The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.
Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.
So many films, so cheaply to be had. Clint Eastwood did what, 500 films? Surely they can fill up a good catalog.
All this spending on Netflix's own studio is ludicrous cheap-money investment banking startup lunacy.
Just give me a big catalog of films, and give me all the stupid tv shows too. MASH, The Office, whatever. Pay HBO for sopranos and move on.
Or, just be a carrier. That's what Netflix is good at. Delivering reliable and easy to access, good quality streaming. Don't worry about the rest. I love my Roku because I can search and it'll tell me what service has the film or show I want to see. There's a good number of Cary Grant films I get for free consistently.
All that to say, Netflix seems to spend money on stupid stuff.
Edit: You know who else is doing this? Cable companies! You can sign up for HBO and get that content right in your Xfinity app, or search/browse on your set-top box and stream "on demand".
However, their English language catalogue gets worse by the day.
It's not bad if you want full subtitles, if they're available in the language you want. The lack of forced subs however is quite annoying.
Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
Those are all different genres, made in different countries. Algorithms tend to want to match us to more of the same. But just because I like South Park does not mean I want to see a bunch of manatee jokes on Family Guy, right?
This is due to a row over rights as well as Charlie Brooker's working on other things and hesitancy to create a new series in the first place. But a new series did get announced last month, so...
I much prefer the "British model" of slow releases over longer spans of time to the "American model" of just endlessly cranking out stuff like a factory.
I think people are cancelling because Netflix gets boring after some time. When I first got Netflix it seemed to good to be true: So much stuff to watch instantly!
But after some time you realise that they use all kinds of tricks to make it seem like they have more content than they do (eg. different thumbnails for the same film), they don't have a list of their films anywhere, etc.
Their recommendation engine feels like it's written by a 3rd grader (you watched a Zombie movie? let me recommend exclusively zombie movies!)
In the end I just realised I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore, and cancelled the subscription. I don't think the price was important for my decision, I don't even remember how much I paid for Netflix.