Netflix could pivot slightly and offer white-label hosting of content for each content provider. Spinning up a hosting service to compete with Netflix can't be cheap.
I believe mlb does exactly that
Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#42About 2-3 years ago, I said NF couldn't do what it is doing forever, as there is nothing preventing e.g. Disney or Time Warner from selling their content direct to consumers. Obviously the netflix executives were ahead of me on this one.
It takes much longer to steer a huge ship, or however that saying goes.
That's kind of what I'm saying; it's clear now that when I made that prediction, NF had already started going after original content.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#43I'm wondering why Netflix don't make a few topical shows, which could potentially increase the loyalty of their subscribers and would be very inexpensive to produce. Having their own shows similar to the daily and weekly shows on Comedy Central and HBO would add a new facet to their offerings.
I could see that working. I would be surprised if anything like the Daily Show could be replicated without one of the cast members. But some other topical format with the right person. Like what Bill Maher is to HBO.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#44When Netflix first started, they were able to buy the streaming rights to old movies and TV shows for cheap, because executives thought they weren't worth anything. Now those contracts are expiring, and the studios want to jack up the rates or start their own service. Netflix is also getting squeezed by ISPs like Comcast, who want to charge them for the right to deliver video to Comcast's customers who already paid f…
Don't forget the rather oppressive DRM required by Hollywood for 4K video content. This is why 4K is currently only available for Netflix original content.
It's optional, but most producers choose it despite the additional financial overhead, because otherwise it becomes much more expensive to audit which theaters played your movie and how often in order to get paid. Obviously it's not just theaters any more but they're most likely to have 4k gear, in terms of both display and fat pipes. 4k is basically the industry-standard output format* so if there's no DRM then downstream distributors have an enormous economic incentive to rip the originator off by serving up that very high-quality copy for the highest price they can get and pocketing all the ticket sales revenue for themselves.
Very basically, rental of a film for a cinema for a day is $250 or 35% of ticket sales, whichever is more (the flat rate is less over long periods, the 35% stays the same). 2 hours of 4k UHD video in the ProRes codec (which will play back smoothly on a regular computer, with good enough quality that most people wouldn't notice the difference) is about 700gb. A fast 1tb drive in an enclosure is under $200, so if the film is even moderately popular and would benefit from being presented on a large screen (which most films of any quality certainly do), then it becomes very tempting for exhibitors to make a copy, either for display or to produce knockoffs in disc form (which will be fully competitive with the 'official' version as far as audio/video quality goes).
* Technically there's DCI 4k and Ultra-HD, with the former being slightly higher resolution than the latter - see http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174221-no-tv-makers-4k-an... but they're close enough that even camera people lump them otgether as '4k' and the 10% shortfall on UHD gear is not considered that bad of a loss. If you're very concerned about horizontal resolution chances are you're using anamorphic lenses anyway.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#45I'm wondering why Netflix don't make a few topical shows, which could potentially increase the loyalty of their subscribers and would be very inexpensive to produce. Having their own shows similar to the daily and weekly shows on Comedy Central and HBO would add a new facet to their offerings.
They have indeed recently commissioned a "topical talk show" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/business/media/chelsea-han...).
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#46Netflix is well on its way to becoming the first of the 21st century "networks". When you think about a television network it plays re-runs of old shows, re-runs of old movies, movies that have come out of theatres, and original series.
The only difference between Netflix and say "TNT" or "FOX" (other than they don't have news shows) is that the content is available on your schedule, not the networks, and they don't put advertisements in their content they just charge you a monthly fee to have access to it.
They have, nominally 60M subscribers[1] world wide, and 40M in the US[2], out of a total of 113M TV households [3]. If half of their subscribers watched the series Daredevil (which I recommend) that would be the equivalent of Netflix getting a 20 rating. [4] That would be equivalent to a Seinfeld [ibid] which was NBC's hottest show for a very long time.
So what that means is that networks need to either adapt to this new model or die. And the more that die, the more content there is for folks like NetFlix.
Oddly enough, this sort of makes Roku the new Comcast :-)
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/01/20/netflix...
[2] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-tops-57-million...
[3] http://www.tvb.org/media/file/Nielsen_2014-2015_DMA_Ranks.pd...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings#Commercial_rati...
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#47Content is king and Gates was right: http://www.craigbailey.net/content-is-king-by-bill-gates/
Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.
The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.
When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of “content” becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content-an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.
But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#48When Netflix first started, they were able to buy the streaming rights to old movies and TV shows for cheap, because executives thought they weren't worth anything. Now those contracts are expiring, and the studios want to jack up the rates or start their own service. Netflix is also getting squeezed by ISPs like Comcast, who want to charge them for the right to deliver video to Comcast's customers who already paid f…
No kidding about Comcast - Streampix? Talk about derivative naming. And it's priced to kill Netflix at $5/mo for cable subscribers. I'm not so sure about the pirating scene - while big content providers likely will never kill it, they seem to have lawmakers in their pockets, and so will criminalize it as much as possible - expect draconian measures to destroy the most dangerous threat to big content providers.
Every time I login to pay my Xfinity bill, I pause, because their website looks like a carbon copy of Netflix.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#49I guess there is another, very big reason:
The Non-US markets.
The US is surely important, but Netflix has launched in Europe and faces a huge obstacle that very few US Americans know about - rights licensing is far worse.
Selling content overseas is a huge business, which means a giant time delay until something makes it to, say, Germany (even if not dubbed). Which worked in the past, but the Internet is forcing real time usage, see the piracy numbers worldwide for something like Game of Thrones (HBO, I know). There is practically no legal way to easily consume something like GoT the same time as it is aired in the US.
Not so for Netflix' own content.
House of Cards, Daredevil - all already available globally.
The world is a big place and Netflix is going after it, the US is just one market.
That HBO/Apple TV deal better be global soon.
Re: Netflix Is Betting Its Future on Exclusive Programming
#50When Netflix first started, they were able to buy the streaming rights to old movies and TV shows for cheap, because executives thought they weren't worth anything. Now those contracts are expiring, and the studios want to jack up the rates or start their own service. Netflix is also getting squeezed by ISPs like Comcast, who want to charge them for the right to deliver video to Comcast's customers who already paid f…
So big media created their own competitor by jacking the price up for netflix. Oops.
Netflixs growth forced the issue. Cable can't run on original, first run content alone. There is so much content that is on Netflix that it doesn't matter that it is all reruns.
Netflix would destroy the networks but also their main suppliers.
That is why Netflix is going into original content. If they won't fund it nobody will.