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Comment by bumper_crop | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> > 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.

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.

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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