The sole purpose of Netflix is to make money. That’s all it’s there for. So that the owners (which includes thousands of normal working class employees) can buy food for their families.
Everyone should be focused on that goal, surely?
Ethics? Nope, money.
Good art? Nope, money.
Public benefit? Nope, money.
It is a reductive view that assumes that the legal framework is static, unchanging, and aligned towards morally good benefit.
It's been around for thousands of years. Can find examples throughout history as far back as Silk Road and probably further.
What is a relatively new idea is doing things for non-profitable reasons.
While there is a long history of corprate charters being to make money for the shareholders, i think there is a long history of other goals as well.
Equity valuations assume distant future returns. Yes, there's strategic decisions to be made at both the department and overall level about how much one tries to maximize current cash output vs. invests in the brand and infrastructure.
Not to mention: it works better when you have different parties advocating for different parts of this picture and arguing. Let finance try and squeeze out every nickel that can be squeezed, today. Let content seek after a vision of success. And let creatives and finance argue and advocate and figure out a compromise that works and fits in as much of what each wants as possible.
A similar, but infinitely harder problem exists for content production. You simply can't know with any certainty what a given strategy is going to do to long-term demand. If the VP of Content is too focused on the bottom line it will lead to a strategy of pruning production based on short-term viewership. This will decrease the viability of show-runners to do anything risky, ahead-of-its-time or with a longer-term payoff. Potentially even worse is killing cult classics (eg. The OA) which could lead to negative word of mouth both on the customer and on content maker side creating a long-term impact the bean counters can't see until it's too late.
So while Netflix overall has fiduciary responsibility, it is not the best strategy for every single person to be focused directly on revenue and ROI. I'd expect Content to have a slightly more abstract objective that allows room for creative judgement. I think Hollywood and HBO understand this dichotomy and how to operate within it, but judging by the overall bland feel of their catalog, Netflix doesn't.
Same goes for Research & Development. Quarterly profits are not the correct KPI for every department. Where will those quarterly profits be ten years from now?
No, that's the capitalist investors view. The problem is that Netflix now sees it as theirs. I'd bet quite a good sum of money that was not the goal when it started. I'd be surprised if that was the goal in 2010-2015 even.
> So that the owners (which includes thousands of normal working class employees) can buy food for their families.
If that were true, they would not be trying so hard to turn these excess profits. With how Netflix pays I don't think you can really call their employees "normal working class" either. Netflix is a classic case of greed and profit corrupting art. In some ways inevitable, but it's sad to see there's not even an internal tension between finance and content. That should be a battle that is waged daily in order to balance multiple purposes: both making money to support its employees and investors, and the art of shows and movies, among others.
Doing the something well enough that someone else wants to pay you for it (or keep paying you for it) is a pretty important part of that.
- To reduce the number of product/political commercials
- To spread the best media from every country to everyone
There are legitimate reasons besides money.