Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

That graph isn’t showing that. Sure, Netflix produces way more content than competitors but they also have more shows in the far right (outstanding and exceptional) than their competitors.

View on HN

There is a disconnect between what I want and what providers are trying to offer me. I want quality content with powerful search. Providers seem to think I want a huge unsearchable library from which they will make recommendations. Netflix has lots and lots of great original content, but given a random show, it's far more likely to be average or less (versus, say, HBOmax).

On the other hand, a lot of people are fine with putting unremarkable content on as largely background noise. That's what a lot of broadcast TV was. So there's probably at least some market for a large catalog of OK stuff rather than more of a focus on prestige TV.

There was a while where they were talking about providers making a lot of Niche Content. I wonder if they need to do a better job of adapting to personas. I love the Victorian/Edwardian Farm series that are on Prime, and I think of shows in a niche as sort of "beyond rating". i.e. They are never going to get the money to be considered "exceptional", but will be draw just as strongly for people who appreciate that niche. (Deep not broad). So can Netflix create a curated and simpler interface that optimizes for Outstanding/Exceptional or period pieces or whatever instead of just a long list that's hard to grok.

> Providers seem to think I want a huge unsearchable library from which they will make recommendations.

Providers want to act as gatekeepers who have the power to make something popular by limiting your options to alternatives. Sometimes they also want to be able to accept money for heavily promoting specific things over others. It's not about delivering a quality product to you at all, it's about what gives them money/power at your expense.

I had HBO and tried to watch every show. There are plenty of ho-hum shows. An HBO show has a theme and style their own which makes getting into a show a lengthy affair only to realize it's not what you really want. Netflix sums up the show in a preview making it easier.

The probably is we've coupled the gui and the service, the people making the UI have a monopoly and no reason to improve. Same goes for spotify, audible and just about every streaming provider these days.

How would you know?

Between deliberately bad search and a bias towards pushing you to waste time rather than entertain, they bury their own content and deliver swill.

Netflix got away with it because they were the only game in town. Disney really broke the seal and delivered a good platform. Apple is delivering strong content that compensates for the horrific application.

The ratio of OK-or-worse to good-or-exceptional sure appears to be a less favorable for Netflix than the others.

Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.

Hence my comment about the methodology. And HBO Max doesn't have anything that's exceptional?

For that reason, it doesn't really make sense to focus on the specifics of a handful of outliers as unreliably ranked by RT (I think). The real message is that large as Netflix' catalog is, it doesn't necessarily have a lot more highly ranked content than other sites have. (Which roughly squares with my anecdotal impressions.)

But doesn't this? Medthodology aside, taking the data as is, Netflix has like 30 programs outstanding or better. The next best is like 10. Weird about HBO Max though. Maybe because they don't consider HBO shows as 'streaming'. At least Succession should be in exceptional. If not a lot more, if you include the older work.

The fact that Titans is slightly higher ranked than Peacemaker on HBO is insane.

The data would be more interesting if it could be broken up by demographics. My wife (along with a lot of women) likes reality tv, and Netflix has a fair amount of that. I personally can’t stand it.

While Ratio is usually the right way to evaluate things. Is that applicable in this case? Doesn't what matters is the number of good shows not the percentage? If I watch Netflix I can find three Exceptional shows and a bunch of Outstanding shows, including three at the high end of outstanding. If I watch Apple TV + There are no exceptional shows and only one at the high end of outstanding, but the ratio seems better.

I guess it would depend on discoverability.

It matters if they're not spending less for each show, on average, than other services. If you're dropping $20m a season, on average, and so are your competitors, but more of yours are duds, that's bad. If you're dropping $5m to your competitors' $20m, maybe it's not a problem if, say, twice as many of your seasons are bad.

But, part of the trouble with this analysis, as far as sussing out the above issue, is season-count. How many Netflix originals are as long as, say, The Sopranos? Or The Wire? How many are only one season, or maybe two? It's possible (possible! I do not know) the hours-of-original-content difference between Netflix and the other services isn't as large as this suggests. Or that it's even larger. Hard to tell.

I'd say that this chart points toward bad things for Netflix, but without some other pieces of data it's hard to tell what it's actually saying.

People were hungry for non-crap Star Wars content. Disney+ knows how to ride the wave.

Right. I don't care about the shows/movies I don't want to watch on a streaming service. I only care if there are enough shows/movies on there I do want to see.

I also don't want to spend large amounts of time researching what i want to watch. If there is one good show with poor discoverability burried under a mountain of crap, that is still a product failure.

They don't really have that many more shows well out to the right; it's mostly a draw. (And at that point you're talking pretty small numbers.) But it's pretty clear from the graph that, as a percentage of their total shows, more Netflix shows are just OK than the other services. (Now if the bulk of that is very cheap drek to boost the size of the catalog, that's OK I guess. But I doubt that it is.)

>They don't really have that many more shows well out to the right; it's mostly a draw.

Netflix has significantly more in the outstanding category: for example, I count around 8 for Disney, 11 for Apple, 10 for HBO Max, 8 for Hulu, and at least 39 for Netflix. I don't know how you call that a draw.

And I don't really care about the average show, since I (and I suspect most others) are not uniformly randomly sampling movies to watch with zero input from others. I (and I suspect others) watch those that are rated as good movies, and in that case, Netflix is crushing the competition by the numbers in that chart.

Netflix, by that chart, provides a lot more shows rated good, outstanding, and exceptional.

Although most of those Netflix shows are on the far left of that category.

There are a lot of ways you can interpret the info and a lot of good questions that it doesn't really answer. But it is interesting that Netflix clearly looks different from others.

The chart doesn’t include HBO originals. I’ve never seen a Netflix show that is on par with the best HBO content.

I would put Narcos up there.

I would not. It's not even close either.

As long as you’re not comparing it to El Patrón del Mal, Narcos: Mexico wasn’t half bad.

To The Wire? No way

Reply on news.ycombinator.com