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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

While you can make that argument today, Netflix as a company is 24 years old. It got to its current position not by spending $15B/yr on original content (which it can afford to do now) but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.

Of course eventually all discussions of this nature devolve into the intricate definition of "tech company", and in the absence of one that is agreed upon, bringing this whole thing up is pointless.

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Eh, as a user Netflix original content is a large part of why I still have a subscription.

I used Netflix back when it was mailing me DVDs, and loved the online streaming back in the halcyon days when it seemed like they had everything.

Then came the dark days when content owners began pulling their IP from Netflix and scattering it all over the internet behind a dozen different options that offered them more money or control, and Netflix was a barren wasteland without anything that caught my eye; my queue was a variety of B-tier series that I tried a few episodes of and gave up on.

So I canceled my subscription, for several years. It didn't matter what their UX or uptime was or how smooth their video codecs, they didn't have enough content I wanted to watch.

Then I came back for the original content -- I forget which series first made me sign back up; House of Cards? -- and while I watch licensed content on Netflix from time to time, at least half of what I watch is produced by Netflix.

> It didn't matter what their UX or uptime was or how smooth their video codecs, they didn't have enough content I wanted to watch.

Netflix has developed a novel data system (as evidenced by papermill) that is likely responsible for countless decisions that manifested the content which brought you back. I don't know first hand but I suspect data is integrated into their everyday processes in ways most companies can't even dream of. Does that make them a technology company again?

And Disney/Pixar is constantly pushing the bleeding edge of computer animation and CGI special effects. Is Disney a technology company?

Disney's research divisions do a lot of really cool stuff:

- https://studios.disneyresearch.com/publications/

- https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/

As much as I am not a fan of Disney, I think they are.

Even outside of movies they have significant care to innovate and push the boundaries, for instance in theme park animatronics or toys in general.

This is a little bit hyperbole don't you think? I think companies with means these days just invest in this sort of technology because that's what you do in business now. Target is a department store but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they are hiring pure machine learning researchers too and doing remarkable things with data as well, same goes for any large company. 60 years ago you had large companies operating complex switchboards in their offices but you would never call these businesses telephone companies even though they operated their own internal telephone network. That sort of technology was just a tool of the trade, just like data science is now for large companies. I wouldn't call netflix a technology company when literally every large video production company is investing in the same things and trying to hire the same sort of talent, and you wouldn't call MGM or warner brothers a technology company either.

Is Coca-Cola a sugary drinks company, a logistics company, or a technology company producing hardware, software, chemical engineering processes and countless other disciplines to enable international scale methods and logistics employed in delivering various liquids and other goods all over the globe?

It's still a sugary drinks company in my eyes, because all the things you listed are necessary parts to become a sugary drinks company as large as coca cola or pepsi in this day and age.

> purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.

I don't think this is accurate - the main value proposition of Netflix seems to have always been "streaming site with lots of mainstream content, that is also legal". I.e. it's the streaming deals they've made that mattered, not delivery tech or their web player.

Pretty sure he's talking about the OG Netflix DVD-by-mail request-by-web model.

No. For the first decade plus of its existence, Netflix was a DVD by mail rental service and there, its technology was a key differentiator. You paid a subscription depending on how many DVDs you wanted to have out at a time, Netflix mailed them to you in red envelopes, and you mailed them back in the same envelope. The ingenious part was that there was a website where you entered in all of the DVDs you wanted and Netflix would mail them to you as they either became available or in order of priority (the original Netflix queue).

Yes, you could be pedantic and call a lot of that logistics, but the lack of physical stores, the website, the queue and rating and recommendation system (the Netflix recommendation algorithm was a huge part of its appeal, even after the streaming stuff, until Netflix got sued for accidentally outing someone with the algo), were all tech.

Netflix has ALWAYS been a hybrid tech and content company. Always. But it started out very much more on disrupting the video store model the same way Amazon disrupted brick and mortar bookstores.

Then all companies are tech companies. They all aim to come up with a product that's better than the last, and they almost never use old tech to do it.

Well, yes. In a certain way, everything is tech. Tech != computers/engineers/algorithms/robots/HAl/whatever.

But even in the popular understanding of what a tech company is, Netflix more than many others DOES have historical and current tech bonafides. 25 years ago during dot com mania, there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing about whether WebVan or Pets.com or Amazon or whatever were tech companies. It was accepted that e-commerce WAS tech, even if it was different than DEC/Compaq/HP or Sun or Microsoft or Apple or whatever.

And Netflix operated from a website, used technology for its logistic and delivery system (much like other e-commerce systems)and had a recommendation algorithm (that they had a contest to improve, because they saw that good recommendations reduced churn) and a focus on UX to keep the product good.

It took them more than a decade, but the goal of delivering video via the Internet was always there. Roku, which in its original incarnation was simply a Netflix streaming box, was originally ideated and developed at Netflix before the company decided it didn’t want to be in the hardware business and so the head of the project and the engineers left to make Roku. Netflix has done as much work as any single company except perhaps YouTube to optimize and pioneer how to effectively serve large swaths of video to users across the globe.

The problem with Ben Evans’ piece is that he misunderstands that Netflix has always been a tech and a content company. Even when it was a rental company with more tech and no original content, the recommendation algorithm and the dedication to buyers and curators who would make the decisions about what DVDs were purchased (eventually customer signals played into this too) always had a very strong content focus in the product.

That’s the reason Netflix works. It was the first media company to really innately understand both tech and content. Disney and HBO (WarnerMedia, whatever) have great tech stacks too (especially Disney), but Netflix was the first and is still the most successful.

My local library has had the same service for about equally long. The only difference is that instead of ordering them to my house, I order them to the nearest branch and then I walk in and pick it up whenever I feel like it. Then I drop them off a couple weeks later. No need to mess with envelopes and shipping. And it's free!

While I don't disagree that this experience exists in many places, the reality is nowhere near as convenient as you describe it. The waitlist for any movie I want to see is astronomical unless it's a decade old so by the time I get it, I might not be interested anymore. Netflix somehow had the logistics worked out that everyone could get most new movies pretty close to release which I think is why they took off in popularity.

Also, the Netflix shipping/return mechanism is arguably more convenient than even driving to the library. The envelopes were prepaid and were built in such a way that opening it uses one part of the packaging, which exposed a tape seam to seal it for return. Chuck that in any mailbox and you're good to go. Better than driving 15 minutes across town to the library to return a movie in the drop-off bin and hope it doesn't get lost and I get charged for it, forcing me to go inside so I know it was returned properly...

I want the local library version to get better, but right now it still has a ways to go in my city.

I was going to say something similar. It's inarguable that they were a tech company, when they pioneered streaming delivery for existing video content. Their tech platform was their primary differentiator to competitors for a number of years.

Whether they are currently a tech company is a bit fuzzier. Certainly they new have content as an additional differentiator, and the margin of their tech advantage has narrowed.

I think we have a large advantage in the CDN space, both in integration and efficiency.

In terms of efficiency, we've been serving at 100Gb/s (mostly TLS encrypted) from single socket servers since 2017, and are moving towards 400Gb/s today. How many other companies can say that?

I'm talking about the push to 400Gb/s at EuroBSDCon online, a week from Sunday..

But that mostly doesn't matter. The consumer doesn't care if their movies are coming from a server handling 10Gb/s or 100 Gb/s or 400 Gb/s. There's cost savings there, but I imagine that content costs dwarf delivery costs at this point.

There is some technology component where the UI, resposiveness, reliability, and so on impact the user experience. But still content is king there. The HBO apps suck and their streaming is less reliable than others but they've got the content I wanna watch so I put up with it.

Perhaps Netflix has shifted. In the beginning, I think you could have made a good argument that technology was their moat, but I don't think you can say so today.

Today, their best attempt at a moat is content, and it's a poor one at best since they can only make so much original content and it's not as if they can do so in a way that is inaccessible to other services.

Content for them seems a desperate attempt at countering deep content firms' moats, who can now build streaming services copycatting Netflix.

> but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.

I mean they were the pioneers in offering tv and movies via streaming. The tech is really not that dramatic.

You can think of streaming tech in three parts: video quality, recommendations and UI.

Arguably video quality is the most important, but other platforms have already offer similar/better quality (albeit a lil more data).

Their recommendations and UI are better than others but I honestly don't care about these two as they are still not good enough for me to discover content I would want to watch, for that I still have to go to reddit/curated articles.

So I would say Netflix's contribution was more in pioneering tv streaming as opposed to tech. They are now competing mostly in terms of their originals, so I would label them more like Disney/HBO rather than tech.

I disagree, I think getting the license to stream the content is a much more difficult problem than the technology to stream it.

Only once each of the thousands of impossible problems that need solving in order to stream reliably have been solved.

That's the problem with software. It solves problems so well they stay solved, and only constructed problems such as IP ownership remain.

Definitely. The title of OP should be 'Netflix is no longer a tech company' or so.

Right. It started as a shipping service company that specialized exclusively in DVDs.

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