Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

marketwatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 417 posts

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#181

Post by habosa »

I signed up for Netflix because the original (maybe too good to be true) premise was that I'd be able to stream basically everything in one place. The key is that I came to stream shows that I already watched but which had no home on the internet.

Now Netflix is a place to watch shows and movies made by Netflix. So it's like HBO, but more quantity and less quality. My favorite "comfort food" shows like The Office, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc are slowly leaving the service.

So I find my Netflix account collecting digital dust most of the time. More and more I find myself liking YouTube TV. It gives me mindless channel flipping, live sports, and the cloud DVR gives me a pseudo-netflix where I have every episode of all my favorite shows ready at a click (I just need to fast-forward recorded commercials).

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#182

Post by NullPrefix »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #111
bamboozled wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want. I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t…

I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original

Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie? That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#183

Post by habosa »

zadkey wrote: post #38

I think Netflix needs to invest in quality over quantity. I agree, its hard to find something I want to watch. There is definitely choice fatigue. If they had 1/3 as many shows but those shows were 3 times better. I am sure I would have no problem.

For sure. I recently started watching HBO Go more and I realized that 90%+ of the shows on that service are excellent. On Netflix it's like 20% tops.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#184

Post by geodel »

Well Netflix is now big enough where what their CEO want and what middle management chose to implement will be different things.

On tech side despite all their tech wizardry I get this feeling that this company is overwhelmed with Java design pattern types. On business side it's full of too clever by half folks who would think every user hostile feature is great if it improves some bullshit metrics.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#185

Post by _rtld_global_ro »

isbjorn16 wrote: post #77

My problem with Netflix isn't the slate of shows and movies it has in its catalog. It's definitely not as nice as it used to be, but there are a jillion and a half shows and movies out there. My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch i…

It become more or less just a catalog, often times spent close to an hour just trying to find something might be interesting (not totally shitty), and that's pretty much it: couldn't find anything, just browsing their catalog, with time wasted.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#186

Post by dragonwriter »

atombender wrote: post #168
noelsusman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick an…

People aren't asking for a single distribution channel in the sense of a single monolithic company owning all the IP. They do want (1) convenient apps that aggregate, such as Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, and (2) a way to get all the content without having to pay lots of individual companies (I'm subscribing to around 5 streaming services myself). Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pr…

> Why can't video be like music?

Music is still fighting being “like music”.

> Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now.

There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now.

> You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music.

Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up.

> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.

No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners.

But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#187

Post by pessimizer »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #111
bamboozled wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want. I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t…

I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original

> one person cutting out ads and reuploading it

Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.

Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.

I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.

Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#188

Post by iamnotacrook »

noelsusman wrote: post #147
archey1 wrote: post #75

Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming platforms that I refuse to pay for - I'll probably eventually just cancel Netflix as well going back to the tried and true method of just buying bluray box-sets of the content I want to watch. Or piracy. I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are…

Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick an…

"I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?"

I don't know about anyone else but I'm interested in shows, not channels. I'm not going to sign up to 10 channels - that'd cost too much and some months I'd probably watch nothing on some of them. If I could pick and choose which shows I watched I'd have no problem with a low-friction "sign up via email and pay for what you watch" but that's not the offer. Your suggestion is fine for people who are rich and have loads of time to watch hours of tv every day. That's not the target for these companies though - they recognize it's a zero-sum game and want it to be them you pick over Netflix (or vice versa).

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#189

Post by foldr »

rhegart wrote: post #110
colemickens wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to understand what you're describing. Can you give an example of a Netflix show, the season and political trope, and how it detracted from the show's quality? And I'm definitely curious what you're imagining as you write out "repulsive".

Great- gay crossdresser from sex education is one of my favorite characters ever. Didn’t find it political at all and it just fit the story. Bad- stranger things overly sexist men and the constant putting men down. Detracted from the show, annoying me. Unbearable- Sabrina

Stranger Things is set in the eighties. It's not that much of a stretch to have a local newspaper run by men who don't take a 19 year old female intern very seriously. It also has an obvious function as a plot device, since it would be kinda boring if Nancy instantly figured it all out and succeeded in getting her story published.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#190

Post by addicted »

Alupis wrote: post #178
noelsusman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick an…

> They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting. Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.…

The best Netflix originals are the British shows they've rebranded as Netflix originals in the US.

The actual Netflix created ones have largely missed the mark for me.

Post reply on HN