Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

So Intel, TSMC, Nvidia are not tech companies?

I've been in video tech for a long time, and you glossed over the part where Netflix does tech company things. They invented VMAF and per-title encoding. I've seen countless video tech talks and Netflix consistently brings innovation to the table.

> Like Sky, Netflix has used technology as a crowbar to build a new TV business. Everything about how it executed that technology has to be good. The apps are good, the streaming and compression are good, the UI is good, the recommendation engine is good, and the customer service and experience are good. Unlike American cable subscribers, Netflix subscribers are generally pretty happy with the tech. The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV... It used tech as a crowbar, and the crowbar had to be good, but it’s actually a TV company.

By this logic, Google is less a tech company than an advertising firm that used tech as a crowbar! Microsoft is an office supplies manufacturer! Which seems absurdly reductive.

In my mind, if you're scaling customized services for individual users far beyond what a team of top-tier customer service professionals could do (or you're cyborg-izing those service professionals!), you're a tech company. Plain and simple. And Netflix fits this bill because part of its approach to content creation is that programming choices should be driven by quantitative insights about individual users - it's just a very, very long iteration cycle on the optimization algorithm.

Netflix is still trying to figure out what it is. I think their growth post-DVD was based on the assumption that they would be the clearinghouse for all video content; with Hulu and the further balkanization of the video space, it was clear that this was not going to happen; that Netflix was destined to be one provider among many, and that their sources of content would start to dry up as other companies decided that the streaming and application and appliances were commodity technology that they could just brand in-house.

The quality of the UI of Netflix is terrible, but everyone else is so much worse that for the moment they stand out. And they never managed to get on the bandwagon of selling add-on packages like Hulu and Amazon did (although both of those products have such abysmal UX that you gain very little over using the respective native apps).

So now they're continuing to play up the original content game, which appears to be where the industry in general is headed, because the Paramount Consent Decree is so dead that it can't even hear our prayers.

They are a tech company insofar as they have invested heavily in the tech and as a result have the most reliable and usable platform (and the most research into recommendations), but the gap between Netflix and commodity streaming is narrow enough now that their edge in the technology space is gone. So they're basically a studio/theater at this point, like everyone else in the space. The only difference between Disney and Netflix is that Netflix doesn't have a theme park (yet!).