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Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

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Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#211

Post by auggierose »

Jensson wrote: post #189
auggierose wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody I know considers a car company a tech company. I think there exists a strange Silicon Valley definition of tech out there. But maybe my German bias shows. I mean, most of the stuff in SV barely qualifies as tech.

> Everybody I know considers a car company a tech company I have never heard that. Car companies are mostly manufacturing, that is the major part of their organizations and what drives their decisions. They have big engineering teams, but they have way bigger teams working at factories. If you had a company just creating car designs and selling those to manufacturing companies it would be a tech company, but the curr…

Audi. Vorsprung durch Technik.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#212

Post by cletus »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #205
cletus wrote: post #148

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…

> Netflix isn't a tech company anymore They're still solving some interesting problems like how to watch the same content, in sync, with your friends. Interestingly my gf and I noticed that when we watched NFLX together using a video call to see eachother's faces/commentary our video would skew by noticeable amounts across the span of a movie. (eg even a 0.5% speed difference would give a 3 second skew in 10 minutes,…

Co-watching is an interesting space. One I've worked in actually. And yes, I agree it's not "solved".

Amazon has taken a stab at this with a watch party on Twitch. I imagine you could have a private stream and do it that way maybe? Not ideal of course. It's intended for a different use case.

The best options I've seen involve using sites of questionable legality plus Discord.

Your observations of skew are kind of interesting and larger than I would've expected. But I guess this is the video players being built to show you the content not showing you the content at the same time as someone else. Specifically this means no effort is made to "catch up" in case of buffering. You or your GF must have a lot of buffering. This alone surprises me because Netflix's core delivery tech seems to be extremely good. But again, their delivery tech probably isn't built to solve this problem.

Anyway, while that's an unsolved problem it's not core to Netflix's business and that's the key criteria here.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#213

Post by jakeinspace »

spoonjim wrote: post #196
cletus wrote: post #148

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…

There is probably still a lot more AI/ML work to do at Netflix. For example if you are browsing through standup comedy specials and you see the trailer joke, and you skip to the next one, they know exactly where in the joke that comedian bombed for you. So for other people like you, they can show a different joke from their special, and for you they can build a profile of the kind of humor you like. Then if you start…

I don't see how this example would necessarily benefit me as the content consumer/customer nor Netflix. What if the clips that Netflix learns to show me aren't representative of the entire special, and I'm disappointed? And while Netflix to some extent wants to have me spend time using their service (to ensure I feel like I'm getting value and don't cancel my subscription), watching more things I don't enjoy may not help.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#214

Post by swman »

Every problem that business solve, even if it is "technical", is still a business problem.

Nobody cares about docker, until businesses (that might be in retail/healthcare/cruise/whatever) realize they can use docker for their needs.

Nobody cares about stripe. Until businesses realize they just pay for a well documented, easy to use SDK.

I work for a company in a sector that is not that familiar with technology. We're bridging that gap, and the software we sell is a technical product, but engineering is only part of the equation. Again, nobody cares about what we make until those business realize that software loaded on those phones everyone carries can help them improve/increase their business.

Just solve problems. Labelling problems is for business analysts/consultants/hamster wheel professionals.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#215

Post by cletus »

mulmen wrote: post #207
spoonjim wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably still a lot more AI/ML work to do at Netflix. For example if you are browsing through standup comedy specials and you see the trailer joke, and you skip to the next one, they know exactly where in the joke that comedian bombed for you. So for other people like you, they can show a different joke from their special, and for you they can build a profile of the kind of humor you like. Then if you start…

It’s an open question if this kind of capability actually has a positive impact on the bottom line.

Honestly that's my experience with ML in general. And I know any organization that does a lot of ML has things like backtests and holdouts to supposedly measure impact on key metrics but I've seen too many cases where adding X has a +10% impact in some top line metric and then removing it later (and returning to the initial state) has another 5% increase in that same top line metric.

Maybe we need to revise the famous phrase to: Lies, damned lies, statistics and machine learning.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#216

Post by majormajor »

cletus wrote: post #148

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…

One core problem Netflix is currently trying to solve with tech is "how do we produce hundreds of series/movies concurrently with predictable budgets and predictable performance."

They want to be a tech and data-driven studio.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#218

Post by kbenson »

duped wrote: post #170
cletus wrote: post #148

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…

There are numerous "unsolved" problems in VoD - technical, economic, and creative. Netflix and YouTube barely scratch the surface, and traditional multimedia organizations give up and ship what they can on other companies' infrastructure without any technical innovation. XR and interactive content are the obvious next generation of platform with many technical challenges to overcome. It's hardly solved.

It's solved to the level that additional changes and advancements won't make a major difference to the company as it is right now. Those advancements might end up being a major component later, but someone else could solve that problem and they could license it just about as easily. At this point Netflix is a multimedia company that runs their own infrastructure, not a tech company focused on delivering multimedia.

Netflix could swap out all the underlying tech for someone else's and update their players to use that and nobody would really notice, except possibly for the very few interactive experiences they run. That's why they're not a tech company anymore, they've matured the technology, and so have their competitors, to the point it's a commodity.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#219

Post by robertlagrant »

tomrod wrote: post #177
cletus wrote: post #148

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie a…

Tech firm: your product team creates externally used technologies. Not tech: tech improvements are internal and/or your IT staff is all about maintaining/integrating external products. IT as cost center versus profit center may be a useful distinction.

> IT as cost center versus profit center may be a useful distinction.

Or perhaps "has a software engineering department".

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#220

Post by southphillyman »

cletus wrote: post #183
tapoxi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify? I subscribe to HBO Max and it works fine.

I wonder if that commenter meant HBO Go? HBO tech has had an interesting history. First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems. HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came fr…

HBO Max performance seems to be platform/tv dependent. It works fine on my Ipad but is absolutely dreadful on my Samsung televisions. Super slow and crashes every single time when viewing content that is 30+ minutes.
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