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There's a legend of when Sony bought Columbia Pictures which is probably not true but the story is, after Sony bought Columbia Pictures, some Japanese executives flew over to meet with the top management at Columbia. The Columbia management explained to the Japanese execs that only 1 in 20 movies makes a profit. The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then turned back to the Columbia management and said "Please only make the profitable movies" (lol)

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.

> 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

Pretty much. xD

why are you xD'ing here?

It was supposed to be a juvenile snark at the comment I replied to, which also used xD for no good reason.

It deserved the downvotes :-)

I get your point, but it doesn't necessarily implicate that you should try to replicate precious hits? Why pretend you've found the formula when it's clear you have no idea?

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“?

Squid Game's success is partially due to international mainstream audiences not being familiar with Korean overly dramatic narrative style. Once one has seen and gotten used to their melodrama style, they are in a rut just like US laugh track sitcoms.

This seems like a mirror to the other classic apocryphal story where the IBM ask a new Japanese manufacturer to only have a 3/1000 defect rate and the Japanese seem alarmed by this request.

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 half of advertising is effective trope hasn’t been true on the internet for over a decade. Advertisers on the internet know exactly how effective their advertising is.

> on the internet

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?

Most of the internet ads I see are for stuff not available in my country, and if they even bother to translate, it's pretty random what language they choose. Just my IP adress or browser heathers should tell em both. That's assuming the product category is something I care for.

If they know exactly how effective their advertising is, they have too many dollars they want to get rid of.

Ad networks don’t get paid for targeted ads unless you do something. In the case of Google, you click on them and in the case of Amazon affiliates, you buy something. They aren’t paying for ads based on how many people see the ad.

The more entertaing version of this story goes:

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".

Unprofitable movies is just accounting. Something to do with Hollywood union compensation or something.

There are obvious flops based on how much it cost to make and how much it made in the box office.

Yeah, and there's also a Hollywood Accounting entry in the wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

:shrugs:

They were probably fooled by metrics. People were watching the crap, so it looked like crap was good enough (until it wasn’t).

Very true. They find something that's kind of amusing, then milk it until it bleeds (gross analogy, sorry...).

"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 kills shows too soon.

People complain that Netflix drags shows on past their prime.

People complain.

If only there was a number between 2 and 7!

People want good stories told to a satisfying conclusion. Both cancellation and dragging on with no end in mind fail at this simple unsurprising wish.

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.

The problem is not so much whether shows are killed to early or too late, but when you blindly follow metrics to determine either way.

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.

One issue is that they don't keep writers and show runners around. Each season gets new writers so any magic there was in season one of lost in season two. The tone is the same but you lose something when you bring on me people. The do this because of the lag between seasons and the fact that they don't hire on writers, but rather contract them on a per season basis.

Most of what I watched on Netflix was this cookie cutter rubbish, but what they don't know is I was usually just putting that on in the background or when falling asleep.

Even though that accounts for 90% of what I watch, I cancelled Netflix because the 10% I actually care about isn't there now.

Yes! It takes so much more to gain the kind of insight that is valuable for film/art. And it is very difficult to scale. I thought they were onto something when they were experimenting with the gamified Black Mirror stuff because A) it implied something totally new and proprietary in the artform and B) it could probably lead to more information and more feedback all around.

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.

Netflix viewers used to be really good at rating movies and then getting recommendations based on those ratings. The Netflix ratings actually meant something once upon a time.

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.

Participation rate is significantly higher with the new ratings system. The text of the reviews are missed by me and likely you, of course, but most didn’t read them.

Metrics can easily fool you on Netflix, because many will watch an entire bad season of a show. If you had to watch an episode a week, and you don’t care for the show, missing an episode one week will easily cause you to just drop the show and viewer number quickly drop off.

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.

And it would result in people not sticking around till the end of the season -> less views.

I think they realized a few years back that HBO, Disney and the other major IP holders will be pulling out entirely and setting up their own streaming services, not because Netflix didn't give them a big enough cut of the pie, but simply because they saw how well Netflix did and realized that tech was no longer an issue they'd work hard to resolve in 2020+. Once Netflix saw that on the horizon, they went into panic mode and bought anything half decent to have something to put on their library. In particular, it seems like the main thing driving one special niche Netflix created - the movie packed with multiple A and B list stars that has great production but a mediocre story at best - it gets views and attention, even though it's boring as hell...

These last few years have been fantastic for show developers, screen writers, and anyone in series development, as all the new streaming services are literally trying to buy the talent to make their services successful.

The land grab cycle is always the best time if you’re the thing trying to be acquired.

In the early days of Uber it was a dream. Free and massively discounted rides all the time.

> bought anything half decent

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.

Arguably, MLB Advanced Media killed Netflix by commodifying streaming tech.

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.

Yeah, I agree. I mostly gave up on netflix because their SFF catalog has been underwhelming for so long.

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.

Science fiction and fantasy

Nobody knows how to reliably create "quality"--the definition of which will vary by person. Take a dozen of the top quality series on Netflix or streaming services generally and I'll probably be meh on at least half of them.

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.

HBO seems to do it.

They do, but it's very expensive and very slow. That kind of development culture requires discipline and quality control.

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.

HBO is hit and miss too--though I agree that the "best" of their catalog is better than the best of any other streaming service (to say nothing of broadcast TV).

> Nobody knows how to reliably create "quality"--the definition of which will vary by person.

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.

Pixar? Sure their track record isn't 100%, but I'd say they know how to create quality, even if they don't always fully succeed at it.

> And yet for some reason for years they have been aiming for quantity and not quality.

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.

I agree that the content is not very interesting (to me at least), they still seem to produce a ton of it though. But companies like Disney, Paramount etc. building their own platforms and withdrawing their content from other streaming services makes it hard for Netflix to compete. Especially for families Disney+ is much more attractive due to their large catalog of AAA titles. Netflix just can't compete with that it seems, and all their self-produced movies were at most B+ in my opinion, not a single blockbuster there. I think right now Disney+ is well positioned to take the market lead, they just need to acquire a few more studios (and maybe Netflix itself) and they will have a moat that's impossible to penetrate. Personally I would hope that the market will consolidate, it's just annoying to have content I'm interested in spread out over 5-6 platforms, all requiring separate subscriptions.

Netflix bores me to tears (I’m into stuff like Criterion and Kino) but I begrudgingly have to admit that they offer a ton of kids shows. Disney+ is better quality but they too don’t have a lot to offer, or didn’t three months ago, in terms of episodic kids entertainment.

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.

Netflix is 'all you can eat', and all you can eat is about quantity ('good enough'). Also, it is a given you are not going to like/want everything. The quantity is in such abundance that they try to please everyone somewhat. I suppose you could call it spreading.

No doubt about it. The question is for how long will 'all you can eat' be sustainable in the longer term. Only so long until everyone will have had their crappy experience, loses trust and/or desire to continue paying, brand becomes tarnished etc.

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.

Imo the reason for this is because there isn’t one perfect show for everyone. If they have to cater to the world, then they have to cater to everyone’s tastes.

Content is king. But so is IP. Disney competes based on its IP. Disney has multiple studios that can create series that people will automatically see based on their IP - Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and Disney.