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Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

This might be an overreaction, but for me it's kind of the end of Netflix as a tech company.

For years, Netflix stock has been growing, Netflix has been hiring great software engineers, and people considered them a tech company. But the tech there is not a differentiator. I don't know anyone who will choose Netflix over Disney+ or HBO because of better tech. My brother hates the HBO app, but he uses it because it has content he likes to watch.

Streaming still provides technical challenges, and people will praise providers for great UX, high quality video etc. but in this case, very clearly content is the king. Netflix has had a few years to catch up with competitors who have decades worth of content. It wasn't a lot of time, and they did what they could, but it seems this time is over now. Netflix is no longer the sole player, it's one of a few competitors.

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What I don't get is why Netflix never licensed their technology to other platforms. For instance, why not white label their tech for Disney, Paramount, sports leagues, etc. Their tech is better than competitors and it would have been great to watch MLB through a white-labeled Netflix experience rather than MLBAM. Maybe they did try to pursue this path but it wasn't lucrative enough?

I also wonder if Netflix thought that perhaps content could be licensed on multiple platforms. It's unfortunate that movie/TV content seems to have exclusive licenses in contrast to music which is available on multiple platforms.

Maybe they thought it would be difficult enough to replicate their streaming tech, that it would serve them as a moat? And by the time they realized that it wouldn’t, nobody else was interested because they already did it?

My guess is that they tried to keep advantage as long as possible to remain number 1 in streaming, so they didn't want to give their leverage to competitors.

Their advantage was licensing (Marvel, Friends, The Office etc.) and tech. In both cases eventually competitors caught up - they launched their own platforms, and licensing contracts expired. That gave Netflix a few years more to develop their own content, but now it's over.

Disney, NBC, HBO etc would never pay Netflix, their competitor in the video entertainment industry, for any tech. At best Netflix could provide tech for smaller players like Crunchyroll, Nebula, Mubi, Spuul etc.

"never" is a strong statement especially if it meant that Disney, NBC, HBO could have launched online platforms years earlier.

>What I don't get is why Netflix never licensed their technology to other platforms. For instance, why not white label their tech for Disney, Paramount, sports leagues, etc

That's probably a company worth billions. But not the hundreds of billions Netflix is valued at.

The premise before streaming tech matured at least was Netflix's data pipeline was so great and ML algorithms so good they'd recommend films so effectively and produce films that users would crave. Feels like those two claims have failed, and at the end of the day content (IP) is king in the entertainment media world.

The recommender may be having trouble because of the large catalog of garbage content. That is, it's working right, but there's so much shite in the catalog that the recommendations are polluted.

Why is there a belief that the provider of content should also be the source of quality recommendations? I also see this disappointment with for example Steam and gaming. Or Spotify and music.

But the days of walking into department stores and purchasing things based on a service rep's recommendations are behind us. We understand stores are incentivized to sell you the item most profitable to them. The Internet has a vast amount of places to inform your decisions independent of parties acting against your interests.

Netflix is a gigantic warehouse of a lifetime of content. Some bad, some good. If you select something poorly, perhaps you're better served honing a better selection criteria.

>Why is there a belief that the provider of content should also be the source of quality recommendations?

I suppose because they should be able to do this well. They know what I have watched, what I bailed out early on, terms I search for and which results I looked at, and so on. And no shortage of tech talent to do the right thing with all of that.

Has it failed? Youtube and tiktok's strategy of using top notch AI to hypertarget a tsunami of really cheap and mediocre content seems to work pretty well.

I think it failed for Netflix, those two sites have massive corpuses and a constantly pumping pipeline of fresh content. I guess they also figured out the economics re: paying content creators to ensure that's the case, Netflix I think dropped billions to establish IP to keep people hooked to Netflix and failed.

I can’t speak for TikTok (as I’m not a user), but I haven’t met anyone that would consider YouTube’s recommendation algo any good at all. I believe most users share the experience of pausing their scrolling to deliberately say “Don’t recommend this channel”, or “I’m not interested in this”. Recommendations have to be pretty terrible for users to break the apathetic endless scrolling motion they’ve been conditioned to embrace, and make several distinct and deliberate clicks amounting to the provided feedback, “stop annoying me with how much you suck”

> My brother hates the HBO app

Funny, Netflix is my least favorite app (on AppleTV), followed by the AppleTV TV+ app. The current version of the HBO Max app is fine. It lets me find what I want, keeps track of what I was watching so I can easily resume, surfaces interesting content.

Netlfix by contrast makes it hard for me to resume where I left off unless I explicitly add a show or movie to my list, which it still makes it hard to get to. Netflix refuses to expose its catalog to Apple, so I can't search for shows via Siri. Netflix also still forces the end of a show/movie down to a thumbnail sometimes before the credits even roll. And yes, it does this regardless of the autoplay settings, which I have turned off.

The only annoying bug HBOMax continues to have is that it constantly turns subtitles back on.

My favorite streaming app is Criterion. Netflix at the bottom, the others all in the middle.

IME the most annoying bug in HBO Max is the audio starts out of sync roughly 75% of the time. Rewinding once or twice fixes it but having to do it so often is frustrating.

I haven't experienced that with HBO Max on AppleTV. The Disney+ app sometimes has the audio drift out of sync as a movie plays and pausing/play brings it back to sync.

You know what has none of these problems? Playing locally from my NAS using Infuse. When I'm watching something I care about, I download it to my NAS in advance. Sad, but true.

>I don't know anyone who will choose Netflix over Disney+ or HBO because of better tech

There was a time when the player for some streaming services was so terrible I'd avoid it, though sometimes only terrible on a specific platform (Roku, etc). I think you're right though, they are all now good enough that it's not a real factor for the basic player functions.

Though I do still tend to prefer Prime over some other services when picking something that's available on many, like a new-ish movie rental. Mostly because of the "X-ray" feature where I can see the list of characters and actors by scene. So, at least for me, there's some tech advantage left here and there.

> I don't know anyone who will choose Netflix over Disney+ or HBO because of better tech.

I don't think it is about tech choices but user hostility. Any streaming service could differentiate by allowing you to turn off autoplay or not have some pushy in-your-face "feed" berry your recently watched series list.

But ye, in the end its probably all down to content, like you say.

That would only provide an advantage if all of the platforms had the same catalogue. I think people switch streaming music platforms based on UX differences because they all have most of the music, and it's rare that people want to listen to specific music.

That doesn't seem to be the case with video unfortunately. I predict a resurgence of piracy.

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