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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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231–240 of 354 posts

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#231

I wonder what else humanity would have done with those 100 billion hours if it were not for Netflix.

In the old days? Back-breaking work that's no longer necessary or efficient. In the slightly less old days, probably socialize. Nothing super productive or world changing I assume. I would also guess that a lot of these hours are spent sleeping rather than actively watching. Most people I know put comfort shows on to help them fall asleep these days.

I don't know that I can agree with the common view that back in the "old days" life was just tons of back breaking work. Yeah it was definitely more labor heavy, but people didn't have the nutrition to keep up with the heavy workload people assume these days and not be crippled by 40, which we know they weren't outside of accidents. Plus it would make all the art, monuments, religious ceremony, technological and social advancements, war, and other time and energy consuming activities near impossible if people just barely managed to survive. And there are tons of games from antiquity that people wouldn't invent and been playing if they were working all the time. Especially when you consider it would have been even harder during bronze age or stone age eras with even less technology and knowledge. And farming work just doesn't keep bringing gains by working all through the year. Crops take time to grow and can only be harvested at certain times. You are wasting effort keeping planting past the spring because you will get worse and worse returns on it and at some point you won't be able to harvest or eat it all before it rots anyways.

People worked for themselves and did what they needed to survive and live how they wanted, and doing more beyond that gave worse and worse returns that eventually people will stop for not having much value. Chopping 5+ years of wood ahead of time gains nothing because without a ridiculously large building to store it in it, which also requires more maintenance, will rot and lose energy and become less valuable over time. There is no point in making a lifetime's worth of your own clothes now if it is just going to get eaten by moths and fungus after being stored for 10-20 years. You are only going to get slightly ahead to head off bad times and then stop producing after that.

One of the biggest rallying points behind the 19th and 20th century labor movements was people wanting to return to the lower working hours that their grandparents and great grandparents worked living a far more subsistence lifestyle, and is how we came up with a 40 hour work week, which also assumed having time for the multitude of religious holidays and seasonal breaks in work they also enjoyed, and was still a mere compromise between the two lifestyles.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#232
post #73

Kinda sad that Netflix opted for quantity over quality. It shows with all the inane sequels like Murder mystery 2, Extraction 2 and with the idea of just filling an uninteresting script with some stars to make the numbers like Red Notice. And many of the top 50 shows reflect just that. The last Netflix original I watched and liked was The Queen's Gambit.

Or, to look at it another way, they're giving their paying customers what they want.

They are not. They removed the five star rating because they thought people lied to themselves, but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data.

What they will give you is what I call the lowest common denominator of shows.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#233
post #185
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The POV character might not speak Japanese, but some viewers without hearing difficulties might, so Japanese-speaking viewers using CC shouldn't be discriminated against. Or the Japanese phrase might be "konnichiwa", which most people would understand. Or it might be a commonly used term, like "Cinco de Mayo". The subtitles shouldn't cop out with [speaking foreign language], but instead put the foreign phrase in the subtitles if it isn't meant to be translated.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#234
post #116
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…

There are definitely still Current Thing's though - Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Squid Games. They'll come and go. There's also the 'in-joke' kind of references from more niche shows that can form a stronger connection than the big thing of the day.

If you think that Game of Thrones counts as Current Thing then you've fallen behind

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#235

Huh, wow, good for Alice in borderlands. Didn’t expect it to do so well. Death games are kind of cliche by this point but I liked this show. The games were fun and not as depraved. They were often dumb and unbalanced. And the final fight was wildly choreographed much better than almost any non martial arts thing

I think we have a US exhaustion.

There are some really great movies that does great locally, then gets a remake by Hollywood and flops because it gets americanized, and then you kill not only the american version but the local one as well, as it becomes harder to market it, killed by association.

American movies are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s too much.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#237
post #206
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”

Paul Graham has an essay that touches on that http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html >And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. W…

> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.

I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.

Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.

Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.

If you want to see some data, check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...

The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.

Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.

Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#238
post #35

I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25: TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,8…

Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you d…

Basically no one in my age group (gen z) knows what Torrents are let alone is able to use them. Most piracy happens via sites like s dot to.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#239
post #187

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.

Eventually enough content will have been produced that a human could watch an incredible series every day of their lives without anything new coming out. That's when humanity will peak and crumble happily away.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#240

It just occurred to me Netflix has a great history of finding ways to screw workers. They famously are the first company to go with “unlimited vacation” so as to not have any money on the books and also screw employees from taking a vacation. They also found ways to not share any revenue with writers and not reveal engagement numbers either

> They famously are the first company to go with “unlimited vacation”

I took more vacation at Netflix than anywhere else I ever worked, and so did most of the people around me. Management would make it a point to remind you to take your vacation, and would always make sure they all took vacations more than a week at a time so you knew it was ok.

Unlimited vacation was a huge benefit to me as a worker at Netflix. Other companies have ruined it by using it as a stick instead of a carrot.

> They also found ways to not share any revenue with writers and not reveal engagement numbers either

They paid up front, before the show was even created. For most writers this worked out better than residuals. It was only the writers on the most popular shows that got screwed by this, and only after Netflix got really popular. The system needed changing and it was good that they went on strike for it, but they all seem to forget that it was actually advantageous for them at the beginning.

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