681–690 of 1001 posts
Netflix was a great product innovator for a long time but now that they're running out of ideas they're pivoting to acquisitions.
I guess one big difference is that their direct competitors aren't startups - they're Amazon, Apple, etc. - so perhaps this plays out more as a race to acquire studios, IP, and creative talent.
Then if/when they have a monopoly they'll charge $20 a month and still play ads every 5 min and we'll be back to cable.
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The production side is the problem. Netflix churns out shovelware crap designed to be on in the background. Every once in a while they get lucky or stick their neck out to acquire something good, but the batting average is very low. HBO on the other hand has the highest batting average, and the brand actually still stands for quality. Of course Netflix is saying all the right things now to keep anti-trust off their b…
"Something good" is subjective and your opinion. They make a lot of shows to appeal to all kinds of different audiences. I'm not sure why you'd conclude they would 'drag down' the quality.
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They won't be American. The balance of power has already shifted east. There are now more productions, more money and more facilities east of Madrid than west of it.
Why on earth would Madrid be the dividing line between east and west?
East of Madrid is booming, West is in decline.
More accurately the line should be in Lagos but many are more familiar with EU film production centres.
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I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content. I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription t…
This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows. Now these are a…
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
We’re witnessing the globalization of television. When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations. Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some…
I don't like this. Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner? Are cinemas now second behind streaming? Edit: I agree Netflix has good Originals. But most are from the early days when they favored quality over quantity. It is sad to see that they reversed that. They have much funding power and should give it to great art that re…
> Are cinemas now second behind streaming? It feels like a race to the bottom. Movie and TV content quality has taken a nose dive in the past decade. Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s hard to find these days. Maybe it’s because producing movies/TV is so much easier and cheaper that there is now so much low quality noise, that it makes finding the high quality signal so difficult. But it seems like you used to be ab…
This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).
IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.
Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year. For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia… Oracle?! “ On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion. In June 202…
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players. It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
one can hope
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More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like…
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
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> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers. WBD was on an increasingly unprofitable path, and we know where that road leads.
The exact same road that generally leads to the same sort of problematic consolidation? At best, WBD could have gone bankrupt and a court order could require it to be sold as parts with no one studio getting a significant chunk, scattering WBD's IP moat across many competitors. But most likely it just means someone like Netflix would have the chance to make a smaller offer for the same kind of deal on a WBD with a wo…
But more drawn out. This way, creatives, consumers will get a reinvigorated outlet, rather than seeing it spiraling downward.