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IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
> Instead of producing two mediocre shows and an algorithmically designed movie every single week Thank you. The only reason I break my Netflix embargo (and log into my profile on a friends account) is so I know what some viral meme is about. Nobody[1] talks about or remembers shows from there two weeks later. [1] this is hyperbole validated by 200,000 - 2,000,000 others seeing the light
> Instead of producing two mediocre shows and an algorithmically designed movie every single week I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise. Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productio…
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> you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60 You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development. I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x. The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
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It is not easy to see for me. If you want access to all the content all at once, then pay up.
If you want access to specific content at the specific time you want, then pay then, watch, and cancel the subscription if there was one.
This latter option was not available before, and it is now. I am loving the new system which cuts out the middleman (cable/satellite tv) that was able to jerk around both me and the content seller.
The next problem needing to be solved is reducing copyright length to 10 years or so. That is what will make the price of content go down by increasing the number of content sellers.
Interesting analysis. I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after sur…
I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
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I agree re: Netflix and Dropbox. Salesforce acquired Slack though. The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
Zoom is trying to compete in that space and doing pretty ok
Interesting analysis. I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after sur…
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
I get Netflix through my cell phone carrier, otherwise I would drop it. I don't watch a lot of content, and I find myself watching HBO Max more often when I do. With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
I get Netflix through my cell phone carrier, otherwise I would drop it. I don't watch a lot of content, and I find myself watching HBO Max more often when I do. With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
I love HBOMax content but the technology is a nightmare. Constant buffering that makes shows almost unwatchable, which I cannot understand since I have no problem with Netflix, Prime, Hulu and Disney.
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HBO Max is phenomenal. They seem to be going a different route (pushing quality) than Netflix (algorithms generating low-budget reality shows).
Apple+ is also slowly entering that bracket (with stuff like Severance) and I'm here for it.