The bottom is dropping out of Netflix
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The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.
Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.
Yeah, and I was right on the edge, not really watching it enough to justify the previous, cheaper, price. When they raised the price it served as a motivation to cancel it. In a 6 months I might join for a bit to watch some newer shows, then probably cancel again.
Raising prices works well perhaps if people are in love with the product or there is just no other alternative. But people have been auto paying and not really thinking much or using it, raising the prices is a decision point to re-evaluate the value of the service.
The full effect of price increases will take time to fully play out, plus the effects of implementing commercials have yet to be seen. Also, it remains to be seen how other streaming services will respond. Will they raise prices and add commercials too?
If Netflix becomes the one streaming brand most associated with actions hostile to their viewers, this could be the beginning of a long decline.
to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.
What these media companies seem to want is for us to pay $100/month in various streaming services rather than the $80/month we were paying for cable because, hey, we should pay for the privilege of unbundling right? I refuse. Netflix is no longer an automatic renewal. I'll sign up for it 1-2 months a year to binge watch on certain shows.
But you glossed over a really important point I haven't seen given much attention: the pandemic. The pandemic was a huge boost for subscriber numbers for obvious reasons and we're now pretty much at the end of the pandemic (as far as staying indoors goes, anyway). That has to have an impact.
Additionaly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has cut off hundreds of thousands of subscribers due to the sanctions. IIRC I heard this was 700,000. If so, isn't down 200K still a net increase?
The stock market routinely overbuys and oversells on good and bad news. It's the fear and greed cycle. And this honestly feels like an overreaction that'll be corrected as soon as Netflix spends some time controlling costs.
I have not seen anything that wows me for quite some time at least for my preferences (SciFi).
So maybe it is for Netflix (the sky falling) things that start as a trickle might end as a flood.
There are also those who are not happy with woke content and "Anything Silicon Valley/Tech" and are walking away.
Disney has the same thing going.
Not sure how much this holds true anymore, as now many big players have direct-to-customer streaming, but just sharing since it was a neat thought when I first read it
That in turn was based on the experience with Amazon, which has raised the prices of Prime, products on its site, and the fees it charges its sellers all while still growing.
Netflix’s valuation was based on the thinking that Netflix was now a necessity for people. But this shows it isn’t.
In fact, the loss of subscribers is an even bigger deal because it suggests Netflix is eminently replaceable.
Netflix is a scalable company precisely because they produce content, when they are share other people's content any other platform can do that. But when they create their own content suddenly they operate based on a fixed cost rather than paying for other people's content.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926
$9.99, $15.49, and $19.99/mo
What did their prices used to be?
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
It was beautiful:
- There were no video previews.
- All selection was text-based only.
- There was no algorithmic feed: only lists based on category / genre / etc.
If Netflix offered this, I might actually pay for it. For now, I'm just using a relative's login, and I won't be paying if they boot us off.
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
I forgot where I got the original list of links
Facebook was also way more enjoyable to use when your home page was just a chronological list of all your friends wall posts.
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its successor Movies Anywhere, in which Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate are not participating.
[Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19046108]
One of many, many examples: https://screenrant.com/its-always-sunny-blackface-episodes-m...
Even things like iTunes Music Store which once claimed that all your past purchases are available for download from iCloud forever quietly became untrue when I discovered parts of my music library went missing. Come to find out the record company decided to pull licensing from Apple which made that media forever unavailable. So don't forget your backups..... rule of thumb is that you can never trust any company with your media no matter how much bullshit they sell you.
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
This feels like a really inefficient market.
The only way to stop me from pirating the media I like is if you actually let me buy the superior experience I can have as a pirate.
P.S. copyright and IP law in general need severe reform if we want to serve creatives and not executives
I remember looking at the Criterion Collection streaming channel not that long ago and what struck me was just how much of the Criterion Collection was not even available on their streaming channel.
https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Things-Complete-Blu-ray-Orig...
Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable.
A cloud copy of something on Google, Apple, Amazon or Netflix is essentially forever.
People don't realize what they're effectively asking for is digital rights to something in perpetuity. And you can't really price that realistically.
Streaming services actually far better match what users actually want (in general). There's no issues of storing media or keeping digital copies safe. The limited time you can view something is what makes it economical.
Remember too that most things tend to only ever be watched once. The satisfaction for collection isn't relaly about repeat viewing at for the most part.
It's sad that the general public cannot get its shit together and every man jack keep and use his own library.
I know because I'm one of the sad sacks that owns hundreds of original LPs, CDs, VHSs, DVDs, and also has a couple TB of HDD worth of borrowed series, and hasn't touched the damn pile of 'precious' in ages.
"Give me Convenience or Give me Death", as those 1980s punks so neatly summed it up.
I think though there will be some laws passed hopefully that will allow us to own digital content outright in the near future, hopefully in a decentralized way.
And did anyone ever use those UltraViolet codes? I never tried them. What did they even do?
I guess streaming won out because consumers prefer it - I know I do.
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
But it is a trend, they said to expect a 2 million subscriber loss in the following quarter.
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-faang
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
Sports are trickier of course.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- Edit: Plex et al are not the *only* ways to download content, not sure why some replies are thinking so. I too can type in a show into a piracy site, click the magnet icon, and start immediately watching it. I personally don't even use Plex, Radarr or Sonarr myself, it was just a suggestion. In contrast, I can't just type any show into Netflix and watch it, since it might not even be on Netflix! Then I'd need to get on justwatch.com just to figure out which streaming service is playing the show. This is harder than piracy in my view.
- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
example issues. Here's the quick start guide. https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/quick-start-guide 1. Get stopped immediately at the indexer. No sane defaults there at all. No guidance either.
Plex doesn't do 4k streaming to Apple TV, doesn't do 4k to chromecast.
The movies you pirate frequently have technical problems, usually the sound is off. You are lucky to have subtitles that work(synced correctly).
Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Oh I use a Nvidia Shield as Client. It’s awesome!
I'd rather do without.
- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.
- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.
- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.
- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
Go check out my imdb and see how many of my credits you've watched https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1968249/
For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.
You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
Stop stealing our shit.
I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.
Netflix after canceling all of its best shows during a period when piracy has never been easier: "Let's start doing ads!"
I wonder if anybody at Netflix has seen the UX of popular streaming apps like (now defunct I believe) terrarium and its successors. They're easier to use, just as fast as Netflix, have much larger libraries, allow DRM-free downloads, ad-free, no algorithmic spam, etc. It is incredible that when faced with that as another consumer option they've gone for "severely degrade user experience" as the strategy.
At this point, some vulture private equity firm should just take them private and sell it for parts. Clearly they've spent far too much time being the biggest player and have completely disconnected from what their customers want.
Price increases bring increased scrutiny on the value of the service compared to just hiding as a monthly $15 charge or so amongst a sea of subscriptions that products are sold as.
This is anecdotal but this is my experience. I used to love Netflix and though maybe they didn't have the most shows they had shows I realllllly wanted to watch. Now? There is so little that I care about and the positive brand sentiment is gone. Great shows that I became attached to were canceled so regularly that I am truly not interested in investing time into their shows. Not all shows should go on forever but then you might as well commit to making everything a limited 2 season series and be honest about it.
I actually canceled Netflix and had not had it for a year before the pandemic (where I gave in) but I think many people in this economic environment are finding it easier to give up a TV subscription to a company that produces _mostly_, mediocrity.
It truly has been interesting to watch a giant brand so committed to their own internal analytics that they've lost so much of their brand reputation.
Care to list? Most of the loss of shows I see are from studios pulling them off Netflix to make them exclusive to their own streaming service - a bunch of Disney stuff is now Hulu or D+ only for instance.
The straw that broke the camel's back for us was the disappearance of a deep catalog and only one or two new shows which were worth attention — if we really want to see them, we'll sign on for a month next year and binge-watch through them, then drop the service again. This is the model we're going to be going forward with any such service.
It's not entertainment, it's education.
The challenge now is to find and filter 'useful books' (most are not, and don't deliver on the promise on the cover).
I looked for it in all platforms, Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, Play Store, and it wasn't available in my country. I then connected to the US through a VPN and tried to buy it or rent it but my PayPal account didn't work because it isn't associated to the US. I finally found it in YouTube posted by a page that seemed official! But it had no captions... argh!
I wasted 2 hours trying to have anyone accept money to let me watch it, but got nothing. Then I tried torrenting and 3 min after I had the movie ready to watch and a captions file ready to add. In the end I couldn't finish watching the movie because it had already taken too long.
- Lots of competition, some more serious (Disney+) than others (Amazon)
- Nearing the top of the streaming adoption curve
- End of the stay-at-home covid bump
The covid impact is noise in the long (5+ years) term.
Reaching full adoption is a sign of maturity overtaking growth. You run the company differently, but it's not "the bottom dropping out."
Competition is rough. The competitors have deep pockets and back catalogs, but consumers have no appetite for 6 separate services. This is where I'd be worried.
I empathize with the recommendation and UI gripes, but I doubt they're driving Netflix's woes.
My question is, how did people not expect this given that a huge XX% of the first world already uses it, and there are tons of viable competing streaming services popping up like weeds? They had a first mover advantage, and that was pretty much it, but streaming is a solved technology now. Competition took much longer to mobilize than it should have, but it's finally here now.
At the end of the day the only differentiator for Netflix is as a production company. Up to you to decide what their moat is there
1. Netflix is boring
2. Their recommendation algorithms didn't solve 1.
The root cause of it all is their odd focus on expensive originals over third party content. Their catalogue is just not deep enough if you remove all the subpar content. Before using Netflix I engaged in massive piracy for over ten years, and I'm considering it again - this time in smaller amounts, because I don't have that much free time anymore.
1. I want to find my own shit with filters, not by scrolling through endless reams of D- grade cable TV quality shows.
2. I want major efforts from networks and studios, not homemade content. I know I may be in the minority here, but I strongly prefer HBOMax right now (which I get for 'free' with my phone plan) because the content is aligned here coupled with their own solid content, not D+ grade self-created content.
For me I associate the big red "N" with bad content. So when I open Netflix and see the red "N" plastered on every thumbnail the algo serves up, I immediately wanted to close the app. I eventually felt tired of batting away their originals to find good content so I unsubscribed.
I don't know how many other people actually feel the same way, but it seems pretty clear to me that their subscriber base doesn't like Netflix's original content as much as Netflix does.
That seems very premature to me. Subscription growth has slowed and they may still lose some more, but saying the bottom is dropping out is hyperbole at best & clickbait at worst. (though why not both?). They're facing more competition, and coming out of COVID lockdowns probably means people aren't home as much to binge watch shows. Not enough to doom them unless they start hitting a bunch of own goals.
Thank you. The only reason I break my Netflix embargo (and log into my profile on a friends account) is so I know what some viral meme is about.
Nobody[1] talks about or remembers shows from there two weeks later.
[1] this is hyperbole validated by 200,000 - 2,000,000 others seeing the light
I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise.
Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productions, but especially their foreign stuff sometimes proves that less is more. They tell interesting stories in "good enough" settings for them to be enjoyable.
Every Pixar movie is exactly the same, and they're all great. It's a good formula. My problem with movies is that they're built for two many audiences. Pick China xor America, and the will be more enjoyable to watch
IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
I wonder if they'd be better off making better quality content, but less of it.
They don't want to to get in and get out. They need subscribers and the revenue flow they bring. I think they should stop the binge model for new, original content. That is, release new seasons one episode at a time rather than drop them all at once.
Sense8, Travelers, Altered Carbon, basically there expensive science fiction.
Sure nailed it is fun but I won't miss it. The only one that I will truly miss is Big Mouth... but there are alternatives.
Apple TV+ is quickly becoming my science fiction go to and they seem to be going more than HBO route with a smaller catalog.
> 71% of TV households nationwide have some form of pay-TV service. The percentage of TV households that have a live pay-TV service (via cable, satellite, Telco, or Internet-delivered vMVPD) is down from 82% in 2016, 87% in 2011, and 86% in 2006.
http://www.satellitemarkets.com/71-percent-us-households-hav...
A second source that classifies vMVPD differently: https://www.emarketer.com/chart/239301/us-pay-tv-vs-non-pay-...
Combined with the decline of movie theaters, it's an existential crisis for everyone in the media world. Can they replace lost cable/theater revenues with streaming subscriptions?
I expect we'll end up with a 2 or 3 major media companies and a couple small premium services bolted onto unrelated products like Prime and Apple TV. Netflix has some short term headwinds with this new competition but is the only company that's a shoe-in for making it.
Netflix is old enough now that a lot of subscribers now have children that are in college or have graduated. My daughter is in college, and she definitely uses my netflix credentials. At what point does Netflix feel it is required for her to have her own subscription?
The series that are really well made are few and far between. E.g. - Narcos - Ozark - House of Cards - Stranger Things
For every good show, I see another few dozen that I can't bear to sit through. Stuffing the catalogue with filler is reminiscent of cable.
For example, I've been enjoying "Handsome Siblings," a Chinese wuxia show that's pretty shallow. It's not going to win any awards for writing or acting, but it's beautifully produced and good mindless fun.
To some people, it's filler junk (worse—subtitled junk). To me, it's perfect for passing the time on a long plane ride.
Even shows like Ozark have this very "netflixy" feel to them.
The sense I got when Netflix started going original content was that it was the place for creatives to go and flex their muscles. They could do really weird stuff like Sense8 or The OA (both absolutely top tier stories in my opinion).
But now, I have come to expect that no shows will ever go anywhere (story wise) that is interesting. No boundries will be pushed, just bland kindof all the same background stuff. It's too bad, because some of the early stuff was really cool.
The result is that all these new netflix-produced shows like Ozarks all look super flat and similar. Most scenes are very poorly lit, which leads to a really poor experience when watching on a laptop or tablet. I don't think all viewers are consciously realizing it, but I think this is why many people are getting "bored" of netflix shows.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90653850/why-netflix-movies-look...
Squid game was huge and should have been a monster pole to hammock off of for months. The conversation about Squid Game should still be goin on...
Killing off shows because they're not bringing in new users is a terrible idea.
Their tech is great but the running a network aspect was pretty terrible.
Maybe they could have had a huge windfall by offering to be the “AWS” behind every “$CHANNEL+” streaming service. In other words, instead of having 14 kludgey apps that all suck in at least one way, we get 14 services but with a smooth implementation.
I don’t see how content is a long-term win for them.
Disclaimer: I work at Twitch, an Amazon subsidiary whose tech it's based off of.
The customers they lost are likely ones they would lose no matter what now that the pandemic is waning.
Separately, the disdain for bringing in advertisers, saying it's bad for customers: advertisers are their customers, too.
With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
What has gone wrong with our world that making a 6 billion dollar a year profit is considered a problem?
People are so used to having smoke blown up their asses that when someone tells them honestly about slightly negative news, they get confused.
The password sharing thing is also huge, as due to the insanity of the fragmentation that the ludicrous number of streaming services has caused, a lot of friends and families cope by subscribing to one service apiece and sharing them among each other.
As soon as these little tricks stop working and it becomes more expensive, people will just drop it. It's not like Netflix has actually worked on any value adds recently - tbh I feel their content offerings have gotten so poor recently it's next on the chopping block for me, too.
Hum... It's not that. It's just that it's impossible to access the long tail of Netflix content.
Better Call Saul is proudly labeled a "Netflix Original".
But you couldn't watch season five on Netflix until April, even though it originally aired two years ago.
Had to let AMC reair it first, right?
Think season six will air on schedule with AMC in August?
Meanwhile, HBO Max, and Hulu by extension, released The Batman nearly on time with theatres.
It's clear that Netflix simply lacks the content creation supply chain of its competitors.
And no amount of price hikes, ads, excuses, or desperate back-door deals will solve that.
Their greatest hope was to capitalize on successful originals, like Love Death and Robots.
But in three years they've managed to deliver only two season of that show.
Which, even with the pandemic, should have occurred much faster given it's an animated anthology.
I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning to find news of a Sony and/or Paramount buy out.
They've reduced content.
They consider emplacing password locks for their users.
These things say to me "we no longer want your business and will blame our decline on what YOU'RE doing rather than our policies that aren't keeping up with the real world."
Netflix content is mediocre. I loved Squid Game and The Queen's Gambit, but they felt padded and I fast forwarded through them. A lot of their other other content is shock and sex, which I presume gets people to binge.
But there's only so long you can keep dropping quality before people leave.
One would think there's room for a Netflix equivalent of Amazon Prime, where you pay a yearly fee instead of a monthly fee (as the author mentions), for which you get a discount off the monthly rate for essentially "buying in bulk", as well as early access to original content, and maybe even get access to content that non-Prime subscribers can't access at all.
Netflix's strategy contains several apparent contradictions that I'm unable to make sense of. For example, charging by the month seems to conflict with releasing an entire season of content at once. If you're going to charge per-month, then as the author mentioned, switching to a weekly-release model seems like the smart move, so you can squeeze more months out of a viewer who sees that content as "appointment viewing". If you're going with a "binge-release" model, I would think you'd charge per-year instead.
Another contradiction- simultaneously raising subscription rates and cracking down on password sharing seem to conflict with each other. The more you raise your prices, the more you incentivize people to share passwords.
On top of that, raising the price in the same month that they announce record profits left a really bad taste in my mouth. I know they're a business, and businesses love to chase infinite growth, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or give them my money.
The best streaming service for my particular usecase, which is primarily watching wide release movies, has been hbo max/go/whateverthey'recallingitthisweek. They get most of the wide release movies I'm interested in, and for the older weirder niche stuff that they don't get, I just buy the dvd/blu-ray and throw it on plex.
I'm also surprised Netflix doesn't have a yearly bundle... that's how Prime gets me, by the time I get charged for a year, it's already too late. Less frequent bills means less chance for someone to reconsider their subscription.
But yes, the constant email they send me about things changing and the price increasing, every email is a chance for someone to realize they don't use Netflix and would rather unsubscribe.
[0] https://popculture.com/streaming/news/netflix-officially-add...
That doesn't sound like very good deal to me, I'd prefer 12 months for the price of 10 or pay as you go for minutes/hours of actually watched content. Though Netflix has so much trash it's not really worth paying for. Had it for many months and hardly watched anything there.
I've got Netflix and then someone will tell me about something very interesting on Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, or Showtime. I'm not gonna sign up for Hulu just to watch 1 movie or a series. I'm not gonna give Comcast more money just so that I can get HBO and a whole lot of other channels that I don't want.
And the marketplace is so complicated. I can pay Comcast to get the History Channel (and a lot of channels that I don't want) or, I could go to another steaming service and get History Channel, but you've gotta look into the details to discover that the "new" episodes are actually 1 season behind.
So, when I think about dropping Netflix, it's not because Netflix in and of itself is lacking or too expensive. It's more about throwing up my hands and quitting the madness of the whole marketplace.
>Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Since then NFLX: -40.90%, SP500: +51.14%, DBX: -10.08%
* 2 years ago (Aug 4, 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054157
>Almost all Netflix competitors (Disney, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple ... ) will have other sources of revenue besides streaming so they can afford to keep loosing money to gain market share. Netflix can't cut prices too much.
The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
Curious where on your crystal ball you see the likes of Spotify and the music (and podcast I guess) industry in 10 years.
Still more original than the next MCU movie.
As far as tech goes, I think Netflix has the best and I can see a future where it will provide streaming tech to all other major players.
So, putting my money where my mouth is and buying some shares. Let’s see how this plays out.
We need a 'must-license' system for TV-shows and movies, so that any movie that is available on one streaming service must be available to any other streaming service for the same terms. No doubt this will not mean that all movies are available on all streaming services, but it will mean that there will be actual competition.
The writing was on the wall that Disney+, HBO Max, etc would be attacking them and taking away customers.
Those legacy businesses have other sources of revenue and streaming is their future. They have the means to keep their prices low for many years to fuel growth.
Not sure what Netflix can do to continue growing. Then again, they managed to switch from DVD to streaming years ago. It was rough, they made mistakes but overcame them. Looking forward to see what they do.
Why or why not?
Clear violation of private REAL property. I think a lot think INTELLECTUAL property is rent seeking.
Being overly focused on engagement optimizes what’s easy to measure. It doesn’t always optimize what’s important. In the case of Netflix what’s important is brand strength and month over month subscriber retention. Engagement optimization leads to click-baity crappy reality TV instead of shows that actually drive retention
Meanwhile other services (notably Apple TV+) simply focuses on quality over quantity and starting to do rather well.
Is Netflix on more devices? Does Netflix have technology that make content distribution more efficient compared to other streaming services? Is it the location of the team, CA? I am genuinely interested.
I think it’s inevitable that Netflix will sell to one of the media behemoths. They simply don’t have the time that it will take to make the kind of major pivot mentioned above.
Fragmentation is becoming annoying and unsustainable. I see some streamers as better content producers than tech companies, so they will probably shift towards that over time. Also all these services are upkeeping parallel streaming tech. All this will be consolidated sooner or later.
It's at a point where I'll probably resubscribe for maybe the next season of Squid Game, like I'll resubscribe to HBO Max if they do another season of Righteous Gemstones.
The streaming market is so over saturated, it makes more sense to cancel all your subs, get your entertainment from YouTube, and then subscribe just for a month to binge your favorite shows.
I have enjoyed Narcos, Tiger King, Stranger Things, Queen's Gambit and others.
But there are so many bad shows, that are formulaic, unoriginal and overall, lame.
Then, I have nothing against noble causes such as social justice and such. But compare a good movie, such as Men of honor, or the Green Book, with the unoriginal content on Netflix. It is just not watchable.
Exactly. Same false argument as for torrenting entertainment content. Most people who get it for free will just go without if they're prevented from getting it.
As for Netflix specifically, I don't watch it but I believe the missus is finding fewer and fewer shows worth watching.
I think many just pirate those show they are interested in or subscribe just 2-3 months a year to binge watch.
Next time HN pops up with a licensing thread, it would be helpful to reuse arguments here as to why any company or person should be able to freely do what they want with source code, art, graphics, etc.
Netflix is being run by MBAs. It could benefit much more if it actually listened to their customers instead of doubling down each week on yet another terrible idea.
We used to watch five to ten movies a month via Netflix. We haven't used it in two or three years now.
You know what’s easier than dealing with that crap…
Missing option: woke partisan programming
Putting the face of a divisive politician like Obama on a show? Guaranteed to lose 30% - 50% of potential viewers who won't watch it no matter how awesome it is.
More than half of the most watched shows are not shows that Netflix produced. Shows like Better Call Saul.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
I have and will keep Disney Plus and HBO Max even when I watch them infrequently cause of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Pixar and other big tentpole IP properties that Netflix has none of!
And....nothing seems to be changing...
TIP. wanna survive. give me a build my own tv service.....with timeslots and my own show cycles that I put together from the content.........that would fix binging and would allow me to have a real value add......simple easy fixes....but they are going to try and market their stuff to look better rather than fix it....
fix it....it's busted...
I would probably watch more of their terrible shows if I could listen to commentary through an unsanctioned channel
Hey you know what? I think Steam should probably do just that!
How is this company still alive?
There’s not anything particularly compelling right now IMO on HBO dropping new episodes except for Tokyo Vice… which others am I missing?
Horror? How about The Truman Show!
Sci-Fi? How about The Truman Show!
Action? How about The Truman Show!
Adventure? How about The Truman Show!
Finally I just unsubscribed.
capitalism has always been about infinite growth but seems to have gone wild since everything starting going service-based
Elon Musk, April 2022. Accurate.
I mean, as long as we're going to be spewing content-free sentences I might as well get mine in.
"Woke" isn't a useful term because today in 2022 it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like". "Woke mind virus" is particularly egregious -that's pure hyperbole without even a pretense of meaning.
The problem with Netflix in the main isn't that they show too many people who are white, or show two many people who are LGBTQ+. The problem with Netflix IN THE MAIN is that they are cracking down on a subscription policy no one wants while increasing prices beyond what people believe are reasonable while at the same time hemmoraging content. It doesn't help that they have demonstrated over the last decade that you cannot rely on their own content to actually tell a full story (because it will get cancelled prematurely).
None of that has anything to do with the "woke" bugbear -it would be equally true if Netflix's political stance matched OAN.
Heh.
building for everybody and in the same time building for nobody
you optimize for the most impact, and yet you forget that the average man does not exist.
at least vudu should have something like the more you buy the cheaper you will be charged
"First Sale Doctrine? Who cares!" -Big Media (probably)
The whole "you're stealing" comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123354) is clear byproduct of all this, with people talking past each other.
**
I can buy a DVD, and loan that DVD out to 1000 friends. Everyone enjoys the movie without paying a dime. The movie studio only makes money of that first DVD sale to me.
--> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone.
Governments around the world can do the same as a public service with libraries that lend out all sorts of media. And, once again, the media right holders only get paid that first sale.
---> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone; and is democratically approved, government sanctions, public good.
Blockbuster and OG Netflix (DVD-by-mail) can buy 1000s of DVDs. Rent them out for profit. Once again, the media companies only profit off those first sales. No pay for view, pay for rental, etc royalty or extra cost.
---> Again, legal, moral, the way things were for decades.
---> More so, Netflix could buy and rent out whatever movies they wanted. Media companies couldn't deny them, no negotiations needed. Thus, Netflix had a fantastic movie catalog, the world was happy.
---> Heck, Netflix could even resale many of these DVDs months later on the used market to make-up costs. Eg. stock up for blockbuster launches, downsize later. Again, zero additional cut given to the media companies.
**
- Netflix the DVD-by-mail company was built on first sale doctrine.
- Netflix the "DVD-by-email" (streaming) company normalized a model that bypasses it, let media companies re-write the rules under the specter of piracy, and ultimately disrupted themselves.
- Sure, their value skyrocketed as the harbinger of the streaming era, but likely sealed their long-term fate in the process.
**
Steaming being "different" is kinda just an accident of history too. Imagine a timeline that turned out different and treated streaming as an evolution of renting tapes -> DVDs -> Blu-rays.
A hypothetical world where Netflix:
- Buys N digital copies of some show, and can only stream to N people at once.
- If I'm N+1, Netflix tells me "All copies are currently being streamed. We estimate a copy being available in 10 minutes. Would you like to join the queue? Feel free to watch Y (recommended by your viewing history!) while you wait. We'll notify you once available and you have up to 30 minutes to start watching before your reservation expires."
- All in all, basically the same as the old Netflix DVD era, where we had queues, multiple DVDs in the mail so we always had something to watch every night, etc. Just faster.
This alternate timeline would lead to multiple competing ventures, no way for media holders to pick/choose services (eg. no "only on X" nonsense) and everyone competing on price, quality, catalog (eg. blockbusters vs all-the-things vs speciality, etc)
It's a shame that simply using a faster postal service (eg. Internet) reclassifies the entire venture into something completely different, and gave media right holders more power over end-user-distribution than all proceeding home viewing formats.
**
Addendum
If someone ever invents a teleportation device (yeah, I know...let me dream), I'll happily pour all my money into a "DVD by Portal" business to recorrect history and get us to a world that is both consumer friendly + convenient.
Such a same that digital teleportation vs physical teleportation forces us to pit convenience vs everything else.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
What's probably going on is after after a few years of pandemic isolation and Netflix binging, the arrival of pandemic triggered inflation, and overall higher employment rates, people just have less interest, time, and money to binge watch longer form content. Many are probably consuming shorter form content (like TikTok), or enjoying more time in public.
We economize by scrutinizing our spending of both money and time. When we feel we have less of both of those, streaming services are an obvious "nice to have" for a lot of people that can be cut from their lives with minimal feeling of loss, especially since it can be substituted with fulfilling time spent with other people.
Also, if you're paying an extra $150 a month for energy utilities and gasoline, it kind of makes sense that you might cancel a streaming service that you watch once or twice a week.
These days the time I spent on streaming services during the pandemic is more likely than ever to be spent having a beer on a neighbor's porch (with them of course!).
- I recently realized I had only turned on my TV just about 4 - 5 times in about 6 months and yet I was paying close to $140 per month, so I downgraded my cable subscription to the minimal (combined cable & internet is cheaper than only internet).
- Also realized I rarely watched Netflix (hadn't watched in months) cos I no longer found shows that I liked and I was paying $15.49 per month. And then I saw HBO Max was $9.99 a month. So I canceled Netflix and signed on to HBO Max. There's also the psychological part that HBO Max allows me to pay for the whole year upfront (Netflix doesn't) so I can close my eyes and just pay them $100 and be done with it.
- I also realized I rarely have time to watch long form content except for weekends. This is one advantage that Amazon Prime has - apart from it being 'free' to me since I already paid for prime, I can rent movies for $2.99 for those few times that I need to be 'entertained'. Maybe I spend $6 in one month and $0 in others. It's still better than $15.49 (or $140) without watching at all.
- It's possible that lots of people have a variation of these reasons. I understand that Netflix had to raise their prices given how much they were spending on content. It looks to me like they 'overspent' on content without taking into consideration that they would have to recoup the cost from increased subscription fees and this might not be palatable to their members given that there are now multiple alternatives
I miss the days where I could binge watch a series on release date. Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
All the qualities that drew me into streaming have slowly faded away.
They don't make it easy to discover content. They still have quite a lot of good original content that isn't promoted and a slew of third party things that aren't promoted or discoverable at all unless they happen to make the trending list
The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal.
For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers". Leaving a bunch of stories half told doesn't give me the confidence that it's worth the investment to start on their new content. This is especially problematic because it is a vicious cycle where since they aggressively cancel stuff that isn't performing, people don't invest their time in new stuff because of the expectation it gets canceled, means more new stuff underperforms, leading to more cancelations, and further eroding the trust of viewers. It's also negatively impacted by poor discoverability.
Their UI is seemingly optimized to shove their latest broad appeal stuff in my face and seems to deliberately make it hard to find anything else.
- Netflix with 4K and 4 streaming devices costs 17.99€ here ($19.50), while Disney+ only costs €8.99 with the same features.
- Netflix made and continues to make good content, but since major producers have been removing their content from Netflix and into their own services, Netflix here almost survives on old local shows and new in-house content. Feels like there's almost nothing new to watch. I have rewatched Gilmore Girls 4 times. Disney+ gets you Marvel, Disney, Pixar, FOX, NatGeo, StarWars, Star (lots of ABC content)
-Netflix decided to crackdown on password-sharing: my brother moved away some months ago and has been using our Netflix account, and we don't want him to pay Netflix for himself.
-There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue. Hell to the no.