Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it
vulture.com
vulture.com
My business produces storytelling videos for e-commerce and we almost got into the television/entertainment business at one point, as it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries. Stock photography and interviews and cheap-but-good editing. You’ll notice solo YouTubers are making great documentaries. I don’t know how they are spending so much money considering the quality of much of the crap they make. High schooler YouTubers make similar quality with their iPhones.
There must be thousands of talented directors who haven’t been given their big break yet who have artistic ideas and would almost work for free to be given a chance to make a name for themselves. Give them resources and a chance and see who has what it takes.
This is only one relevant factor, ofcourse.
Unrelated: I’m currently trying out CuriosityStream so I feel less guilty for the time I spend watching TV. At least I’ll be learning something.
Reminds me of this hilarious video - https://youtu.be/9BUrNe3Vhtk
That was hilarious btw.
Funny, I stumbled upon a documentary “Meltdown”, which is about the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979.
I expected something along the lines of HBO’s Chernobyl, but it just seems like a very cheap, Discovery-style documentary?
It’s very poorly done, and I stopped watching after 2 episodes.
It realistic and quite close to what went on, but not documentary at all.
I wonder if they just greenlit it because they had such a success with the Chernobyl series and wanted to do it again.
What’s the issue with 4k?
> “We have to have an Adam Project and a Bridgerton every month and to make sure that that’s the expectation of the service constantly,” he said.
Are there people to watch an "Adam Project" and a "Bridgerton" (I assume these are interesting shows) every month? Are there people that are some kind of stream-receptacle?
In case the specific shows threw you off, those were meant just as examples of quality. They don't mean that people would literally rewatch the same show.
As for are there people who watch shows every month? Absolutely, many people watch an episode of a show or a movie every evening.
On Netflix, they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick. And they're doing it in various genre because it's a diverse world out there (an Indian soapie is different to a British one, for example). While your bar might be high, someone starved of space x zombie crossovers will like something just enough not to cancel their subscription for a couple more months.
My benchmark for this genre is Forensic Files. I have yet to find another one that is this concise and informative.
Would be nice to have a show like that again with a similar format but eased back on the law enforcement propaganda.
(I still fucking miss the OA and Sense8 if you follow my comment history)
You could say this about anything. “Walmart is in the selling business, not in the food business.” But in the end, when, in a remote village in France, 3 dads discuss at a bar about how Netflix has probably gone below TV level (which is quite a performance), then you business opportunities dwindle pretty fast.
It’s known. People discuss it for lunch. Everyone’s looking for a Netflix alternative and is discussing their experiments. Only young teens without much taste are satisfied, and not that much.
Dark was around the same time as well.
My perception of the untouchable Netflix was changed when they cancelled The OA. For one, I didn’t really trust them with multi-season serialized content anymore and, two I started to notice good content on other streaming service.
I sort of wonder if every faithful Netflix subscriber had an OA moment over the last few years? Where they lost faith in the service because of a poorly-handled choice for a show they enjoyed.
(By the way, if you dig the OA and Sense8 you might like Severance on Apple TV.)
You're assuming the general population wants artistic, fresh ideas rather than the same re-hashed tried & true stuff.
Disney pretty clearly proves rehashing the exact same thing over and over again is a never ending gold mine.
Disney probably makes $1M for every $1 A24 makes.
And yet, Disney's business itself was once a brand new, revolutionary idea.
Perhaps the table stakes aren't just "making something innovative", but creating opportunities for themselves to build the next Big Thing.
* audio sounded odd, like it was dubbed but it did match facial expressions. It lacked any reference to culture or geography, like it was made to simply swap out sound tracks in another language. * the settings were minimized: house, hospital, vet… and not much else. This also was unnerving because it felt like it may as well have been shot in another planet.
I assumed the dialogue and the sets lack of references resulted from an effort to make it really easy to just swap audio tracks and launch it in another country with as little work on their end. I understand they’d want to do that but their cookie cutter formula resulted in a terrible movie.
Money is not enough in this department and baseball metaphors don’t do justice illustrating just how hard it is to put together a team that has that special thing going on. Some would argue it’s impossible - teams like the one behind Better Call Saul are just extremely rare and can’t be rushed. The traditional system has sort of known this for a long time, I think.
Netflix tried rushing. I’ve personally worked on a failed series season made by the company and it was a chaotic clusterfuck. So are their efforts in ordering and buying content haphazardly to stuff their library with something. Now they’re probably going to have to learn the slow quality development and bring back many of the traditional practices they threw out the window.
This is a good thing for audiences though. I think we’re going to be seeing Netflix settle as one of many big content delivery platforms in the long term.
"Nailed It", sure, I can watch it from time to time but it doesn't mean I will watch 150 other baking shows.
Same thing with "Jessica Jones". I literally found articles about "The top 30 superhero shows on Netflix this year", trying to remember the name of this one. After a while you realize that the funny premise stops being engaging after a couple of episode and the spell is broken.
I watch almost no Netflix these days but I got excited about the new season of Russian Doll, but despite an original script, it doesn't have the punch of the first season. Perhaps it's not just a money grab, but I would have preferred more risk-taking. Why not let created Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler do something new and crazy instead of a season 2, for example?
People complain that Netflix drags shows on past their prime.
People complain.
S2 of Russian Doll also fails because S1 felt like a mini-series that nailed it's landing. It was one of the few series Netflix had with some artistic integrity and they bust it open again for a "not as good" attempt to milk it.
There are plenty shows pre-streaming that got killed prematurely (Firefly) and plenty that dragged on way past their prime (Simpsons) because of exec idiocy or internal politics or whatever that had little to do with whether the quality of the shows was good or whether they had found an audience or just needed time to grow.
I think Netflix tried to avoid that by using data-driven analysis to determine whether to keep or kill a show, but it turns out you probably need some human in the decision chain with an experienced gut. Another problem is that you don't necessarily know whether a show is going to be popular upfront, so the writers try to have a self-contained story arc within a season. If it gets renewed you end up having to awkwardly start a new arc with characters that were pretty much "done" in terms of development. This is pretty obvious with Jessica Jones and Stranger Things, both of which were arguably much weaker in their second seasons.
Even though that accounts for 90% of what I watch, I cancelled Netflix because the 10% I actually care about isn't there now.
Also, they never even tried to build any sort of community or conversation around anything on the platform. No creative form of discovery for different types of viewers. It’s just a one-way interface of content rectangles that are presented to you in algorithmic order.
In my own personal view on this, I think we will see a whole plethora of boutique niche vod platforms built using off-the-shelf tech from the cloud providers. Netflix only had around a decade of a technological upper-hand and it’s been a couple years that anyone can build a VOD platform.
And then, one day, Netflix just got rid of this.
I’m still awestruck by the fact that they had this incredible and free source of data and they just relieved themselves of it.
On Netflix I’ve watch entire seasons of bad shows, because it’s easy, and it might get better and now I’ve already watched the first two episodes. What does happen, and which can’t be meassured, is how many shows I don’t start the second season at all, because season two of that other Netflix original was bad, so there’s a big risk this is as well.
Part of the problem could be eliminated by moving to more classical episodical shows, rather that trying to make every show storylines. It would also make meassuring easier.
Just to spell it out in case the point wasn't clear. The Columbia management was trying to explain they don't know and have no way of knowing up front which movies will be good and which movies will sell and make their money back. Instead they're always gambling by funding a bunch of movies and it only works out because the few hits pay for all the non-hits.
So, Venture Capital? xD
It deserved the downvotes :-)
It seems like every celebrity had their shot at a sitcom in the 90s for example. Is it like the saying about nobody getting fired for buying IBM? But then, risk-taking within that narrow space was limited. From the Seinfeld Wikipedia article:
'The pilot was first screened to a group of two dozen NBC executives in Burbank, California, in early 1989. It did not yield the explosion of laughter garnered by the pilots for the decade's previous NBC successes like The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls. Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced the show would work. A Jewish man from New York himself, Tartikoff characterized it as "Too New York, too Jewish".'
It was almost not even aired.
Squid Game seems to have been a gamble. I'd like to see more like that, but I'm afraid they'll over-fit to that success as well. US remake perhaps? Sequels, prequels, spin-offs. "The 100 must-see dystopian Korean horror shows on Netflix 2023“?
When the product arrives there's a seperate little box with the defective items that have been manufactured seperately to meet the spec.
(There's also the "half of my advertising is effective, I don't know which half" line)
The GP didn’t limit advertising to the internet.
Imagine you’re a law firm advertising on radio, billboard, bus stop benches, AND Instagram/Facebook.
Do you really know which half is converting?
If they know exactly how effective their advertising is, they have too many dollars they want to get rid of.
IBM asks Japanese manufacturer to make 100 boards, specifying 1% failure rate.
On the day of the delivery from the manufacturer, the Japanese CEO comes to inspect the final shipment.
After doing so, he discusses the contract with his chief engineer, and the engineer mentions the failure rate spec.
The CEO nods, takes a board from a box, breaks it over his knee, and says "There is our failure rate".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
:shrugs:
Disney is also hoarding the giant catalog of classic or older films. Fox wasnt just XMen and Simpsons, they had been making films since the 30s. Seems like Disney is going to trickle out the old content slowly.
In the early days of Uber it was a dream. Free and massively discounted rides all the time.
The problem is, it's not even close to half-decent. It's just a huge amount of pulp that is so boring you actually ask yourself existential questions after a few minutes of watching this.
Using MLBAM, any company could set up high quality streaming services cheaply and instantly.
For example, WWE went from announcing they would be creating a streaming service to actually delivering a highly successful and glitch free one within months.
SFF genre has outstanding authors like Brandon Sanderson, Will Wight, Jay Kristoff, Jim Butcher etc. who are producing amazing content for an adult audience at a much faster rate than I can consume with a busy schedule. In contrast Netflix titles simply fail to catch up - there are few good titles (100 & Arcane are the last ones I enjoyed) but for those too the storylines come nowhere close to as interesting as the best works by aforementioned authors.
At some point I realized I was spending almost all of my free time in books and 0% on Netflix and cancellation was a no brainer at that point. Likely I'm just too niche for mainstream streaming services.
Even if we were to assume a good quality, there is still too much quantity. Netflix drops new shows so often that they never have time breath or get legs. I may see an interesting trailer, and then a week later there's another trailer, and so on. There's just so much stuff.
Add to that the fact that for many, TV, whether streaming or otherwise, is essentially background and they'll immediately cancel your service if all they have is a relative handful of prestige must-see TV.
People like to throw this 'you can't cater to everyone's tastes' bit whenever talking about culture/film/game development. But everyone knows there is fast food and there is michelin. The latter requires a lot of hard work, and it is very hard to replicate at scale.
Try different things. Don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be afraid to fail. Do things nobody's ever done before. Create new trends. Hire professionals so that every scene gives the users some level of satisfaction in terms of plot and aesthetics. For example, in a good comedy, each scene (if not each line) should at least bring the corners of your mouth slightly up.
Instead, Netflix is doing the opposite: recycle, recycle, recycle. This is maybe fine for some genres like romantic comedies for Netflix-and-chill, you kind of expect everything but it doesn't bother you. But for the rest, Netflix has become a symbol of mediocrity to the point that I explicitly choose only movies/shows without the N letter on them.
I'm not saying this is an end to Netflix - losing your competitive advantage and having others catch up doesn't put you out of the race. Their brand is huge.
Now it’s mostly quite mediocre content across services that easily cost $100+ a month, so we’re back to the old cable days in terms of cost and content and instead of switching channels we’re endlessly browsing the library for something interesting.
The consumers just aren’t complete idiots.
- lower quality productions (not the necessarily the cost, just not interesting)
- less good external content
- at the same time constantly increasing prices and/or charging for things that were free at a given tier
If you keep charging more for less, people eventually will get off their lazy asses and cancel the subscription.
One other thing that may have contributed: trying to keep users on the platform for long makes it more difficult to have good content left that hasn’t been watched.
Edit: formatting
The consumers kinda are the idiots here. They know what they like, but they have no idea why the content is getting worse. Why shows are being pulled. Companies that had their content on Netflix realized they were facing an existential crisis.
Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances. It's the same with Netflix. All other studios realized at some point Netflix would become so strong, even the royalties Netflix pays for their content would put them out of business permanently. There is no amount of money Netflix can pay for other studios content. Consumers only see the net effect of good shows going away, and imagining reasons why.
No vote no power.
You ask what this person should have done? Not sign up for other services. The other providers are better quality, but regresses on all the rest of the experience. Youtube TV is more than $60 a month. Disney+ great content, but an extremely narrow content offering ("few but ripe"). HBO lagged like crazy when the season finale of GOT came out. When the regular person you asked about spends money on these other services, it encourages them to grow. The content is great, but the bad-experience, price, and schism is what they will get in return. They are unknowingly demanding it.
Like you say, consumers want high quality content. That costs money to make, and when Netflix first started streaming, the cost of shows was subsidized by cable TV. Cable TV is declining or dead now, so who is going to pay for those shows?
Look at how Netflix's prices continue to rise, but their originals are mediocre for most people. Not signing up for other services would just encourage Netflix to keep doing that.
Until Netflix, TV production was funded by Networks paying for first run rights. The re-run/steam right were worthless unless you could get big re-run deals. So they got the rights for next to nothing and destroying the networks that paid for the content in the first place.
I agree that high quality costs something, but anyone familiar with modern media should be aware that the relation between cost and quality is not 1 to 1.
Red Notice would be an example, and interestingly enough, an argument against the idea that consumers want high quality content. Sometimes consumers just want content that will be exactly what they think it will be, no more and no less.
The real trick here is Amazon right now because the Prime subscription has other benefits - in my house we've kept that active because it makes ordering baby stuff much cheaper.
If Netflix could just take what they wanted, nobody would make anything but disposable reality TV.
In the end, Netflix is a company that used to be great and kinda made some of the most genius ideas to fight the Goliath but was undone by a single dude leading a team making poor choices on what content to make. 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? I’m assuming this is as big or a bigger blunder than Zillow, and was powered by stupid data science ideas as well, probably.
I think a large contribution to their failure is Netflix cancelling shows after two seasons. If a show's probably gonna get cancelled before it gets a good run, why why would I bother watching it? People want easy watching, and they want a lot of it. Eg The Office, which ended up lasting nine seasons. Only Netflix knows exactly why they canceled shows, as only they have the viewer numbers, but a rumor I've heard is that after two seasons is when the production starts to get expensive because that's when a show gets traction and the production team and actors can unionize to demand more money - money that Netflix doesn't want to spend.
Unfortunately, in cancelling shows so quickly, there just aren't the shows to keep subscribers on the service - especially if subscribers have to keep picking a show to watch every two seasons. There's nothing more unsatisfying than spending an hour on Netflix trying to find something to watch only not to find anything. If they had more shows that ran nine seasons, it would be easier to justify keeping the subscription just for those shows. Two seasons just isn't enough episodes to keep watching a show and by playing penny-wise and pound-foolish, they just don't have the catalog. Which is sad, because the have a ton of good short-run shows that just needed more of a chance.
The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once. Their choice, but it's very supportive of my habit to cancel my Netflix subscription every time I run out of things to watch, and subscribe to a different service.
The Korean studios are quite smart with this. They release 1 or 2 episodes on a weekday just like Netflix used to with Star Trek Discovery.
If they didn’t do this and I were going to screw about with subscription micromanagement, I would just subscribe when an entire season had been released, since I have no interest in being drip-fed a show or watching something over several weeks.
That is very subjective. My wife and I really liked The power of the dog. And I am sure there are more.
Also subjective: watching Netflix every day (I do not) will end up in watching below par stuff. No service will be able to produce that much high quality content for everybody’s taste.
they had the wrong idea that original content is their strong point. It's not. It's disney's strong point.
Netflix should've used their dominant position to lobby for new rules to the game - prevent exclusivity of content! They should've lobbied gov't to mandate that studio productions of content be permanently untied to a streaming service, and be available to all players in the streaming space. Just like net neutrality, we might call this content neutrality.
Netflix is at it's core, a tech company that solves technical issues with streaming. They pivoted to content creation, and they aren't very good at it - sure they got a couple of hits, but they cannot possibly compete on this with actual movie studios that own IPs from a century ago to this day.
When they started out creating original content, they were hitting it out of the park. Orange is the new black, daredevil, house of cards were all big hits.
They scaled, quality was sacraficed for quantity, and their brand became very dilluted.
I've never used Hulu, but there's a good chance I'll sub in the next few months for the new season of The Orville. I'd expect anime series would be a great similar target- there are plenty of manga/novel adaptations that did one 13-episode series that covered the first fewbooks, and now the source material is finished with 25 more volumes they can adapt.
That only really works if you respect the original source material, which seems to be a problem for the "creatives".
The original version of House of Cards was a four episode mini-series. There was a lesson there that Netflix chose to ignore.
What is it? Network television spent decades milking shows way past their expiration dates and still made bank.
The Office was originally a 14-episode arc built to an actual conclusion and NBC made who knows how much with middling season after season of the US version.
People watched because we're creatures of habit and you only have to get us hooked once.
That didn't change. What changed is the # of options. Instead of 1/25 shows catching on its 100/2,500 and it doesn't scale the same way.
I was late to Netflix.
The original movies I saw were beyond bad. In every movie they used every plot twist ever invented, and every bit of cliched writing. The overpaid actors just read lines.
It's almost like they locked sober hack writers in a room and told them just write. Write like your audience is an angry/perverted Forrest Gump, and can't speak English. (I threw in sober because even if under the influence--they might have written better?)
They just wasted money.
I understand comming up with original clever scripts is hard.
I felt they could have redone classic movies though--instead of the garbage they threw at us.
I was watching Dog Day Afternoon the other day. The movie aged very well, and is an all time classic. No one is going to top that movie on any level.
Netflix could have tried to remake it though with up to date references, and even change up the script. Sonny, and Sal could have made it on the plane, and go from there.
Dog Day Afternoon is a bad example because it aged so well, but their are other good movies that could have been brought up to date?
I believe it's too late for Netflix.
In retrospect, I would have rather had them throw money at students in film school.
(I don't bet on stocks, but we all saw this comming. Every studio was working on their own pay per view service a year after we started talking about Netflix. Someone brobally made millions shorting that company.)
>
> they had the wrong idea that original content is their strong point. It's not. It's disney's strong point.
I guess there are different people watching content. Note that I mainly talk about TV shows, as I’m not a big movie fan.
Because I hate pretty much everything Disney. MCU is low-brow humor with plot-hole riddled writing and weak characters mainly fueled by action scenes and star power. I don’t know what Star Wars is, but nothing that interests me, I don’t think I’d even have liked the original trilogy if I had been older when it came out.
Netflix, both their English original content and many foreign shows (assuming good dubbing, which usually means the actors dubbed themselves) has far better content.
and the different groups have different sizes. Your tastes, unfortunately, belongs to the smaller of those groups, so content-wise, disney's franchised content won't appeal to you. But they do appeal to a very large group. And this large group is where the profits lie, and why netflix is not competing well in. It's the wrong game to be playing for netflix.
I’d also argue Amazon prime has fared far better with OG content than Netflix in a fraction of its budget. The blame should entirely fall on its current ceo who imo should be ousted and Hastings needs to come back to salvage his baby.
Netflix used to be a tech company that solves the problem of content discovery, too. Then they chose to not generate recommendations based on data but instead push their in-house content.
Countries like India already have protections like these in place. They haven't regulated the streaming space yet. However, the other channels are very well regulated and content cannot be tied to the delivery channel. This means consumers win at the end of the day and competition is preserved. Content can be acquired by competitors _without_ consolidation.
Kind of a weird example when the adam sandler movie (uncut gems) was probably one of the few critical succeses of their recent original content.
Separately, Netflix just purchased streaming rights for Uncut Gems, which Sandler didn't write, from A24.
I'm assuming it's the Sandler originals that OP is referring to.
This is why my group of friends stopped playing Catan after a while..
The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts."
Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform.
The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site.
As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.
Serving video is an absolute commodity. They should have been getting pennies on the dollar if that. A simple distribution service for studios who should have been thought of as their customers. But no, making a steady, useful, profitable business is not enough.
Taking a big cut from an easily replaced service, and using the money to fund a direct competitor to their customers sure was something. Took a lot of chutzpah, is about the best I'll say for it.
They either picked netflix and have stayed with it at $22/mo or have changed from netflix to 1 other service like paramount+ or whatever, but the idea of paying $50-60-80 a month for more services on top of their residential broadband connection at $55-85 is a non-starter.
It’s more likely they pirate because apple’s library is pretty small, compared to others, so it’s easier to just torrent than pay for the couple of programmes they want to watch.
It’s also more difficult to share logins with appletv (no profiles etc), so you’ll get less of the account sharing that Netflix is now trying to crack down on.
The industry is killing itself this way. Netflix is just the first to take the hit because they have the largest market saturation.
They also offer HBOMax, Netflix, and Disney+ but when you take those as your media offerings you have to use the various sites which I think is a mistake (probably they have to do it that way because of contractual requirements) but obviously if you use up your potential media selections from an YouSee account on other providers at some point you probably think why am I using YouSee?
Don’t go back that far. Newsnet is far superior.
Every streaming service had their own app which may or may not be available on my TV, tablet, phone or computer. The experience is varying on each device (e.g I can disable auto playing trailers for Netflix on my phone but not TV).
Then on top of that, each streaming service requires additional complexity (logins, setting up profiles) and has varying UI (search, continue watching, subtitle and quality control).
It's significantly less hassle for me to just Jellyfin + *arr services than try to manage this on a daily basis.
If I click unsubscribe, that’s more or less final.
I’m fast approaching the time when I won’t be subscribed to anything most of the time, and occasionally sign up for one to watch one show.
Again, you're right: before the other players came to streaming, Netflix had an amazing value proposition. Why? Because "the other players" didn't realize that streaming would displace cable, DVD purchases, and Blockbuster rentals so they licensed their content to Netflix a lot cheaper than they would have if they'd realized that. Yes, there was a golden era of Netflix before "the other players" realized that streaming was the future. Over the long run, it's logical to think that they weren't going to just want less money while you got the same quality content.
I would disagree that it's mediocre content across the streaming services. I do think Netflix has invested too much in mediocre content and that's biting them (as the article notes). However, we have so much amazing content being produced.
I also think that "across services that easily cost $100+ a month" is a bit unfair too. $15.50 Netflix, $8 Disney+, $6 Hulu, $15 HBO Max, $5 Apple TV+, Paramount+ $5. That's $55. "Oh, I don't want ads so it's $13 for Hulu and $10 for Paramount+." Fair, but it's not like cable TV was cheaper, it had practically zero content compared to these streaming services, and more than 25% of its time was ads.
I think a lot of people don't really remember how there was almost nothing to watch back then. I think people's memory of the earlier days of Netflix streaming is colored by the fact that they went from "there's nothing on TV" to "OMG, Netflix has so much to stream! This is amazing!" Part of the issue is that we've gotten really accustomed to having so much to watch available. Even if Netflix were giving us just as much quality as they were when they were a "good value", people's perception of what is a good value has changed.
Netflix is still way better than cable in most ways (live sports being a big exception). It's also way cheaper. But it's also not unique anymore. When Netflix launched (and for many years after), we were all thrilled that we could watch 20-25% of the content we wanted via this one service. That was amazing. However, I think our expectations have changed: we think we should have access to all the content we want - and for cheap.
For ages, people complained "why do I have to pay for a cable package that includes X which I don't watch! I should be able to select services a-la-carte!" Now that we're offering services a-la-carte, it's becoming clear that the real complaint was that people just wanted to pay less money for the same content.
I think that Netflix launched and was such a huge jump from the old experience of cable TV and people expected that $10-15 to keep jumping from 20% to 40% to 70% to 90% of what they wanted to watch for one low price. I do think Netflix has had missteps along the way including pouring money into a lot of stuff that ends up being background noise rather than great television. However, with others entering streaming, they were going to keep their own shows for their services more often than not and there would be more competition for high-quality content. Disney explicitly went after Star Wars and Marvel to build a content portfolio they could leverage and bought Fox and its huge library of TV and movie productions (both the historical library and ongoing) as well as Hulu (pending them buying out Comcast's 33% which they're entitled to do).
I guess I wonder: if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently (with the caveat that you do need to create a business that will make money)? My suggestions would be things like: don't keep throwing money at low-quality content that people "watch" but don't really watch. Just because you can measure streaming hours of a program doesn't mean that people like it. I might suggest buying a content company, but that seems like it would be a hard thing to do. It'd give them owner-economics over a large back catalogue, but even in 2016 Netflix was a $40-70B company. Who could you buy without giving away half (or almost all) of your company? 2016 you're talking $40B for Viacom without CBS. Disney would be $150B+. In 2016, AT&T made its deal for Time Warner for $85B. Disney bought Fox for $71B in 2017 - minus the US stations and Sky. If you go before 2016, Netflix is a $25-30B company in 2014 and a $5B company in 2012. They don't have the money. Do you try to negotiate even longer-term third-party content deals for streaming in 2007-2010 before third-parties realize that you're going to be cannibalizing their business? Get Time Warner to give you their catalogue for a 20-year run - giving you a very long time before they can compete with HBO streaming? Do the same to others?
To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours", but isn't quality viewing hours that keep customers loving your product. It's more like settling hours. Beyond that, I think a lot of it is just that people want access to everything for less money and realistically that wasn't going to happen. But maybe you have other ways they could have gone - without saying "keep spending more money, keep losing it, die a hero."
Reflecting on that: I’ve started to reduce my consumption all together. Bought Blu-ray’s of one or two shows I was interested in and that have been around long enough to buy at a reasonable price for all season (though I won’t bother with that anymore after relocating to a different region).
But the biggest change: turning away from the TV in the evening hours. Back to educating myself or gaming.
I’m not sure if there’s something Netflix could have done honestly. They had a technology moat with video streaming tech at a time when everyone else focused on cable but video streaming and streaming apps became a commodity over ten years or so.
To expect them to also become a great studio company when they started out with the tech moat would be a bit of Silicon Valley hubris. It works for a few like Amazon but even Amazon is facing similar issues where online shopping tech is now commoditized and rivals have better depth in retail itself.
The worst thing the service can do is force viewers back to that New Playing screen, and just hope they find something before giving up, disgusted at your library's lack of content. Netflix never did conquer the Now Playing page. If I don't have a show that someone else has promoted to me, I'm not opening the Netflix app, that page is where dreams of just watching some TV go to die. Not for lack of trying, mind you, they've run a large number of experiments on that page, it's just a difficult problem when you don't have the content your users really want. It's thoroughly unsatisfying a UX, especially if you can't find something before your attention span gets bored of trying to find something to watch, and you switch away entirely. To Fortnight or TikTok, as the article suggests.
Spin-off shows don't generally do well on network TV, but things are different for streaming, and mediocre content set in the same universe as existing shows, for easy transference of viewing keeps users on your platform. Even if viewers are rewatching The Office for the Nth time. Because that show has nine seasons, Netflix might as well just be The Office streaming program and it would keep subscribers just fine. You're right that they're "settling" hours, but not everyone is a TV show snob. Netflix was never going to afford to be at ABC/Paramount/Disney level but it's trying to play there and make shows that rivaled their quality - and cost - that killed them.
At 17B/year Netflix alone spends ~$48/year for every single person in the US. Prime spends 13B, Apple 6B, Disney 33B, Warner (HBO, etc...) 18B. Or put another way ~$250/person in the US/year on content.
Even if accounting for world wide distribution, these numbers are just not sustainable from an investment standpoint.
Is that a new series?
Sure it would be nice if I had HBO max, hulu, disney, apple, but honestly I don't think I'd have time for them.
How many hours of streaming video can a person possibly watch that one would find stuff on Netflix not adequate?
Or is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch?
Yeah. I love discussing shows with friends and family and I’ve been finding it harder and harder to watch shows together or watch them later on our own time to discuss them later.
For example, I recently watched Pachinko and would highly recommend it but none of my friends have Apple TV so they can’t watch it (unless they pirate it)
For example, I go to TV app on my phone or laptop or Apple TV. Search for what I want. Pay for it, and if it is a subscription, then go back to list of subscriptions and then cancel.
If it is Netflix, then you might have to do this in a browser since they do not cooperate with Apple.
Not sure how much easier people want it to get. I will gladly take this method of paying and watching for media than anything I experienced in previous years.
Right now I have projects, road-trips, other things to do....
We generally wait for an entire series before starting to watch anyway (so we can watch at a pace we want, rather than having it strung out over weeks) so it is not much hardship to just sign up to a service for a month or two at a time and then "bleed it dry" of things you are watching then move on to another service.
- Criterion Channel for the good stuff (cheaper than Netflix, too.)
- Tubi for guilty crap... and some good movies here and there too (ad-supported.)
For a while I tried Mubi but it was clear I'm not the target audience. I was watching 1-2 movies a month, tops.
They're the outsider compared to all these old boys studios and copyright holders. The old boys are literally the mob. And when the mob saw how much cake Netflix was taking, they said "Nope". Given this, I feel like Netflix has less and less of a choice when it comes to what externally-produced movies/shows they offer. They're just trying to survive. And keep their kneecaps.
I think a lot of the discussion in this thread could be summed up as, maybe Netflix should have been content to be a low margin tech supplier to the studios rather than try and spend it's way to becoming a new Disney. A lot of tech firms are built off the back of the fact that it seems to be harder for other industries to learn how to be a tech firm than the other way around. Streaming video is clearly one of those cases where it's the opposite and that fact had been hidden for a long time by the flood of QE funny money.
It's why studios love sequels and franchises. They have a built-in audience ie predictable returns.
The biggest innovation we've had in this industry is the advent of highly serialized TV shows, made possibly in large part due to (at first) DVRs and then streaming. 30 years ago it just wasn't possible or practical to do somethin glike this when people had to tune in at a set time. The audience drop off would've been too severe.
For me this has been the true Golden Age of TV. But movies? It's all superhero films now and dull, dull, dull for the most part.
So the lesson Netflix is learning here is you can't just scale up a content business by throwing money at it. Studios would love if it this were true. Netflix has thrown many billions at this problem and not spent it wisely. You can't just write a check for $10 billion and become HBO.
Movies in particularly just don't make economic sense without theater releases. We've seen this durin gthe pandemic with movies that have skipped theaters out of necessity. It just doesn't work.
I agree Netflix needed to create original content given the inevitable "me too" streaming platforms from all the studios would otherwise rob Netflix of their catalog. But they may have just saddled themselves with so much debt that they're forced into ever-increasing sub prices because of decreasing subscriber numbers, which just accelerates the need for more price hikes and so on.
Ironically this is exactly what is killing cable TV.
[1]:https://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp...
My favorite style changes. Sometime I just drink a new one because like dopamine hits and I get excited about the potential novelty and discovery. But it's beer, and I think there's nothing wrong with it. From bud light to like whatever quadruppel or super IPA monstrosity someone in the Bay Area decided to brew and that may work as an antiseptic, I like them all. There's a formula and I like it, and I also like Marvel movies. Maybe I'm a basic bastard and I'm making a cardinal sin by spending my money on non innovative things and I should be only watching surreal pieces shot in a single take where at least one actor committed suicide or got addicted to opioids while shooting the movie. Don't get me wrong, those are great too and specially the followup documentaries. I also can then participate in high stakes intelectual debates. But that's a formula too.
And maybe I should drink sours but fuck that.
But yeah I think your analysis is great but I also think it's important to say that milking successful formulas is not wrong or morally reprehensible. If you scam people or whatever while doing yeah that's bad, but letting the chicken lay the golden eggs and not changing anything about it is pretty much ok in my hierarchy of sins.
They must be doing something right. And that’s just in theaters. That’s not counting money made via syndication, licensing, home video, etc
It's good to not be insufferable in constantly policing oneself to follow the trend. sure. But watching Marvel movies isn't the only alternative.
On this note, Pliny the Elder (the highest rated IPA in the Bay Area) used to be hard to find but recently is just everywhere, and it turns out it tastes horrible. But it’s like single-origin horrible. Like drinking the highest quality grass clippings.
My point is that creating original content is a creative endeavor that doesn’t naturally scale. MrBeast is obviously successful but that doesn’t mean you can just cookie cutter another 100 MrBeasts. That’s not how it works.
What we call movies are 1h30 or more of continuous contents, and in this day and age this becomes an increasingly long time to be stuck in one place doing one thing. If it’s a full hobby, like pottery or bordering why not, but for “casual” people I feel the proposition is less and less attractive.
Worse case if you’re disrupted is you’d restart the eps you were on at a later and you’d lose less than an hour of watch time. Current movies go up to 3h…
I see as the same paradox as people watching Tiktok shorts for hours. Yes, in aggregate it could be more than several movies stuck together, but it’s order of magnitude less binding and requires less commitment.
You can pause a movie? I don’t always watch a movie in one go.
My new hobby is watching movies as they were 4-episodes series. It's great, much more to the point.
Rewinding until a point where you can get back the context can also be a PITA, and for many movies stopping somewhere in the middle lands you in the flat part which makes it extra dull to resume watching.
All in all, I’ll often end up dropping a movie if it was 3h30 and there was 40min left to watch, it’s just not worth it in general.
Just a handful of films under 90 minutes:
"Toy Story", "High Noon", "Rashomon", "This is Spinal Tap", "Frankenstein" (and "Bride of"), "Umberto D", "My Neighbor Totoro", "Run Lola Run", "Duel", "Rope"...
Streaming services are equivalent to MVNOs on cellular networks.
Most of original content is just crap produced to fill the library. Netflix creates more and more titles, not watching material. They are cancelling their own shows with such pace that I started avoiding investing time in their new content, assuming they will promptly fuck it up.
Abundance of unnecessary sex scenes. It's almost like watching bad porn: -Ma'am, have you called about cable TV not working? (oh, they're gonna bang now); -Oh, I'm stuck with my head in the washing machine (he's gonna bang her now); -Teacher asks student to stay after class? (banging in 3.. 2...); Opening Netflix (ridiculous, out-of-place sex scenes no matter the content). Just create "soft porn" category already and let people choose.
Production aiming at 100% engagement, giving viewer no time to think. Whatever the genre, every movie or show is unnecessarily action-packed like "Speed" (1994) or "Crank" (2006) making watching feel like work, not relax. Refreshing, thought-welcoming productions like Apple's "Severance" have little place on Netflix platform.
> "This show was so good I couldn't stop watching. But would I watch it again? Hey, this wasn't good at all, I got played"
I think Disney has been better with their series in this regard. I've been watching a few shows that were planned with many seasons in mind, but instead of abruptly pulling the plug when viewership was lower than expected they gave them a final season that writers have been using to wrap things up really well. I can start a new show from them with a bit more confidence it'll get finished.
Not that netflix is super good, but just that stuff I watch or get recommended is much different then yours.
Weird. I've always felt Netflix moved away from sex scenes/nudity compared to something like HBO. It was so clearly different I thought it was a Netflix thing to avoid it.
While Disney (and other producers) do something like 90% depreciation over the first year, the famous "Hollywood accounting" that gets a lot of criticism.
But "Hollywood accounting" might be closer to the truth than Netflix's model. 20% of the movie "Bright" (released in 2017, the Will Smith + Orc buddy-cop movie) is still being "paid for" on Netflix's books this year.
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Since Netflix's growth has slowed a bit, the effects of depreciation are now going to start hurting it. But it seems like everything discussed in this article is about the fundamental viewership issue, which might be worse.
Amortization - Netflix treats content as assets, and recognizes on average 90% of amortized expenses in the four years after first broadcast. Net revenue looks better, but cash flow and balance sheets are still going to reflect outlays, which can often occur before first broadcast.
The "Hollywood accounting" recognizes 90% of expenses in the first year to artificially reduce net profit, which in turn means less taxes and royalties during the year when most revenue for content is recognized. Netflix can make a case that content continues to make an impact on subscription revenue over a larger window of time, and so expenses should equally be recognized in relation to the income statement.
Netflix also regularly updates their amortization schedule as trends shift.
How many people are getting Netflix subscriptions to watch Bright (2017 Will Smith+Orc movie) this year?
Or from a Disney perspective, how many people are getting Disney+ to watch Coco (2017 Day of the Dead 3d cartoon)?
Does it make sense, from an accounting point of view, to have "paid" for Bright in 2017 dollars and its 2017 cash-flow? Or does it make sense to pay for "Bright" with 2022 dollars?
Its all accounting. But next year, when Netflix is down by 2.2 million customers, Netflix's 10k statement is going to be "paying" for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 movies despite having much fewer customers.
In contrast, Disney+ or Disney loses 90% of their value in the 1st year, so Disney's accounting will only be paying for "Turning Red" this year and next year.
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It kind of sorta doesn't matter "how" accounting is done, as long as everyone understands it. Except because of this Netflix methodology, Netflix has effectively "borrowed future money", from an accounting perspective, to make 2017, 2018 and other years "look better".
Yes, that's the entire point of accounting. They use ASC 920 and 926 accounting standards, so that anyone familiar with GAAP can understand what they're looking at.
> Disney+ or Disney loses 90% of their value in the 1st year, so Disney's accounting will only be paying for "Turning Red" this year and next year.
Disney+ also amortizes, and expects 80% over four years on original content.
> Netflix has effectively "borrowed future money", from an accounting perspective
Except that's not the accounting perspective. Netflix spends most of its cash on content before it even airs - should they recognize those expenses against income before that content has even had a chance to start generating income? That's borrowing future revenues against current cash outlays.
That's why we have these standards, so that when combined with three-sheet accounting we can understand how the pieces come together.
Things like depreciation curves are not standardized. It may all be GAAP, but there's a huge difference in how Disney's Coco was depreciated vs how Netflix's Bright depreciated in their respective accounting books.
The question is whether the 18-month schedule for Coco makes more sense than the 5-year schedule of Netflix's Bright.
Nothing was depreciated, because we're dealing with intangible assets. And yes, depreciation and amortization schedules are absolutely standardized. I literally included TWO standards in my last response that Netflix & Disney+ use.
> huge difference in how Disney's Coco was depreciated vs how Netflix's Bright
Yes, because Coco was part of Disney and not Disney+.
> The question is whether the 18-month schedule for Coco makes more sense
Yes, it makes sense for a theatrical release. "Bright" and "Turning Red" were created for streaming, and it makes sense that their amortization schedules cover the years that this IP will be helping the companies generate revenues as those titles continue to be viewed by subscribers.
If you were to take all the views for "Bright" and aggregate it by year, I imagine the distribution from year 1 to 5 looks very similar to Netflix's amortization schedule. Funny that, almost like the SEC approved it or something.
So where do you allocate the $8?
Netflix's strategy seems to be just get big name actors and mediocre creatives and hope it works. The Adam Project might have a lot of viewers but how many of those are just because it's there? How many people would say "The Adam Project is my favorite movie" and how does that compare to Luca?
Netflix has been essentially making the equivalent of direct to DVD movies as its whole strategy while Disney has been bringing their best. They are becoming The Asylum of the streaming world.
It's kind of sad because Netflix had over 5 billion in net income last year, and 30B in total revenue. Suppose that Netflix can afford to spend 15-20B on content a year. You could do so much with that money. I mean, 20B is 20 thousand million dollars. Assuming you take just 5 billion and fund indie movies at 20M a pop, you could produce 250 indie movies a year. If they were smart about it, they would give scholarships to kids coming out of movie school. Create movie making contests. Give a lot of fresh young creative people a shot, and keep funding the creatives that produce the better reviewed content... Like, you know... A meritocracy of sorts...
Most people coming out of movie school never get to produce movies. There's just a lot of wasted talent out there. If you have tens of billions of dollars, there's no excuse for producing shit content year after year.
The big question is how big is the fraction of people who are below average intelligence. Depending on that ratio, it could make sense to produce content for that part of the population ...
Additionally, highly intelligent people earn more money and don't have to buy content wholesale. They can afford to buy movies directly which means that each view of intelligent content is worth much more. Now, how can Netflix integrate that into their platform? There won't be any bargains left. Even young talented creatives will demand what they are worth.
There have to be different streaming services for different quality levels. Netflix has decided to serve some fraction of the bell curve and leaves other fractions to others.
Allow me to be cheeky and save you the suspense: it's half.
George Carlin figured this one out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh6qqsmxNs
Their reasoning was as simple as it can get. Their data showed what shows people liked in terms of genres and runtimes.
That might seem reasonable for short term gains until you realise how silly it is for longevity.
If you look at what people like in your current library of content which you've classified into 10 different categories, you get an incomplete picture and you're kind of looking in the rear view mirror. Steve Jobs understood this too.
And yeah, go to weekly releases.
By contrast, Netflix uses the viewership ratings from the first season to determine whether to renew for a second season.
I also agree with OP that encouraging binge watching is not good. Netflix pumped out more content than any cable TV package I've ever had in the past, but by allowing binge-watching people binge and then get bored and say Netflix has no content.
If they spread out these shows it would be healthier for the viewers and would create a perception of more content.
People don't say that Netflix has "no content" because they binge watch. People say that because Netflix does genuinely have dramatically less content than it did 8-10 years ago, because of the proliferation of competing streaming services.
If Netflix still had access to all the content it has hosted over the years, people wouldn't be making those complaints.
Maybe that sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. If you're browsing through random movies on IMDB and come across something interesting, the chance that Netflix will have it is vanishingly small.
This is because consumers have been conditioned since last century to assume this is how things should be. Netflix is trying to create a new [better] experience, and this is how they are going about it. Pilots of shows suck! Almost always the second episode the characters are more realistic, more developed. Sure, it hurts when the season gets pulled, but it was a much better experience during the run. Why say it's a problem? It's just "different" from what you personally expect.
> This is because consumers have been conditioned since last century to assume this is how things should be.
Or people aren't conditioned to care about what the idiotbox tells them at all. They are simply upset that something they like is being summarily made unavailable, like any other product.
I would bet that some people would pay for always getting the newest content, if only for being able to talk to their friends about the newest episode each week.
A three year series is fine but treat it like that in the third season before too many people's behaviors change and it starts to become difficult to get their attention to new series because they fear it ending suddenly without resolution.
with this as the case, they’ll likely be wrapped at the end of S03.
There’s not much to be done if they’re cancelled before S03.
I don't mean to sound like some "well akshuallyyy"ing Comic Book Guy figure, but you must realise it's not real life? If it's a Poirot-type mystery where the entire payoff lies in the resolution, then I totally understand, but for a regular TV show I can't see why you would enjoy the episodes any less simply because it might end without resolving all your questions. There's no real suspense - it's not real people, it's just a bunch of people performing in front of a camera. Being distressed about 'what happened to them?' seems, well, puzzling to me.
tell the story you want to tell, with a satisfying ending. book and run the show for all of it.
no open ended shows that will run until it lives.lo h enough to suck. no shows canceled before their story is complete
And seasons are so short that even the bad seasons weren't a lot of TV.
The first four seasons are among the best TV ever. The final two among the worst.
It’s not that having 10 seasons is bad. But many shows tell the story they wanted to tell in much less time. At which point you should just stop.
Some formats are interesting though like American Horror Story. It’s more like an anthology. Different story each season. Some actors might return with different roles.
Dr Who is also interesting since the mechanism for “reboots” is built in to the character.
Or go the Disney route and expand the individual character stories like they are doing with Marvel and Star Wars.
That said, for shows that have a continuous, overreaching storyline I'm highly suspect of the writers having no idea how the thing is gonna end. Sure, in some lucky cases it works out super well, but in other cases it gets us unsatisfying stuff that undermines the show like with Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Come up with the story arch and tell the story. Please don't keep stretching the thing out endlessly and end it when it's bad or the crew wants to move on. That's fine with shows that have disconnected episodes, but for modern shows or can ruin the whole thing and leaves me feel like I wasted a ton of time.
I think the full release of everything prevents it from building up cultural relevance but I'd like to see something like 2 or 3 episode every two or three weeks rather then 1 at a time.
I won't even play wordle, because it wants me to come back for my daily dose of engagement.
90's star trek (tng ds9 voy) all 7 seasons, MAS*H 12 seasons, Frasier 11 season, Scrubs 8 season (I skip season 9 and refuse to acknowledge its existance), Red Dwarf 8 season (+ more after the revival decades later), X-Files 11 seasons, How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons, Freinds 10 seasons, Stargate SG1 10 seasons, three seasons is to little to grow a fallowing and not enough for you to rewatch
Luckily the last season only has 22 episodes!
A lot of series jump the shark of they get dragged out for long. Even worse, if it's a slow decline, it kills rewatchability. Some manage, but it goes wrong more often than not. And especially if your concept does not lend itself to a lot of seasons (like Chernobyl, for example), you should stop while it's still good.
Great shows are often 6-12 episodes for 5+years.
Most streaming shows have far shorter seasons than classic TV sitcoms/dramas/soaps.
Maybe personal bias, but it seems to hold up pretty well in my viewing history. Seinfeld definitely felt stretched at 9. Star Trek TNG's seventh season definitely felt like about time to wrap it up. Simpsons went kind of wonky around season 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed good for a 7 season run.
Not some immutable law, but really good shows ending after 5 seasons seems a bit disappointing as well, like Babylon 5. Writers run out of ideas and the original concept seems explored pretty thoroughly after going through 7 seasons.
Three is way too short. Seven seems like the sweet spot. Maybe everyone just gets bored and they don't do stuff as well after seven seasons, but shows really start to change after season 7.
And from a more recent sample, The Expanse would not have been allowed to get to the end of the story arc.
All three have a few things in common. A strong cast of good-but-not-a-star actors.[ß] Writers who knew what they were doing. A story that they wanted to tell, and knew how long it would take. And above all: the integrity to end the series once the story was told. No stretching into infinity with useless rehashing or replaying of old hits. No resets. No desperate attempts to magically reinvent itself.
You pointed this out yourself: Shows that get dragged out inevitably suck.
ß: Idris Elba became a star later.
(EDIT: grammar)
The mistake for Netflix was the price increase - I've had a bunch of online video subscriptions kicking around, and when I got the notification that prices were going up, it served as a reminder that I really wasn't getting much value out of Netflix at the current price, so it made zero sense to put up with a price increase. This actually made me cancel Hulu while I was at it.
It definitely doesn't help that it's about 99% certain that if there's a mainstream movie you want to watch, Netflix won't have it.
No regrets, haven't felt like I was missing anything. After the pandemic the last thing I want to do is spend more time shut indoors staring at a screen.
One comment about the article:
> While Netflix has taken small steps to evolve its release model, particularly with unscripted shows, it refuses to experiment with weekly releases on its original scripted shows. One exec at rival streamer I talked with yesterday believes this is a huge mistake, if only because it makes it harder for Netflix to build those reliable franchises it so desperately needs more of.
The only thing dumber than this idea is adding commercials, which they're planning, so I assume they'll also be dumb enough to start listening to idiots telling them to do weekly releases.
> […]
> when I got the notification that prices were going up, it served as a reminder that I really wasn't getting much value out of Netflix at the current price
A perfectly reasonable reaction. Netflix is still generally my primary streaming service, but mainly because the others are either a terrible UX for my setup (Hulu), won’t ever get me as a customer for ethical reasons (Amazon), or have content/catalog models like Netflix, only smaller catalogs (basically everything else that isn’t a cable provider).
Netflix becoming a studio was great when it still offered licensed content I love. I could watch their originals and my favorites and things I’d put off watching. Now it feels like I have an HBO subscription I never asked for, where the only thing they offer is original content I don’t want to sift through to find out if it’s worthwhile.
I will immediately cancel any service that has advertisements. One of them (I think Amazon) did not immediately show the video I asked for, but a preview of another video they think I might be interested in. Even that got my delete finger twitching.
Not sure why you are arguing? People have stated that's the reason they have quit, and yet you are somehow suggesting that we are wrong? Or because another service does it?
Accept that some people are tired and bored of having unrealistic plots and characters that are only there to "tick boxes".
But sure, recasting the queen of England as a black woman is obviously fine.
Let's do a series on MLK and get a balding white guy to play him, or perhaps an Asian person?
As for White Lotus: you might not enjoy it, but are you representative? Me and my wife enjoyed it very much. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 88% and IMDB at 7.6. I'm not sure if "terrible" is an appropriate word for that score.
I'm left wing and I believe everyone deserves equal rights and equal respect, but I find utterly fatuous the idea that 'representation in television shows' is an important political concern. I believe in fighting global starvation, climate change, social safety nets under increasing automation, etc - not how many transgender lesbians are in TV shows.
I do not give a fuck about that, I do not give a fuck if transgenders and/or lesbians give a fuck about that, it is not important, and I'm disturbed at the increasing frivolity, corporate-ness, and lack of depth in political life when people are seriously suggesting that this is a worthy expenditure of our political willpower and attention (which is extremely finite and scarce, regardless of what people on Twitter insist).
[1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2022/05/15/netf...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-praises-netflix-te...
The only reason Chapelle is on Netflix is because one of the CEOs is a huge fan. There was a lot of internal pushback.
> The only reason Chapelle is on Netflix is because one of the CEOs is a huge fan. There was a lot of internal pushback.
In other words, CEO endorses and demands a "comedian" who punches down on __other minorities__, and somehow Netflix is "woke".
I reject the concept of 'punching down' in comedy. Either a joke is funny or it isn't. Nothing else matters.
You are free to reject everything, and anything, does not mean reality will bend to your will.
That is reality, not ideology. That is precisely the point I am making, actions have consequences.
Please point out __which__ part of my comment is ideologically fueled, because I see just facts.
Maybe you will grow up some day, probably not.
Netflix finally implemented rating selection filters for profiles, but a few years too late for us. Try taking those shows away after they've already been watching them.
They have no real business justification to expand to cheaper models until they have enough spare capacity.
Building factories and the required battery supply chains isn't fast or easy. Model 2 and 1 will come eventually.
Everything is a genius growth model until its not.
Growth is when you get more money from customers.
This is basically the VC formula applied to entertainment, and just like how sometimes you get a Dropbox, sometimes you get a Stranger Things. And sometimes you don't.
Of course the key in both is having people with a developed enough market savvy and eye for talent to spot the future Dropboxes and Stranger Things. In VC, it requires a deep understanding of market forces, founders, teams, and tech, and in entertainment, it requires an understanding of both popular tastes and critical tastes as well as the intricacies of production.
Smart people can make bad bets and anyone can get lucky, but the part that's so much harder than it looks is to improve that batting average. Everyone has an opinion on what Netflix should do – I certainly have my own thoughts on things that ought to work (sign Ian Hubert to make a Dynamo Dream series! Adapt Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination with The Rock as Gully Foyle!), but ultimately, it's just my guesses about the cultural marketplace. What Netflix needs is people with greenlight power who have a better feel for that marketplace than anyone else.
All the shows I’ve gotten into on netflix get cancelled once the cast demands to much money around season 4. This strategy makes sense if you can turn around a new hit next year to replace it, but having to deliver an exponentially growing set of hits is really hard. At this point just getting cast and crew who want to work with you is a challenge with 5 other major content streamers. If given the choice, I’m sure hot talent would prefer a studio that won’t fire them once it’s a smash hit.
My intuition is that it's more like statistics led Netflix to produce low quality content that performed on their target metrics. This strategy led Netflix to a local optimum that is far from a global optimum. Plus, given market conditions, that local optimum is starting to be, objectively, pretty bad.
One of my favorite shows by far was Disjointed. It was a very silly Stoner take on Roxanne. Cancelled after 2 seasons.
I get the feeling Netflix doesn't want niche shows, everything needs to be Squid Game.
I imagine experimenting with other rev models might work. You can already buy Stranger Things on DVD.
Let me buy the shows I want a la carta.
I've found Disney Plus / Hulu to be a better deal. Surprisingly stuff like Marvel What IF tends to be much more enjoyable compared to whatever animation Netflix is putting out.
Hulu has a better back catalog,
HBO Max has a better bang for buck when it comes to investing my time. The shows have decent writing.
Half the Netflix shows feel like you took a 20 year old English major, paid them in Blue Moon and asked them to write a script.
The best thing ends up being the show premise, once I have to sit down and watch it I'm not having a good time
And I for one am glad when a show is rated TV-MA because it means that they can be more authentic and unfettered in terms of the vision for the show instead of watering it down to appeal to a broader demographic. "Television is for families" is purely your subjective anecdotal experience. There is a reason the expression is "Netflix and chill", not "Disney and chill".
Conversely, if you're not interested in yet another marvel show or movie, Star Wars or old animated movies, Disney+ is a desert.
This part of the article is telling:
>It’s why five or so years ago, anybody with a hint of success in TV (or movies) started getting a call from their rep saying, basically, “Netflix would like to write you a big check.”
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-...
My guess, and I have nothing to back it up other than external empirical observation, is that they didn't like what the big data revealed. The output didn't fit The Message, or The Ideology. So they ignored it. They decided to use the good ol' twitter mobs to Gaughan the success of a show/concept instead.
If you want to include financial data maybe consider that Walmart and Target both had lower profits, lower revenue resuting their stock price plummeted the most in decades?
What "bad habits" do they have? Target and Walmart are bellwether for consumer spending. If consumers are buying less essential items, maybe a stresming service is going to get cut too? Maybe....just maybe....people can't spend as much money anymore?
For people who want to be able to tax unrealized gains like stock, what is the plan for these kinds of events? Would stockholders receive a credit from the IRS when the valuation dips?
Imagine you're the founder of NFLX and you held $1 billion worth of stock at the peak last year ($690 / share)
The IRS says you owe $300 million (30% of your unrealized gains)
Fast forward to spring 2022. The stock has crashed to $186, your shares are worth only $270 million but you owe a $300 million tax bill.
Not to mention the impossible situation this creates for corporate governance and the general functioning of a business when founders / board members are constantly forced to divest and therefore no one can know who will even control the company from quarter to quarter.
Perhaps you're not familiar with some of the proposals to tax unrealized gains or what this means. This means there have been serious proposals from so-called serious people to tax individuals when a stock they're holding goes up, even if they don't sell that. So somebody is making a point that nobody has made a serious proposal to give a similar credit for unrealized losses. It's just the government wanting to tax and take and take.
> Also, the only people who would be subject to those taxes are already extraordinarily wealthy, so who cares?
You've got it backwards.
The already wealthy aren't the ones bothered by paying a bit more taxes on unrealized gains too much. If Warren Buffet had to pay an extra few million because a stock he held went up, he probably wouldn't really notice. It wouldn't even be a buzzkill on his day.
In the event of a tax on unrealized gains, it's the middle class dude who made a great investment on the next Apple who is screwed over from holding for a few years because he has to sell the second the price went up just a bit to pay that tax.
Second, the proposal isn’t to tax on price changes, its taxing the value of the asset at a given point in time. If the value goes down, the tax collected goes down. This is also how property taxes work - it’s a percentage of the assessed value. If the assessed value drops, you pay less in taxes.
Also, there no reason a middle class investor would have to sell all their stock to pay taxes. If the value of your portfolio doubled, you’d only have to sell between 7.5% and 10% of your holdings to cover the taxes (at the current capital gains tax rates).
tax-loss harvesting
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/taxgainlossharvesting.a...
>Would stockholders receive a credit from the IRS when the valuation dips?
If you realize the loss (ie. sell at a loss), under certain circumstances you can get a credit.
People pay property taxes every year on assets that change in value without selling (ie unrealized gains). Nobody seems perplexed by that. But can't seem to figure out how it works for stocks.
Regardless of if you agree or disagree with doing it (which I'm not pushing for or against here), it's not a complex concept.
Hard for me to make sense of taxing unrealized gains. Not even France could make a wealth tax work, and they tax everything.
Land value tax is the proper way to go, questions of how to value land aside.
The issue with a wealth tax is it’s inflationary - most taxes are deflationary but a wealth tax forces you to sell assets to get their cash from them. It does encourage rich people to mark up their assets less, which might reduce apparent income inequality aka make poor people less jealous of them…
There’s no way to borrow against a property to pay a 2% tax for mor than fifty years, for example. You need an outside source of funds, or appreciation.
Right. That’s the idea. Create value or sell the property to someone who will.
If it encourages people to undervalue, or lower the value of something, I don't see how that's inflationary. Could you explain how it would be inflationary?
Lower asset values aren’t deflation because “asset inflation” isn’t inflation. You can’t eat assets and it doesn’t matter if their prices go up because you can buy fractions of them. Asset inflation (the theory that 2010 QE was causing inflation “in the stock market” even though we didn’t see it in goods) is a crank theory from online people who think central banks print money.
Believe me, as a European living in an American city currently “booming”, not only am I perplexed by it but also wonder how in the hell Americans have put up with it for so long.
The negative effects are quite plain to see as people get pushed out of their homes by the wealthy moving in from other states, and yet people seem to want to apply the same fundamentally flawed logic to other asset classes too.
(a) wealth tax. Every year each household with over $XX million in net worth pays y% of the amount above the threshold in taxes. No refund if your net worth goes down in subsequent years.
(b) treat unrealized capital gains as income. Each year you pay income taxes on the increase in the value of your stock portfolio, even if you don’t sell. Any losses can be written off subsequent years’ taxes.
Year 1, I own 10,000 shares at $0.1 each. I'm taxed 25% of $1000, or $250. Year 2, my super smart investment pays off and I own 10,000 shares at $100 each. I'm taxed 25% of an "income" of $999,000, or $249,750. Only, I don't have enough cash to cover the bill, so I sell about a quarter of my stock, leaving me with 7,500 shares. Year 3, the stock goes bust down to $0.2 per share. I write off a loss of $997,500? Does this mean I basically never pay taxes again?
So the end result is I paid a total tax bill of $250,000 on essentially nothing?
Furthermore, what if I decided not to sell my shares when they were worth $100 each and wanted to defer the tax bill. But now the price has crashed to $0.2, and I still owe a massive bill. Is that offset by my tax write-off?
Also worth pointing out that under the current taxes rules the exact same thing would happen if you’d sold all your shares after year two and then invested all the profits into an ill-fated second company.
However, the proposal is mostly to stop a specific tax dodge: stocks that are given as gifts/inheritance exempt both the giver and receiver from paying any capital gains taxes on profits from prior to the transfer. Combine this with tricks like taking out margin loans to fund expenses instead of selling stock, and someone can become a billionaire yet be paying next to no taxes
Don't forget you're also taxed on that sale, so you'll have to sell more than that.
They also have competition on the "content" front in that amazon prime video is now creating its own terrible "lets throw money at this until it works" service to compete with them, and many people already have it with prime so don't feel the need to pay netflix's increasingly expensive service.
I don't know about you but netflix costs more than amazon prime for me, so I could either get netflix or I could get all the amazon prime benefits. It's a losing proposition for netflix.
So is that why the increasing competition from the likes of Apple, Disney+ and HBO, recent price increases and password sharing loopholes have plagued its growth?
All of that explains why they are (still) losing subscribers. Pulling out of Russia, just accelerated it and that was self-inflicting.
This is also a false narrative. Netflix subscribers seldomly churn. Long lived accounts typically don't cancel, since new content comes out on a weekly basis. You can't cancel your cable subscription and just buy Disney+; you usually keep Netflix around too. Netflix is only tangentially competing with other streamers; they are directly competing with cable.
The subscriber count is affected by two things: new subscribers coming on board, and existing subscribers leaving. Since subscribers usually don't leave, the miss was on the new subscribers coming in. It absolutely was due to high growth countries (like Russia) not growing.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
Sci-fi nerds are somewhat used to this; it was a problem even when cable tv was the dominant model. Netflix has somehow managed to bring this sour note to every genre.
Netflix was beloved because it was convenient, meaning everything you wanted was in one place. Now the things you want are spread out across many services.
By comparison a good tracker that has everything you want is more convenient vs searching a half dozen services.
This is not the latest and greatest, but much of the content is far more interesting.
The children's content on them is extremely good. If programming for kids is keeping you on Netflix, some of these (Kanopy, Hoopla) could easily eliminate your need for a paid subscription.
Pesky things. I bet Gutenberg felt the same.
Yeah fuck you. I am a Netflix subscriber with little to no love for the company. The algorithm fails for me and I detest the user interface. If Netflix disappeared tomorrow my life would be barely affected. But getting 200 million subscribers to anything, much less a paid service, is a massive achievement. If that person knows so much, why are they anonymous? If they’re that brilliant, they could go out and start a 200 million subscriber business themselves. Because that’s the easy part. Any chimpanzee could do it. The tricky part is getting to 300 million or 500 million.
Decade+ subscriber: I'm never watching those shows. If they have to advertise or talk up their programming, it's not going to be worth the time to see how terrible it is. On the other hand, I'll have 3 people mention a new season of Ozark before I've noticed it's been released.... Actually, that was more true of the second season than the recent ones.
So, if fixing the content is the answer, then maybe the people who created the problem aren't the right ones to fix it. Their taste is out of sync with that of their subscribers.
While Netflix throws tens of millions of dollars on brainless scripts and big stars, HBO diligently shepherds the material it likes to completion, with talent that is great but that will not break the bank. HBO does not use stars - it makes stars.
For all the talk of Netflix not being a family but a team, it sure does sound like their content division management is pretty "tight", regardless of results. Did they think they were going to coast on the House of Cards forever?
The ending could just be a limited episode conclusion similar how to they ended sense8.
It would be great to view, for example, all of the Best Picture winners, or work my way through all of the film noir.
Give the customer what they want.
Parents: don’t let your kids anywhere near TikTok.
There are competitors, that’s a given. People subscribe to multiple services because one does not have all the content. That’s a given.
Therefore Netflix is competing for the time that viewers actually spend watching it, vs watching other services they pay for. If they end up watching less Netflix than, say, Disney+, guess which one they’ll cut if there’s a cost of living crisis?
In this market, I believe the best strategy is a small amount of high quality content. Disney+ is probably the best balance of this, and Apple TV+ is probably not a bad bet either, considering it’s also the cheapest service.
Even companies that were wonderful to work for (e.g. Hewlett-Packard when Bill & Dave were alive) have shriveled to irrelevance and horror. It happens.
It's what's convinced me that leadership is all their is to prevent this - the 5% of organizations that thrive longer all have charismatic and ethical leadership that is focused on the mission being done "correctly". Every time.
Netflix pivoted to making their own shows under the premise that they have all the data. This is outside of their tech expertise and creates average content.
I believe netflix should create video editing tools (commoditize your complement) and make it easy for almost professional film makers to upload content. The area between youtube and professional films could discover lots of talent and keep those rights cost cheap.
The nail in the coffin was the price hike - in Canada it went to $20.99 for 4k streaming, for something I was rage watching maybe once a week. It's just not worth the money to spend so long hunting for content, only to be disappointed.
Even when I'm crunching at work and can only watch Netflix a few hours a week, I end up running out of interesting content.
What follows is several weeks where I find out some movie or show that was released last year is not available on Netflix yet, or some old stuff is not available.
Eventually Netflix release some decent content, which temporarily fixes their APIs responses. Rinse and repeat.
- to add a setting to not show me stuff I've already watched (so that others who don't mind that, can continue to see their seen stuff).
- add a "don't show me again" toggle (I know I can dislike but maybe I'm just tired of seeing that one particular video and am fine with other such content)
But then again, back in the day of network tv shows when they did ~26 episodes per season, there were entire episodes that felt like fillers.
Netflix may solve this problem by introducing adverts on their cheaper plans.
* +500,000 outside of Russia
* -700,000 due to cutting off Russia
* = -200,000 so far that's already happened
* +2,500,000 previously projected future
* -2,000,000 now projected for the future
The last two bullets are what the article is about.
First time I thought seriously about leaving for good.
I've also been a long time Netflix user from their DVD days to the present and while I did not feel like streaming would be the hit they did (I was totally wrong on that count!) I note that the streaming model had an interesting impact on control.
Specifically with the DVD model, Netflix could go out and buy some number of copies of a movie as soon as it hit the shelves and now you, as a subscriber, could watch it without forking over the $20 - $30. Since they had lots and lots of DVDs you could always find something you would probably like. But in the streaming model this changes. Now the people who "own" the content just rent it to Netflix and once that rental term expires it goes "poof" and vanishes.
Two things then emerged, the content holders created their own streaming service and stopped renting out their content, and Netflix's catalog of things to watch shrank so a customer who watched something before and liked it, and then went to watch it again couldn't find it.
That customer experience, going to a service for a product that was available before but isn't now, and is only available for additional money elsewhere, is a strong negative influence on the "let's find something to watch on Netflix habit."
Once the state of mind changes to (it probably won't be on Netflix any more) then the only reason you watch Netflix is because they advertised something new and you're going to watch it this month before it vanishes. And that can lead to months where you don't watch Netflix at all, and of course that often results in re-evaluating what you are spending per month on a service you aren't using every month.
The market response has been pretty predictable, groups who each sign up for one streaming service and share their passwords with other members of the group so they get access to the aggregated catalogs of a number of services with the monthly cost of one service. Service providers have hinted that they are going to "clamp down" on that sort of thing, but one thing that Netflix proved quite clearly was that "Piracy" was a response to cost and cost alone. Content providers really only have two choices[1], share the content at a price people are willing to pay, or collect nothing as your content is shared for free.
There is some hysteresis here, people put up with a lot of crap until they flip over to "alternative access methods" and then it takes a much lower price than you could have gotten before to get them to switch back to the paid access method.
[1] There is a third choice, lock up the content forever, but that is like the null choice for most content providers.
You're saying that as if that was a bad thing.