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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game. But in the process they realized that it’s not actually a game worth winning, and more importantly, that YouTube and TikTok are their real competition, not Hollywood.

The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix probably understands this and is trying to get away from the historical model as movies you watch online and closer to the optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.

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> YouTube and TikTok are their real competition

Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.

Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.

> My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.

HN spans this incredible gamut from “Turing-award winner chimes in on their field of expertise” to stuff like this that just puts you in awe how pozzed some people are.

I think that those of us who live in the HN bubble, who tend to be more intentional and minimalist about our technology choices, are often out of touch with 90+% of users. My wife is my daily reminder of, and window into, the technology world that most people live in.

> Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game.

Inadvertently an Inglorious Basterds paraphrase?

_Brief him._

Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i look at it in disgust.

Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many other content types that I wouldn’t characterize that way: 3+ hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc. YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of different kinds of content.

My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.

Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.

I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.

I can see this working for individuals but what about families? And although i dont feel thinking too much about netflixes business it raises the question if this would requre to adapt their model to an ad based model rather than subscription.

Anyhow- i see a gigantic problem coming towards us caused by rapidly decreasing attention capacities and this does not help.

Not sure what you mean by families, but I would be willing to bet that most families today already let their children watch more YouTube family content than Netflix content.

And I do believe Netflix introduced a cheaper ad tier recently?

Every parent I know forbids Youtube, for obvious reasons. Even the content on the Kids service is utter crap (I know several who tried the service and dropped it.)

The app has 2.5 million reviews and 131 million downloads, so it is obviously used by a lot of parents.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251942/global-youtube-k...

we’ve all seen the people with the kid glued to youtube and clearly self-navigating. just because there are many people doing this doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

I didn’t claim it was a good thing, I just said it was popular.

(Also a parent) there are two ways to use Youtube. One is to let the child choose what to watch and, I agree, this is a disaster. There's no possible guardrails that would work with their current algorithmic models. The other is to find things they (or I) are interested in, particularly tutorials, and then watch them together and then apply that to real life. It is a fantastic tutorial device and my kids have learned how to do things I wouldn't have known how to do or teach myself. I don't think there is a better substitute for this use case.

Anecdote is not data. We have data

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1301730/us-time-spent-ch...

Yep, YouTube is banned for our daughter except for pre-vetted videos as the content and ads can’t be trusted. We tried the Kids app but the content was 99% terrible.

I do recommend The Kid Should See This though, a really good selection of curated videos.

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/

My kids routinely watch YouTube (with me): videos about carpentry, pottery, machining, robotics, electronics, chemistry, microbiology, recreational mathematics, visual effects, history, ...

It’s really hard to (really truly) ban YouTube and not ban any search engine.

You might find your child spending 2 hours a day on ddg.

Unfortunately all content is being optimized for increasingly brief attention spans and availability / focus.

Interestingly it’s not all content. Super long videos are doing well too, particularly interviews and video podcasts.

I assume some of this is the same trend of people putting long content on and half watching it in the background.

Youtube still has massive variety and quality of production. I've largely been able to avoid the clickbait-optimized videos by curating my subscriptions. I've found about a dozen creators who's content I regularly watch. Many of them create YouTube videos as secondary to some other hobby or profession. Most are trending towards the clickbait thumbnail, but few are actually changing their content in that direction.

YouTube is optimized for unattended children.

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