Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I guess at some point it looked like all content was just going to be sent to Netflix, like a giant modern Blockbuster. Every movie that was no longer in cinemas, every niche classic from times gone by.

It might have been a great business, if the owners of those movies had been happy to just get a small fee from Netflix.

Unfortunately that's not how it turned out, for instance Disney decided they could both make their own tech and their own content, esp for such things like Mandalorian which takes a modern long-story format that is suitable for streaming. Basically it turns out content is king, which Netflix also realized as they went and tried to make their own stuff with limited success.

What I don't get is why it's so hard to make the content. They've certainly thrown a lot of money at it, how come nothing sticks? By contrast everything Disney makes seems to be high quality.

View on HN

Indeed, and if things had turned out that way I would've happily kept my subscription and paid for such content to watch it legally.

Instead they fragmented, and there is no way that I will be figuring out which of the dozen subscriptions I need any time I want to watch something, and I know I am not alone here.

Piracy is king once again. It has all the content, and none of the bullshit.

For some users like me. The value of Netflix would have been in the long-tail content. Collection and ease of access to enough of it. But if that is gone, is their own that much better than any other competitor? With their much longer tails?

Mmm, I think Netflix made plenty of their own missteps in that department. They’re notorious for shutting down popular shows after a few seasons, for example. I’m sure they had numbers that convinced them that was the smart thing to do, but you do that enough times and people might wonder why it’s ever worth getting into your shows.

This kind of thing comes from company culture too. I can’t speak to specifics, but presumably Disney and other studios who have been at the content game a lot longer than Netflix have a better understanding of how to cater to their customers and foster that relationship over time.

Another way to put all this is simply that it’s a lot harder to build a content business than a CDN, especially now. So the existing content biz just built CDNs.

Indeed Netflix seems to rely too much on numbers and data to justify decisions, and to define what goes into their shows. And they ended up with a bunch of generic, disjointed, easily forgettable shows that get cut midway.

Netflix seems to be perfectly happy beating the corpse of House of Cards, Stranger Things, and Ozark for content. There's just a difference between popular and popular on the internet. Sense8 as an example was decidedly the latter.

It crossed my mind that perhaps content is actually a relationship business. You need to have a bunch of connections with the creators that goes beyond just giving them money to make a show. There's some kind of negotiation between what the artists want to make and what Disney wants to sell that requires some sort of hard-to-put-your-finger-on experience to handle. But it's not my industry, so very hard for me to anything but speculate.

Plus their excessive pushing of 'woke' crap turned normal people away. Who would have thought most people don't want coercive brainwashing but just entertainment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reply on news.ycombinator.com