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Comment by tom_walters | Hacker News Reader

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content.

Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together.

Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.

It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.

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Disney could have done that and I would have paid.

But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy.

Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.

All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.

Important point about relative novelty, but kids aren’t subscribers / account holders / bill payers, so I can see how the population with children can become a persistent subscriber base, but growth requirements necessitate either more children (joking) or providing better content.

It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?

It depends on the age of the kids—for the price of a Disney+ subscription you can buy ~2 DVDs a month, which at my kid's age (4 and 2) is way more frequently than they actually want to watch new movies. When I was a kid, (and I'm seeing it with my own kids) we had a tiny selection of movies that we loved to watch repeatedly. Why pay rent for that selection when you could own it for the same price?

I may do something like this if Disney ever creates good content again on accident.

I bought puss and boots 2 last year on release, and that movie was excellent.

Is that true for all kids? I thought popular opinion was that all new gen kids have insatiable content appetites with low attention spans demanding constant newness?

Or is that just what the content producers want you to believe in order to get you to sign up the the latest streaming service?

If you feed them a constant stream of new content, yeah, they'll probably be that way, but they're not born with an insatiable desire for novel consumption.

Well maybe not everyone, but most of us are born with some level of Novelty Seeking [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking

I don't think that's a good argument. You find "new" when rewatching. The moment is not engaging anymore, it means you drained the entirety of the content

I think it depends on the person. Other than a few favorites, I've never tended to rewatch movies, reread books, replay games, etc. I think that a lot of it may be that a lot of the appeal to me is in "figuring out" the content so that once I know how things play out I don't care all that much about reexperiencing the playing out itself.

I imagine this greatly depends on the age of the kids and their immediate friend groups. A very young child generally isn't going to care or even understand some movie or show is old or not, everything in life is new to them.

You create your own monsters. my 2 years old must have watched the mario movie 200 times at least. I was like him, I watched Aladdin 200 times.

My 4 year old has had unlimited access to most services since 2. Mostly what she does is watches the same 10ish hours of content whatever that is for about a month. And then she picks another 10 hours. This 10 hours may or may not include things from previous 10 hour binges.

Kids like repetition. They are perfectly willing to watch the same season of something over and over again even when they could technically choose to watch something brand new

The streamers make some shows that some people want to watch.

Netflix’s report, first of its kind, showed 20 titles that you will have never heard of unless you use TikTok.

Most people are watching the shows most other people are watching, it’s memetic. People want to feel like they’re a part of something; that is they’re are willing to pay $20/mo in Fear of Missing Out.

Nobody has FOMO for old Disney content. The largest expense for Netflix is creating content, all the shows in that report were from 2022 and 2023.

The kicker is that it’s the opposite of the top of the Steam charts, indicating how bad of a business the streamers are in. Those games are most free and have been around for a long time, sometimes decades.

Both games and TV/movies were threatened by piracy. Yet the result for TV/movies was wildly undercharging for the stuff people were pirating - giving away the old catalogue content on the premise they were competing with $0, simultaneously ceasing to monetize their pay to play audience. Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement, which would have been much much cheaper and effective. TV/movies just do not have enough secular ways to innovate like games do to completely supplant piracy from a technological and social perspective.

Two takeaways: (1) the pay to watch model model was much more sustainable, because most content makes way more sense to sell for those payers, it was non-FOMO content, it was good content. (2) in order to make most of the highly engaged streaming content sustainable, streamers must innovate in monetization, and it’s not obvious if ads will be enough.

My kids watch minecraft and roblox streams ad infinitumon youtube though.. I pay for ad free youtube and ad free streaming services but they still know of and want the latest toys. It's amazing. My kids never want to watch a movie or tv show, only youtube.

Gabe Newell had it right, piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.

> Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement

They did. However, it turns out that often, you're suing upstanding citizens for what the public views as minor infractions. This does not really recoup costs. It does act as a deterrent, both for Joey Public to illegally download your content, but also for them to spend money on acquiring your content legally. For some reason, the big fish are hard to catch, and catching one doesn't move the needle on illegally downloaded content much.

Moreover, they're not just competing with illegally downloaded content. Disney's back catalogue has been sold for literally decades. I bet that before the era of streaming, most folks lived within 10 houses of a legal, viewable copy of Disney's big hits (Lion King, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, etc). And if not, physical media of such movies and series are typically available on 2nd-hand markets for very affordable prices*. That's what the back catalogue of Disney (and others) needs to compete with first and foremost.

* case in point: I bought a 7 season, 24ish episode/season series on Ebay for 50. Watching it with the envisioned company (ie. no binging) took months; streaming would have been more expensive already at 5 bucks per month.

Not to backseat parent or anything, but I would never let my kids watch Anime unsupervised. Disney is fine, and they aren't going to sexualize minors like anime often does.

Where was unsupervised consumption mentioned? Quit your pearl clutching.

I think you've misread my comment and OP's comment here

...I'm really having trouble understanding this comment. Maybe my sarcasm detector is broken?

Watching anything unsupervised is of course age-dependent, so I'm not sure I understand the mechanism at work in that part of the comment.

But on the deeper matter of Disney vs. anime:

Obviously anime is a huge basket, so it depends on what studio and creator(s) we're talking about.

There's plenty of amazing, reinforcing, validating, positive anime to be found. The Miyazaki films are, without exception, lovely and perfectly messaged for kids of all ages, including this 41-year-old. There are many other non-Miyazaki works from Studio Ghibli that are similarly friendly.

Disney, on the other hand, absolutely sexualizes and gaslights vulnerable populations. I loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, but in retrospect I realize that it taught a generation of little girls to endure abuse in the hopes of some magical transformation. Aladin is horrifyingly racist and two-dimensional. Pocahontes? Holy fuck.

Compare the Disney and Ghibli renditions of The Little Mermaid and tell me which one is made with greater concern over kids' worldview and mental health, let alone faithful passage of the ecological message of novel.

The Disney formula is very often predicated on a woman whose value is in her sexuality and virginity, with men who are divided into distinctly "good" and "evil" camps who fight over her. It's absolutely the kind of sexualization that is toxic for kids.

The truth is kids are resiliant and not stupid. generations "survived" these types of stereotypes and in 20 years someone else will be wringing their hands about the misguided stereotypes the current crop of acceptable movies is involved in (including everything you listed as a positive).

I would never hesitate to allow a child to watch any disney movie, but I definitely would hesitate to allow a child to watch Berserk or a lot of the borderline loli content. I remember watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and waiting for the hammer to drop on the PE teacher who was constantly creeping on the teenage girls. When the season ended and it never happened I was completely confused, it wasn't until years later I found out that's an actual trope that shows up in a lot of anime.

What I'm saying is that I don't disagree with you that there are plenty of anime that's perfectly fine for children to watch, but the other posters concern is absolutely valid too, there's a lot of anime children shouldn't be watching (opening scene of elfin lied anyone?) and your hand wringing about Disney movies not being perfect doesn't move that needle in the slightest.

I'm not sure it's a fair to compare your average Disney movie to famously transgressive/extreme examples of anime like Berserk or Elfin Lied. That would be like comparing One Piece to something like Watership Down.

For every Berserk or Elfin Lied there's a Bocchi the Rock! or Spy Family.

True. I mean, I let them watch anime I already watched (that's a huge catalog), so I know what to expect

Everybody wanted to control the entire pie, when in reality almost all of them would have been better off just licensing their content to Netflix and not worrying about streaming distribution

So much this. Netflix was valuable to me because I could watch any movie at any time, but now the streaming space is so fragmented that no single provider is worth the price of the subscription, so our family doesn't pay for any of them.

We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.

I am in this boat as well. Our stream subscriptions are down to zero -- just the one I get for free with my cell carrier. And as for Disney and whatever the heck it is they have become, I have reverted back to purchasing purchased discs of any good movies or series.

Same, and with my toddler we’re back to good old fashioned DVDs. They may be slower, fragile and have a few unskippable parts but at least the ads are predictable, they don’t involve endless scrolling, and they belong to you.

I kind of skipped the whole blue-ray thing, but is there a reason for DVD over blue-ray besides the price?

I keep Netflix subscription most out of loyalty than anything else. I've had Amazon prime since it was first introduced but may drop it after the recent announcement.

I also tend to rent from Amazon if it's not on netflix, but if it's on neither or I disagree with the rent price or they don't allow you to rent, I just pirate.

I'm ok with them having my money, but once they started pulling everything off of netflix the entire landscape because anti-consumer. Their greed lost them my money.

Well of course they'd have been. But prevailing wisdom just few years back was Disney's of the world can just steamroll Netflix of the world because they own all the content. Developing streaming system is only some low level implementation detail in larger scheme of things.

Well to be fair, Netflix got free money for years on the premise of future profits, whereas Disney are valued on quarterly earnings.

If we didn't have at least 3 major services, ultimately said services would have made contracts that would have taken most of the value of the deal: That's basically what Netflix was doing when they were the only game in town. We have too many streaming services now, but a monopolist with sensible prices was never the way it was going to end.

It would’ve been interesting if the major studios made their own Netflix.

Assuming they could execute technically on it, then a consumer would have just one subscription to get a ton of great content, and honestly would probably be compelling to have that AND Netflix (all the long tail stuff).

That was the original idea behind Hulu back in 2007 (originally free but funded with mandatory ads).

Wasn’t that the original idea behind Hulu?

Depending on what you mean by "studios", is this not what Hulu was? A joint ownership between multiple partners... ultimately down to Disney now but not originally.

Back 7 years ago this is exactly what my company (one of those listed) decided was the right move.

Then they changed their mind and pivoted to streaming, now. They're thinking maybe they should have just been an arms dealer.

...and Netflix couldn't grow as a tech company paying the ever increasing content costs (and wasn't happy with a utility company valuation) so has spent enormous sums on just terrible shows.

If you're an executive at any of these companies: VERTICAL INTEGRATION

If you're an outsider looking in: GREED

Ok but what's wrong with becoming a basic content internet utility? Why can't Netflix "just" be YouTube for professionally made TV and movie content, with a great UI? Why is that a bad business?

The Netflix Ui/UX sucks bad enough that I quit the service over it. I for one do not want them to gain a foothold in the market similar to YouTube, because their market dominance would just lead to the formation of yet another cesspool of shit content.

It's not a bad business it's just a different business. What you are describing already exists and is less valuable than Netflix.

Nebula, brilliant, masterclass, dropout, ...

I do recommend all of these. They provide a stream of high quality YouTube like content.

They tried, didn't they? The move into content was forced when the content producers started pulling the licenses.

> better off just licensing their content to Netflix

the thing is, this makes your IP a commodity. If netflix truly has a monopoly on the market like this, then they can supress the price of the licensing down to very low, and therefore disney would make very little money from the licensing.

It's good for the consumer, but not for disney.

If the IP is valuable that would in the negotiation. Simply put, there would be a minimum Disney would require from Netflix for their content. Better yet, structure some type of Joint-Venture deal with Netflix if the Disney content is so valuable (I suspect it is not…)

> a minimum Disney would require from Netflix for their content.

and netflix would just play hardball, since the scenario proposed by the grandparent post is one where only netflix is doing streaming.

> Joint-Venture deal with Netflix

which is not the scenario proposed by the GP - and in any case, this is not different from today, where every media company wants to own their own distribution network.

The way around this is license it to another platform. No exclusives.

Completely agree, but they never seem to learn.

The plumbing companies (like Netflix) look jealously at the content producers, and they desperately want that sweet content revenue.

The content producers (like Disney) look jealously at the plumbing companies, and they desperately want that sweet plumbing revenue.

Sometimes grabbing for the other revenue stream works out (like for Netflix) but most of the time it doesn't.

Disney was so eager to get into the plumbing business that it forgot how to create compelling content and now it can't do either.

Disney didn't forget :( They chose to stop, because they valued creating social change more than creating compelling content.

What did they do that makes you think they valued creating social change more?

I could explain, but South Park did it so well already.

If anyone is genuinely curious, you're looking for "south park panderverse".

On the flip side, the old content is exactly what I want. I'm a big fan of Star Trek, including TNG, Voyager, DS9, and even Enterprise. If I play music while I work, I find myself getting distracted by it. So, I prefer to have Star Trek playing in the background since I've seen every episode multiple many times it's really just comforting background competence porn. Other than that, I don't really watch much TV but it's nice to have if I'm bored.

In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.

Voyager was one series I never completed before the streaming roulette started. Not sure how I started looking for it but I finally said no thanks to subs and bought a box set for 50 bucks. I can watch at my own pace and don't have to shell out 10-25 bucks every month. Have seen DS9 but may do the same there since the price (50 bucks) is so compelling as compared to streaming monthly costs, and you get to keep it forever (forever defined by some arbitrary parameter and not equal to infinity)

Why stream when you can either buy/torrent old media? I don't see a point to streaming when its more efficient to buy or download.

Because buy doesn't exist in a sane form for some things. Kids shows are known for never selling by season and only by some weird theme and of course there are dupes between sets. Buy isn't an option at all for some stuff. I'm looking at you Disney vault bulkshit, but also other not as iconic stuff.

Yes pirate, but that's a problem too. I've tried to pirate some stuff that wasn't popular or it was too old and you're just not able to.

Streaming removes a lot of that hassle. Now that the price is becoming too high, people are considering other options, but there is a reason it exists. Streaming is how I let my kids explore media. Yes, I can just give them my childhood favs, but they need a way to try new shows without me directly interfering and it's been great. I would have never picked out my kid's favs for her.

I was gutted when Paramount took ST:Discovery off Netflix. But not only did it not cause me to shell out for a Paramount subscription, it made me decide that I was completely done with Star Trek. I’m cured!

Netflix's secret starting in their DVD days was to provide a service that had way more variety than Blockbuster, so that no matter who you were, the movies you wanted to watch would be available.

Disney especially was arrogant enough to assume that they controlled all the IP that people actually want to watch, so they thought they could just pull out of Netflix and everyone would switch. But that's not how movie preferences work. There's no brand loyalty, there are movies (and shows) people like and movies they don't, and each person's set of preferred movies is unique and spread out across studios. Disney isn't Apple.

To be honest I give credit to consumers to puncture Disney's inflated ego and bring them down to earth. If a minimum threshold of folks kept hankering for Disney's content to keep them in good financial condition they'd remain arrogant as ever.

You also have to be willing to be put out good content that isn't written by ChatGPT, which, as we've seen, Disney has been unable to do for quite some time.

> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay.

Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.

Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.

Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.

Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated.

I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters.

Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2).

BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault).

So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance.

Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result.

Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".

Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.

Exactly this. SW productions are side characters who had some kind of relationship with a skywalker at some point getting their own shows. The recent movie franchise didn't manage to open new directions for bigger plots that can be presented as tv shows therefore all Disney+ SW productions are stuck in the past trying to unsuccessfully expand on existing characters.

For my family, Disney’s value is more balanced between old and new content, vs Netflix, which I expect to lose content after some time.

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.

Corporations don't have feelings. It is okay to be mean to multi billion dollar corporations.

Corporations don't have hands to wring either. I don't love Disney, either IP or their agenda but they didn't wring it. Factually.

They bought an IP to add onto it. If any company wringed anything it was Google buying Motorola for patents and then spitting out the bones to resell.

Corporations are made up of people and groups of people do very much have feelings.

Corporations are people when it benefits them, and are mindless machines when it benefits them.

Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine.

It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.

You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value.

As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable.

That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.

> That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive

The streaming model requires a conveyor belt of content to work. And movies are expensive to produce, consume a lot of bandwidth, and not really replayable. The constraints tend to give bad content. It’s the whole cheap, fast, and good triangle.

This comment reminded me of South Park’s Panderverse for some reason.

Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.

Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

Religions don't wring up other religions by making more media of other religions.

WTF does religion have to do with this? I have no idea what you're trying to say.

You don't wring anything by making more media. It is a ridiculous idea to think.

You absolutely can wring something out by making too much of it. There's a reason "superhero fatigue" is a thing.

Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any. They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.

> you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

Still in luck, you are not yet in Hadoop domain :-)

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.

I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.

Andor is phenomenal at least.

> The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content.

I'd love to see this backed up by sources. I for one recall seeing streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed.

Anecdotally, I watch and rewatch a lot of old series. Like I'm rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.

It's definitely relative to some degree, X-Files is new content to people of a certain age.

The perspective isn't "this is old" it's "think of all of the people born after $THING released, it's new to them."

> streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed.

This doesn't contradict OP—Disney's new content is mostly bad, so it's unsurprising that on their platform people are watching older stuff. But would that have been true of Netflix before everything fragmented? And how many people aren't on Disney+ at all because they'd prefer to see new, good content and already finished what little Disney is putting out?

Isn't Suits - a long since lapsed cable series - like the most popular thing on Netflix? So was Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office for a time too. People love to think they can generalize all streamers into a bucket when in reality it's not as simple as anyone thinks. Viewing trends change all the time and can be unpredictable, even horrible stuff gets tons of views.

Apparently not:

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv

Top 10 is pretty dynamic. Longest item there was there for 6 weeks and is new content. Hilariously "Fireplace 4K: Crackling Birchwood from Fireplace for Your Home" beats out Squid Game.

Squid game show not the actual Korean drama series

Ultimately yeah, it's this. Netflix wins because it understands hanging your hat on one series or IP is business suicide. They churn out a bunch of shows, from higher budget big IPs to a bunch of lower budget series and animations.

David Zaslav and other media execs wanted to try and force the old media philosophy in the streaming environment, which also meant executing a bunch of mid-budget and lower-budget series to try and save money. Except they also shot their only chance of following the actually successful model of Netflix.

Yes because running NFLX, by comparison, is probably not as "fun" of a job as running a traditional media org. Imagine being in charge of IP you watched as a kid, mingling with famous actors & directors .. it's very sexy. It's a ticket to a different social life. A lot of them are larger than life personalities than come from media families.

Netflix by comparison is like running any other FAANG. Pays well, but you can live a pretty rich-but-anonymous life still. I had to look up who was running NFLX these days, and one of the co-CEOs doesn't even have a picture on his Wiki page.

Well Amazon shot many very expensive shows and they turned out to be crapola. The only thing favored Amazon studios was huge cash from Amazon so they could just be fine with all mega failures.

So far lot of streaming shows are crappy in a way I can't quite put my finger on and its definitely not just about budget.

I believe it’s the writing. There is no soul in te dialogue and characterization always seems forced. Acting and set design may be good, but it feels like no one is giving a damn about the scenario

I feel the opposite for Netflix, which has better writing but worse acting, casting, costumes and generally plastic feeling on most of its original shows.

I find most streaming shows subpar, I don’t even bother any more and just watch old series I’ve never seen like Mad Men or Beeaking bad or cheers.

We multicam sitcom is kind of awful in this regard, but at least usually it’s funny.

I think for many Netflix streaming shows it’s something with the cinematography, framing, and use of extras. I know in older movies you would get a variety of shots (through a window outside, or across a crowded room as character approaches, swooping in from above, etc) I think a lot of Netflix shows become framing shot, then “headshot to headshot” without much diversity of perspective. The also use less extra I think. I’m not sure but I think that is a factor.

Money is no substitute for talent.

Except when the "higher budget" is really just paying for an A-list actor with mediocre at best content. There is so much of this in recent years and I think Netflix may be the biggest offender.

I don’t think “beaming 4k video around the world” is really an issue at all.

The way the internet works, with peering etc. bandwidth is super, super cheap. It’s basically too cheap to meter. AWS bandwidth pricing has no relationship to actual bandwidth costs and never did.

Netflix has for years been operating open connect, basically they place proxy servers with ISPs (effectively a peering type arrangement). In 2021 Netflix said they spent $1B worldwide on open connect over the previous 10 years. But they spent $19B last year on “cost of revenue” which basically means content.

$20B a year on content. $0.1B a year on their CDN. I can’t imagine Disney, Comcast, etc is much different.

> I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants.

> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.

If it was so fundamental and obvious like you state wouldn't you have been super rich by now by buying netflix stock when it crashed in 2022. Maybe you are ?

Dominant narrative back then was that netflix is nothing specail. Building a stream app is a commodity that anyone can build and the old-world providers have content that people want to watch.

Everything was doom and gloom for Netflix as I remember it. They were wholly dependent on the licensed content that they will inevitably lose. I guess it turns out that becoming a studio is easier than becoming a streaming platform.

Netflix - The Studio is extremely sub-par, even by today's lacklustre standards. Sure, they have the occasional success; you throw enough garbage against the wall and something will stick.

Either that or Netflix just did a better job than the studios did.

Just because someone was more successful with one strategy than someone else was with a different strategy doesn't mean that the strategy is superior, they could just be a better overall player or even a worse player that happened to outmaneuver a better player, or, even, in the massive multiplayer battle royale that is our economy, a worse player that made bad decisions but happened to luck into ideal market conditions.

I don't think Zoom did anything particularly revolutionary, their product just happened to be the exact right balance at the exact right time.

Any argument of the form “if you knew that all along you’d be rich by now from playing the stock market” is fundamentally flawed because it overlooks one of the most well known dangers of the stock market:

    “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

It absolutely was obvious ahead of time that most of the competing streaming services would fail because they couldn’t possibly recreate the infrastructure of Netflix, but it was not possible to predict when they would fail.

For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year.

Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.

> classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch

The Mall of Damocles

It’s funny how crap the other streamers apps still are compared to Netflix.

Little things matter.

Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more.

Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy.

Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth.

An then they actually have good content too…

Prime never remembers when I finish an episode correctly. It’s always a few minutes from the end or even forgotten I watched it at all. It’s a mess to pick up a new season and struggle with, did I actually watch the complete last season?

Netflix streaming looks worst on my 150" screen. Some shows are watchables but some are simply junk bitrate wise to the point I get huge posterisation effects/pixels. The quality of the content itself is another issue. For movies I just get the disk and store it forever with r.volution NAS(aka old zappiti NAS)

4K at 150" would look like crap. Do any streaming services support 8K? That is a lot of bandwidth and decode overhead.

>4K at 150" would look like crap

I mean it would really depend how close you're sitting to the screen, wouldn't it?

The parent post said it looks pixelated. So, yes distance matters but is not relevant to my post because they already said it looks bad.

Netflix spends a lot more on per developer, and has been working on the UI for longer: See, for instance, how a big percentage of manpower at Disney has been spent going from two completely different UIs between D+ and Hulu into a single one, so every feature didn't have to be made multiple times. Those kind of projects, with a quantity-over-quality approach to hiring, tend to take forever.

Netflix also has an advantage in cost management, also due to better engineers that are also better paid, and have been managing their system for far longer. The AWS bill for D+ is not the kind you get when you have good chances to be profitable. I bet a lot of engineering in the next year or two will be used just more efficient use of compute and storage. I bet many teams there are spending far more on servers than on people.

And if D+ could be doing better, and is still unprofitable, imagine the situation in other competitors that are even newer. The total cost of the infrastructure, without even counting the licensing or the marketing, might cost the more than people are paying.

Oh it's so much worse than opening speed. Paramount+ is straight unusable on every platform I tried, the Android reviews show I'm not the only one. It crashes, fails to load, kicks your dog, you name it. Can't be used.

Peacock has no way to remember I want to see my local news channel live. I have to scroll the entire list of all of the channels across the nation and find mine. It's somewhere near the bottom.

Peacock also has the problem if I pause and want to resume somewhere in the last 15 minutes of a show it'll assume I've finished it and restart. Not great when you just wanted to watch the conclusion after getting off of the treadmill. Also not great when combined with the impossible to use scrubbers, it moves far too fast to be accurate. If you get within 5 minutes of what you were aiming for, it's best to just rewatch that 5 minutes again. You can't improve on it.

I could go on for a while about these platforms, they're hot garbage.

I had this problem with Peacock when trying to rewatch the Office. I kept having to dig through their search to get to it and for some reason it wouldn't add it to my recents. In the end I bookmarked the show page and just use that.

The un-disableable auto-preview, however, is so annoying I never want to open Netflix.

What's really great is MAX. If you've already seen an episode (rewatch or whatever) you probably didn't watch to the complete end (ie skipped the credits), especially if auto play is on. You go to watch that episode again and it drops you at the last 5-10s of the episode and you need to quickly scramble to pause-rewind back before it jumps to the next episode.

Netflix buffers more for me and quality is awful for up to 20 seconds, I like the small jump back on Disney+ when resuming

Disney has admitted they aren't trying to please Star Wars fans. Amazon has admitted they aren't trying to please Tolkien fans. Fans already consider these new developments of timeless classics to be non-canon no matter who technically owns the rights. It'll be a lesson taught in brand management for eons, until the heat death of the sun - don't acquire a property which is only valuable because of fans, just to discard the very thing that gives it value - the fans.

They truly will learn their lessons, or somebody else will.

This. I've always wondered why these companies are trying to create content for audiences that literally don't exist. It's really only shown up in the last few. years.

They're government supported, is my guess. There's no profit motive so everybody can do whatever they want.

> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.

I stopped subscribing to Netflix around 2 years ago because that "sophisticated production tooling" was producing almost purely garbage tier content. With the exception of Black Mirror, there were no compelling new shows - and Black Mirror on its own was not worth the monthly subscription.

I think that part of the problem might be that streaming no longer reliably supplies the old classics. I would likely pay for a service where when someone says "You haven't seen X? It's a classic!" I could reliably watch it. However, in practice the classics are spread across so many different services that none of them are worth subscribing to.

>I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding

I love this. I am not being sarcastic but the optimistic and somewhat enthusiasm of fundamental misunderstanding.

>It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy

I am old. But it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance.

But then I also remember for more than 10 years the media went with the idea that "execution eats strategy for breakfast."

> it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance.

How much money did the executive make while it took years for these strategies to fail? How much will they make from the golden parachute if they're actually fired for their failures? Is that really failure, relative to the executive?

Maybe Disney just needs to start charging Netflix prices?

Disney really shouldn't even be included in the first sentence of this article, according to itself they have 8 million subscribers and are expecting to be profitable next year.

With a subscriber base of 8 million, assuming hypothetically that each pays $15 monthly over an entire year (a figure which is inflated), the resultant annual _revenue_ would be approximately $1.4 billion.

However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone)

Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite optimistic :)

Disney also has Hulu and ESPN+.

(They rolled up Hulu after acquiring a majority share with the purchase of Fox)

Oh, interesting. I'm surprised they haven't merged them / moved people over / shut down Hulu.

They have stake in Hulu, other partner is Comcast. So Disney can't just shut it down on their own.

They are in the process of selling it to Disney (following a 2019 deal giving them the option).

https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavana...

To some extent, Disney are using it as their adult oriented streaming service in the US.

Hulu is the touchstone service — it’s the more edgy and diverse content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_Pictures?wprov=sfti...

They're merging the two apps right now.

As of the last couple of months, much of hulu's content is available under the disney app. Seems only a matter of time before the hulu app is completely deprecated.

I'm confused about your numbers.

Disney+ apparently has 150 million subscribers.

To downvoters: it's from the Wikipedia page...

Netflix isn't profitable if you reject that their production have long term value. Or did that change?

They have way more subscribers than that but are losing subscribers and are themselves in a frenzy over what they consider the failure of Disney+

Do you have any first hand sources of Disney’s thought process and strategy as you’ve summarized them here? Calling Disney naive is bold.

> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.

Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix.

Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.

I can remember when Blockbuster and video rental stores would put all this in a foreign language section, which was then further broken down by genre.

Netflix’s foreign content is quite good. Especially the Korean stuff is pretty high quality and way cheaper to produce, seems like a good idea to me.

I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.

What is foreign language for such a global service?

If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful?

Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, would be a bad thing. But I seriously question the helpfulness of "English" and "Other"

I think the right approach would be to label content that is not in the source language you have set as your device locale.

It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.

Hollywood is not in the source language for most of the world. Netflix brand new English content is also not in the source language for most of the world.

Locales are often compromises that don't reflect user preferences particularly well. People speak multiple languages, and they may have different preferences for content / UI languages, date/time formats etc. And the preferences may be situational, such as native X > native English > English translation/localization > X translation/localization.

Just tag the content with the relevant languages and let the user create filters based on them. And assume that the user understands that languages don't form disjoint categories, because the content itself could be multilingual.

Besides, original audio with subtitles is usually superior to dubbed audio.

Netflix started as English only and already has regional content. It would make since for foreign to be considered “not the dominant language in this region/nstion”

The content quality is excellent, but the English-language voice acting is horrible.

Because it's an afterthought.

Netflix added KDramas in order to help it pivot into the Asian market. Most viewers will be watching the shows via subtitles.

The shows are heavily promoted here in the US, and they default to the English soundtrack.

I'm in the US. And KDramas don't show up prominently in my recommendations (I prefer watching on KissAsian - force of habit and the subs are better).

The algo is heavily targeted to your own assumed tastes. The one time I did watch one, it was in Korean with English subs.

Maybe you watched a western marketed KDrama like Squid Games? Try watching Beyond Evil, Itaewon Class, Reply 1988, or Mr Queen and see if it reverts to English. I'm kinda curious now

Use subtitles?

On top of that, the English subtitles don’t match up with the English voiceovers.

That’s normal. You have to match appropriate sentence length in dubs otherwise when another person is taking the wrong person will still be talking in the dubbed language. Subtitles allow for better translation as that limitation isn’t there

> the Korean stuff is pretty high quality

It's part of their Asia pivot. Netflix invests in fairly high quality Asian TV to try and compete for market share within Asia.

Amazon Prime is doing a similar pivot (fairly successfully I might add) in India.

Disney has dropped out of the Asian market because they just couldn't compete Asian competitors or Amazon+Netflix.

Disney is big in India through Hotstar and Star India which they acquired along with Fox.

Edit: Seems, I wasn't up to date, they are planning to exit India also. Thanks, alephnerd

Disney is selling Hotstar and Star India to Reliance.

It's part of their larger pivot away from Asia and towards building a competitive American streaming presence

https://inc42.com/buzz/reliance-to-acquire-walt-disney-india...

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2023/06/15/disney-shuts-down...

Why is it a problem for you? Don't like reading subs when doing stuff in the background? It's my main reason I don't like foreign, I'm either reading or watching.

Edited post to make my reason more clear

I don’t like reading subtitles period (totally distracts from actually watching the movie for me) and I don’t like dubs either as the words not lining up annoys me.

With the way the sound is mixed, I always have subtitle shown. But I’m a fast reader.

Cross-country content doesn't have to mean foreign language content, right? Squid Game and Money Heist are two examples of "cross-country" content that served Netflix extremely well IMO. Produced for a specific non-anglo-centric region, they slapped shitty English dubs on those and suddenly, world-wide hits.

That’s another thing I don’t like about Netflix: English dubs by default. It’s an example of the deceptive tactics I’m referring to in how they present foreign language content.

The default audio should be in the source language, with subtitles in your language.

Is it really the default? My "default language" isn't english but don't remember seeing a dubbed show.

Unfortunately it is. If you want to listen to the original source audio with subtitles, you have to change these settings each time. It’s super annoying. (Unless something changed recently)

No you don't. I set one show to play with original audio years ago and since then all of them have followed that setting.

It never worked this way for me, but I always use their Apple TV app.

The world is so much larger than the US, you wouldn't believe.

Huh? What does that have to do with anything I stated?

The same would be true if I was watching Netflix in France with my device locale set to fr-FR. I’d just consider English content to be foreign language content instead.

How exactly is that relevant to a streaming service located in, and targeted at, the US?

It is not targeted at the US.

I’m totally with you. I still use almost exclusively Netflix but have to spend a lot more time finding content as it even seems they go out of their way to hide the fact it’s a dub in the trailers. I do a lot of backing out once I realize it’s dubbed.

Thank you, this is exactly what I was referring to. I forgot about the deceptive trailers that attempt to hide the fact it’s dubbed. There’s definitely a deliberate attempt to trick viewers here.

I think the only easy way to tell without watching is by looking at the names of the actors. If they are look like they are from a particular language/region, then it’s usually a sign it’s dubbed.

I was starting to wonder if I was alone with this opinion or if there is just a some Netflix employees here trying to gaslight me. :)

I guess I’m not sure how it’s deceptive? Yes, content isn’t segregated at the top level into foreign and domestic, but the original language is clearly shown and there are many country or language-specific categories too.

Maybe in Blockbuster in the US in the 1990s putting all “foreign” stuff over in its own corner made sense. But most countries didn’t do that. And content consumption has become a lot more globalized in the past decade.

For many people, easily accessing (and being recommended) interesting foreign content is one of Netflix’s selling points, I’d say.

It’s deceptive in the tactics they use to hide the fact it’s dubbed until you actually start watching it. (See sibling comment further down)

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