Hacker News Reader

Or you've already read the details of every story on the net hours earlier.

It's not mission critical except for stickiness/adherence.

Arguably it could be used as a guaranteed self-marketing platform (in the intimate/most core sense - you can't watch if you don't have Netflix so people will just think of it as NetflixNews).

Believe it or not, a lot of people still use local tv/news for entertainment or information (of local news).

(Near) realtime would be important for emergencies, as rare as they are.

I'm not questioning that and it doesn't imply that an outage would be a critical event.

Yes it would be embarrassing and it would be an inconvenience, but nothing worse than what happened today.