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Comment by harha | Hacker News Reader

Netflix really had a value proposition a few years ago before all the other players came in. A good selection of rotating movies and shows, sharing accounts with a good model (# of simultaneously running screens). This was way better than cable TV and more convenient than torrent.

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

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>The consumers just aren’t complete idiots.

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.

While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it, but some how screwed it all up. There’s at best 1 or 2 good show and no good movie Netflix has made in years. And anything half decent they cancel mercilessly without giving it a chance. This is not just in the US. The comparison of original content quality between Netflix and other services in India for example is even more laughable.

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.

> they had billions of dollars to create original content

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.

> > they had billions of dollars to create original content

> 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.

> I guess there are different people watching 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 disagree - their issue was scaling it.

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'm sort of surprised there is less effort in poaching series with an existing fan base. This would seemingly be an antidote to the complaint of too-"algorithm says it will work" programming, because it bypasses that entire flow with an established "we see the audience, they exist in fandom forums and such."

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.

>poaching series with an existing fan base

That only really works if you respect the original source material, which seems to be a problem for the "creatives".

> Orange is the new black, daredevil, house of cards were all big hits.

The original version of House of Cards was a four episode mini-series. There was a lesson there that Netflix chose to ignore.

Not disagreeing with the fundamental point, but the original HoC was the first in a trilogy. The BBC made 12 episodes across the three adaptations.

> 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.

Well but House of Cards had such a ridiculous tension arc, that you _really_ couldn't extend it past 3 seasons. And if you try it just gets absurd and nobody can stay emerged anymore. Add to that, that you suddenly need to deal with "you are not allowed to use Spacey anymore" and the attempt to push "women for every job" you end up with a predictable disaster. But even if either wouldn't have happened: They didn't have the writers to keep writing the same quality

I didn't watch the shows you mentioned.

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.)

I don't think you remake excellent movies like "Dog Day Afternoon", you remake the bad ones, usually B-movies, that showed potential. Maybe revisit "A Boy and His Dog", for example.

> Netflix is at it's core, a tech company that solves technical issues with streaming.

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.

Netflix was a dvd mailing company with a website and they pivoted to streaming. Amazon did too. Streaming tech is pretty much tablestakes for any company with a billion to spare. You can’t keep insisting that’s all Netflix should focus on.

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.

Totally agree. If streaming video could get the same terms as streaming audio/radio (standardized mandatory licensing fees) and services could compete on encoding (cost efficiency on their end) and UI/UX (which Netflix is... not great) that would be an entirely different ballgame.

> Netflix should've used their dominant position to lobby for new rules to the game - prevent exclusivity of 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.

No chance that would've worked. Netflix saw themselves as a content creation company because they realized that having great content is the only way to keep growing.

Netflix failed precisely because it's a tech company at its core. It can't outlobby the copyright industry, because it lacks the experience, the goodwill, and the political connections. And the celebrities supporting its goals. If Netflix wants to be successful in the entertainment industry, it must act like an entertainment company and give more power to the producers and the creatives.

Netflix could have bought a few of the legacy companies. Amazon bought MGM, Netflix could have bought cbs/paramount, or ABC, for the cost of a series of the crown.

> and no good movie Netflix has made in years

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.

It was a good movie, but not a great movie. I would be surprised if you would rate that movie in top 20 for the last decade.

You are implying netflix needs to offer a ‘ movie in top 20 for the last decade’ every week or so. You will indeed get very disappointed by all streaming services.

You will also be disappointed by basic math given that a decade has 520 weeks.

I mean I don’t know about screwed it up. You can’t expect any artist to just consistently produce pure hits. The creativity seems to come and go, the zeitgeist and the cultural context matter so much. Nobody (except, I would argue, Marvel) is able to be really consistent with their art. They were always doomed to fail producing their own content.

HBO seems to be doing fine producing their own content so I don't see it as a foregone conclusion that Netflix was doomed to fail. They didn't have the back-catalog but they had the head start in online distribution and could have bought a studio or two as they have for video games in order to seed their back-catalog.

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 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.

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.

> The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once

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.

HBO releases multiple good seasons every year. Many years they have a good show on every quarter.

> 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars?

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.

Different things. Netflix paid Sandler $250 million in 2014 for six Sandler originals under their studio, and renewed the deal in 2017 and 2020.

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.

uncut gems is not a netflix movie. It's A24.

That's not stupid consumers that's people not rightly giving a f what nonsense licensing setups requested by ip owners and enforced by a government monopoly on force. The consumer just wanted to watch the media, which is fair because they probably just spent 8 hours at some nonsense unnecessary job and would like to switch off... again.

No vote no power.

You can only blame IP laws so much. Someone has to fund the production of content.

If Netflix could just take what they wanted, nobody would make anything but disposable reality TV.

Stupid is probably the wrong word here; "clueless"? I personally think consumers are on the verge of reinventing TV channels, with each streaming service acting like a channel. Consumers, who liked that Netflix had so much content in one place, are slowly pushing time to go backward.

I still don't see how it's the consumers' fault. Say there was one single person out there who wasn't an idiot or clueless, and just wanted to watch some TV after work. What should this person have done?

Consumers want high quality, entertaining content, at low cost, with little commitment, at any time. Prior to Netflix, there wasn't such an intersecting product. Now, Netflix has low quality content, but still has all the other stuff. Consumers see this, forget what life was like back in the early 2000s, and switch/sign up for several other services. It's where consumers spend their money that will result in this regression.

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.

The issue is Netflix as it was is not sustainable. It's like plenty of VC startups, build the market at a cost, and then go down in quality so you can make a profit. Or sell the company. But they can't do that because it's already public. In fact that means earning reports and they've just recently turned cash flow positive.

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.

For Netflix it is worse than selling at cost. They were sourcing most of their content from the companies they were putting out of business. It was unsustainable at any cost.

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.

>That costs money to make,

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.

I generally agree with you, though I would say now we are finding out if it's sustainable or not. Remember that for the past 2 years, TV Studios have been on lock down and the only stuff Netflix was really releasing was stuff that was nearly done before covid. Netflix has tons of cash that _they couldn't spend_, but now they can.

The difference is switching services is easy. Month over month billing means I simply watch what I want on one, unsubscribe, and then go to the next one.

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.

Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix.

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.

Netflix is the one that got greedy and over estimated their position.

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.

>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

This is why my group of friends stopped playing Catan after a while..

If only there was a way to what whatever soap 2 day you wanted.

I know a number of people who have just gone back to torrenting everything they care about (such as For All Mankind or Foundation) and are very unlikely to ever subscribe to a 2nd, 3rd, 4th streaming service.

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.

https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd

I'm seeing that a lot too. Netflix killed piracy with price and more importantly convenience. But the extreme fragmentation of the streaming market is driving people back to the torrents. They don't want to sign up somewhere for every new show that they hear about.

The industry is killing itself this way. Netflix is just the first to take the hit because they have the largest market saturation.

Soon there will be some service that bundles up all the streaming services into one service. They might even call it cable :p

Actually sort of have that in Denmark, in Yousee - can't really see anything about it https://tv.yousee.dk/ without being logged in but they have an online cable service which also allows you to take content from HBO, ViaPlay etc. as well as current content from free tv and cable you are signed up for.

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?

They call these services "private trackers" and "VPNs". They're inexpensive and probably have a better UX than whatever other five streaming sites you'd otherwise have to use put together.

Don't even have to do that. There are tons of "free" streaming sites out there that have a decent interface and a massive library that blows every single paid service out of the water.

Fmovies.to is an excellent example. Any others you know of?

> They might even call it cable

Don’t go back that far. Newsnet is far superior.

I'm totally fine with spending $100+ per month on streaming. My issue is consistency.

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.

Interesting to call out Netflix for high price and then the examples for torrenting are Apple shows which is much cheaper.

My assumption with appletv is that you need half their ecosystem to even have the honour of giving them money to watch content.

Appletv+ is available on android, web, and quite a few smart tvs so you can subscribe without having any other connection with their ecosystem.

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.

This is basically me. I have the 15 dollar tier of Netflix and then my friends and i share a Plex hosted at a buddy's house where we get whatever content we want.

I could be in the minority, but I'm perfectly content with just having Netflix. There's a long backlog of shows that I haven't had a chance to watch, and they keep adding new ones.

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?

> 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)

Apple TV+ is $5/month. People used to pay $100+/month for cable and satellite TV. If people do not want to pay, then it must not be about the money. They even have the choice of easily just paying for one streaming service per month, and not spending more than $15 per month.

Like you said, all my friends and family can afford it, but there is a psychological barrier to adding yet another subscription service when they already have multiple. You could switch around, but that is also a hassle.

It is far less of a hassle than it was with cable/satellite companies.

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.

I agree with you 100 percent that it’s not too hard. But even smallest bumps tend to discourage people. I’ve gotten people to switch/ subscribe for a month couple of times but I had to make a very strong recommendation of a series.

I plan on being feeble if I live long enough to become 80 years old. I plan on watching the streaming backlog then.

Right now I have projects, road-trips, other things to do....

Any reason you don’t do, say 3 to 4 months of each service so you cycle through 3 or 4 services in a year to see everything that interests you

This is the approach to take now IMHO.

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.

Just put Netflix on hold for few months and pick a another service for that time. This is what I do and works great.

I keep hearing this $100+ argument all the time, but do you really need all the services simultaneously? As you point out, there isn't that much to watch. So just unsubscribe for a few months, let the new content build up and safe money in the meantime.

Well no, but I also don’t want to constantly be switching just to watch one or two shows. The original benefit of Netflix was that you could have a service with a decent selection, no hassle.

If I click unsubscribe, that’s more or less final.

That wouldn’t work for me at all. I’ve been rotating around all the services, one at a time, since sometime last year. I quit Netflix for the first time since ~2007, last September. Nothing watchable that I hadn’t seen. I resubscribed for the last season of Ozark. When that was over, I looked around for what good stuff they’d added in the last 7 months and found squat. Promptly canceled again.

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.

While that makes a lot of sense, that's a difficult sell when you have multiple people in a household.

Yeah, this is not rocket science. Subscribe to one service at a time. Switch to another service when you want to watch something different. It's not like the old days where switching from cable to satellite TV was a huge hassle.

I don't think you're wrong, but to over-simplify what you're saying: "Netflix took my $100/mo cable bill and $40/mo Blockbuster habit and turned it into a $10/mo fee. Now I'm not getting all that entertainment for the now $15.50/mo fee."

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."

I think all your points are spot on. One thing to add is that we are in the golden age of content (it takes some volume to discover on good shows), and it is probably coming to end as cheap money goes away. At no point in history has so much money been spent on content creation.

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.

Disney also has the benefit of being able to makes billions in movie theater that pays for content before if ever gets to streaming. On the other hand, how many people watched Loki and WandaVision to have context for Dr. Strange? It’s the famous “flywheel” that Disney has been talking about since the 60s.

Very good points.

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.

I think the issue of low-quality filler being the issue is debatable. House of Cards or Orange is the New Black hasn't stopped the platform from sinking to where it is now. But as long as people are watching something, they're subscribed to the platform. The real problem is a lack of shows with nine seasons and plenty of shows that got canceled two seasons in. Viewers will take a chance on a new show, binge watch the two seasons, then end up blankly staring at the Now Playing screen and this hollow feeling of Netflixlessness - that listless feeling you get when your life was previously consumed by a show that you've now caught up to, so you have nothing to watch.

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.

> To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours"

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.

> if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently

Is that a new series?

Netflix is doing what they can to survive in the face of the mob.

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.

Given Netflix comp levels, "trying to survive" might be overplaying it. The reason for the schadenfreude mentioned in the article is the massive cost inflation Netflix spending levels created.

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.

I ditched my Netflix suscription and have found a much better replacement combo:

- 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.

I never understood why Netflix is assumed to be more convenient. There are illegal streaming websites with better UI and user experience than Netflix.

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