Comment by avl999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avl999 | Hacker News Reader

What Netflix needs is pilot episodes instead of straight to series orders. Some of the shows that get greenlit and get minimum one season are so bad that if they had any kind of pilot/quality control process they'd never make it on beyond episode one (and thus release resources for multiple seasons of the shows they cancel or a good quality new shows). I watch some Netflix shows (eg Another Life/The I-Land) and wonder how they ever get made, it's like no one is paying attention.

They also need to give shows some kind of ending even if they are not part of their long term plans. Having a library of shows without ending is not attractive to customers.

AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality), what is the last critically acclaimed series on Netflix? I am not saying that your shows need to be critically acclaimed but you can't be in a state where your shows are getting panned criticlaly and on top of that not giving endings to your semi popular shows.

I didn’t know Apple TV was watched a lot. Anecdotally two tv addicted friends mention it. Besides Ted Lasso I don’t see it mentioned. And whatever Oscar bait they have.

I watch Mythic Quest. No one else I know does.

Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.

OTOH, overall. Netflix is still huge. Just when I’m on HN of Reddit this never appears to be the case.

I registered for Apple TV just for Foundation. I did the same for Amazon Prime Video because of The Expanse.

Once I saw those two ended for the season, I also ended my subscription.

> Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.

I never found For All Mankind or any other Apple TV+ show to be sterile (well, maybe apart from Severance, but that is deliberately done) - to me, they have an unparalleled production value. Nothing comes even close in the streaming landscape. I wonder if that is creating that feeling for you.

Most of the people I know are watching Apple's new show Severence. Probably their biggest hit yet.

From where I see it Apple TV is trying to be to streaming services as HBO was to broadcast/cable network in the pre-streaming era. Back then, broadcast/cable networks would crank out shows like a lot of streaming services are doing to day but HBO would have a much more limited selection but what they did put out was aimed to be high quality (where quality here is defined by critical approval; and production values).

AppleTV like HBO is trying to follow a strategy of focusing on the quality of the product over quantity. It seems that most of their shows esp as of late get excellent reviews and look very expensive. It probably doesn't have the viewership of the bigger streaming services like Netflix/Max/Disney+ who have more populist content but they are managing to differentiate themselves from the other services.

Apple can also get away with a small library in the short term because their users can bundle in cloud services they were likely to buy anyway.

Once you want a music subscription and a family-size amount of cloud storage (the 2TB plan), you’ve basically got the whole Apple One bundle justified.

On top of that these services all further increase the friction of ever leaving the Apple platform.

Apple is the most valuable company in the world for a very good reason.

> AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality)

No it hasn't, Apple TV has been making shows for a narrow demographic of people who hang around on HN and nobody else.

That's fine and all, I hang around on Hacker News and I like that, and Apple can afford to dump two billion dollars a year in a furnace and set it on fire to make Tim feel like a Hollywood big shot, but it is not a successful service by any conventional metric.

Well AppleTV shows tend to get pretty good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, tv critics certainly aren't the "hacker news crowd". I do agree that AppleTV's content is targeted to be more niche than the much more broader content of Netflix which is trying to produce something for everyone. But that allows them to have good quality control over their product and there is nothing wrong with producing less content but content targeted at a niche. HBO found a lot of success in the pre-streaming era following a very similar model.

Yes, Apple TV is making shows exclusively for the 10,000 people that use HN. Clearly that's their genius business model.

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