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Comment by wand3r | Hacker News Reader

Man, Netflix is really going down hill. I get that the entire landscape has changed but they dont seem to be innovating. Why not try to give small budgets to UCLA students or something like that. Prefect the dubbing of all their content to make it more appealing in other markets. Have some conviction in their shows on a longer timeline and stop cancelling things after 1-2 seasons effectively making the IP worthless. They can improve their search so people have a better experience finding content and don't churn. License their own content to othet studios.

They can definitely keep making money, but in my exoerience Netflix has not been #1 or even #2 when I go to watch media now. Which is a big change from a few years ago. I dont pay for it myself or I would have cancelled.

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Here is the problem: What you're doing is describing ways that Netflix can be a good media company. Netflix is valued as a tech company and pays tech workers like a top tier tech company. At some point they either have to do some innovative new tech that separates them from the competition, or they have to become an excellent media company- and that probably starts with firing all the fat and happy tech workers.

Netflix is very unique in that they put significantly more stock (and subsequently, capex) in making data driven content decisions than other studios do.

I don't know how the gamble will play out, but if it works well for them, I imagine they'll continue to pay top tier.

So while we may hate all their weird reality tv shows or wonder why good stuff gets cancelled why other things continue, it may have a lot less to do with a single individual's decision.

Also note, Netflix is known to pay significantly more than the rest of FAANG at this point, though they hire much less frequently.

And for anybody who is keeping score Amazon who is often not data driven, but rather driven by random opinion of random empowered employees. The result are worse not better.

> Netflix is very unique in that they put significantly more stock (and subsequently, capex) in making data driven content decisions than other studios do.

> I don't know how the gamble will play out, but if it works well for them, I imagine they'll continue to pay top tier.

This would've made sense a little under a decade ago. The last few years have shown how badly the idea works or Netflix's models are.

Who’s to say the proposed $300M in cuts won’t touch tech? They may be still trading as a tech company, but it looks like they may be firing some of those engineers anyways.

So worst of both worlds?

Describing engineers as "fat and happy" is really derogatory. Their spend on tech employees is a tiny fraction of total content spend. Also, an even tinier fraction of what they spend on services like AWS. If they want to cut costs, there's a ton more low hanging fruit than letting people go. In fact, revenue per employee is the highest compared to other FAANG

If you look at the complaints about Netflix, most of them relate to content, not tech. This suggests that they've under-invested in content, and over-invested in tech.

Disagree, total content spend the last 4 years has been ~18bn/year compared to ~500m/yr on all employee R&D. That's shows there's a content quality problem not a content underinvestment.

According to their latest annual statement (2022), they spent 2.7 billion USD on "Technology & Development". Where are you getting the 500 million figure?

https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/2022/ar... page 23

I think the tech side of Netflix is great, they do a great job. But it’s simply not what makes money for Netflix anymore and they are extra-ordinarily well paid.

I think that the budget cut means starting fewer high-end series. They've been saying for a year or so that they realize it's not a good look to cancel so many shows. But I suspect that manifests less as "finish shows they start with" as "commit less".

I'd like to see them do more shows as one-season limited series. I understand why they want to have cliffhangers that encourage you to stay subscribed for months waiting for the rest, but obviously that doesn't work if they cancel it.

I'm watching 1899 right now, and I'm enjoying it despite knowing that it was canceled prematurely. It's pretty and fun to watch. But it moves at a glacial pace and could just as well be compressed into one season.

(For that matter... it's clearly "Lost, But On A Boat", and whatever ending they actually had in mind was gonna suck. Shows like that never end well. I'll probably be just as happy not to have to watch whatever unsatisfactory solution they were going to throw at me.)

> Its pretty and fun to watch. But it moves at a glacial pace and could just be compressed into one season.

I feel this captures most streaming series. 10 years ago a season could consist of 24 separate stories with one continuous background plot. Now you have one story spanning 10 episodes and ending on a cliffhanger. I'm not against the format. Parts of Terror was great. But most are excruciating slow with next to no character development and detours that doesn't matter.

The good dubbing would also help me with learning Spanish. I remember trying to watch The Office when it was still on Netflix and it didn't have Spanish dubs or subs!!

I was floored. Peacock has both for The Office and the dubs are pretty good.

I understand Netflix not wasting the time on content that isn't theirs, like The Office. But still - its crazy their content library hasn't at least added language support for the next 1 or 2 most popular languages. They can overlap those languages with their top 50 or so shows?

I don't know if they've already looked into this and it just isn't profitable.

Can't you watch... Spanish-language TV shows?

Dude, really?

Are you implying that a Spanish-language speaker should stick to Spanish language television?

Yup, but I can also re-watch shows like The Office or Seinfeld where I know or understand the context and jokes

And so I need not turn on subs like I may have to with Spanish originals. Also I recognize jokes or bits and realize what they're trying to say.

I feel like when I go into a new series blind, I end up turning on subtitles. But I didn't for the two shows mentioned above, I tried to force myself to hear the words rather than read the subs, because I already knew kind of what the episode(s) and conversations in them were about.

I find that that's a slightly different reasoning process.

Netflix is probably the platform with most foreign film and matching captions. Including production. I highly recommend you to look at their hidden language categories.

The downward slide has been happening for a long while, but it was still better than a lot of what was being broadcast on TV in a lot of countries and was cheaper than cable.

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