken 60+yrs for our society to have a computer in the majority of homes after the Manchester Baby was created (and I think this change happened extremely quickly). And, analog and electromechanical computers go back even further. So, again, I think even these things have been a very gradual change happening over many decades once the leading technology was invented.
To further expand on my thoughts, to imply everyone was using ‘industrial revolution’ technology overnight would be heresy. I’m sure it took factories many decades to build and retrofit equipment including a technology run up to the revolution itself. With this said, you peaked my interest in this area and I have some researching to do this weekend.
The sexuality is not "changing" significantly, what changed is that it's getting less dangerous to 1. realize that you are not straight 2. not be straight 3. tell people (including polls) that you are not straight...
I think that's part of why we are seeing such insane comments on here.
But tough. I wouldn't slow down progress just to placate or somehow reduce hate.
It’s amazing how far that kind of emotional and physical violence will go toward suppressing honest self-reporting of sexuality.
Gallup doesn't make any bones about it, the bulk of the uptick was in Gen Z women identifying as bisexual. They also didn't hesitate to observe that the bulk of bisexual-identifying people eventually settle into a heterosexual relationship.
So in point of fact we haven't had a 10x increase in homosexuality, we have had a surge in young women who are statistically likely to settle into hetero relationships declaring themselves as bi.
In my opinion it helps nobody to muddle or politicize the statistics. For me it's hard to not draw the conclusion that heterosexual young people want to be allies and are declaring themselves as bisexual and perhaps experimenting a bit as a show of support. Seems more likely than the idea that a full fifth of the human population that has been sexually oppressed since the dawn of history, but it's open to interpretation I suppose.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-tick...
This makes sense until you understand the realities of the dating scene for bisexual women.
1. If you're young and have the highest rates of wlw your dating pool it's only 20% of women but 95% of men. So supposing bisexual women are choosing randomly among their dating pool it's not at all shocking they end up with way more men on average.
But it's not random and made even worse by
2. Women aren't taught how to approach other women and initiate a romantic relationship -- this is where the memes of "we've been best friends for years who are obviously pining over one another" and "useless lesbians" come from.
3. Women, having basically all experienced the discomfort (to put it lightly) of unwanted sexual attention from men, don't want to inflict that on others and so are more apprehensive hitting on other women.
4. And even if a woman does have the confidence she has to face the reality that 4/5 women she hits on will be straight and in general wlw are super apprehensive about hitting on people they don't already know are wlw. The rejection of confessing to your crush who turns out to be straight it mortifying and getting as is getting an "ew no" at a bar. It's fine, I'm fine.
5. Bisexuals in general tend to not hang around queer spaces as much.
6. Bisexuals tend to not have as much of a "gay aesthetic" as lesbians and so are harder to identify in social settings.
7. There are lesbians that wont date bisexual women because they have the same biphobia the rest of the world does, that they're straight women experimenting and will end up with a man.
Source: Am a bisexual woman.
I still feel like there's something weird going on with the recent surge specifically in bisexuals. Most other LGBT identities are in the low single digits as a percent of US population and have ticked up slowly over time (L and G roughly doubled going from Gen X to Gen Z). But with bisexuals you have a 9x increase in the same time period. If it was just a matter of people in previous generations keeping their mouths shut because of discriminatory attitudes in society, you would think that bisexual identification would tick up at about the same rate as the other identities. Something else must be going on.
- sharply criticizing the US on race, but hiding black characters in Chinese movie posters (eg, Star Wars)
- sharply criticizing the US on sexuality, but removing gay scenes from Chinese and ME versions (eg, Harry Potter)
To me, it’s like men who beat their wife because they’re angry someone at the bar was rude — but are too cowardly to confront him, so they take out that aggression at home.
Similarly, movie companies aren’t standing up to real bigotry in China or the ME — they’re coming home to abuse us domestically, over things we don’t even do.
I think that abuser mentality is abundant among the “Wokerati”.
For example, 'demisexual' people are included in this categorization, even though all it means is that a person prefers to form an emotional bond with their partner before engaging in sexual activity. Not only is there nothing particularly unusual about that, this includes people who are heterosexual. Who are not a marginalized sexuality by any means.
Heterosexual couples are underrepresented on TV due to institutional bias against them.
That’s the definition of “marginalized”.
Because by your rules black people aren’t allowed to have fun fantasizing about being a pirate sailing the high seas in colonial England, a trans man can’t be in a WWII fiction fighting nazis, a woman can’t be in a medical drama about stopping the cholera outbreak.
So if they can’t be key roles (i.e. important at all to the plot) minorities should be relegated to background characters even in historical fiction?
Also what show has half the cast being trans or non-binary or whatever? I could use something interesting to watch.
And yes, Chernobyl is among the best shows ever produced. Only exception is the last episode, they could have focused more on the international reaction to it, and the fact that everybody wanted the total cost and impact of the disaster to be low. It was a choice, so, to focus on the Soviet perspective. Taking the Soviet trial for the last episode made perfect sense.
Maybe it's me but this doesn't represent regular people I see on the street?
Inter-ethnic relationships in England and Wales rose by two percentage points between 2001 and 2011 (7% in 2001 to 9% in 2011).
Ten years later, I expect the figure to be much higher but nowhere near as portrayed on TV. Let's be generous and say the increase has been 50% - and is still a minority.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Casting in non-US tv shows, to my eyes, seems to give a better mix of ordinary looking people (fat, ugly, disabled, scarred, plain, old, teens-actually-cast-as-teens etc). This is just as important for representation, not everyone can be insta-perfect.
Who is “us” and who is not worthy to be represented?
You realize you’re free not to watch if seeing people that look or live differently than you is upsetting, right?
We are in a time when winning is enraging even to the winner https://mobile.twitter.com/ShannonTheDude/status/15230781188...
Everybody is triggered, all the time, including the unborn, who morn their forced births as sacrifices on the alter of rule of law.
Pre-Columbian Exchange historical fictions?
If you want fantasy, make fantasy worlds. Don't call it historical at all.
Signed, a fan of Japanese fictions where they put random races in the worlds as they like.
tldr; I shed crocodile tears when I hear that white people are offended by race switching in modern period films.
So Hollywood bent over backwards to shoehorn in representation everywhere they could and now they find that the majority of people don't like these shows and movies that are all about people who don't look like them and have experiences they can't relate to. This is surprising somehow?
Personally, I never had a problem enjoying a good story regardless of how different the characters are from me, but it seems a lot of people only want to watch things about themselves. The studios also seem to put a lot more emphasis on checking the correct boxes rather than telling a good story.
> The studios also seem to put a lot more emphasis on checking the correct boxes rather than telling a good story.
What you’re describing is the paternalistic racism that Democrats have never confronted, in Northern and Coastal cities.
A charitable interpretation is that people don’t like racism:
- anime is popular; Korean TV and films are popular; Chinese movies are popular; Bollywood movies are popular; etc
- treating race as a defining characteristic is not, as in Hollywood
People want a good story where the culture and people are faithfully represented in a reasonable way. They detest products which treat the race of the person as defining or which “paint by numbers” with race.
That is, people on average are rejecting Hollywood because it is more bigoted than they are.
People said the same thing in the 60s when Star Trek had the nerve to have a representative crew aboard the Enterprise and when they showed an interracial kiss.
Whereas in Star Trek, it made sense that a future spacefaring crew would be made up of people with origins from all different parts of the world. This was entirely consistent with the overall storyline.
Back in the 90s, they showed Jadzia Dax as being interested in men and women on Star Trek DS9.
Not to mention X-men has always been a allegory of prejudice against minorities.
When telling a story on TV, you often want to cut the story to the bone such that it can be understood quickly and entertain without confusing the viewer with side tangents that aren't central to the story. If a non-story-essential element is too prominent then the viewer might feel it's boring
They forgot the golden rule of tv, make a good show first.
I’m really not a prude, I hope, but I prefer to keep my intriguing and backstabbing separate from my softcore pornography.
But the show was pretty much about identity for most of its first ten series, not to mention that you could say that there is an inherent aspect of transness to the character of the Doctor (especially their experience with other characters familiar with past incarnations of the Doctor). The show plays a lot with gender, especially around the timelords.
Heck, even on a purely literal textual level the show is extremely LGBTQ from the start. Captain Jack Harkness is openly bisexual (or pansexual) and flirts with the (male presenting) Doctor who is clearly intrigued. The "love triangle" subplots largely play out more as depictions of polyromantic relationships rather than sources for drama. Even without featuring any clearly trans characters, the show is fundamentally queer if you even barely scratch the surface of it.
I guess if you want to consider the show overly "woke", that started as early as when Martha Jones became a companion because her race became relevant to the plot. The only thing that changed with the newer series is that the writing IMO got sloppier.
That's all percectly reasonable but I don't see how this has anything to do with the discussion related to the article, given that the new Doctor Who show started in 2010, Netflix only started doing its own productions in 2013 and most complaints about "too much politics" tend to be about media produced in the mid-2010s onwards (the Ghostbusters reboot was released in 2016).
People were been just as dismissive about interracial kiss in the 60s. About gay relationships in the 70s and 80s.
Evolve or become a dinosaur.
If it made sense, why was it so groundbreaking?
As was Ellen’s episode when she came out.
Even more recently there was an uproar about “wokeness” when they decided to cast a Black woman to play an orange alien from Tamaran on Titans.
Strangely enough, there was not such an uproar about lily White shows like Friends and Seinfeild.
A larger percentage of Republicans support transgender rights today than Americans supported interracial marriage when in 1969. More Americans support transgender rights today than supported it 20 years after the Trek kiss aired.
The reason all the Star Trek comparisons in this comments section are so wildly off base is that Star Trek was actually a well-written show with interesting plot lines and interesting characters, that happened to have a diverse cast. Most of what's on Netflix now is just junk that that thinks if it pushes the cultural envelope far enough, no one will notice that most of the shows are little more than clumsy preaching.
Again even back in the 60s with the original Trek “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, they showed two races fighting because one was black on the left side and white on the right side and the other race was just to opposite - to show just how dumb racism was.
If some ruler in middle age europe was white then why do they have to change that just to showe more black people into the show or whatever. They should make original shows and stories where they can do whatever they want
What are the rules for allowing black characters on tv?
I can not stand how every "documentary" on netflix is actually an extremely opinionated political piece or true crime. And I usually agree with the political opinion, it's just incredibly annoying and divisive, and really it mostly feels dishonest.
All the true crime stuff is retired officers cashing in. So much for books.
Most documentaries have always been very low on information density. Even universally loved ones like something from David Attenborough are mostly a collection of disconnected (yet amazing) film snippets with a bit of commentary over the top. It's only gotten worse as narrative has become more of the focus.
There are exceptions, but when it comes to conveying meaningful information and detailed analysis youtube is far superior than mainstream documentaries.
Except everything done by the BBC. I am so sick of slow-paced american docs that inevitably swing into conspiracy rants and crying interviews. If there is a BBC doc availible on a subject, that is the one i will risk my hour of free time watching.
I too watched the 3 Mile Island netflix thing. The only fact i trust is the coincidence of The China Syndrome hitting theaters the week prior the accident, and only after i verified through imdb.
There was no real attempt to compare the enormous toll of deaths and environmental damage of fossil fuels compared to nuclear. I kept thinking "did Shell commission this?".
To name one, Seaspiracy[0] is not like your friend who's from the opposite side of he political spectrum, it's more the crazy guy with "moon nazis are coming" sign.
Icarus was fantastic, for instance, but of potentially limited appeal (which is a shame, as it touches on a lot of topics of broad interest from doping in sport to political intrigue).
YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.
10 minutes has no relation to the complexity of the subject matter; 10 minutes is derived from the attention span of youtube viewers (and it varies a bit, but sub-15 seems to be the most common). An hour of content may be pruned until only 10 minutes are left, or two minutes of content may be stretched to 10.
Example chosen from the videos they're recommending to me now: Two documentaries from the same channel. One is about the Bob Semple tank, a wacky prototype from New Zealand designed by an amateur and never mass produced and never used. The other is about the 1960 U-2 spyplane shootdown over the Soviet Union, a serious diplomatic incident. One is 9:08 long, the other is 9:20 seconds long. What are the odds that both subjects just happen to have almost exactly the same amount of content to say about them?
Zero chance of that. Compare the articles on wikipedia, the U-2 shootdown article is 5x longer than the article for the tank. The two documentaries are the same length because this guy always makes his documentaries roughly this length because this is what the system rewards.
Watch some that are on film festivals, on quality tv channels (in Europe public tv broadcasting channels) etc.
Usually someone just wants to show interesting stuff without a political agenda.
Unless they are doing it the opposite way - have and agenda and want to support it with their documentary film.
While my Siri remote thing makes it a little nicer, the thing that drives me bonkers is searching for an exact title that I know is in their library and getting other results instead of it as the first few results items. Ridiculous.
CMV
I don’t want to defend Netflix though, lots of crap too.
Netflix honestly has plenty of good content. You just have to not use the in-app recommendation system at all and find content through traditional sources, i.e. word of mouth, professional critics, and industry publications, then search directly. As long as they allow you to find a title by name when you already know the name, they're fine.
* Russian Doll S01 * Stranger Things S01 * Squid Game S01 * Glow S01-02 * American Vandal S01 * I Think You Should Leave S01 * Mindhunter S01-02
There's also a lot of content aimed at different audiences that is considered good, but not for me (Gilmore Girls reunion show, Shadow and Bone, many romantic-oriented shows, etc.).
I'm not saying that's exclusively the good content, and I have also canceled my sub, but I think you're underselling it a little bit. Bojack is, without question, my favorite thing that's come out of Netflix.
As for whether Netflix is still worth it...I honestly don't know, might need to discuss with my family.
This is exactly why I stopped watching Netflix.
They have amazing instrumentation in the kernel, and they give back to FreeBSD.
I don't work for them, I have met them. Nice guys.
Contrary to Shopify so, streaming lives of content. Which means the only reasonable customers for Netflix tech were content owners looking at their own streaming service (not that many around pre-Netflix, Amazon developed it's own tech) or content creators (excluding big studios, this market was and is owned by YouTube). I think Netflix didn't have much of a choice, and they did very well, didn't they?
Anecdata: Most of my current streaming is happening on Netflix (original content from Spain, Scandinavia, Poland,... stuff you don't get somewhere else) or Disney+ (incredible how deep Disney's catalogue is, especially for older films like Alien). Prime Video fell behind quite a bit on the content front. Netflix has an opportunity so, IMHO, in cooperating with local studios and producers in smaller countries. Something neither Disney nor Amazon seem to be capable of doing.
You haven't tried All4 then? Even a paid subscription will not save you from random freeze and adverts.
What you’re describing would not work in the movie industry, which is very contract and license heavy.
In 2021 streamers should be supporting atleast 1080p for Linux but if they can't I can live with 720p like Netflix does, but serving 480p is just disrespectful and looks awful on any decent size modern monitor.
So it isn't like they can't do it, just won't.
So it's Linux technically, but not in spirit, hence a different proposal.
And since I'm running a reasonably recent GPU, it could be conceivable that all decoding is done on the GPU itself and sent directly to the monitor, which supports HDCP.
And for someone like me who doesn't watch a huge amount of video, that's not a great look. Tastes differ of course but my tastes aren't that out of the mainstream. And I'd rather a streaming service had a modest number of high quality shows than a whole lot of meh.
[1] https://twitter.com/loudmouthjulia/status/151679497810579456...
Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.
For that reason, it doesn't really make sense to focus on the specifics of a handful of outliers as unreliably ranked by RT (I think). The real message is that large as Netflix' catalog is, it doesn't necessarily have a lot more highly ranked content than other sites have. (Which roughly squares with my anecdotal impressions.)
The data would be more interesting if it could be broken up by demographics. My wife (along with a lot of women) likes reality tv, and Netflix has a fair amount of that. I personally can’t stand it.
I guess it would depend on discoverability.
But, part of the trouble with this analysis, as far as sussing out the above issue, is season-count. How many Netflix originals are as long as, say, The Sopranos? Or The Wire? How many are only one season, or maybe two? It's possible (possible! I do not know) the hours-of-original-content difference between Netflix and the other services isn't as large as this suggests. Or that it's even larger. Hard to tell.
I'd say that this chart points toward bad things for Netflix, but without some other pieces of data it's hard to tell what it's actually saying.
Netflix has significantly more in the outstanding category: for example, I count around 8 for Disney, 11 for Apple, 10 for HBO Max, 8 for Hulu, and at least 39 for Netflix. I don't know how you call that a draw.
And I don't really care about the average show, since I (and I suspect most others) are not uniformly randomly sampling movies to watch with zero input from others. I (and I suspect others) watch those that are rated as good movies, and in that case, Netflix is crushing the competition by the numbers in that chart.
Netflix, by that chart, provides a lot more shows rated good, outstanding, and exceptional.
There are a lot of ways you can interpret the info and a lot of good questions that it doesn't really answer. But it is interesting that Netflix clearly looks different from others.
Providers want to act as gatekeepers who have the power to make something popular by limiting your options to alternatives. Sometimes they also want to be able to accept money for heavily promoting specific things over others. It's not about delivering a quality product to you at all, it's about what gives them money/power at your expense.
Between deliberately bad search and a bias towards pushing you to waste time rather than entertain, they bury their own content and deliver swill.
Netflix got away with it because they were the only game in town. Disney really broke the seal and delivered a good platform. Apple is delivering strong content that compensates for the horrific application.
In contrast, on HBO Max / Disney+, usually there's far less content but since the quality is better you can easily pick something to watch.
Every so often I'll go to search and enter random 2-3 letter combinations because I usually find a bunch of stuff I'd like to see but Netflix has been hiding from me.
Total speculation, though.
Netflix's catalog historically has been small enough that it can fit within a single rack.
With 8Mbps [0] bitrates for 4k (okay, add 50% for transcoding to lower resolutions, so let's call it 12Mbps), we get about 5.4GB per hour of video. At 360TB for a single 2U Open Connect storage device [1], that translates to 67k hours of 4k video.
This article from 2020 [2] indicated that US Netflix's catalog was about 36k hours. Even at 50% growth since then it would still comfortably fit on a single machine.
[0] "The highest 4K bitrate on average is 8 Mbps which is also a 50% reduction compared to 16 Mbps of the fixed-bitrate ladder." https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for...
[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/#the-hardware
[2] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...
All TV shows A-Z: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/83?so=az
All movies A-Z: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/34399?so=az
You can find it in the web UI by clicking a TV or movie page, and then choosing Sort A-Z. The reason it's so buried is that it's pretty useless. Most people don't want to scroll through a hundred mostly bad shows starting with punctuation symbols and numbers.
Agree with you that it would be lovely if Netflix had more fine-grained controls.
They both have fantastic shows and films, I know because i've seen some of them, but they NEVER seem to show up in app. Instead, I get endless scrolling of the same shows I skip over every time.
The algo doesn't seem to learn (Not to say it doesn't but the perception). The UI doesn't have enough unique elements to drive the algo. What I mean is if I tend to watch 20min comedy shows between 9-11pm. Create me some blocks of shows that meet this criteria. So a rewatch, continue and a new show.
They need to allow the customer to feed in more data. Integrate IMDB, Trakt etc and farm this data to improve recommendations, even if they are shows/films outside of their catalogue. I have a feeling that the lack of "I've seen this before outside of Netflix" button and the simple thumbs up or down doesn't provide the depth in the data.
I get why they moved to the current rating system, the thread on here discussing it at the time was actually really insightful for someone who was learning algos at the time.
I remember finding great b movies and content with user reviews.
I’m somewhat confused by your sentiments here, if you search “French”/”Spanish”/etc Netflix will bring up a list of movies and shows in those languages, it’s one of my main uses of Netflix these days.
Netflix's UX is fucking terrible. Even when they do something right, they do it wrong.
“I hate autoplaying videos!” If you hate it so much why not going it he settings and turn it off. A quick Google search will help you.
“I want an A-Z list for Netflix” Again a quick Google search will show you a way.
And so here we are, despite living in the post movie scarcity future you can never watch the movie you want to because it is on a different streaming service.
The clustering is a visualization of Benford's law:
Disclosure: I work at Google, but no on anything related to this.
Netflix is slowly reinventing cable. Reality shows, cooking shows... all of these cheap production things has an audience. Who am I to judge?
But, my experience as a viewer is frustrating - all I see are the Netflix recommendations for me - browsing, exploring and discovering are tedious. I see less than 5% of their catalog through their UI. I would like an "experience" over the Netflix catalog with faceted search.
What a hellscape to work in. I got on Netflix very briefly, just to watch that show. I can't think of any reason to get back on.
And all the content producers are doing it. I tried Severance on Apple TV+, and I had to stop after 4 episodes because nothing was happening, and this is supposed to be a critically acclaimed show.
The new Batman movie was excruciatingly long too. I miss my 100min stories from the early 2000s and before.
So most shows were pretty much 30-60 self-contained minutes with relatively little prior context needed. If you're going to tell a story over 8 hours or even several seasons, various aspects of the pace are going to be a lot slower.
When I was a kid tv shows typically had 22 episodes per season. Flight Attendant wouldn’t have been made back then, but if it was it would have had much more filler. More likely it would have been about a flight attendant who is a secret CIA agent and defeats a different commie every episode.
I find that I often don't want to commit to another long series nor do I want to watch some movie that is exceptionally long. I hope this sort of shorter content comes back as an alternative to the very long movies we see today.
Bajaria is brought in to bring fresh eyes and a new approval chain to the process as part of a strategic direction. It's just asserted this was the wrong thing to do, and the anti-Bajaria sources here clearly met her with hostility from the start:
"Everybody thought it was a terrible thing Ted did, allowing one team to greenlight something that another team had passed on."
and
"And Ted loved that stupid phrase, ‘There are multiple paths to yes.’"
Why? Why was it a bad thing to have different groups looking at shows with a different eye? For a corporation and workforce which allegedly pride themselves on diversity this seems strange to me. They go through a bunch of examples of shows that were dismissed by Holland which Bajaria picked up, but list hits, and credit her with other "megahits". Seems like the diversity of opinion and skill paid off in those cases at least.
They're also dismissive and making seemingly arbitrary statements to support that:
"By then, Holland was to oversee 80 shows on the service while Bajaria was responsible for 60. “Who can make 140 shows a year?” asks one creative. “That’s insane."
Why is 80 shows by one team okay but another 60 by another team insane? Maybe they're just talking absolute numbers, but the article very clearly ties it to the same paragraph where it introduces Bajaria.
Given the hostility and dismissiveness of the original group, I could completely understand a bit of return from the new group. Now what I think is equally likely to have happened is that the new group's arrival put noises out of joint because it threatened the existing power structure, and things deteriorated from there. Now that is always to be expected to some degree in a situation like this so likely the CEO should have managed it better. But maybe it was largely caused by assholes in the Holland camp. Or maybe by those in the Bajaria camp. Or maybe none of it's really a problem and Netflix hasn't got dramatically worse, they're just hitting limits of growth and facing increasing competition, and their stock crash is just a good excuse for disgruntled people to air their grievances.
I agree that the US-made content on Netflix is not as good as it used to be, but the foreign content is quite good. Plus virtually every country except US is used to read subtitles, so shows have a big audience. For example a lot of great shows nowadays come from Korea, and I assume they are much cheaper to buy than the US-made shows.
On the subject, the problem with Netflix was that they tried to have it both ways. They seemed to think they could significantly increase output without decreasing quality. So saying that the failure of the new strategy is prudence ignores the fact that reckless spending got them into this position...bankruptcy tends to force prudence, but that is ex-post...prudence is not the cause of bankruptcy.
I think this should indicate that problems with NFLX are slightly more fundamental. I am sure they have the capacity to produce great shows. Look at their debt, look at how much capital they have committed to production...you can produce multiple "best ever" shows, and it won't get you out that hole.
An executive is quoted, on their strategy, as saying “We succeed if 1 in 10 shows is a hit.” I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t think they were pumping out pure winners.
If the events mentioned in the story are in fact a cause of NFLX's decline is another story. People were forced inside(globally) during the pandemic and consumed alot more media than ever before in history. The quality of shows at NFLX has gone down considerably the past 2 years. NFLX pushed a show that alienated alot of people with Cuties. Friends and other hit shows left NFLX. Inflation has hit a 40 year high and gas and food are expensive, people are cutting costs and NFLX seems like an easy cut.
Would Cindy have stopped all of the above events? Maybe the quality issue but costs(under her) seemed steep, who can say? I think no matter who is at the top NFLX would have suffered in some way. If Ted had chose Cindy instead of Bela Bajaria we would have a similar article talking about Bela's sources and how Cindy's excessive spending and smaller show lineups are killing NFLX.
Well, the people blaming "wokeness" aren't connected to reality anyway, so I doubt that any evidence will change their mind.
But it's ironic if the reign of an "anti-woke" Chapelle loyalist is what tanks them.
Given that the journalist goes out of her way to include this, it's not a mystery why "wokeness" is not mentioned in the article :)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/he-makes-you-fe...
Some shows just don't hit their stride until two or more seasons in. Parks and Rec had a really rough first season.
If you turn auto play off, there's no way to play anything. You have to just start watching.
What I would like to see is, semantic search where I could elaborate the shows/movies I'd like to search for: "A classic movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg" and Netflix shows me "War of the Worlds" in search results.
I don't feel like Netflix lacks things to watch, I just feel it does a terrible job keeping its suggestions fresh.
Thumbs-down on a video seems to remove the whole category.
You just can't start a service with recommendations as part of your sell... and then bastardize those recommendations into advertisements or original content-pushers. Paying customers eventually lose patience.
You can disable autoplay of previews, and you can disable autoplay of the next episode in a series.
I don't understand what in the world XX% match is all about.
My biggest complaint about Netflix is there is no simple 5-star rating. Or something like that.
I'm not going to watch a trash movie that is a XX% match to some bogus criteria. Even if that match is 100%.
Thus, unlike Prime, I explore very little with Netflix. I manually look up the rating in IMDb before I watch anything. (Which is why I prefer Prime. Since IMDb is built in.)
If you like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven't seen Ghostbusters, and 94% of people who have seen all three movies and liked the first two also liked Ghostbusters, then it's 94% likely that you'll also like Ghostbusters.
I'm sure it's much more complicated and nuanced, but that's the general idea.
Specifically at some point it seemed like Netflix started weighting all their own content much more heavily than others so the match scores on Netflix shows were much higher, even though obviously Netflix producing a show has almost no bearing on whether I'll like it or not.
I wish it started at 0% and worked its way up because the current implementation is really misleading. It's trying to get me to watch something because it's a Netflix original they want to push but really their plan backfired and now I don't watch any Netflix originals unless I know for sure I want to watch it beforehand.
As a consumer, I don't want to have 5 different streaming services with subs coming and going depending on what shows happen to be in season. I'd rather choose to subscribe to one of various streaming services that in turn let me source content from many providers and just let me pay per show or whatever (maybe after a free first episode or something, I dunno).
In a way I kind of feel bad for Netflix, because they were there "first" and for a long time had maybe one of the more "open" (in terms of content) services. Now the studios are in control again. It's not good for the consumer.
Netflix was basically forced into this template when major content owners started pulling out and creating their own services.
It's the downside of all "content platform" plays. There's nothing stopping a new platform from taking over YouTube or Facebook or Twitter. All it takes is the actual content producers moving to a different platform and poof there it goes.
It would be lovely if they'd just offer a "random sort" as an option.
Wrote this and feels like I sound a little burned out.
When this happens to me consistently it is nearly always depression killing my desire. Although it's never obvious in the moment that's the case, it just feels like I'm not in the mood.
Obviously I don't know anything about you or your situation, but if you're consistently not in the mood for things you used to enjoy it's worth considering if you're depressed (or burned out as you said). Depression is not always obvious when you're in the middle of it, and it's not always "woe is me I want to die".
Of course could be many other things in your situation you would know better than I, your comment just reminded me of myself and I wanted to share my experience with it.
Edit2: as part of the growth of competition in this arena, Netflix was having certain shows pulled (an example that comes to mind is The Office)
It's an interesting story, quite clearly heavily informed by Holland, but just because Hollywood types don't like Netflix coming in and stopping on their industry doesn't mean Netflix is actually doing the wrong thing, and I don't think the current turn around in the stock price tells us anything about that strategy.
The article pinpoints it quite well.
It would have been more expensive for the immediate term to spend more on shows and earn less profits. But now, they spend less and lose even more.
Once they are on this downward spiral, its going to be really hard to compete with Disney. Netflix may really go the Blockbuster way.
By diamonds, I am assuming you mean popular shows. Quality and popular tend to be correlated, but not always. Bad quality scripts can sometime be successful (e.g. Fast and Furious / Transformers, but these are not cheap either), but I think those are usually the exception and not the norm.
Given 1 high quality script vs 2 low quality scripts with the same total price, I would rather fund the high quality one. Although the high quality script has equals less choices for the customers, I know there is higher likelihood they might like it and would come back to watch again and again. There is almost certainly not the case with low quality scripts.
The script writing is the only variable that they can control. So why give it up just to throw a bunch of shows on the wall and see what sticks? You already know the script is not good, even if it is cheap. What are the chances your customers will like it?
My parents, their parents, and many of their peers have TVs on in the background during virtually every waking moment they spend at home, and have done so since at least the 90s.
People are watching video differently, but I'm not sure it's "a lot more".
Come to think of it, my wife often does this as well (she's in her 30s). She'll put something on and then do something completely different, just the other day I came into the room to find her with netflix running on screen, a youtube video playing on another screen and her staring at her phone looking at something else.
But I find myself, if I'm going to watch something, sit down and focus on it completely, to the point that I often pause and rewind if I didn't quite catch the phrasing of something.
I guess it's just that certain people don't mind passive viewing and can have a lot more inputs without being bothered by it.
It'd also make it easier to enter both parts of that market, as a production company or a distributor, which is currently something that only a company with an enormous pile of cash and/or ownership of an existing large catalog of material, can realistically do.
The implicit assumption here is that without competition, we'd have all (or most) of the same shows, just on a single service.
I don't think that's true. I think competition between streaming services largely on the basis of original content has produced a lot of good shows that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It seems to me like there's a lot more variety in things to watch these days, and it's not like I have to pay for every streaming service every month...
Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example? Netflix has started and cancelled a ton of original series, but would they have even been tried at all back when cable TV was king? I don't know, maybe there are some statistics on the variety of TV shows being watched and I'm wrong, but I can't find them.
> Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example?
I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production. However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
More importantly than whether Disney would still be OK, I think it would make it easier for indies and startups to participate in the market.
That's a big "might" there, isn't it equally possible that eventually distribution will converge on a single platform? It's much easier for that kind of thing to happen with streaming than with, say, theaters.
> I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production.
But there is no monopoly right now. I don't think you can slice an industry as thinly as "Star Wars TV shows" and say Disney has a monopoly there. Disney does not have a monopoly in the streaming market, no-one does. They have a monopoly in the same way Walmart has a monopoly on Walmart brand toothpaste, I guess.
At most you can say it's an oligopoly, which I somewhat agree with and yes, it seems like it could be improved.
> However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
If the government bans production companies from distributing their shows, mandating middle men and lower profit margins for the producers, that decreases the incentive to spend as much on production. And it's not clear that forcing a distribution middleman into the transaction is going to lower prices. After all, when Netflix raised prices, people left despite Netflix's "monopoly" on Netflix Original content.
Either of us could be right, it would be great if we could find some data, or some example from another industry to get a clearer picture.
So they the only thing they could and started producing content.
In other words, we want as many middlemen as possible in the chain?
In the current environment, I suspect we'll see (are already seeing, to some extent) history repeat itself, but not do anything about it this time, because we're so skittish of regulating markets now.
I don't think you should have to own an extensive catalog of content to launch a streaming service. Nor that you should effectively have to grovel for the patronage of one of a handful of integrated production+distribution mega corporations to undertake production of new media. But that's rapidly where the market's heading, and I don't see any mechanism to change that course short of anti-trust action.
There are, as usual, some benefits to the rents the current monopolistic system produces (extra cash sloshing around to throw at projects, for example—extra R&D money is a typical benefit monopolies produce, and in this case, because the monopolies are on particular content rather than on all content [so far—Disney's getting alarmingly close], there remain incentives to actually spend that money on, if you will, R&D, or the closest thing to it in media production) but at the cost reduced competition on cost & quality, and of making it much harder to enter the market, for new players.
As it gets increasingly hard/expensive, not to mention the bickering between services and platforms and services and markets to watch them on, customers are resorting to piracy as a way to get the content they want.
I think a middle ground would be shareware-like pay-per-view type model. Are you creating a new series? Make the first episode freely watchable, and then don't price excessively the entire season.
As a consumer would make sense for me to pay 5$ for a season of show X on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max/etc. But allow me to watch the thing I payed for perpetually in the future, as long as the show is still on the platform. And when I'm looking for something new to pay for, allow me to see the first episode of existing shows for free.
Would that work for all consumers? I don't know, most people I know with streaming subscriptions, barely actively watch shows and very often those are standins for background noise.
I wish the internet ads worked the same way. I'd happily pay any website 2x whatever google or similar ad networks pay, to avoid ads. Seems like it would help reduce clickbait as well.
Fragmentation in VOD is taking us back to the cable era where you had to pay extra for different content packages.
High quality content is spread across multiple platforms so users have to pay more for other services or simply miss out on that content.
1) Choice fatigue.
2) The annoyance of wanting to watch a specific thing and then hunt it down, hoping it is on your service.
3) The costs (financial, time, irritation) of subscribing to multiple services to combat #2.