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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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261–270 of 354 posts

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gen Z fallen to the fallacy that you won’t own anything, smh

Just think of all the amazing content from decades past, even movies from not long ago in the 90s, that many gen z will never see and experience and enjoy in their whole lives because they can’t buy or rent or play dvds any more, don’t use torrents, and streaming providers have very little content from years or decades past. It a loss.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#262

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.

I don’t feel like I can name an example of a good foreign film that got poorly remade such that the local one is bad

Bad American remakes seem kind of rare too, with the exception of terrible live action adaptions

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Night Agent was not good enough that you would want to go through the effort to pirate it, but it was slightly good enough to watch if you had nothing else to do after a hard day of work. I had no idea it was that successful, now I feel sort of bad for contributing to it.

I'm surprised that I wasn't the one who wrote this review!

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms. There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves"…

So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard. Conflating time watched with user enjoyment is much easier. Sounds pretty similar to all mediocre companies out there. I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.

> So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard.

Or to not throw away all the points I argued for: There were a lot of good reasons for moving away from the five star systems, and the main motivation was providing a better less confusing UX

> I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.

The main thing that changed was that media companies woke up to streaming and stopped giving away the rights to properties that many people enjoy (mainly nostalgia shows + blockbusters) for cheap. That forced Netflix much more into media production of their own, which has it's up- and downsides, and gave Netflix the same warts that media companies always had (e.g. having to make hard decisions around canceling shows). It's a very clear case of a first-mover losing its advantage over time.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#267
post #2

93,455,200,000 total hours viewed from January to June 2023. Some quick math says that at any give time, 1 out of every 400 people is actively watching Netflix.

~20 million hours per hour... crazy amount of output. Also if you assume that people only watch while awake then it's 1 in ~250 awake people.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#268

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…

This is fantastic!! Excited to see more data from the other providers, and perhaps building useful things around the data :-D

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#269

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…

Your quote left out "subject to a confidentiality agreement". Streamers are not obliged to make this information public, and I don't expect companies like Amazon to do so since they're extremely secretive about viewership numbers.

Interesting- I'm not sure there's been any streamer more secretive than Netflix about its numbers though.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#270
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…

Less pessimistically, we now have content for a broader diversity of tastes - greater than ever before. As a result, people can choose to watch shows socially with friends, as well as have content just for themselves. And consuming that content can lead to finding new social groups based on shared interests, if they do desire. I find the diatribe of "things got better, we got worse" so... boring and antisocial? You n…

Afaik, overall, we are more lonely then ever. People are not making friends, they are sitting home lonely and isolated.
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