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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#181

Post by rasz »

j7ake wrote: post #161

Read the top 10 list, and I haven’t heard of any of these shows. Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about? Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them: they were the topic of conversations or at least listed in thr “TV guides”

>everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them

as defined by Nielsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research#Ratings...

    1980 1,700 audiometer homes and a rotating board of nearly 850 diary respondents
    1985 Nielsen meters TV viewing in more than 5,500 U.S. homes
    2003 Nielsen doubles its national TV sample from 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. households
    2014 Nielsen has installed electronic devices known as “people meters” in 16,916 homes
    2017 A Nielsen rep personally told me, this very afternoon, that there are about 17,000 Nielsen
    2019 approximately 46,000 households nationwide
    2021 Nielsen ... among its almost 60,000 active
    2022 National TV panel reached 42,000 households
    2023 Nielsen uses several sampling procedures, but its main one is to track the viewing patterns of about 20,000 households
Looks like in the nineties they had ~5K sample points.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#182

Post by ravetcofx »

jval43 wrote: post #7

With all their employees and machine learning people Netflix couldn't find a single data scientist to present this in a nicer way? All we get is an Excel sheet dump with a huge list, not even grouped by series? Not to mention regions, languages, genres, some graphs, etc. I'm a bit surprised to be honest.

And was it just me or did the formatting cause massive lag in LibreOffice Calc, had to convert it to CSV first to make it usable

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#183

Post by rasz »

alexpotato wrote: post #96
jl6 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stephen Fry described TV as the nation’s fireplace, with the implication that shared viewing of a common canon strengthens cultural connections with other people. It’s like how millennials can drop a Simpsons quote into a conversation with their peers and everybody gets the reference. Peak TV has annihilated this. Nobody watches the same stuff anymore. Did you catch the latest season of Current Thing? No, because the…

Good time to mention that 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of MASH. To this day it's still in the top 10 of most viewed television events with the other being primarily sports events (e.g. Super Bowl etc)

as estimated by a sampling of 1700-5500 homes.

    1980 1,700 audiometer homes and a rotating board of nearly 850 diary respondents
    1985 Nielsen meters TV viewing in more than 5,500 U.S. homes

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#184

Post by Dig1t »

tempusr wrote: post #128
Dig1t wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really love the show, I think it's a combination of likable characters and feeling special when you understand a physics/chemistry/scifi etc reference. It makes you feel smart because you are in on the references that the smart people are making.

Sure, but the show displays toxic masculinity as a dorky thing that "nerds" just do. Overall, I believe the show is a terrible role model for how men who are in STEM fields should behave to others who do not fit the stereotype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4

If all entertainment must conform to an idealistic view of society then it's just going to be really boring isn't it? I think a lot of people are not going to watch TV shows if they only portray the world in this highly moralized way.

I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#185

Post by eszed »

wmil wrote: post #168
Tomis02 wrote: post #67

Slightly related. Netflix is that company that doesn't provide English subtitles in Australia (unless the movie/show's original language is not English), and possibly other native English countries as well. They do provide closed captions however, so that we get helpful captions such as " loud urinating sounds ".

What's really annoying is when you turn on the CC subtitles and someone speaks a foreign language. The on screen subtitle gets covered with an unhelpful "[speaking Japanese]"

That's an artistic choice: the POV character in that scene doesn't speak Japanese, so viewers receive information limited to their perception.

Languages are handled differently in truly multi-lingual media. Watch _Invasion_ for a good example (the first season is amazing, but we didn't care for the second). There, the audience gets subtitles for everything, so viewers often know more than the characters do. There's a beautiful sequence in the desert where two men, unable to understand each other's language, pour out their hearts to each other, and - unwittingly, and across a cultural chasm - share the same hopes and fears.

There's a third way of handling language, which I hardly ever see: the characters on-screen understand each other, but the audience doesn't. The _Star Wars_ by-play between R2-D2 and C3PO is the most accessible example. This is engaging because viewers have to fill in the blanks to infer what one or more of the characters have said.

You might prefer that everything be of the second type, but keep an open mind! The creators probably had a reason for making the choice that they did.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#186

Post by lotsofpulp »

echelon wrote: post #65
deafpolygon wrote: post #48

No wonder Netflix continues to make shitty shows. People are watching shitty shows. I don't watch the shows that the bulk of Netflix viewers watch!

Same. I feel Netflix is a really shitty version of HBO. I rarely, if ever, watch it. The original House of Cards was great. Mindhunter was alright. Neither reached the pinnacle of most HBO programming. It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing. And the fact that they ditched such a prestigious brand to rename themselves "Max".

> It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing.

While Zaslav will obviously make things worse, note that it was AT&T that fired all the HBO bosses that curated HBO’s offerings quite a few years ago now. HBO was killed before Zaslav got to it.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#187

Post by rr808 »

thebradbain wrote: post #118

For anyone else wondering “why they’ve decided to do this”— This is an outcome of the WGA strike negotiations. Now writers (and actors, and anyone else) can use this information to better negotiate their worth with studios, rather than it being 1-sided. All other streaming services should be following suit soon. https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won > Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to…

Who needs new content? Kinda sad to see the most popular shows being Friends, Suits, Breaking Bad, the walking dead etc.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#188

Post by russelg »

dom96 wrote: post #64

This is just about the worst "yearly report" by a major company I've seen. A mass of text, a link to an xlsx file and a youtube video with audio quality remniscent of a telephone earnings call. Where are the pretty charts and interactivity all in glorious HTML5?

To be fair the video is a recording of a telephone call with reporters, so basically an earnings call.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#189

Post by magicalhippo »

imglorp wrote: post #50

These results must be heavily influenced by canceled series but the word is not mentioned (probably verbotten) on the posting. If I've watched a dozen series and had them cancelled before their conclusion over recent years -- not an exaggeration -- I will be much less likely to watch a new series. Instead I will tend towards movies or a limited duration series, usually sixish episodes with a premeditated conclusion,…

Thos has been a thing for a long time. Like you I'm not watching a show until I know it's a contained thing or at least 2-3 seasons are out.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#190

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

nickthegreek wrote: post #123
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It had an interesting characters at first, but then it quickly devolved into relationship show with all the character adjustments necessary to make it happen. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.

Putting Seinfeld and Big Bang in the same bucket hurts my soul. Not sure how either are bad for you though. People need a way to decompress and a 22min sitcom is a great way to transition from one mood to another.

I will admit it is not a perfect match, but both have a laugh track and both remain very popular. I think I may have been trying to get an agreement from several generations of sitcom enthusiasts.

How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.

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