I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members, not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a slice of pizza...
If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix. So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to Apple instead.
No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I will grant that they've been innovative in producing/distributing international content, this is really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international content to different global target distribution markets but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign market rather than foreign production -> localization -> Anglophone market).
Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time - that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the apparent success, further investment will not improve user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth the spend).
Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the streaming behemoths. I do not have subscriptions for each streaming platform out there, but out of the several ones I do, Disney+ and especially Prime are the worst offenders that throw random trash either into the home screen or into the «personalisation» section, e.g. «because you have watched The Expanse, we thought you would like an NBA season / rugby World Cup» and stuff like that. You would think that obsessively clicking the «Like» button after watching something you actually liked would influence the personalisation, except it does not. Disney+, again, fills up the home screen with garbage I would never fathom could even exist.
The thing is that with the currently available technology, building a capable (it does not have to be perfect) recommendation is not that hard. At work, we almost daily design and build solutions that employ semantic similarity search / something, and with the current crop of multimodal LLM's that can generate vector embeddings with ease, it is relatively easy to build out a recommendation engine or algorithm tailored for the needs of a specific streaming platform.
Granted, specific optimisations are required and there will be unique new challenges in there; however, crafting such a solution is well within the realm of possibility. And the amount of money required is not even that high considering that many building blocks are available as mature, managed services, or creating a bespoke and tailored in-house solution does not require starting off from the clean slate by leveraging the prior art. That was not the case, say, back in 2018, but in 2025 it is a reality. For a bizarre reason that is beyond my comprehension, almost no streaming platforms do that.
> […] that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic […]
That is the aspiration and the high ideal; however, something else is going on, and it is not entirely inconceivable that the marketing department is complicit in the foul play.
I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future.
Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.
A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).
But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.
Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)
It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.
Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.
Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).
EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.
If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?
I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.
Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.
The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already
They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.
But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.
Money is the only thing that matters to them.
Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".
The word means something different now.
The more you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe.
If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months, that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at your credit card statement.
Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.
But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use it and pay for it.
Is there a circumstance that could cause their stock price to drop to $0 more quickly?
Even critically acclaimed shows like Slow Horses from a supposedly prestige media seller like Apple has scenes where you watch actors put on AirPods Max headphones (obviously with no relevance to the plot).
More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”
Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.
What definition of propaganda are you using here?
There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.
That money goes to the people who made the film though, which in some cases actually is Netflix but not usually.
On the TV show White Collar, the main character is never, shown driving a car, or talking about them, or having any interest in cars whatsoever. He walks around New York City, or is driven in a government employee's car. Yet, in one of the later seasons, he compliments on specific features of a car he is being driven, and has a dialogue about it with another character.
Extremely jarring for anyone paying attention, and obviously advertising. Product placement is sacrificing some portion of the art in exchange for money (or products/services which otherwise reduces production cost).
It works on Hulu too. You get a box at the beginning of the show saying "please turn off your ad blocker" but once you click OK it never comes up again.
And that’s why you can’t get a faster horse
I have to go wash my mouth out now. Brb.
Some of these companies are trying to go for status now as well. They’re trying to strengthen their brands by picking up epic storylines and making them into the show everyone is watching. Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. Which means Netflix cancels more shows because the numbers are terrible.
What they should be doing is test audiences. If those people hate it, then yes cancel. And be patient with everything else.
What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.
Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to make additional seasons even if they announce them it's still forever before they come out.
This doesn't feel as true anymore. There's still the odd HBO blockbuster but they're producing a lot more garbage as they search for the next hit. And they're not immune to the Marvel approach of strip mining a profitable franchise well past there being any gold left.
Netflix shouldn't bother signing shows without a 2 year contract at this point.