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Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

ben-evans.com

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Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#221

Post by robertlagrant »

eslaught wrote: post #130
paxys wrote: post #6

While you can make that argument today, Netflix as a company is 24 years old. It got to its current position not by spending $15B/yr on original content (which it can afford to do now) but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users. Of course eventually all discussions of this nature devolve into the intricate definition of "tech company", and in the absence of one that is agreed upon, bringin…

Perhaps Netflix has shifted. In the beginning, I think you could have made a good argument that technology was their moat, but I don't think you can say so today. Today, their best attempt at a moat is content, and it's a poor one at best since they can only make so much original content and it's not as if they can do so in a way that is inaccessible to other services.

Content for them seems a desperate attempt at countering deep content firms' moats, who can now build streaming services copycatting Netflix.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#222

Post by kristjansson »

jen20 wrote: post #190
cletus wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The UI of HBO Max on an Apple TV is entirely befitting of AT&T - it makes me want to watch anything else because of how bad scrolling is because they insist on using their own crapware instead of the platform-native software.

Chalk up DirectTV NOW/ATT TV/DirectTV Stream (all the same product) as a victim of that too. Scroll interactions take multiple seconds to register, click activates elements other than the one indicated as selected by the UI, just an overall shitshow.

But they’re the only OTT streamer that carries the Lakers and Dodgers channels, so alas…

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#223

Post by [deleted] »

cletus wrote: post #215
mulmen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 famou…

[deleted]

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#224

Post by maerF0x0 »

cletus wrote: post #212
maerF0x0 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 int…

On different hardware how do they synchronize the playback speed? Each device has very different processing environment, so I cant imagine it would be easy to ensure that exact of playback speed. eg maybe one is playing 30 frames per second, and the other is playing 29.85 ...

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#225

Post by robertlagrant »

pmoleri wrote: post #108
paxys wrote: post #6

While you can make that argument today, Netflix as a company is 24 years old. It got to its current position not by spending $15B/yr on original content (which it can afford to do now) but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users. Of course eventually all discussions of this nature devolve into the intricate definition of "tech company", and in the absence of one that is agreed upon, bringin…

I disagree, I think getting the license to stream the content is a much more difficult problem than the technology to stream it.

Only once each of the thousands of impossible problems that need solving in order to stream reliably have been solved.

That's the problem with software. It solves problems so well they stay solved, and only constructed problems such as IP ownership remain.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#226

Post by filmgirlcw »

teawrecks wrote: post #121
filmgirlcw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. For the first decade plus of its existence, Netflix was a DVD by mail rental service and there, its technology was a key differentiator. You paid a subscription depending on how many DVDs you wanted to have out at a time, Netflix mailed them to you in red envelopes, and you mailed them back in the same envelope. The ingenious part was that there was a website where you entered in all of the DVDs you wanted and Ne…

Then all companies are tech companies. They all aim to come up with a product that's better than the last, and they almost never use old tech to do it.

Well, yes. In a certain way, everything is tech. Tech != computers/engineers/algorithms/robots/HAl/whatever.

But even in the popular understanding of what a tech company is, Netflix more than many others DOES have historical and current tech bonafides. 25 years ago during dot com mania, there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing about whether WebVan or Pets.com or Amazon or whatever were tech companies. It was accepted that e-commerce WAS tech, even if it was different than DEC/Compaq/HP or Sun or Microsoft or Apple or whatever.

And Netflix operated from a website, used technology for its logistic and delivery system (much like other e-commerce systems)and had a recommendation algorithm (that they had a contest to improve, because they saw that good recommendations reduced churn) and a focus on UX to keep the product good.

It took them more than a decade, but the goal of delivering video via the Internet was always there. Roku, which in its original incarnation was simply a Netflix streaming box, was originally ideated and developed at Netflix before the company decided it didn’t want to be in the hardware business and so the head of the project and the engineers left to make Roku. Netflix has done as much work as any single company except perhaps YouTube to optimize and pioneer how to effectively serve large swaths of video to users across the globe.

The problem with Ben Evans’ piece is that he misunderstands that Netflix has always been a tech and a content company. Even when it was a rental company with more tech and no original content, the recommendation algorithm and the dedication to buyers and curators who would make the decisions about what DVDs were purchased (eventually customer signals played into this too) always had a very strong content focus in the product.

That’s the reason Netflix works. It was the first media company to really innately understand both tech and content. Disney and HBO (WarnerMedia, whatever) have great tech stacks too (especially Disney), but Netflix was the first and is still the most successful.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#227

Post by NordSteve »

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,…

Target and Walmart are still solving some interesting problems around online ordering and fulfillment. Are they tech companies now?

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#228

Post by robertlagrant »

eldavido wrote: post #76

I used to read a lot of writing like this and still do (tech strategy newsletters--Stratechery, Benedict Evans, etc) The hazard of reading stuff like this is that it makes the world seem much more orderly and predictable than it is. Case in point: Zoom. "Videoconferencing is a commodity". "Distribution is all that matters". And all of a sudden, someone does this "commodity" a lot better, without the pre-existing netw…

> Calling the tech "still fundamentally a commodity" bothers me not because I'm a technologist, but because it's horribly hand-wavey and imprecise. It sounds precise, but what...exactly...does this mean?

Quite a lot of analysis seems to be making people feel better about not being technical, when technical jobs are exploding in prominence, and you can sell your analysis better if you make customers feel better.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#229

Post by ycomb9 »

I think almost every company is a tech company in some ways. Tech enables them and has moved on from a concept of being a cost center to revenue enabler. Also tech resources are likely the most expensive resources as well.

Re: Netflix is not a tech company (2019)

#230

Post by robertlagrant »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #199

I'm probably wrong here, but it seems to me that storage is practically cheap enough (not quite) that Netflix could simply send out a drive with their whole library and then a membership gives you access codes. Send out a new drive per year. Do they really only have 4,000 movies in the US?

I doubt my subscription would cover the cost of that drive every year, even if I wanted to wait 12 months for new content!
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