Earlier quoted context omitted.
"So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed." They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era. Sitcoms would be perfect…
> Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason. The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws . I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms. I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows…
But what if I want a faster horse?
601–610 of 632 posts
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason. The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws . I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms. I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows…
Exactly, Netflix should do more and release a new episode every week to make sure people keep subscribing!
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't often watch that service on anything other than our "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very brief black screens were where ads would have been.
>Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. It works on Hulu too. You get a box at the beginning of the show saying "please turn off your ad blocker" but once you click OK it never comes up again.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much. No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what…
> Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time […] Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the…
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were people who only had HBO subscriptions to watch the new season of Westworld. Given they merged with Cinemax I’m not sure if that worked out for them. But there were also Apple+ subscriptions just to watch Ted Lasso. And I begrudgingly got Prime to watch the Expanse. But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to App…
Prime is a whole different beast. That's about maximizing their ecommerce profit through market manipulation.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#606The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees. Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscr…
I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library. You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-mont…
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#607Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time! It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing. I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music. Are they having licensing issues?
It’s less obvious than with Netflix because the songs don’t completely disappear. Spotify pays different rates for different songs depending on the label so there are certain songs they’d rather you not listen to and other content it’s much cheaper for them if you listen to so they push you to that content.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH I agree with that. > but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars I agree with that too. > because the people who are into cars like those marques. I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence. The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desi…
By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt.
> By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable.
Yep. I don't see anything problematic with that. I believe if you make a rare and cool looking sportcar people will recognise it as desirable. That's basically the definiton of "cool looking". If people (gearheads and regular folks alike) don't recognise it as desirable then you didn't made a cool looking car.
Which part do you disagree with here? I'm just thinking how we could test it. Imagine a car hot-or-not site. One where users have to "pick" which car is looking better or more desirable. The ultimate test would be to mix a few fictional sport car looking cars there. One which is completely made up so the gearheads could not have possibly approved it already. Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? If you think this is suitable to answer our disagreement we could set this experiment up.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#610For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…