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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#301

Post by klondike_klive »

layoric wrote: post #66
teej wrote: 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…

> The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 That is just depressing IMO.. I don't understand the appeal to that show..

I never understood it either. My parents used to watch it together at top volume. My theory was that it was easy to watch, you knew exactly what was going on, it was familiar. When my mum died my dad would watch it alone at top volume, I guess it reminded him of her and a bit of comfort in a world that had suddenly gone unrecognisable, crazy and scary. I could never stand the grotesque yelling voices and hysterical laughter and I would ask him to mute it or switch it off when I came visiting with my son. I can't imagine I will ever watch an episode but I derive a weird sort of mild comfort knowing that it's there.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#302

Post by flanked-evergl »

blitzar wrote: post #288
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…

I expect they fought for, and won, something that will ultimately work against their best interests. Netflix etal. didnt hide this data to pay writers less, they hid to to juice their stock price. If they disclosed how few views they recieved for the piles of cash they were throwing at original content the magic money tree would have dried up.

What is really insane is that stockholders didn't press this, but then you remember that most stock is held in trust by the likes of BlackRock who couldn't give less of a damn, and it all makes sense.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#304

Post by globular-toast »

kombookcha wrote: post #286
globular-toast wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness? I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.

HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in. Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological…

> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.

That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".

It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.

Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.

The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.

At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#305

Post by bmacho »

anvuong wrote: post #127
tantalor wrote: post #100

Kind of funny that Netflix, the video hosting website, uses YouTube to host their videos on their website.

Why is that funny? If you treat Youtube as a social network, which it pretty much is, then it would actually be funny if Netflix is not on it.

Because youtube comes with things like

  * depending on another, rival company
  * mysterious bugs you have no control over
  * loss of your own data 
  * giving your customers data to a company for free that maybe even would have paid for the same data
  * not your users having a conversation about your product on a media that you don't control (which is not necessarily bad, but is definitely a side effect)
  * it is illegal to embed youtube in Europe, without asking consent first, and immoral in the rest of the world too*
and such. 'Funny' as in 'ridiculously bad decision'. If I were at Netflix I'd just put the videos on a netflix server in a standard media format, embedded with html video tag. Simple way to ensure that as long as the website is up the video is also up, users are not redirected from your website, the video is fast, good quality, and so on.

*Not the act, but how they do it currently. When you open the article, it tells google that you have opened the article for no reason. They should avoid this if they can (and they can), also they should put google in their privacy statement which they didn't do.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#307

Post by blitzar »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #302
blitzar wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect they fought for, and won, something that will ultimately work against their best interests. Netflix etal. didnt hide this data to pay writers less, they hid to to juice their stock price. If they disclosed how few views they recieved for the piles of cash they were throwing at original content the magic money tree would have dried up.

What is really insane is that stockholders didn't press this, but then you remember that most stock is held in trust by the likes of BlackRock who couldn't give less of a damn, and it all makes sense.

Said stockholders as well as the VCs had/have the exact same incentive as the management of Netflix, namely to see the price of the pieces of paper they hold increase in value.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#308

Post by Eumenes »

abenga wrote: post #303
ziptron wrote: post #148

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

Do you work at 100% concentration and effectiveness 100% of the time? Downtime is restorative and important.

During Q4 2022 the average US adult spent 294 minutes per day with TV, down slightly from 303 during Q4 2019. [1].

Nothing says restorative and important like sitting stationary on a coach watching TV for 5 hours per day while obesity and mental health issues are at an all time high. Its def important for advertisers. Stop excusing lazy and slovenly behaviors.

1 -https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-...

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#309

Post by mejutoco »

EvanKnowles wrote: post #239
rr808 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has happened with books already and nothing (arguably) broke.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#310

Post by kombookcha »

globular-toast wrote: post #304
kombookcha wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in. Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological…

> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes. That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements". It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch. Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as…

The "meal replacement" industry is exactly what I am thinking about. I know some of them are marketed as essentially premade low-caloric meals, that theoretically make it easy to do calorie-counting. At least that has some kind of niche application that I get the use-case for.

But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.

I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?

I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.

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