It honestly feels like the technology advantage Netflix enjoyed has all but disappeared.
Content is now king and all of the other production companies have been making content for decades, Netflix is in serious trouble if it doesn’t lift its game.
Content is now king and all of the other production companies have been making content for decades, Netflix is in serious trouble if it doesn’t lift its game.
Solution: Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing. Disney must set a price for a piece of content and then allow any distributor to pay that price to carry it. They must not advantage their own distribution service in any way (which they shouldn't be allowed to have in any case).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
However I note on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... that the decree has just been sunset with the reasoning that ""the antitrust restriction was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings"" - but it seems really like the exact same model,
Theaters take tons of staff and logistics to operate. A streaming service is comparably simple (once the initial system is setup) and can deploy all content to all customers within seconds with the efforts of minimal people and overhead.
There is no barrier to distribution these days. The only limitation is quality of content. If a content creator makes something good enough at a price point people will accept, then customers can easily pay it.
No one is walled in now. If a content producer in Tajikistan made something that blew everyone away, everyone can watch it around the world without having to go through the bosses at Disney and Comcast and Netflix.
By and large, people like their curators. For example, I have no interest in sifting through content to see if it is worth watching or not. So I let my sources mention a show or movie’s name a bunch of times before I decide to watch it.
Others depend on the fact that it u in a on Disney or Netflix or Apple TV to be the filtering mechanism. Others do not mind wading through YouTube or TikTok filth.
The power is in the consumer’s hands.
The important thing is that it can get in front of everyone. Which the internet enables very easily.
If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
The distributor is irrelevant nowadays. Today, Disney’s role is to curate.
Again, that's laughable nonsense. If I want to stream a Marvel movie, Netflix' curation is irrelevant, because you can ONLY find it on Disney. That's not curation, that's distribution.
> If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
This isn't true - Rocky Horror Picture Show? That's the just the first one that comes to mind. There are so many cult classics from the 60s-80s.
> There are 8B people in the world, there is no way everyone has time to watch everything. There will be a filtering mechanism for everyone.
Right now it's whoever owns the exclusive license for a piece of content. That's my entire point - consumers aren't choosing the winners, content owners are.
I still put up with listening to Joe Buck call the World Series because Fox has exclusive rights to the broadcast. I would pay money to hear just about anyone else call it, including an ML powered Vin Scullybot (RIP).
Alas, I cannot, for a lack of FRAND licensing.
MLB choose to give Fox exclusive rights, and Fox chose to give exclusive announcing to Joe Buck. Ideally, you could just go to MLB.com and choose whichever announcer you want, or some other equivalent system.
I would lean towards MLB having the right to sell their games how they want, but they also benefit from taxpayer funded stadiums, so I would not mind the government being able to force certain terms like FRAND on them.
Would a carpenter be able to only distribute their furniture directly to their customer? A hotel be not be able to exclusively take reservations from their hotel guests? An independent videographer not be able to sell their own videos however they want?
I think the solution here is to reduce copyright to 10 years. Or maybe 15. Then there is no more “exclusive” distribution.
The solution is to mandate non discriminatory licensing, everything else you suggested is a workaround to avoid that step.
For some reason* everyone seems to think monopolism was this quaint thing of the past, and not the thing that every market everywhere sprints towards as fast as the technology of the era will allow without some kind of restraint or regulation.
(*"deeply motivated ideological reasoning")
The next season they outsourced to MLBAM and it was flawless.
And would you know it. Disney bought MLBAM.
Although now there are several content producers who can match up with Netflix, with their in house teams.
What I will never understand though was Netflix voluntarily choosing to eliminate the tremendous data collection operation they had in their rating system. One of Amazon's biggest advantages are the reviews. Netflix had that in the media space. They decided to throw it away for a system which has no user input (so no moat) where anything that is presented to you is invariably rated 99%. It makes absolutely no sense.
Now they give me some stupid thumbs-up/-down thing, and I just give them the finger in response. Ratings on Netflix are useless now.
I do have one huge bit of praise for them: the cancellation process was absolutely painless. Not being snarky, I really appreciated that! (Contrast with trying to cancel SiriusXM, or Spectrum Internet; both painful)
After finally convincing them that yes, I really did want to cancel, I was about to hang up and decided to double check that my auto-pay billing would be cancelled too.
"Oh no, if you're enrolled in auto-pay, you have to call the billing department to stop that."
I was so angry I nearly lost my composure with the lady on the phone who clearly wasn't responsible for such an asinine setup. I wonder how many people got charged for services never rendered and didn't want to deal with their bullshit enough to fight for a refund because they didn't know they had to cancel that separately.
They really had every possible advantage, and then instead re-built trash TV.
But technology advanced fast and if your differentiator is tech you’d better watch out.
I’d say if your differentiator is tech, also sell the tech.
Netflix has new stuff but it gets old faster.
You're correct that any streaming service has a chance at providing a show I'd like. That's the problem for services at the moment. Netflix has a huge catalogue but I've watched the shows I like. Disney has a smaller catalogue but happens to have a show I can watch with my wife. So that's the one we like at the moment.
They don't differentiate on anything else for me. They both work well enough. That said Disney is not on my spart TV so I have to use the Chromecast.