Netflix is different now – and there's no going back
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I suspect with Netflix’s recent crackdown on sharing, this will get much more common and their recent gains in membership will reverse.
They just don’t have that much good stuff coming out, nor do many of the services.
Currently really enjoying Hulu on their 1.00/month plan from Black Friday. Many many shows and movies we’d not seen.
I've had trials on all the others, and they just don't interest me. Some are actually bad, like Apple TV+'s interface and frankly boring content, or Amazon Prime's paid content inside an already paid for service. Netflix has always stood apart in terms of quality (in all areas), but it's already pricey.
I’ve canceled most of my streaming services other than Hulu with Disney at this point. The reason I haven’t canceled Hulu with Disney is that I’ve shared the password with a family member who likes it. “I have to coordinate pulse-width-modulation on my subscriptions” is the only stickiness that these services actually have at this point, I think.
OTOH, Netflix is still in business, so maybe I’m wrong. Shrug.
Although, come to think of it, the worst ads are product placement, and to be fair those are pretty egregious (7-11 anyone?)
https://i.redd.it/7izx4m9d0oy81.jpg
Also the Snapple product placement in 30 Rock.
Product placement can be done well, but 90% of everything is crap.
Netflix is extremely strong, and even more so out of North America. They have a fantastic regional catalogue, massive anime department, produce shows for all age groups, and their shows constantly do well regardless of what people think.
Plus, if they can outlast the other streaming services (which are losing money) and those fail, it might get cheaper for them to license non-original content again.
So they may actually be in a pretty good position.
The game was always profitability, they just had their eye on marketshare gains earlier.
I’ve been pushing this for years, it’s the obvious choice, but people keep saying FAANG anyway.
Because by the time the term was coined, Microsoft was a slow-turning behemoth that had shed a lot of talent to help create the internal engineering cultures at the non-Apple others.
Apple doesn't really belong in FAANG either, but at one point including Apple made it seem cooler.
Of course 3/4 lean on TSMC for the hardest part, so…
Their reputation might not be quite as stellar as it once was, but afaik nowhere near enough of a drop to overcome the fact that they've made a lot of top-tier hires and are still paying top tier comp - I think they're still a very desirable place to work and have on a resume.
It doesn't make much sense to make a group of big tech companies with Netflix and leave out Microsoft.
Amazon might be second easiest if you aren’t using AWS.
But for the question of whether Netflix's compensation and reputation are still at that level - reputation maybe is debatable, comp is definitely still there.
I would be interested to have curated streams of content from YouTube that has been found to be, by some metric (or some critic), top-shelf content.
Just as an example, I consider Pete Beard's entire channel to be a first-rate history of the golden age of western illustration:
https://www.youtube.com/@petebeard/videos
Click on any video, I think you'll be impressed.
Netflix can produce absolutely gorgeous shows, but they lack either the ability or the will to produce anything with with a good story. On top of that they are no long able to buy any good content.
As for pushing ads... Nope, I've spend the past ten years mostly ad free, I'm not going back. Whenever I do see ads on TV, when visiting family I feel assaulted. The cuts and the messaging feels like it's actively trying to hurt my brain.
They used to offer discs in the mail from an absolutely huge library of content that just kept growing.
It’s the only time I used them. As soon as they stopped that I canceled.
Now they just stream from a much smaller library of content where stuff disappears over time. No interest in that.
To offer a movie as part of their subscription a streaming service has to have permission from the studio. Generally only one streaming service has that permission.
With discs no studio permission is required, as long as the rental service doesn't want to make their own copies. If they just buy retail copies and rent those out it is covered by the first sale doctrine.
With discs then all I would need is a subscription to one disc based service, like Netflix used to offer, and my recent movie needs would be covered.
There is an alternative that is kind of like the streaming equivalent of Netflix's old mail order DVD business for those whose ISP is Comcast if you have been a Comcast customer long enough.
Comcast has a rewards program, with the rewards based on how long you've been a customer. One of the rewards is $1 movie rentals. Once a week they make this available on their rewards site. If you claim it that week you can rent any one movie that weekend that they normally rent for $5.99 or less for $1.
Subscription makes everything so much simpler for everyone involved.
The reason I ask is that 20 years ago the refrain was, "I don't want to pay for a collection of channels on cable. I want to be able to pay per channel." That way you could decide to get ESPN and CNN without having to pay for the Hallmark Channel and Disney. Fast forward 20 years and now we are kinda subscribing per-channel and people don't like that either - because, of course, a channel often has lots of stuff we don't want that we think we're paying for.
The problem is that whether you watch 2 shows or 20 shows, it mostly costs Netflix the same (modulo some residuals and bandwidth/hardware costs). They've already paid to make the show.
Looking at Apple TV, buying the complete series of Better Call Saul would be $100. Looking on Amazon, you can purchase by season at $18-24 per season. We're talking about around $90/mo to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, and Apple TV+ so you could purchase around 4-5 shows per month buying a-la-carte. Movies might become another matter since they're usually $20, but maybe movies aren't something you'd want to rewatch much so renting for $5 would make sense.
I think some of this might come down to whether you're an individual or a family. If you're an individual, 4-5 shows per month would probably be around 40-50 hours of content each month. However, I think a lot of people watch more than that since it comes out to less than 2 hours per day. I guess the questions in my mind are things like how much you watch and whether you think $20 for a season of tv is a fair price (or what you think a fair price would be).
A lot of the time, I find the response to be that people still want access to all the content they like, but they want it at a lower price. The idea is that they think they're paying for things they aren't watching - and they don't want to pay for the stuff they don't like. But it doesn't really work that way. If a company has created 10 shows, they need to get the same amount of money from their customers regardless of whether you watch 2 of them or 10 of them. You might say, "let people who watch 7 of them pay more than me since I only watch 2." That's certainly a form of fairness, but it's hard to really price things that way.
I think paying per show (or paying more for watching more) is an untenable position for content creators because it means that you won't try something new. "If you start streaming another show, that's another $x," really pushes people away from watching your content - which doesn't help you at all. You still have to pay to make the content. People aren't likely to pay for a show without getting into it first. It's hard enough to get people to take a chance on a new show even when it's free (or included in a price people are already paying). If they need to spend money to try out a new show, most shows would never catch on. We all complain about great shows getting canceled. That happens because they couldn't get enough people to watch it even when it was free (or included in a price people are already paying). If they had to convince people to put out money before even knowing if it were good, that would make the problem so much worse.
We see (and discuss) these kinds of monetization issues all the time. How do you get people to pay for content? We've seen browser-plugin based stuff where a site might get compensated from a fee you've paid based on what you're reading. But again we have a key thing there: you don't pay more to read more, it just gets spread more thinly. We've seen things like subscription-blogs/newsletters, but it's hard to get people to pay $x for a single creator.
The problem is that it's hard to get people to give you money for unknown items. It's a lot easier to get them to give you money for a few known items that come packaged with a bunch of unknown items which they might end up liking even more than what initially drew them to your service.
But the key thing is that even after your product is "done", you have to keep changing it anyway, to make it look like progress. It goes without saying that all this stuff usually makes the product worse. I'm surprised the word 'enshittification' didn't show up in this article.
Netflix states that it wants to entertain the world: https://about.netflix.com/en#
There are hundreds of millions of people who are not subscribers yet, mix of content and price for the most part.
> Netflix expands to 130 new countries, bringing the service to members in more than 190 countries and 21 languages around the world.
(Emphasis mine)
Saying how many specifically would be too controversial for them :-)
This being the only lifecycle for them is a very recent development. We are at the first generation of companies born with that attitude.
The enshittification has begun...
I’m currently in a temporary place— but it was the same crap quality a few months ago on the other side of the country, with a different internet provider, and an LG C1, native TV app or Apple TV, made no difference— utter crap (HD or 4K didn’t matter- the 4K HDR/DV was just a different flavor of badness) whilst all the other apps were perfectly OK.
Netflix has done a lot of work on better compression via optimized shot-based encoding for 4K: https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for.... The highest 4K bitrate now averages around half of what it used to be (8Mbps rather than 16Mbps), but Netflix does encode highly complex 4K video at higher bitrates (even if they're higher than the previous 16Mbps).
However, there have been complaints about this. Whether it's people actually noticing a quality difference or just feeling like they do, I can't say. I don't personally notice details that small in video.
Maybe it's other changes you're noticing. I believe Netflix has started rolling out the AV1 codec for compatible players.
Compared to AppleTV+ and Disney+ and HBO MAX.
More worryingly, if their metrics show that video quality barely improves past whatever bitrate they're serving now, then their metrics must be completely wrong.
I'm not paying for that, especially with how they often fail to deliver 4K in the first place through their native apps. I could never get my 4K stream working on a Windows 10 machine at the time, so I switched to the high seas which does so perfectly.
I rarely watch any of their original shows anymore for other reasons (their tendency to abruptly cancel shows for one), but the video quality difference between Netflix and HBO/ATV+ is staggering.