Netflix loses 970k subscribers, says ads and new fees are key to recovery
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think they are dead. Whats their competitive advantage? The tech is commoditized. Other streaming platforms really sucked at first but they’ve upped their game and now I don’t see much difference. What does Netflix offer that others don’t? The only thing atm is that they’re ad free. Once thats gone, its so over.
Such an easy, available target.
Long story short the Spray & Pray exec got promoted and the other exec got squeezed out. But now that all of the major studios have started their own streaming services (and have started being stingier with their licensing) original content is perhaps the most important driver of new subscriptions and subscription maintenance for a streaming platform. And it seems Netflix bet the house on building their library out of cheap crap like Emily in Paris and God’s Favorite Idiot with the occasional expensive (but still crappy) Ryan Reynolds action movie sprinkled in to keep things “fresh”.
Netflix made a huge mistake when they went with the spaghetti against the wall strategy and for some reason they just keep doubling down to make their already shitty strategy even worse.
Who is selling good content anymore? HBO? They run their own thing now. Paramount? They've got their own thing now. Disney? They've got their own thing now. MGM? They're streaming through Amazon Prime now.
Netflix was forced into this position by competition, not by internal decisions.
If you're going to do spaghetti against the wall strategy, why wouldn't you continue to support shows that actually stick?
They almost certainly do, by the measures they use for sticking.
The problem is that things that don't stick by their metrics are going to feel like they stuck to the people for whom it did work, so spray and pray strategy ends up with lots of individually-small, but large in aggregate, disappointed fandoms.
+1. Content will become even more important as the bandwidth keeps increasing (hello, 5G!). Netflix solved some hairy problems back when streaming was hard due to bandwidth and other limitations. But as those constraints are getting addressed the content is again a hero.
As tech gets commoditised I wonder where else do we expect to see similar shifts.
A somewhat similar shift occurred last decade in India in the online retail payments space. Early in 2010s there was this rush of pre-paid wallets that enabled customers to overcome the pain of online payments. So any product/company that had superior payments experience stood to win. But then UPI happened and retail/online payments is now more or less a solved problem in India and has become a commodity. So the focus is now on quality of product/service that's delivered, payments is taken for granted.
This isn't necessarily a Netflix thing - it's a streaming industry problem - driven by short supply and high demand with having multiple competitors in the market with big bank balances. When Netflix first started, they were pure quality distribution, now they and other streamers are bleeding money in bidding wars for content generated primarily by lame "chose one word from each column" production houses. Aliens, Teenage, Investigators - out pops humdrum 8 episodes of binge-fodder.
I went to streaming to escape from the cable playbook. I anticipate that all these additional revenue tactics will result in me dropping Netflix, and others. Maybe I'll return once the market has consolidated a little. Maybe not.
The worse being that it is not directly UX incompetence but it is done on purpose: try to avoid that you notice that their catalog does not have so much interesting content after a few months; push in front the content that they have incentive for you to watch. Like movies with product placement.
In all seriousness, every now and then I open YouTube by mistake in another browser that doesn't have ublock, and the experience is infuriating - having to waatch 5+ second ads on every video I search for or look at. How do people stand it?
They are not people anymore. They are borg
Their Engineering Blog is great, some really great projects, but sometimes and even more and more there are projects that left me asking: „Why so complicated“
At scale everything is a problem, but some „solutions“ seem „well we have staff, money and time for nice funny stuff“ vibe.
Like inventing batch jobs, but more complicated
Still does. Both OG cable and the cable-for-cordcutters streaming TV offerings like Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, etc. (even if the latter doesn't happen to sell their own ads, they are still charging for access to ad-loaded streams.)
10 Incumbent offers mediocre service at high cost.
20 Alternative appears that's better faster cheaper stronger.
30 Alternative gains significant marketshare.
40 Consumer surplus extraction mode. Also some customers miss features from the old platform (bloat).
50 goto 10In turn this has drove up the pricing, enabled exploitation by subpar producers, and over-extension of streamer capital in a bid to stay competitive.
Implosion and consolidate seems inevitable, the market just isn’t big enough to support 5x Netflix sized companies.
Infinite growth is impossible. Stop destroying your very good magic money making machine.