Netflix prepares to send its final red envelope
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- $120M in annual revenue
- 1M fiercely loyal customers who paid every month
- 5 distribution centers spread across the country
- 100 happy employees, each with a tenure of a decade or longer
You'd probably say that I had achieved the definition of success in the business world and should be proud of myself. To Netflix, on the other hand, this business is so irrelevant that they'd rather take it out back and shoot it in the head just to save the bother of continuing to run it.
All those happy employees have to be paid.
The 1M fiercely lyal customers will only be 950K next month.
The lease on 3 of the 5 distribution centers comes up this year and business would have to commit to another 5+ year lease.
When you license a show via a streaming service, you don’t own anything.
This is the problem with the tech economy. The consumers don’t own anything. They just rent.
When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. Same as I own a DVD disk. It’s just the medium that is different. E.g. I have a collection of Friends on disks, which is legal, I own it. But when it’s ripped as files and stored on an old hdd so I could rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB. I assume it is likely to be illegal.
The thing is, copyright holders think it’s wrong, and they want us to rent the content, not own it. I mean it could be done other way technologically, avoiding physical medium and still making it legal somehow. It could be done if the party was interested in it. The problem is not in the physical medium itself.
When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright).
> Same as I own a DVD disk.
That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.)
> [...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB
Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.
Only because the laws say that physical media is treated differently. If the law said that you could buy a disk and then stream as many copies as you have of the disk, it would completely change the business model.
But the law doesn't say that.
Yes, we could have compulsory licensing, like with music on the radio.
If radio stations have a copy of a song, then provided they pay the legally-mandated royalties to the rightsholder, they can play it. They don't need to negotiate with the rightsholder, and the rightsholder cannot prevent them from playing it.
We have a working model for how it can work, so we could do the same thing with TV shows and movies on OTA/cable/streaming... but we just don't.
I would give a grace period to allow for exclusives; 2 years from release, maybe.
Popcorn Time (free torrenting service) but with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible. Instead of subscription to lots of expensive services.
IPR is a system maintained by the democratic government, make it work for the people.
> with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible
This is your problem. You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
That said, how much should I pay for an episode of a TV show from 30 years ago where the producers are dead and the other creators are mostly comfortably living in retirement having already earned their living and been paid for their work? The offspring of the people working on the show in many cases probably don't even know that their forbears did such work.
…filmed in the USA, I assume? There’s a tremendous amount of content from other countries that’s not available on any major streaming platform. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of the USA movies that have never been streamed as well.
> You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
I don’t think there’s a legal way to watch the majority of movies that have ever been filmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
The DVDs avoid all the licensing issues that properly licensed streaming media has because the profit and control for the rights holder ends when the sale of the media happens.
Similarly, the profit and control of the media ends for the rights holder when it enters The Scene for release amongst their myriad distribution channels.
And the postal service, to a rough approximation, already goes by every mailbox every day. Adding an envelope has a smaller impact than a bicycle delivery.
Would a bicycle delivery have been okay? How about 1/10th of the impact of a bicycle delivery?
It takes a lot of people to make internet connections work too.
(And that a significant part is wasted on running ads doesn't make it any better.)
It is like litter.
Paper ads are somewhat limited due to consumer complaining about having their mailboxes filled with them and someone has to go there and put it in and can't avoid a homeowner guarding the mailbox if they would force the issue.
Using e.g. uBlock Origin might be the most impact for no effort environmentally friendly thing you could possibly do.
In regards to Netflix I suspect there's a streaming bandwidth plateau we will hit (if we have not already): there are only so many hours per day people can watch content, population growth isn't that strong (and can't increase forever), and video resolution then becomes the driver of increased data use (and that probably can't increase forever either).
Right, which is why it's a moral imperative to use an ad-blocker. Ad-blockers avoid displaying ads, which reduces CPU usage for displaying those ads, thus reducing power wastage, and helping the planet.
You shouldn't be special-casing the ads that pay for the pages you visit. All of the tech behind the page is equally good or bad in this sense.
Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
That doesn't mean there isn't by the OP's logic a moral imperative to not look at that content, due to the environmental impact. My point is that same imperative should apply equally.
> Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
That's a bad analogy, unless someone holding a flyer out pays for a service you consumed.
Are you obligated to actually read the booklet? Or is "no thanks" OK?
But here you seem to be claiming it's ok to visit the event without reading their ad booklet. That's inconsistent.
It would depend on the specifics of each implementation, but shipping 10 discs total over a year is likely to be more efficient than to keep streaming infrastructure up and running for that one movie.
Obviously, the same streaming infrastructure would be used for other content, but how many (unpopular) shows are only watched a few times a year yet they take valuable infrastructure capacity?
And then we get into lack of popularity leading into obsolecence, and we are now talking a much wider topic.
Disk space is cheap. I would assume that they don't really take infrastructure capacity.
That's less than an end users TV will utilize, and it's probably also less than a standalone DVD player requires.
It is likely still more efficient to stream than ship on DVDs (I wonder how much it changes with eg. USB flash drives, SD cards or other rewriteable media), but have upfront energy costs that are harder to estimate.
I'm baffled to see such an innumerate take on HackerNews of all places. Yearly US per capita plastic consumption is a few hundred kg. How much do you think a netflix subscription adds to that?
Almost every problem can be divided into many tiny ones, and solution to each tiny problem can be ridiculed that it solves only tiny bit of a problem.
There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).
I'd rather have people kick back on their couch and watch a Netflix DVD instead of feeling great that they saved so much plastic, and then smugly drive their SUV to the next shopping mall.
It's probably an impossible question to answer.
As an hn'er you should be used to premature optimization ;)
In reality of course there are a few big things that matter, and lots of tiny things (like Netflix DVD rentals) that don't. Two of the main sources of plastic waste are the packaging and textile industries. If you have a fast fashion habit it's pretty easy (and, at often single-digit $ prices per item, widely affordable) to rack up a few kg of plastic waste per year (a non-trivial fraction as micro-plastics). Now how much plastic waste do you estimate a Netflix DVD habit creates in comparison?
The best case scenario of the innumerate and self-righteous setting environmental agendas is that rather than addressing the big problems, attention gets frittered away on non-problems.
Often, of course what happens is that you end up with something that's much worse than doing nothing. Like for example the bogus plastic recycling policies enthusiastically enacted in much of the Western world, which saw to it that a lot of stuff which would have ended up harmlessly in landfills was loving hand-cleaned and shipped around half the world to Asia to be then dumped into the Oceans. Or “Green” politicians building brown coal plants like crazy.
You are comparing single DVD rental company with whole textile industry -> fallacy of relative privation.
Some of us just see a positive that less trash will be produced, less stuff will be moved around and you start mentioning "setting environmental agendas". How are those thing related? We cannot be happy until in single stroke we fix over 50% of a global problem? That will never happen.
You mention plastic recycling - I agree it is either pointless or harmful, depending how you look at. it. Do you really consider that not producing trash is also a failed policy? If not why are you doing this comparison?
I know it’s some naïve idealism, but I would love to see the world where we, as human race, choose to do nothing rather than trash our planet even more. I may sound like a crazy ecology fanatic (I’m not yet), yet I’m becoming more and more worried over all this. While the other commenter legitimately pointed out that servers aren’t free (ecology wise) either, I think they can be optimised over time. Shipping physical disks, I don’t see as rational these days. Even when it gets you money, discard half of your customers and the other half would switch to subscription anyway, you just push them to do that earlier.
I don't understand this comment - it might make sense as a (bad) pitch for digitising Netflix in the 2000s, but the millions of FTE days to do that have already been pitched, paid for and worked. What is this adding?
Replace - I'm not sure how much I can add on top of what we've already said, that Netflix has been replacing its mail order business with digital for the last 15 years or so.
Meanwhile DVDs are relatively democratic and unencumbered way of distributing video. Netflix can make any movie available via dvd without licensing or asking permission.
I found it to be a very good way of getting high quality movies from the largest selection.
But your complaint seems to sidestep all this, sort of like complaining that paper money wastes so many unneeded trees without acknowledging the huge benefits.
Plus, a stagnating movie/TV shows market based on physical disks only (and on previous theatrical releases) is surely a lot more friendly to the environment compared to a always-going-up movie/TV shows market, a market which has to create a lot more content compared to past times. Creating that content is not friendly to the environment, those film crews don't live based on air alone.
But that won’t go anywhere, so at least physical disks would.
In my case I have a very good video rental store nearby but now I need to drive somewhere I wasn’t driving before.
Streaming unfortunately is not a replacement, mostly due to the limited selection of titles and, in the case of Blu-ray/UHD discs, reduced quality.
It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.
> The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020.
> New passenger cars generally emit from 90 (smaller cars) to 150 (larger cars) grams of CO2 (yes, it's the weight of the whole carbon dioxide, not just the carbon in it) per kilometer.
Disks could be still better, if you rent 20 of them at once.
and there might be opportunity cost to not redirecting resources to other things.
Just 3-years ago, the DVD business was generating $200M in revenue.
Today, it’s only $120m.
That means total revenues are down 66% in just 3-years.
You can’t fault Netflix for wanting to divest a business that is rapidly declining.
And that doesn’t even speak to the profitably of that business unit which is fair to assume to be losing money when you have such rapid revenue decline.
https://www.mediaplaynews.com/netflix-indifference-to-disc-r...
If the DVD and Blu-ray rental userbase is dropping, I could cut that division's budget in half and move it to another division that is generating much stronger traction (eg. Netflix Korea and their KDrama acquisitions making Netflix a market leader in Asia).
The TAM of the DVD/Blu-Ray rental market has fallen, so as a company, it's best for me to fire those customers - either by slowly degrading the service so they change to the mainstream service, or deprecating the entire service.
> 100k titles. No streamer has that.
But
1. Do does a large enough userbase actually want that?
2. Can that large enough userbase spend enough margins on that service to generate a healthy profit?
3. Are my operating costs for that division rising faster than the revenue from that division?
If all 3 of those answers aren't satisfactory, you end up shutting down an initiative.
Also, there's always FMovies or Pirating for those who really really want it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1250636/global-container...
I only see one today in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and from the recent Xbox leak it looks like that's going away.
Revenue shrinking means there isn't monetary demand. Consistent YoY shrinkage is enough reason to shut down an initiative.
Brownie point initiatives only make sense during a low interest rate environment. If revenue is dropping significantly with no foreseeable market growth, that money can be better deployed in other growth opportunities, or kept in a bank, or given back to investors via stock buybacks or dividends to ensure stronger investor relations and higher valuations.
If you feel there is actual market demand that can be satiated, feel free to build your own alternative. Maybe the economics work for you. This is a forum maintained by YCombinator...
Can you even get a 15" laptop with a dvd drive these days?
https://junocomputers.com/product/nyx-17-v3/
for watching DVDs.
The simple fact is that most people by now don't even have the means to play dvds.
It isn't just DVD players. I've never purchased a standalone player, it came built in on my Playstation. It's only in the most modern generation of consoles that you have a choice to buy a disc drive-less version.
I have never been a TV console gamer (always been a handheld person), so I concede that point.
My parents for instance were surprised to learn that the reader didn't need to be built into the laptop and could be a separate usb thing. They just figured that they'd need to pay for a service to get the discs converted to files on a flash drive similar to how they had previously done for taped videos rather than thinking that they can just buy a reader.
Streamers do have unparalleled access to films and TV. Instantly. No waiting for DVDs that are out of stock.
Ignore the fact that streaming costs more. Why does that matter? It’s a better product.
Spotify disrupted a free product in pirated music.
Price is not the only consideration when it comes to product choice.
The US alone has almost a half a million active streaming service subscriptions. Netflix DVD has 1/500th of that subscriber base.
> down 66%
down to 66%.
"down X" suggests/implies down by X.
it's not, unfortunately. If the business isn't making _enough_ money (where "enough" actually means maximum possible out of all of possibilities), then you are better off switching the investment to the other investment that is returning more.
Netflix's main business makes 2.4M per employee (31.6 billion for 12k employees), and given the nature of such businesses, is almost certainly much more profitable per employee.
Making more money than you spend is not a tech-specific concept.
Even more hilarious when people utterly fail to see that. If people weren't serious, it would be peak meta irony.
To calculate operating costs it's best to look at Net Income per Employee, which is $378k [0]
Out of that $2.1m, only $378k is left after expenditures, payroll, R&D, etc.
[0] - https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/NFLX/Revenue-...
I don’t know of any copycat.
$80 million in revenue in Q2 2023.
however reading on company "Redbox shares were down 40% in recent trading.
Redbox shareholders on Tuesday approved the company's acquisition by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment." in August.
You would think Netflix getting out of the business should be a sign for shares to go up. Maybe they're not that profitable either.
Investors don't care about profit of the business, they care about profit of their investment (ROI). Whether a company is profitable or bleeding money only matters as part of the prediction on where the share price will go.
Netflix IPOed in 2002 and Redbox's parent company is a penny stock (Chicken Soup of the Soul Entertainment // NASDAQ: CSSE)
VCs do not invest in public entities.
The companies that invest in public entities are Investment Banks and Private Equity, both of which are different industries with different norms and regulations from Venture Capital
A massively corp with many experienced analysts considers a market no longer capable of producing a profit... to me that is a sign that the sector is dying.
There's probably a [small] steady-state business in there, but investors want growth.
Are you aware that there are publicly funded buildings in most towns in the US that permit you to rent one or multiple books without a monthly subscription fee? And that the late fees charged by those institutions do not share any of those revenues with the author? And that this model has been around for hundreds of years?
millions of people rented nintendo/sega cartridges in the nineties. N actually tried suing blockbuster https://www.nintendotimes.com/1989/08/19/nintendo-sues-block... but couldnt on game lending grounds so went for xeroxing manuals. Blockbuster in return switched to third party manuals, but lawsuit failed.
N heavily lobbied for Computer Software Rental Amendments Act, but ultimately failed and games are excluded https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198
There are still places without running water and sewage, never mind electricity and Internet access. I'm going to guess that everyone you know has a smartphone, if not a laptop, kindle, and a tablet, plus home Internet access. But not everyone is so lucky, and even in the US, there are poor areas. Huge swaths still don't have cell phone service, never mind 5G. $500 for a Starlink disk, with a monthly service charge, ain't happening.
Some of these places are intentionally devoid of Internet - there are places in Napa, outside of San Francisco, where none of the landowners will allow cell-phone towers in the hilly region, because they don't want it, so there's still no cell access. 10 years won't change that.
Whether that's enough to sustain Redbox, specifically, is a different question, and sure, more people will have Internet access in 10 years than today, but "dying business" is just a perception. Just because you don't have a use case for it doesn't mean that others won't. OG tech company Yahoo! could be called a "dying business", but they did $280 million in revenue for Q2, 2023.
Netflix has P/E ratio of around 40, when the stock doesn’t look like it’s meeting the ratio why would I buy the stock at that price, I’d buy it (your point) but at a lower price
Tech industry economics are besides the point. Suppose tech industry economics expects (for the sake of argument, insanely) an internal rate of return of 300% on every dollar spent, while the IRR of the disc business is some measly fraction of that. By liquidating the disc business, Netflix gets to take whatever proceeds from the liquidation - even if it's only $1 - and put it towards other internal usages that it expects that 300% IRR from.
A price like $1 is so small that, presumably, you would go to whoever the current salaried worker is responsible for managing the disc business, offer them ownership for $1, and the manager-worker would happily take the opportunity to become a manager-owner of the desirable business that employs him at a price that anyone could afford.
Of course, in the real world, there are various costs involved. So presumably, (a) the costs associated with liquidation are lower than the costs associated with spinning off the disc business, and (b) whatever the cost associated with spinning off the disc business, no buyer could be found for at least the sum of that cost plus $1; that such costs are indeed above what the salaried manager-worker of the current disc business could afford.
Maybe that's bullshit, maybe not, I don't understand enough about Netflix's disc business to know. But Hanlon's Razor is the better guide here. Either Netflix's board is going where the money is leading them to go, or they're leaving money on the table for malicious reasons, and the second doesn't make sense since it would expose them to shareholder lawsuits.
What if the board is just too busy, or mistaken, or stupid?
Mistaken is another form of stupid.
And do you really think you get to be on the board of a ~$168 billion market cap public company by being stupid?
No but i don't think you necessarily get there by being intelligent either.
Board seats are traded as favours and nepotism all the time
High intelligence is rarely a requirement. Maybe most aren't stupid, but more are more lucky than they are particularly smart.
A non-trivial number of boards have run great companies right into the ground, or at least been too stupid or cowardly to stop it from happening.
Private companies, sure. Boards of private companies often have an iron grip on shareholders and are often unaccountable. But the boards of public companies need to worry about shareholder activists, hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits. The margin of error to keep outright stupid, corrupt, nepotists is much smaller on large public company boards.
Plenty of examples of stupid but successful people.
The start-up costs and need of name-recognition are probably sufficient that it'd be hard for a new company try to fill this niche, but if they bought Netflix's distribution network they could likely manage.
This assumes there was a buyer who was able to pay.
As someone who has worked on this kind of stuff, I guarantee the leadership team at Netflix considered and did their due diligence, but didn't find a satisfactory buyer or didn't even find a buyer.
As long as Netflix is a FANG there will be little incentive for them to take risks with their brand.
This post made me hit up their Github again and there are (possible) gems like Zuul, Falcor, Chaosmonkey.. but seriously, go try and deploy them. It's embarassing.
Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.
Almost, but not quite.
(I'm linking the "history" section because it has a nice map. There is a table further down.)
An often forgotten fact is that Netflix started Roku as a product & spun it off.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
did you go work for Netflix? was it enough to live on in los gatos?
what a random selection of non sequiturs
Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone".
I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though.
> As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs
The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so.
It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.
Well...I'm surprised you didn't bother doing google search. You choose what percent of the 500k cash if stock. 0% or 90% if you want.
I don't get why you are complaining about the location - all the bay is expensive and you can easily afford a 2 million dollar home on a 500k salary.
And with barely any land.
How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc.
Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.
It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience.
I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.
I did this for a year or so. The movies went in one of those giant zip-up trapper-keeper things for CD's. All in total, I think I ripped about 80 DVDs.
And a lot of them I don't think I ever actually got around to watching...
The end of its DVD service is a huge loss.
Sadly, many people who've only ever used its streaming service will never know what they were missing.
https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail
https://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com
are the main three so far I believe. More are in the works though.
* People/areas with poor internet connection. Or no internet connection (but a way to occasionally get on e.g. a library)
* People who want to make watching a movie a special event at home, not just a dooms-scrolling life filler.
* People who want to see decent movies :-) that are not available for streaming
* People who want to rip the DVDS :-)
* People who are set in their ways have a DVD connected to a big TV and don't want to mess around with tech.
4k blu-ray is much better than any streaming provider, though. And 1080p blu-ray about equal to 4k streaming.
Black and white films in HDR are gorgeous.. and filmic in a way they've never looked before on home media.
Usually on 4K discs they've been rescanned and restored, but not always, and sometimes even a good restoration job leaves a lot behind.
And other people mentioned that codec matters, but not the full extent. Not only is the encoding on a DVD about 10x worse than a modern codec, 10Mbps is a peak you're unlikely to ever see. I'm skeptical that a well-encoded 1Mbps 720p stream would ever lose to a DVD, and I'm confident that at 2Mbps you'd leave the DVD in the dust.
Or people who don't want to juggle 10 different streaming services
A DVD rental service won't necessarily get you that either. For some stuff filmed before buying DVD sets was a thing, you may only be able to get the original music from a tape someone made off of TV. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen....
That's the huge one. Availability is so fragmented for streaming that it's just not worth it. A DVD service that has everything in one place is gold.
The link to check their SSL certificate is also invalid. '
There is no readily available contact info, or corporate info.
Every hallmark of a scam site.
They feel like a one person shop. The turn around is slow and the system isn’t the slickest, however, it was the only place to get 4k discs for a very long time.
Regardless, that's not why people "revolted"; people were annoyed that their legacy subscriptions (streaming + DVDs) would no longer exist and that they would have to buy two 10usd subscriptions, essentially doubling the price overnight.
Most are under a large interstate exchange system where they help you acquire almost any dvd you are interested in.
Get involved and you can be a part of which dvds are purchased!
When they released streaming it was truly awesome. Not only was the seleciton great, they also had things like the concept of "friends" and you could let your friends see what you watched. The joy of discovering new movies could have gone the way of something like letterboxd except where you can actually see the movies. The Netflix challenge was cool too because it really seemed like they wanted to get you to find the perfect movie for _you_.
But when the studios started to wise up and pull their content they chose the most user-hostile and pessimistic ways of dealing with it. Netflix used to be more than just a content pipe, they added value the form of the recommendation engine and were starting to add value in a social network of sorts. But instead they chose deception to hide the fact that their library was getting hollowed out. They killed off the budding social-media aspect.
I guess content is the foundation upon which you build all of these things and when their content got yanked they had to focus on maximizing viewer experience within those limitations. But a part of me does wonder if I could find something I really like within the huge library of unknown garbage they have. The problem is that they don't seem to care about that kind of experience anymore. So that's why I am no longer a subscriber.
It definitely did not. Reed always had the online streaming business as main goal, but internet was not as fast yet.
He cites Andrew Tanenbaum’s Networking book as inspiration. There’s a page in the book that says “don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of data tapes”.
(I used the same textbook at Uni and I remember clearly reading that page as well, crazy)
I also remember one from Silberschatz's OS textbook about Deadlock that mentioned an old law which said that whenever two trains approached an intersection, they both had to come to a full stop and none could move until the other one had left.
When streaming started Netflix’s incentives changed: if you had a rank ordered personal watchlist, you’ll notice if the movie you added left the service. Back then they were also playing this game of circling the expensive movies in and out of the service every six months or a year - if your watchlist was unordered, you eventually saw the movie you wanted to watch in that list and could see it. They end up paying only half the license fees.
In the end their recommendation system couldn’t be honest because they basically couldn’t stream the best movie you’d like to see. Not to mention they’d have to openly say the movies they commissioned are likely not going to be enjoyable for you personally. So they completely gutted the recommendation system into the ghastly crap we have today which is designed to hide their selection flaws than to serve you honestly.
The other frustrating thing for me to see online is when people criticize Netflix for bad design decisions - till Hastings was running the ship, I felt every bad UX move they made was in genuine service of hiding the flaws necessitated by their limited licensing abilities. And they were damn smart about it too. Netflix’s greatest downfall was their content strategy which seems to be some idea of data driven predictive crap. They likely got buoyed by the success of the first few shows into thinking they can do everything with data. For the budget Netflix has nowadays if they actually got their content act together theyd be a much larger powerhouse. Hope they do it before it’s too late.
It will be missed for sure.
As they could only send out DVDs they have in stock, they were more likely to recommend things that they had a surplus of.
While the list model did allow for even popular titles to be queued up, they wouldn't want a situation where a customer had nothing but new/popular titles on their list with a long wait time.
Netflix ended up in a race to acquire content defensively against the dwindling prospects of major licensing renewals, for example, Disney pulled out of Netflix almost completely.
The honeymoon period of just about everything being on Netflix was either dead or near dead by 2020.
Has anyone attempted this before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo: …the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Aereo's services breached copyright laws. It ruled that, "viewed in terms of Congress’ regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly", and that "insofar as there are differences, those differences concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service."
Supreme Court (donors/lobbyists) simply didnt like the business model. 'these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems' means it doesnt matter how you provide content as long as end effect is similar to cable TV. Imo bad ruling.
Engineers often think the law is a computer program. You put the same inputs in and get the same inputs out. If you find a bug, then you can exploit that until the bug is fixed via a new version.
It's not. The spirit of what the law is supposed to do is far more important than the letter of the law.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zediva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
> The court held that the defendants were transmitting and publicly performing the plaintiffs' copyrighted works, and thus granted plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction.
My email address is in my profile.
I have never in my 33 years heard anyone refer to the precision of the engineers, rather than the watch itself. Every day is a school day, I guess.
Kind of like if someone said TikTok existed in the 90s and they used to mail VHS tapes of people's home recordings.
And yeah TikTok/etc didn't exist then. No one hard smartphones and the Internet was text/GIF only.
That said, we used to have the America's Funniest Home Videos show. People mailed in VHS recordings of their kids/pets doing cute, funny, or cringe things. This aired on TV and people voted to pick a winner. People could win $10k-100k in prize money. So yeah, proto YT or whatever was a thing, just scaled to available tech at the time.
EDIT: Just realized AFHV is still around, and will outlive Netflix DVDs. *That* certainly feels like a joke. How does a network television meme show still exist in 2023???
Yeah, a 33.6 kb/s modem vs a station wagon hurtling down the highway with a dvd is a fair fight.
I wonder if that was coincidence.
Video stores?
And for that matter, Amazon started just selling books.
Not to be smug, but my feeling at the time of Qwikster was that if they didn't spin it off they would shut it down. Didn't expect it to live on for another decade though.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/11/3153720/netflix-qwikster-...
If only I could do all my banking with the library/post office...