Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it

https://www.vulture.com/2022/04/netflix-bad-decisions-have-caught-up-with-it.html

216 432 4 years ago

thrill• 4 years ago

The quoted "competing exec" is 100% wrong when he says Netflix is making a mistake ending shows after three seasons. Shows need to be pitched and run for three seasons max, period. Everyone has a life other than the show that's "hot" for the moment, from cast to writers to the source of money - the viewers. Shows that get dragged out inevitably suck.

And yeah, go to weekly releases.

eggsmediumrare• 4 years ago

Depends on the show (IASIP has been funny until recently, South Park is still good, et cetera), but I agree that shows shouldn't have the life wrung out of them

justbaker• 4 years ago

Sadly I think both are in their decline(and have been past few seasons) Both were the worst seasons of the series… South Park lost its edge where they poke fun at anything and everything without fear of backlash. The “tolkien” episode smelled of wokeness. The tegridy episodes are getting old, you can tell the two creators just don’t care as much about the show anymore as the IRL tegridy.

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

Other studios do "episode at a time" pilots, Netflix does "season at a time" pilots. Pretty much everyone misunderstands; and thinks a whole season implies more seasons.

chimeracoder2• 4 years ago

This is not a good comparison, because except in very few cases, the audience of a pilot is not the general public. In fact, the general public will never have the chance to see the pilot unless it's picked up, and in that case they'll still have to wait until the entire season is filmed.

By contrast, Netflix uses the viewership ratings from the first season to determine whether to renew for a second season.

carlmr3• 4 years ago

But that's a problem. Watching a whole season makes you more invested in the show, so you're pissed off when it gets cancelled.

I also agree with OP that encouraging binge watching is not good. Netflix pumped out more content than any cable TV package I've ever had in the past, but by allowing binge-watching people binge and then get bored and say Netflix has no content.

If they spread out these shows it would be healthier for the viewers and would create a perception of more content.

underwater• 4 years ago

What's good for the network isn't necessarily what's best for the viewers or having a consistently high quality show.

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

That would be fine if the storylines were wrapped up at the end of season three but shows not only fail to do this, they often end on a cliffhanger and then the series gets cancelled. I don't know about other people, but I wait until a show has been on for years before bothering with checking them out. There are a few that I knew were continued as graphic novels, which I thought was a decent compromise but if I know there's an unresolved cliff hanger and a bunch of half finished storylines, I don't bother starting the show.

A three year series is fine but treat it like that in the third season before too many people's behaviors change and it starts to become difficult to get their attention to new series because they fear it ending suddenly without resolution.

smcnally3• 4 years ago

Shows need to be pitched and run for three seasons max

with this as the case, they’ll likely be wrapped at the end of S03.

There’s not much to be done if they’re cancelled before S03.

samhw3• 4 years ago

fear it ending suddenly without resolution

I don't mean to sound like some "well akshuallyyy"ing Comic Book Guy figure, but you must realise it's not real life? If it's a Poirot-type mystery where the entire payoff lies in the resolution, then I totally understand, but for a regular TV show I can't see why you would enjoy the episodes any less simply because it might end without resolving all your questions. There's no real suspense - it's not real people, it's just a bunch of people performing in front of a camera. Being distressed about 'what happened to them?' seems, well, puzzling to me.

Beached• 4 years ago

seasons are iffy measurement. episodes or hours is better. one season of star trek used to be 20+ episodes. no adays lots of shows are only 8, 10, 12 episodes.

tell the story you want to tell, with a satisfying ending. book and run the show for all of it.

no open ended shows that will run until it lives.lo h enough to suck. no shows canceled before their story is complete

nverno• 4 years ago

I agree, milking shows usually ruins them. On the other hand, if they are great shows that last a long time you can gain a loyal audience. This seems to be how HBO has found so much success- Sopranos (never lost quality, even by the end), Curb, the Wire, etc. Although, GOT got milked out terribly. I think the hard part is just deciding which shows to drag on- and being based on a story that already has an ending helps guard against plot degradation.

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

GOT had a lot of problems but dragging content out definitely wasn’t one of them

lupire3• 4 years ago

GOT wasn't milked. It outran the unfinished source materials and then the director/producers D&D "phoned it in" because they started working on Star Wars.

And seasons are so short that even the bad seasons weren't a lot of TV.

xedrac• 4 years ago

Some kid-oriented shows seem to get by just fine, albeit their story lines don't necessarily connect. Sponge Bob, and Big City Greens are two of my favorite kid shows with a ton of episodes. Maybe I just like kid shows...

mountainriver• 4 years ago

How about the show keeps going for as long as it’s good? Arbitrary time boxes on shows seems silly, some shows are great for 10+ seasons, would suck to lose that because we decided that wasn’t possible

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

The problem with American TV is that almost everything is unbounded. Some shows manage to keep things going. Others jump the shark.

It’s not that having 10 seasons is bad. But many shows tell the story they wanted to tell in much less time. At which point you should just stop.

Some formats are interesting though like American Horror Story. It’s more like an anthology. Different story each season. Some actors might return with different roles.

Dr Who is also interesting since the mechanism for “reboots” is built in to the character.

Or go the Disney route and expand the individual character stories like they are doing with Marvel and Star Wars.

ajmurmann5• 4 years ago

I'm a fan of shows or movies being as long as they need to be. To Old To Die Young is a great example of a show that is bold and does this. Episodes range anywhere from 30 to 90+ minutes.

That said, for shows that have a continuous, overreaching storyline I'm highly suspect of the writers having no idea how the thing is gonna end. Sure, in some lucky cases it works out super well, but in other cases it gets us unsatisfying stuff that undermines the show like with Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Come up with the story arch and tell the story. Please don't keep stretching the thing out endlessly and end it when it's bad or the crew wants to move on. That's fine with shows that have disconnected episodes, but for modern shows or can ruin the whole thing and leaves me feel like I wasted a ton of time.

tick_tock_tick• 4 years ago

And yeah, go to weekly releases.

I think the full release of everything prevents it from building up cultural relevance but I'd like to see something like 2 or 3 episode every two or three weeks rather then 1 at a time.

gs17• 4 years ago

There seem to be a few shows they do it for, but it's not the standard.

stirfish• 4 years ago

I refuse to watch anything with weekly releases. Give me all of it and let me decide when I'm done, or don't bother.

I won't even play wordle, because it wants me to come back for my daily dose of engagement.

smegger001• 4 years ago

Almost all the shows i watch over and over and again are ones with 7+ seasons,

90's star trek (tng ds9 voy) all 7 seasons, MAS*H 12 seasons, Frasier 11 season, Scrubs 8 season (I skip season 9 and refuse to acknowledge its existance), Red Dwarf 8 season (+ more after the revival decades later), X-Files 11 seasons, How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons, Freinds 10 seasons, Stargate SG1 10 seasons, three seasons is to little to grow a fallowing and not enough for you to rewatch

Sebb767• 4 years ago

How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons

Luckily the last season only has 22 episodes!

A lot of series jump the shark of they get dragged out for long. Even worse, if it's a slow decline, it kills rewatchability. Some manage, but it goes wrong more often than not. And especially if your concept does not lend itself to a lot of seasons (like Chernobyl, for example), you should stop while it's still good.

skmurphy• 4 years ago

Some other ones I watch again from time to time: Big Bang Theory, NYPD Blue, Supernatural, Cheers, ER, Law & Order, Blue Bloods, Waltons, Parenthood, Little House on the Prairie, Cosby Show, West Wing, MaGyver, Seinfeld, LoveJoy, Rumpole of the Bailey

lupire3• 4 years ago

You are ignoring that "a season" can be 6 episodes or 30.

Great shows are often 6-12 episodes for 5+years.

Most streaming shows have far shorter seasons than classic TV sitcoms/dramas/soaps.

e-dt• 4 years ago

The same model is used for broadcast television in Britain - the standard British 'series' is 6-12 episodes. (Apart from soap opera, which cranks out massive amounts each year.)

theonemind• 4 years ago

It seems like strong shows can go up to about 7 seasons and remain good. Three does seem short for a very strong show.

Maybe personal bias, but it seems to hold up pretty well in my viewing history. Seinfeld definitely felt stretched at 9. Star Trek TNG's seventh season definitely felt like about time to wrap it up. Simpsons went kind of wonky around season 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed good for a 7 season run.

Not some immutable law, but really good shows ending after 5 seasons seems a bit disappointing as well, like Babylon 5. Writers run out of ideas and the original concept seems explored pretty thoroughly after going through 7 seasons.

Three is way too short. Seven seems like the sweet spot. Maybe everyone just gets bored and they don't do stuff as well after seven seasons, but shows really start to change after season 7.

zargon• 4 years ago

Especially considering that streaming seasons are 8 episodes. So 3 streaming seasons is only one full season.

bostik• 4 years ago

Under that rule of thumb, The Wire and Babylon 5 would never have been made.

And from a more recent sample, The Expanse would not have been allowed to get to the end of the story arc.

All three have a few things in common. A strong cast of good-but-not-a-star actors.[ß] Writers who knew what they were doing. A story that they wanted to tell, and knew how long it would take. And above all: the integrity to end the series once the story was told. No stretching into infinity with useless rehashing or replaying of old hits. No resets. No desperate attempts to magically reinvent itself.

You pointed this out yourself: Shows that get dragged out inevitably suck.

ß: Idris Elba became a star later.

(EDIT: grammar)

digisign2• 4 years ago

Another thing I've noticed, they should only do about a dozen episodes per year. Anything more than that, and a much higher percentage are filler.

conradfr3• 4 years ago

Netflix paid $500 million for Seinfeld, a show that ended 25 years ago, that has constant reruns since, which best seasons are past the first three and that they themselves would have probably cancelled after the first one due to low viewership.

simonswords82• 4 years ago

I did not know they were thinking about taking on ads. That's got to be a circling of the drain.

B1FF_PSUVM• 4 years ago

If I remember correctly, a feature of cable TV way back when was ... no ads.

Pesky things. I bet Gutenberg felt the same.

Clubber• 4 years ago

And ads are what killed it too, once a competing technology (finally) came out. From what I understand the US shows way to many adds compared to Europe, it's nearly half of the show time. If TV/cable execs weren't so greedy, they might still be alive. It seems like US companies tend to kill the golden goose.

scarface749• 4 years ago

Where does the myth that cable ever was ad free come from? Cable started out as a method to deliver broadcast TV to people who couldn’t get reception. Then superstations like TBS started broadcasting local content. Cable always had ads besides premium TV like HBO

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

TV shows take about 2 years from greenlight to being distributed for Viewing. Cindy Holland was fired in September 2020, which means we will need to wait till this fall to see if the decision has improved the quality.

fluidcruft• 4 years ago

I don't know about that. Wasn't she was fired because she refused to green light piles of what she found to be low quality content and then the CEO got frustrated because he wanted quantity and decided to allow a bunch of other people to override her decisions?

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

I was under the impression she hadn't had any good hits leading up to the end of 2020, and enough misses caused her to lose favor. I can't really think of any great Netflix originals from 2018-2020.

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

It doesn't help that Netflix stands on principle and blocks all accounts in Russia, one of their major sources of subscriber growth. America, while being the most lucrative market, was already pretty saturated. Cutting off the countries with huge growth makes it extremely difficult to keep growing paying customers. But, principle comes first at Netflix, to the chagrin of their stock holders and employees.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

But, principle comes first at Netflix, to the chagrin of their stock holders and employees.

You're saying that as if that was a bad thing.

nullcipher2• 4 years ago

Isn't the whole point of stock investments for consumers is to grow their money. All this ethics/morals is all passe . What they want is to invest in oil, defense companies and then talk to real people about global warming and peace on earth.

tonguez• 4 years ago

would it even be possible for netflix to not block russian accounts? aren’t companies that big always significantly enmeshed with the state?

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

Generally Netflix makes shows in the same country in which it operates. This has a positive interaction between the country and the company, since the shows are more identifiable to the people who would watch them in that country. While the production in Russia probably would have to stop, there was no reason to turn off access to the existing and new customers. It had no measurable effect on Russia's actions or the outcome of the war. It was merely an attempt for Netflix to "be on the right side of history". Instead, it's shaping up to be Netflix "not being part of the future".

AdrianB13• 4 years ago

Russia is tiny in the overall number of subscribers, it is not an explanation for the hude drop in the stock price. Also the recent Netflix content shows it does not stand on principle, it is highly politicized.

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

It is small, but that's not what you should look at. The Derivative in subscribers matters way more (since Netflix is a growth company), and Russia was nearly doubling in subs each year.

rch• 4 years ago

We have to have an Adam Project and a Bridgerton every month

Decade+ subscriber: I'm never watching those shows. If they have to advertise or talk up their programming, it's not going to be worth the time to see how terrible it is. On the other hand, I'll have 3 people mention a new season of Ozark before I've noticed it's been released.... Actually, that was more true of the second season than the recent ones.

So, if fixing the content is the answer, then maybe the people who created the problem aren't the right ones to fix it. Their taste is out of sync with that of their subscribers.

dragontamer4• 4 years ago

I was expecting to see some discussion over Netflix's depreciation models, which is (apparently) over 5 years, 20% per year.

While Disney (and other producers) do something like 90% depreciation over the first year, the famous "Hollywood accounting" that gets a lot of criticism.

But "Hollywood accounting" might be closer to the truth than Netflix's model. 20% of the movie "Bright" (released in 2017, the Will Smith + Orc buddy-cop movie) is still being "paid for" on Netflix's books this year.

--------

Since Netflix's growth has slowed a bit, the effects of depreciation are now going to start hurting it. But it seems like everything discussed in this article is about the fundamental viewership issue, which might be worse.

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

That’s interesting. And probably astute. One off movies not part of a larger series have significantly shorter periods of relevance. It doesn’t make sense to spread it out over 5 years at all.

tomnipotent4• 4 years ago

over Netflix's depreciation models

Amortization - Netflix treats content as assets, and recognizes on average 90% of amortized expenses in the four years after first broadcast. Net revenue looks better, but cash flow and balance sheets are still going to reflect outlays, which can often occur before first broadcast.

The "Hollywood accounting" recognizes 90% of expenses in the first year to artificially reduce net profit, which in turn means less taxes and royalties during the year when most revenue for content is recognized. Netflix can make a case that content continues to make an impact on subscription revenue over a larger window of time, and so expenses should equally be recognized in relation to the income statement.

Netflix also regularly updates their amortization schedule as trends shift.

dragontamer4• 4 years ago

Netflix can make a case that content continues to make an impact on subscription revenue over a larger window of time, and so expenses should equally be recognized in relation to the income statement.

How many people are getting Netflix subscriptions to watch Bright (2017 Will Smith+Orc movie) this year?

Or from a Disney perspective, how many people are getting Disney+ to watch Coco (2017 Day of the Dead 3d cartoon)?

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

So the problem with media conglomerates (including big studios) is they want predictable returns. More specifically, they want a formula. Let me introduce you to Save the Cat [1]. This book has become so influential that you can read this book and then watch pretty much any movie and you'll be able to tick off everything in the movie to this structure.

It's why studios love sequels and franchises. They have a built-in audience ie predictable returns.

The biggest innovation we've had in this industry is the advent of highly serialized TV shows, made possibly in large part due to (at first) DVRs and then streaming. 30 years ago it just wasn't possible or practical to do somethin glike this when people had to tune in at a set time. The audience drop off would've been too severe.

For me this has been the true Golden Age of TV. But movies? It's all superhero films now and dull, dull, dull for the most part.

So the lesson Netflix is learning here is you can't just scale up a content business by throwing money at it. Studios would love if it this were true. Netflix has thrown many billions at this problem and not spent it wisely. You can't just write a check for $10 billion and become HBO.

Movies in particularly just don't make economic sense without theater releases. We've seen this durin gthe pandemic with movies that have skipped theaters out of necessity. It just doesn't work.

I agree Netflix needed to create original content given the inevitable "me too" streaming platforms from all the studios would otherwise rob Netflix of their catalog. But they may have just saddled themselves with so much debt that they're forced into ever-increasing sub prices because of decreasing subscriber numbers, which just accelerates the need for more price hikes and so on.

Ironically this is exactly what is killing cable TV.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp...

pvarangot4• 4 years ago

I would add that "a formula" doesn't mean it's bad. I regularly drank beer since like when I was 14 until when I was like 35 or something? I do it way less now but still sometimes drink beer.

My favorite style changes. Sometime I just drink a new one because like dopamine hits and I get excited about the potential novelty and discovery. But it's beer, and I think there's nothing wrong with it. From bud light to like whatever quadruppel or super IPA monstrosity someone in the Bay Area decided to brew and that may work as an antiseptic, I like them all. There's a formula and I like it, and I also like Marvel movies. Maybe I'm a basic bastard and I'm making a cardinal sin by spending my money on non innovative things and I should be only watching surreal pieces shot in a single take where at least one actor committed suicide or got addicted to opioids while shooting the movie. Don't get me wrong, those are great too and specially the followup documentaries. I also can then participate in high stakes intelectual debates. But that's a formula too.

And maybe I should drink sours but fuck that.

But yeah I think your analysis is great but I also think it's important to say that milking successful formulas is not wrong or morally reprehensible. If you scam people or whatever while doing yeah that's bad, but letting the chicken lay the golden eggs and not changing anything about it is pretty much ok in my hierarchy of sins.

orzig• 4 years ago

I can't match the near-unhinged brilliance of the above comment, but I'll add that many meditation traditions encourage serenity by inspecting the details of the ordinary instead of a constant grasping for new stimulation.

Ericson23143• 4 years ago

To vaguely respond with an analogy, when I don't care what I'm drinking I don't drink Budweiser, I drink water.

It's good to not be insufferable in constantly policing oneself to follow the trend. sure. But watching Marvel movies isn't the only alternative.

astrange4• 4 years ago

From bud light to like whatever quadruppel or super IPA monstrosity someone in the Bay Area decided to brew and that may work as an antiseptic

On this note, Pliny the Elder (the highest rated IPA in the Bay Area) used to be hard to find but recently is just everywhere, and it turns out it tastes horrible. But it’s like single-origin horrible. Like drinking the highest quality grass clippings.

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

Another commenter described what I meant using what I think is a more accurate term: assembly line.

My point is that creating original content is a creative endeavor that doesn’t naturally scale. MrBeast is obviously successful but that doesn’t mean you can just cookie cutter another 100 MrBeasts. That’s not how it works.

smcnally3• 4 years ago

Netflix has worked to infer predictable returns by using ratings and habits from its 222MM subscribers. They model potential market size against production and marketing costs, assess risk, and make decisions informed by all of it. Lots that can go right and wrong, but it’s a solid approach.

loonster• 4 years ago

Except they fail in the execution. I appreciate that Netflix puts a red N on content that is Not Good.

jakear• 4 years ago

Days of our Lives? Highly serialized, been running since 1965.

makeitdouble3• 4 years ago

I kinda wonder how long movies will continue make economic sense, at all.

What we call movies are 1h30 or more of continuous contents, and in this day and age this becomes an increasingly long time to be stuck in one place doing one thing. If it’s a full hobby, like pottery or bordering why not, but for “casual” people I feel the proposition is less and less attractive.

ummonk3• 4 years ago

This view seems to be contradicted by the extent to which people binge-watch shows, which involves way more than 90 minutes of continuous contents.

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

That’s a short ass movie

tomrod• 4 years ago

All we've done is recreate cable TV on a new medium, with broader access of service providers.

Streaming services are equivalent to MVNOs on cellular networks.

mortenjorck• 4 years ago

Problem is — and again, this is not some massively deep observation — wanting more hits and actually making them are two very different things. Netflix until now seems to have believed the best way to produce them is to throw all the money it can find at Hollywood and wait for the successes to start rolling in.

This is basically the VC formula applied to entertainment, and just like how sometimes you get a Dropbox, sometimes you get a Stranger Things. And sometimes you don't.

Of course the key in both is having people with a developed enough market savvy and eye for talent to spot the future Dropboxes and Stranger Things. In VC, it requires a deep understanding of market forces, founders, teams, and tech, and in entertainment, it requires an understanding of both popular tastes and critical tastes as well as the intricacies of production.

Smart people can make bad bets and anyone can get lucky, but the part that's so much harder than it looks is to improve that batting average. Everyone has an opinion on what Netflix should do – I certainly have my own thoughts on things that ought to work (sign Ian Hubert to make a Dynamo Dream series! Adapt Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination with The Rock as Gully Foyle!), but ultimately, it's just my guesses about the cultural marketplace. What Netflix needs is people with greenlight power who have a better feel for that marketplace than anyone else.

petilon• 4 years ago

The reason for Netflix lost subscribers in 2022 is the same as the reason Netflix experienced a growth spurt in 2020: work from home. When people work from home, on average they gain an extra hour or more per day, because they don't have to commute. (Not to mention, the boss can't walk up behind you and catch you enjoying a movie!) Now that work from home is over, they no longer need the Netflix subscription.

LegitShady• 4 years ago

While WFH probably did impact some of their subscriber amount, other issues definitely affect the total subscriber amount, including cost (compared to competing against apple TV+, amazon prime video, and disney+), lack of content (which they're trying to work on) and controversy.

They also have competition on the "content" front in that amazon prime video is now creating its own terrible "lets throw money at this until it works" service to compete with them, and many people already have it with prime so don't feel the need to pay netflix's increasingly expensive service.

I don't know about you but netflix costs more than amazon prime for me, so I could either get netflix or I could get all the amazon prime benefits. It's a losing proposition for netflix.

mertd• 4 years ago

Netflix losing subscribers is a false narrative. Had they not pulled out of Russia, they would have posted a net gain.

rvz• 4 years ago

Netflix losing subscribers is a false narrative.

So is that why the increasing competition from the likes of Apple, Disney+ and HBO, recent price increases and password sharing loopholes have plagued its growth?

All of that explains why they are (still) losing subscribers. Pulling out of Russia, just accelerated it and that was self-inflicting.

cato_the_elder2• 4 years ago

No it's not. While it's true that that suspending their service in Russia costed them 700,000 subscribers, Netflix is projecting that they will lose 2,000,000 users this quarter. [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

As mertd mentioned, Netflix losing subs was an _unexpected_ loss. In their 2020Q2 10-Q, they made it clear that the increase in subscribers was being pulled forward from subsequent years, and investors were made aware of this. The slowdown after Covid was expected, and factored into the price. It was the cutting off 400K+ subscribers from Russia that spooked investors.

Animats2• 4 years ago

This is starting to look like a generic problem for companies which are valued on the basis of future growth, but may have in fact reached their mature size. Suddenly they have to be priced as ongoing operating companies, which is based on revenue and profits right now. Facebook. Uber. Netflix. Tesla. They all do something that people will pay for, but they aren't going to get a lot bigger.

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

Not sure why you put Tesla in the list. They still grow substantially, just added two new large factories (Germany, Texas) and about to build another one (Indonesia).

Animats2• 4 years ago

Because they are a luxury car maker, a crowded sector. Tesla, to grow into its market cap, has to outsell the top automakers put together. They need something at the Toyota Corolla price point to do that.

KaiserPro2• 4 years ago

Until a few months ago, Netflix was spaffing out content deals to support growth.(although they have announced a $250m deal with double negative animation.)

Everything is a genius growth model until its not.

harha3• 4 years ago

Netflix really had a value proposition a few years ago before all the other players came in. A good selection of rotating movies and shows, sharing accounts with a good model (# of simultaneously running screens). This was way better than cable TV and more convenient than torrent.

Now it’s mostly quite mediocre content across services that easily cost $100+ a month, so we’re back to the old cable days in terms of cost and content and instead of switching channels we’re endlessly browsing the library for something interesting.

The consumers just aren’t complete idiots.

- lower quality productions (not the necessarily the cost, just not interesting)

- less good external content

- at the same time constantly increasing prices and/or charging for things that were free at a given tier

If you keep charging more for less, people eventually will get off their lazy asses and cancel the subscription.

One other thing that may have contributed: trying to keep users on the platform for long makes it more difficult to have good content left that hasn’t been watched.

Edit: formatting

bumper_crop13• 4 years ago

The consumers just aren’t complete idiots.

The consumers kinda are the idiots here. They know what they like, but they have no idea why the content is getting worse. Why shows are being pulled. Companies that had their content on Netflix realized they were facing an existential crisis.

Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances. It's the same with Netflix. All other studios realized at some point Netflix would become so strong, even the royalties Netflix pays for their content would put them out of business permanently. There is no amount of money Netflix can pay for other studios content. Consumers only see the net effect of good shows going away, and imagining reasons why.

Guthur• 4 years ago

That's not stupid consumers that's people not rightly giving a f what nonsense licensing setups requested by ip owners and enforced by a government monopoly on force. The consumer just wanted to watch the media, which is fair because they probably just spent 8 hours at some nonsense unnecessary job and would like to switch off... again.

No vote no power.

ramraj072• 4 years ago

While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it, but some how screwed it all up. There’s at best 1 or 2 good show and no good movie Netflix has made in years. And anything half decent they cancel mercilessly without giving it a chance. This is not just in the US. The comparison of original content quality between Netflix and other services in India for example is even more laughable.

In the end, Netflix is a company that used to be great and kinda made some of the most genius ideas to fight the Goliath but was undone by a single dude leading a team making poor choices on what content to make. 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? I’m assuming this is as big or a bigger blunder than Zillow, and was powered by stupid data science ideas as well, probably.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

If only there was a way to what whatever soap 2 day you wanted.

ipiz0618• 4 years ago

Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances

This is why my group of friends stopped playing Catan after a while..

stdgy• 4 years ago

Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix.

The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts."

Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform.

The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site.

As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.

walrus01• 4 years ago

I know a number of people who have just gone back to torrenting everything they care about (such as For All Mankind or Foundation) and are very unlikely to ever subscribe to a 2nd, 3rd, 4th streaming service.

They either picked netflix and have stayed with it at $22/mo or have changed from netflix to 1 other service like paramount+ or whatever, but the idea of paying $50-60-80 a month for more services on top of their residential broadband connection at $55-85 is a non-starter.

https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd

MauroIksem• 4 years ago

This is basically me. I have the 15 dollar tier of Netflix and then my friends and i share a Plex hosted at a buddy's house where we get whatever content we want.

ajmurmann5• 4 years ago

Interesting to call out Netflix for high price and then the examples for torrenting are Apple shows which is much cheaper.

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

I'm seeing that a lot too. Netflix killed piracy with price and more importantly convenience. But the extreme fragmentation of the streaming market is driving people back to the torrents. They don't want to sign up somewhere for every new show that they hear about.

The industry is killing itself this way. Netflix is just the first to take the hit because they have the largest market saturation.

Handytinge• 4 years ago

I'm totally fine with spending $100+ per month on streaming. My issue is consistency.

Every streaming service had their own app which may or may not be available on my TV, tablet, phone or computer. The experience is varying on each device (e.g I can disable auto playing trailers for Netflix on my phone but not TV).

Then on top of that, each streaming service requires additional complexity (logins, setting up profiles) and has varying UI (search, continue watching, subtitle and quality control).

It's significantly less hassle for me to just Jellyfin + *arr services than try to manage this on a daily basis.

ajmurmann5• 4 years ago

I keep hearing this $100+ argument all the time, but do you really need all the services simultaneously? As you point out, there isn't that much to watch. So just unsubscribe for a few months, let the new content build up and safe money in the meantime.

harha3• 4 years ago

Well no, but I also don’t want to constantly be switching just to watch one or two shows. The original benefit of Netflix was that you could have a service with a decent selection, no hassle.

If I click unsubscribe, that’s more or less final.

chihuahua• 4 years ago

Yeah, this is not rocket science. Subscribe to one service at a time. Switch to another service when you want to watch something different. It's not like the old days where switching from cable to satellite TV was a huge hassle.

bentcorner• 4 years ago

While that makes a lot of sense, that's a difficult sell when you have multiple people in a household.

mdasen• 4 years ago

I don't think you're wrong, but to over-simplify what you're saying: "Netflix took my $100/mo cable bill and $40/mo Blockbuster habit and turned it into a $10/mo fee. Now I'm not getting all that entertainment for the now $15.50/mo fee."

Again, you're right: before the other players came to streaming, Netflix had an amazing value proposition. Why? Because "the other players" didn't realize that streaming would displace cable, DVD purchases, and Blockbuster rentals so they licensed their content to Netflix a lot cheaper than they would have if they'd realized that. Yes, there was a golden era of Netflix before "the other players" realized that streaming was the future. Over the long run, it's logical to think that they weren't going to just want less money while you got the same quality content.

I would disagree that it's mediocre content across the streaming services. I do think Netflix has invested too much in mediocre content and that's biting them (as the article notes). However, we have so much amazing content being produced.

I also think that "across services that easily cost $100+ a month" is a bit unfair too. $15.50 Netflix, $8 Disney+, $6 Hulu, $15 HBO Max, $5 Apple TV+, Paramount+ $5. That's $55. "Oh, I don't want ads so it's $13 for Hulu and $10 for Paramount+." Fair, but it's not like cable TV was cheaper, it had practically zero content compared to these streaming services, and more than 25% of its time was ads.

I think a lot of people don't really remember how there was almost nothing to watch back then. I think people's memory of the earlier days of Netflix streaming is colored by the fact that they went from "there's nothing on TV" to "OMG, Netflix has so much to stream! This is amazing!" Part of the issue is that we've gotten really accustomed to having so much to watch available. Even if Netflix were giving us just as much quality as they were when they were a "good value", people's perception of what is a good value has changed.

Netflix is still way better than cable in most ways (live sports being a big exception). It's also way cheaper. But it's also not unique anymore. When Netflix launched (and for many years after), we were all thrilled that we could watch 20-25% of the content we wanted via this one service. That was amazing. However, I think our expectations have changed: we think we should have access to all the content we want - and for cheap.

For ages, people complained "why do I have to pay for a cable package that includes X which I don't watch! I should be able to select services a-la-carte!" Now that we're offering services a-la-carte, it's becoming clear that the real complaint was that people just wanted to pay less money for the same content.

I think that Netflix launched and was such a huge jump from the old experience of cable TV and people expected that $10-15 to keep jumping from 20% to 40% to 70% to 90% of what they wanted to watch for one low price. I do think Netflix has had missteps along the way including pouring money into a lot of stuff that ends up being background noise rather than great television. However, with others entering streaming, they were going to keep their own shows for their services more often than not and there would be more competition for high-quality content. Disney explicitly went after Star Wars and Marvel to build a content portfolio they could leverage and bought Fox and its huge library of TV and movie productions (both the historical library and ongoing) as well as Hulu (pending them buying out Comcast's 33% which they're entitled to do).

I guess I wonder: if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently (with the caveat that you do need to create a business that will make money)? My suggestions would be things like: don't keep throwing money at low-quality content that people "watch" but don't really watch. Just because you can measure streaming hours of a program doesn't mean that people like it. I might suggest buying a content company, but that seems like it would be a hard thing to do. It'd give them owner-economics over a large back catalogue, but even in 2016 Netflix was a $40-70B company. Who could you buy without giving away half (or almost all) of your company? 2016 you're talking $40B for Viacom without CBS. Disney would be $150B+. In 2016, AT&T made its deal for Time Warner for $85B. Disney bought Fox for $71B in 2017 - minus the US stations and Sky. If you go before 2016, Netflix is a $25-30B company in 2014 and a $5B company in 2012. They don't have the money. Do you try to negotiate even longer-term third-party content deals for streaming in 2007-2010 before third-parties realize that you're going to be cannibalizing their business? Get Time Warner to give you their catalogue for a 20-year run - giving you a very long time before they can compete with HBO streaming? Do the same to others?

To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours", but isn't quality viewing hours that keep customers loving your product. It's more like settling hours. Beyond that, I think a lot of it is just that people want access to everything for less money and realistically that wasn't going to happen. But maybe you have other ways they could have gone - without saying "keep spending more money, keep losing it, die a hero."

harha3• 4 years ago

To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours"

Reflecting on that: I’ve started to reduce my consumption all together. Bought Blu-ray’s of one or two shows I was interested in and that have been around long enough to buy at a reasonable price for all season (though I won’t bother with that anymore after relocating to a different region).

But the biggest change: turning away from the TV in the evening hours. Back to educating myself or gaming.

isignal• 4 years ago

Very good points.

I’m not sure if there’s something Netflix could have done honestly. They had a technology moat with video streaming tech at a time when everyone else focused on cable but video streaming and streaming apps became a commodity over ten years or so.

To expect them to also become a great studio company when they started out with the tech moat would be a bit of Silicon Valley hubris. It works for a few like Amazon but even Amazon is facing similar issues where online shopping tech is now commoditized and rivals have better depth in retail itself.

fragmede2• 4 years ago

I think the issue of low-quality filler being the issue is debatable. House of Cards or Orange is the New Black hasn't stopped the platform from sinking to where it is now. But as long as people are watching something, they're subscribed to the platform. The real problem is a lack of shows with nine seasons and plenty of shows that got canceled two seasons in. Viewers will take a chance on a new show, binge watch the two seasons, then end up blankly staring at the Now Playing screen and this hollow feeling of Netflixlessness - that listless feeling you get when your life was previously consumed by a show that you've now caught up to, so you have nothing to watch.

The worst thing the service can do is force viewers back to that New Playing screen, and just hope they find something before giving up, disgusted at your library's lack of content. Netflix never did conquer the Now Playing page. If I don't have a show that someone else has promoted to me, I'm not opening the Netflix app, that page is where dreams of just watching some TV go to die. Not for lack of trying, mind you, they've run a large number of experiments on that page, it's just a difficult problem when you don't have the content your users really want. It's thoroughly unsatisfying a UX, especially if you can't find something before your attention span gets bored of trying to find something to watch, and you switch away entirely. To Fortnight or TikTok, as the article suggests.

Spin-off shows don't generally do well on network TV, but things are different for streaming, and mediocre content set in the same universe as existing shows, for easy transference of viewing keeps users on your platform. Even if viewers are rewatching The Office for the Nth time. Because that show has nine seasons, Netflix might as well just be The Office streaming program and it would keep subscribers just fine. You're right that they're "settling" hours, but not everyone is a TV show snob. Netflix was never going to afford to be at ABC/Paramount/Disney level but it's trying to play there and make shows that rivaled their quality - and cost - that killed them.

matwood3• 4 years ago

I think all your points are spot on. One thing to add is that we are in the golden age of content (it takes some volume to discover on good shows), and it is probably coming to end as cheap money goes away. At no point in history has so much money been spent on content creation.

At 17B/year Netflix alone spends ~$48/year for every single person in the US. Prime spends 13B, Apple 6B, Disney 33B, Warner (HBO, etc...) 18B. Or put another way ~$250/person in the US/year on content.

Even if accounting for world wide distribution, these numbers are just not sustainable from an investment standpoint.

JKCalhoun7• 4 years ago

if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently

Is that a new series?

pcurve• 4 years ago

I could be in the minority, but I'm perfectly content with just having Netflix. There's a long backlog of shows that I haven't had a chance to watch, and they keep adding new ones.

Sure it would be nice if I had HBO max, hulu, disney, apple, but honestly I don't think I'd have time for them.

How many hours of streaming video can a person possibly watch that one would find stuff on Netflix not adequate?

Or is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch?

creakingstairs4• 4 years ago

is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch?

Yeah. I love discussing shows with friends and family and I’ve been finding it harder and harder to watch shows together or watch them later on our own time to discuss them later.

For example, I recently watched Pachinko and would highly recommend it but none of my friends have Apple TV so they can’t watch it (unless they pirate it)

xref• 4 years ago

Any reason you don’t do, say 3 to 4 months of each service so you cycle through 3 or 4 services in a year to see everything that interests you

RupertHandjob• 4 years ago

Just put Netflix on hold for few months and pick a another service for that time. This is what I do and works great.

rinze• 4 years ago

I ditched my Netflix suscription and have found a much better replacement combo:

- Criterion Channel for the good stuff (cheaper than Netflix, too.)

- Tubi for guilty crap... and some good movies here and there too (ad-supported.)

For a while I tried Mubi but it was clear I'm not the target audience. I was watching 1-2 movies a month, tops.

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

Netflix is doing what they can to survive in the face of the mob.

They're the outsider compared to all these old boys studios and copyright holders. The old boys are literally the mob. And when the mob saw how much cake Netflix was taking, they said "Nope". Given this, I feel like Netflix has less and less of a choice when it comes to what externally-produced movies/shows they offer. They're just trying to survive. And keep their kneecaps.

native_samples2• 4 years ago

Given Netflix comp levels, "trying to survive" might be overplaying it. The reason for the schadenfreude mentioned in the article is the massive cost inflation Netflix spending levels created.

I think a lot of the discussion in this thread could be summed up as, maybe Netflix should have been content to be a low margin tech supplier to the studios rather than try and spend it's way to becoming a new Disney. A lot of tech firms are built off the back of the fact that it seems to be harder for other industries to learn how to be a tech firm than the other way around. Streaming video is clearly one of those cases where it's the opposite and that fact had been hidden for a long time by the flood of QE funny money.

alaricus• 4 years ago

I never understood why Netflix is assumed to be more convenient. There are illegal streaming websites with better UI and user experience than Netflix.

ChuckMcM• 4 years ago

I found that analysis of the big picture problems fairly insightful. Many of the stories I hear about working in production companies, especially during the big Amazon/Netflix competition for projects, felt exactly like the heyday of the dot com boom. Money was being thrown at anyone who had a 'hint' even of creating something big and as a result a lot of money got spent pretty uselessly.

I've also been a long time Netflix user from their DVD days to the present and while I did not feel like streaming would be the hit they did (I was totally wrong on that count!) I note that the streaming model had an interesting impact on control.

Specifically with the DVD model, Netflix could go out and buy some number of copies of a movie as soon as it hit the shelves and now you, as a subscriber, could watch it without forking over the $20 - $30. Since they had lots and lots of DVDs you could always find something you would probably like. But in the streaming model this changes. Now the people who "own" the content just rent it to Netflix and once that rental term expires it goes "poof" and vanishes.

Two things then emerged, the content holders created their own streaming service and stopped renting out their content, and Netflix's catalog of things to watch shrank so a customer who watched something before and liked it, and then went to watch it again couldn't find it.

That customer experience, going to a service for a product that was available before but isn't now, and is only available for additional money elsewhere, is a strong negative influence on the "let's find something to watch on Netflix habit."

Once the state of mind changes to (it probably won't be on Netflix any more) then the only reason you watch Netflix is because they advertised something new and you're going to watch it this month before it vanishes. And that can lead to months where you don't watch Netflix at all, and of course that often results in re-evaluating what you are spending per month on a service you aren't using every month.

The market response has been pretty predictable, groups who each sign up for one streaming service and share their passwords with other members of the group so they get access to the aggregated catalogs of a number of services with the monthly cost of one service. Service providers have hinted that they are going to "clamp down" on that sort of thing, but one thing that Netflix proved quite clearly was that "Piracy" was a response to cost and cost alone. Content providers really only have two choices[1], share the content at a price people are willing to pay, or collect nothing as your content is shared for free.

There is some hysteresis here, people put up with a lot of crap until they flip over to "alternative access methods" and then it takes a much lower price than you could have gotten before to get them to switch back to the paid access method.

[1] There is a third choice, lock up the content forever, but that is like the null choice for most content providers.

robg• 4 years ago

This narrative is tiresome. Squid game alone was worth the monthly cost. There’s just good competition now.

smitty1e• 4 years ago

We have an account, and I sat down to watch some classics. Nothing.

It would be great to view, for example, all of the Best Picture winners, or work my way through all of the film noir.

Give the customer what they want.

Patrol8394• 4 years ago

Deal breaker for me was that tons of series will stop after season 1. Yeah and the content nowadays is mediocre. I have switched to Disney+ and Apple Tv

daenz4• 4 years ago

Its stock price collapsed by more than 35 percent Wednesday, erasing more than $50 billion in value in a single day.

For people who want to be able to tax unrealized gains like stock, what is the plan for these kinds of events? Would stockholders receive a credit from the IRS when the valuation dips?

arrosenberg3• 4 years ago

The holders would pay less in taxes when the valuation drops, why would they get a credit? Also, the only people who would be subject to those taxes are already extraordinarily wealthy, so who cares?

danhak• 4 years ago

Because the policy will bankrupt founders.

Imagine you're the founder of NFLX and you held $1 billion worth of stock at the peak last year ($690 / share)

The IRS says you owe $300 million (30% of your unrealized gains)

Fast forward to spring 2022. The stock has crashed to $186, your shares are worth only $270 million but you owe a $300 million tax bill.

Not to mention the impossible situation this creates for corporate governance and the general functioning of a business when founders / board members are constantly forced to divest and therefore no one can know who will even control the company from quarter to quarter.

logicalmonster• 4 years ago

The holders would pay less in taxes when the valuation drops, why would they get a credit?

Perhaps you're not familiar with some of the proposals to tax unrealized gains or what this means. This means there have been serious proposals from so-called serious people to tax individuals when a stock they're holding goes up, even if they don't sell that. So somebody is making a point that nobody has made a serious proposal to give a similar credit for unrealized losses. It's just the government wanting to tax and take and take.

Also, the only people who would be subject to those taxes are already extraordinarily wealthy, so who cares?

You've got it backwards.

The already wealthy aren't the ones bothered by paying a bit more taxes on unrealized gains too much. If Warren Buffet had to pay an extra few million because a stock he held went up, he probably wouldn't really notice. It wouldn't even be a buzzkill on his day.

In the event of a tax on unrealized gains, it's the middle class dude who made a great investment on the next Apple who is screwed over from holding for a few years because he has to sell the second the price went up just a bit to pay that tax.

gruez• 4 years ago

For people who want to be able to tax unrealized gains like stock, what is the plan for these kinds of events?

tax-loss harvesting

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/taxgainlossharvesting.a...

Would stockholders receive a credit from the IRS when the valuation dips?

If you realize the loss (ie. sell at a loss), under certain circumstances you can get a credit.

BoiledCabbage• 4 years ago

I don't understand why this is so often presented as such a difficult to understand concept.

People pay property taxes every year on assets that change in value without selling (ie unrealized gains). Nobody seems perplexed by that. But can't seem to figure out how it works for stocks.

Regardless of if you agree or disagree with doing it (which I'm not pushing for or against here), it's not a complex concept.

seibelj3• 4 years ago

My house needs protection from the police and all manner of city services. Land is one of the more tricky elements of property to handle fairly and one mechanism is property taxes given there is only so much land in prime locations.

Hard for me to make sense of taxing unrealized gains. Not even France could make a wealth tax work, and they tax everything.

daenz4• 4 years ago

FWIW, the idea of paying taxes on a fluctuating property valuation has never sat right with me either. So you could say that I am perplexed by that. If I'm on some kind of fixed income, suddenly I might not be able to afford the taxes on the house that I bought 20 years ago and need to sell it? It's bizarre.

astrange4• 4 years ago

Property taxes certainly have issues; they tax building improvements, but we want those, so we shouldn’t be incentivizing people to not improve their buildings.

Land value tax is the proper way to go, questions of how to value land aside.

The issue with a wealth tax is it’s inflationary - most taxes are deflationary but a wealth tax forces you to sell assets to get their cash from them. It does encourage rich people to mark up their assets less, which might reduce apparent income inequality aka make poor people less jealous of them…

jen204• 4 years ago

Nobody seems perplexed by that.

Believe me, as a European living in an American city currently “booming”, not only am I perplexed by it but also wonder how in the hell Americans have put up with it for so long.

The negative effects are quite plain to see as people get pushed out of their homes by the wealthy moving in from other states, and yet people seem to want to apply the same fundamentally flawed logic to other asset classes too.

ummonk3• 4 years ago

It would obviously work the same way a realized loss works currently. They’d be able to offset the loss against other gains and carry over any excess loss into future tax years.

seoaeu6• 4 years ago

The question is asked like it is some sort of gotcha, but there are clear answers for both the general proposals floating around:

(a) wealth tax. Every year each household with over $XX million in net worth pays y% of the amount above the threshold in taxes. No refund if your net worth goes down in subsequent years.

(b) treat unrealized capital gains as income. Each year you pay income taxes on the increase in the value of your stock portfolio, even if you don’t sell. Any losses can be written off subsequent years’ taxes.

seibelj3• 4 years ago

If I’m a rich person and I’m forced to sell shares to pay the tax bill, which then harms pension funds and sovereign wealth by incessantly driving down the value of everyone’s assets, isn’t this problematic?

daenz4• 4 years ago

Walk me through it.

Year 1, I own 10,000 shares at $0.1 each. I'm taxed 25% of $1000, or $250. Year 2, my super smart investment pays off and I own 10,000 shares at $100 each. I'm taxed 25% of an "income" of $999,000, or $249,750. Only, I don't have enough cash to cover the bill, so I sell about a quarter of my stock, leaving me with 7,500 shares. Year 3, the stock goes bust down to $0.2 per share. I write off a loss of $997,500? Does this mean I basically never pay taxes again?

So the end result is I paid a total tax bill of $250,000 on essentially nothing?

Furthermore, what if I decided not to sell my shares when they were worth $100 each and wanted to defer the tax bill. But now the price has crashed to $0.2, and I still owe a massive bill. Is that offset by my tax write-off?

mullingitover• 4 years ago

I helped drive that subscriber loss!

The mistake for Netflix was the price increase - I've had a bunch of online video subscriptions kicking around, and when I got the notification that prices were going up, it served as a reminder that I really wasn't getting much value out of Netflix at the current price, so it made zero sense to put up with a price increase. This actually made me cancel Hulu while I was at it.

It definitely doesn't help that it's about 99% certain that if there's a mainstream movie you want to watch, Netflix won't have it.

No regrets, haven't felt like I was missing anything. After the pandemic the last thing I want to do is spend more time shut indoors staring at a screen.

One comment about the article:

While Netflix has taken small steps to evolve its release model, particularly with unscripted shows, it refuses to experiment with weekly releases on its original scripted shows. One exec at rival streamer I talked with yesterday believes this is a huge mistake, if only because it makes it harder for Netflix to build those reliable franchises it so desperately needs more of.

The only thing dumber than this idea is adding commercials, which they're planning, so I assume they'll also be dumb enough to start listening to idiots telling them to do weekly releases.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

I helped drive that subscriber loss!
[…]
when I got the notification that prices were going up, it served as a reminder that I really wasn't getting much value out of Netflix at the current price

A perfectly reasonable reaction. Netflix is still generally my primary streaming service, but mainly because the others are either a terrible UX for my setup (Hulu), won’t ever get me as a customer for ethical reasons (Amazon), or have content/catalog models like Netflix, only smaller catalogs (basically everything else that isn’t a cable provider).

Netflix becoming a studio was great when it still offered licensed content I love. I could watch their originals and my favorites and things I’d put off watching. Now it feels like I have an HBO subscription I never asked for, where the only thing they offer is original content I don’t want to sift through to find out if it’s worthwhile.

rendall2• 4 years ago

The only thing dumber than this idea is adding commercials, which they're planning...

I will immediately cancel any service that has advertisements. One of them (I think Amazon) did not immediately show the video I asked for, but a preview of another video they think I might be interested in. Even that got my delete finger twitching.

UseStrict• 4 years ago

I cut my subscription at the end of 2021. The comfort shows I'd watch from time to time were leaving to other platforms, and Netflix was pumping out so many originals that it would take forever to find a show I'd like, then they'd go ahead and cancel it after a season or two.

The nail in the coffin was the price hike - in Canada it went to $20.99 for 4k streaming, for something I was rage watching maybe once a week. It's just not worth the money to spend so long hunting for content, only to be disappointed.

lumost• 4 years ago

I think Netflix is learning a hard fact about the content business. Hits are hard.

All the shows I’ve gotten into on netflix get cancelled once the cast demands to much money around season 4. This strategy makes sense if you can turn around a new hit next year to replace it, but having to deliver an exponentially growing set of hits is really hard. At this point just getting cast and crew who want to work with you is a challenge with 5 other major content streamers. If given the choice, I’m sure hot talent would prefer a studio that won’t fire them once it’s a smash hit.

ALittleLight2• 4 years ago

It's interesting that Netflix's hits seemed to come towards the start of their career producing content. If the issue is "hits are hard" then I would've expected them to struggle first.

My intuition is that it's more like statistics led Netflix to produce low quality content that performed on their target metrics. This strategy led Netflix to a local optimum that is far from a global optimum. Plus, given market conditions, that local optimum is starting to be, objectively, pretty bad.

nullcipher2• 4 years ago

Netflix's content is truly shocking. They were so enjoyable back when they were not creating their own content. Cancelled a long time ago.

t8y• 4 years ago

It's clear they are just outclassed by Disney+. People thought the hard part was creating the streaming platform, the content was mostly licensed with a few exclusives. It's now clear that exclusive content is everything. Disney have new content every month (ie. Moon Knight -> Obi-Wan Kenobi) and high quality movies like Luca and Turning Red.

Netflix's strategy seems to be just get big name actors and mediocre creatives and hope it works. The Adam Project might have a lot of viewers but how many of those are just because it's there? How many people would say "The Adam Project is my favorite movie" and how does that compare to Luca?

Netflix has been essentially making the equivalent of direct to DVD movies as its whole strategy while Disney has been bringing their best. They are becoming The Asylum of the streaming world.

snek_case3• 4 years ago

I feel like Netflix always kind of had an issue with poor taste. They have crappy reality shows and pseudo-documentaries about how the aliens build pyramids. A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence. In addition to this content being unhealthy because you either don't learn anything, or are actively being fed falsehoods, I think it just gives the platform a poor image.

It's kind of sad because Netflix had over 5 billion in net income last year, and 30B in total revenue. Suppose that Netflix can afford to spend 15-20B on content a year. You could do so much with that money. I mean, 20B is 20 thousand million dollars. Assuming you take just 5 billion and fund indie movies at 20M a pop, you could produce 250 indie movies a year. If they were smart about it, they would give scholarships to kids coming out of movie school. Create movie making contests. Give a lot of fresh young creative people a shot, and keep funding the creatives that produce the better reviewed content... Like, you know... A meritocracy of sorts...

Most people coming out of movie school never get to produce movies. There's just a lot of wasted talent out there. If you have tens of billions of dollars, there's no excuse for producing shit content year after year.

closedloop129• 4 years ago

A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence.

The big question is how big is the fraction of people who are below average intelligence. Depending on that ratio, it could make sense to produce content for that part of the population ...

Additionally, highly intelligent people earn more money and don't have to buy content wholesale. They can afford to buy movies directly which means that each view of intelligent content is worth much more. Now, how can Netflix integrate that into their platform? There won't be any bargains left. Even young talented creatives will demand what they are worth.

There have to be different streaming services for different quality levels. Netflix has decided to serve some fraction of the bell curve and leaves other fractions to others.

native_samples2• 4 years ago

Indie movies are absolutely notorious for their habit of appealing to low intelligence people, it's practically their main market. They don't have much budget to tell an interesting story with, and are often being written by grant funded people without much experience and who are just desperate to make a movie (any movie) so they end up relying a lot on faux depth and complicated BS to make the movie seem like it has more to say than it really does. Critics lap that stuff up but most people who just want to be entertained with a risky but well made idea that doesn't puff itself up, the bigger studios are where you'll find them.

vagrantJin• 4 years ago

I suspect the data teams have a lot of sway at netflix right at the top exec levels. I know this anecdotally since I am close to someone who has approached Netflix and was told it wont work for them.

Their reasoning was as simple as it can get. Their data showed what shows people liked in terms of genres and runtimes.

That might seem reasonable for short term gains until you realise how silly it is for longevity.

627467• 4 years ago

I will tell you an anecdote: I pay and share subscriptions to 3 different streaming services with extended family. The only service we would never drop is Netflix. Maybe this will change. Maybe this is just anecdotal. But IMO Netflix brand/service has gained staying power compared to other streaming competitors.

yalogin• 4 years ago

Netflix is not dead but they focused too much on the R rated content for grown ups and relied too much on algorithms for content too. The reason why cable and free television stays PG-PG13 is that is where the bulk of the population wants to stay. Watching television really is really a family thing even with the explosion of screens. Of course they unearthed and exploited the lack of content for grown ups but it’s obvious they exhausted that market. Once Disney showed up with family content it was a no brainer for people like me who stopped watching Netflix a long time ago and just kept paying to cancel

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

I’m curious if this resonates with others. I’m not one to explore the catalog in depth but it definitely isn’t my experience. Most stuff seems solidly PG13 at a glance.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, some of the more mature shows are also simultaneously their most popular offerings. (Squid game, black mirror, the Witcher, etc.)

And I for one am glad when a show is rated TV-MA because it means that they can be more authentic and unfettered in terms of the vision for the show instead of watering it down to appeal to a broader demographic. "Television is for families" is purely your subjective anecdotal experience. There is a reason the expression is "Netflix and chill", not "Disney and chill".

Conversely, if you're not interested in yet another marvel show or movie, Star Wars or old animated movies, Disney+ is a desert.

999900000999• 4 years ago

Netflix is further eroding its connection to audiences through its unwritten mandate to end the vast majority of its new shows after no more than three seasons, with only the very biggest (or most cost-efficient) scripted hits lasting longer.

One of my favorite shows by far was Disjointed. It was a very silly Stoner take on Roxanne. Cancelled after 2 seasons.

I get the feeling Netflix doesn't want niche shows, everything needs to be Squid Game.

I imagine experimenting with other rev models might work. You can already buy Stranger Things on DVD.

Let me buy the shows I want a la carta.

I've found Disney Plus / Hulu to be a better deal. Surprisingly stuff like Marvel What IF tends to be much more enjoyable compared to whatever animation Netflix is putting out.

Hulu has a better back catalog,

HBO Max has a better bang for buck when it comes to investing my time. The shows have decent writing.

Half the Netflix shows feel like you took a 20 year old English major, paid them in Blue Moon and asked them to write a script.

The best thing ends up being the show premise, once I have to sit down and watch it I'm not having a good time

seibelj3• 4 years ago

I feel like Netflix shows / movies are written by algorithm. As much as management wants AI / data science to be drive creativity, the human soul and character simply isn’t replicable. Their original shows often feel hollow and lack depth. For example Space Force was probably the least funny thing I have ever watched and had all the elements of a show that should have been a hit, but somehow failed so spectacularly that everyone involved must cringe the moment it’s mentioned. Fear Street was an abomination. Just terrible quality. If anything I hope they keep making documentaries as they are far more interesting than their scripted content.

unknownus3r• 4 years ago

I don’t get it; they lost a ton when they banned Russia but if you take that out they did get subscribers overall. Oversold?

Izkata4• 4 years ago

The numbers are:

* +500,000 outside of Russia

* -700,000 due to cutting off Russia

* = -200,000 so far that's already happened

* +2,500,000 previously projected future

* -2,000,000 now projected for the future

The last two bullets are what the article is about.

zucker42• 4 years ago

The problem with the article is it assumes that Netflix's drop in stock price is due to mistakes the company has made. In my view, the reason Netflix has been less successful than shareholders expected has more to do with what its competitors are doing well rather than what its doing poorly. Netflix's CEO once famously said that Netflix had to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix. While Netflix has made steps to become a major content producer, the nature of copyright law means that they are simply starting from a disadvantage. Now that the old Hollywood juggernauts have launched their own streaming services, it's a lot harder for Netflix to grow.

Ericson23143• 4 years ago

IMO focusing on one company in what seems like an industry-wide bubble bursting always struck me as myopic.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

I wonder how much the cable companies are charging them to not throttle their content right now? The price would drop by half the second you put net neutrality back.

brentos99• 4 years ago

I think if Netflix changed it’s policy of just canceling series to giving them an ending, people would be less pissed.

The ending could just be a limited episode conclusion similar how to they ended sense8.

indigodaddy• 4 years ago

Did this get artificially tanked from the frontpage or was it natural descension?

tomcam3• 4 years ago

“Two hundred million was a fairly easy climb,” one industry vet who works at a streamer told me Wednesday.

Yeah fuck you. I am a Netflix subscriber with little to no love for the company. The algorithm fails for me and I detest the user interface. If Netflix disappeared tomorrow my life would be barely affected. But getting 200 million subscribers to anything, much less a paid service, is a massive achievement. If that person knows so much, why are they anonymous? If they’re that brilliant, they could go out and start a 200 million subscriber business themselves. Because that’s the easy part. Any chimpanzee could do it. The tricky part is getting to 300 million or 500 million.

NeverFade• 4 years ago

The article makes some good arguments elsewhere, but this is one of its weaker points. There's no explanation of why 200 million is "fairly easy" while 300 million is "hard". If Netflix was at 300 million today, the magic "hard" number would be 400 million, and 300 would have been the "easy" number.

tomcam3• 4 years ago

My point exactly

skippedtoc• 4 years ago

200 million "was" easy climb (for Netflix). I don't think it meant its easy in general. More of Netflix made it look like it's easy, (for Netflix). Now we see reaching 500 is not easy for them.

tomcam3• 4 years ago

Not sure why you are simply rephrasing what the article said. And I am telling you, acquiring customers is hard.

scyzoryk_xyz4• 4 years ago

“Content is King” We all know this, Netflix knows this. And yet for some reason for years they have been aiming for quantity and not quality.

Money is not enough in this department and baseball metaphors don’t do justice illustrating just how hard it is to put together a team that has that special thing going on. Some would argue it’s impossible - teams like the one behind Better Call Saul are just extremely rare and can’t be rushed. The traditional system has sort of known this for a long time, I think.

Netflix tried rushing. I’ve personally worked on a failed series season made by the company and it was a chaotic clusterfuck. So are their efforts in ordering and buying content haphazardly to stuff their library with something. Now they’re probably going to have to learn the slow quality development and bring back many of the traditional practices they threw out the window.

This is a good thing for audiences though. I think we’re going to be seeing Netflix settle as one of many big content delivery platforms in the long term.

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

They were probably fooled by metrics. People were watching the crap, so it looked like crap was good enough (until it wasn’t).

andrelaszlo2• 4 years ago

Very true. They find something that's kind of amusing, then milk it until it bleeds (gross analogy, sorry...).

"Nailed It", sure, I can watch it from time to time but it doesn't mean I will watch 150 other baking shows.

Same thing with "Jessica Jones". I literally found articles about "The top 30 superhero shows on Netflix this year", trying to remember the name of this one. After a while you realize that the funny premise stops being engaging after a couple of episode and the spell is broken.

I watch almost no Netflix these days but I got excited about the new season of Russian Doll, but despite an original script, it doesn't have the punch of the first season. Perhaps it's not just a money grab, but I would have preferred more risk-taking. Why not let created Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler do something new and crazy instead of a season 2, for example?

cameronh90• 4 years ago

Most of what I watched on Netflix was this cookie cutter rubbish, but what they don't know is I was usually just putting that on in the background or when falling asleep.

Even though that accounts for 90% of what I watch, I cancelled Netflix because the 10% I actually care about isn't there now.

scyzoryk_xyz4• 4 years ago

Yes! It takes so much more to gain the kind of insight that is valuable for film/art. And it is very difficult to scale. I thought they were onto something when they were experimenting with the gamified Black Mirror stuff because A) it implied something totally new and proprietary in the artform and B) it could probably lead to more information and more feedback all around.

Also, they never even tried to build any sort of community or conversation around anything on the platform. No creative form of discovery for different types of viewers. It’s just a one-way interface of content rectangles that are presented to you in algorithmic order.

In my own personal view on this, I think we will see a whole plethora of boutique niche vod platforms built using off-the-shelf tech from the cloud providers. Netflix only had around a decade of a technological upper-hand and it’s been a couple years that anyone can build a VOD platform.

mrweasel• 4 years ago

Metrics can easily fool you on Netflix, because many will watch an entire bad season of a show. If you had to watch an episode a week, and you don’t care for the show, missing an episode one week will easily cause you to just drop the show and viewer number quickly drop off.

On Netflix I’ve watch entire seasons of bad shows, because it’s easy, and it might get better and now I’ve already watched the first two episodes. What does happen, and which can’t be meassured, is how many shows I don’t start the second season at all, because season two of that other Netflix original was bad, so there’s a big risk this is as well.

Part of the problem could be eliminated by moving to more classical episodical shows, rather that trying to make every show storylines. It would also make meassuring easier.

gernb2• 4 years ago

There's a legend of when Sony bought Columbia Pictures which is probably not true but the story is, after Sony bought Columbia Pictures, some Japanese executives flew over to meet with the top management at Columbia. The Columbia management explained to the Japanese execs that only 1 in 20 movies makes a profit. The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then turned back to the Columbia management and said "Please only make the profitable movies" (lol)

Just to spell it out in case the point wasn't clear. The Columbia management was trying to explain they don't know and have no way of knowing up front which movies will be good and which movies will sell and make their money back. Instead they're always gambling by funding a bunch of movies and it only works out because the few hits pay for all the non-hits.

Ntrails• 4 years ago

Instead they're always gambling by funding a bunch of movies and it only works out because the few hits pay for all the non-hits.

So, Venture Capital? xD

andrelaszlo2• 4 years ago

I get your point, but it doesn't necessarily implicate that you should try to replicate precious hits? Why pretend you've found the formula when it's clear you have no idea?

It seems like every celebrity had their shot at a sitcom in the 90s for example. Is it like the saying about nobody getting fired for buying IBM? But then, risk-taking within that narrow space was limited. From the Seinfeld Wikipedia article:

'The pilot was first screened to a group of two dozen NBC executives in Burbank, California, in early 1989. It did not yield the explosion of laughter garnered by the pilots for the decade's previous NBC successes like The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls. Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced the show would work. A Jewish man from New York himself, Tartikoff characterized it as "Too New York, too Jewish".'

It was almost not even aired.

Squid Game seems to have been a gamble. I'd like to see more like that, but I'm afraid they'll over-fit to that success as well. US remake perhaps? Sequels, prequels, spin-offs. "The 100 must-see dystopian Korean horror shows on Netflix 2023“?

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

This seems like a mirror to the other classic apocryphal story where the IBM ask a new Japanese manufacturer to only have a 3/1000 defect rate and the Japanese seem alarmed by this request.

When the product arrives there's a seperate little box with the defective items that have been manufactured seperately to meet the spec.

(There's also the "half of my advertising is effective, I don't know which half" line)

zeroth32• 4 years ago

Unprofitable movies is just accounting. Something to do with Hollywood union compensation or something.

ThePhysicist• 4 years ago

I agree that the content is not very interesting (to me at least), they still seem to produce a ton of it though. But companies like Disney, Paramount etc. building their own platforms and withdrawing their content from other streaming services makes it hard for Netflix to compete. Especially for families Disney+ is much more attractive due to their large catalog of AAA titles. Netflix just can't compete with that it seems, and all their self-produced movies were at most B+ in my opinion, not a single blockbuster there. I think right now Disney+ is well positioned to take the market lead, they just need to acquire a few more studios (and maybe Netflix itself) and they will have a moat that's impossible to penetrate. Personally I would hope that the market will consolidate, it's just annoying to have content I'm interested in spread out over 5-6 platforms, all requiring separate subscriptions.

kinghtown• 4 years ago

Netflix bores me to tears (I’m into stuff like Criterion and Kino) but I begrudgingly have to admit that they offer a ton of kids shows. Disney+ is better quality but they too don’t have a lot to offer, or didn’t three months ago, in terms of episodic kids entertainment.

Disney is also hoarding the giant catalog of classic or older films. Fox wasnt just XMen and Simpsons, they had been making films since the 30s. Seems like Disney is going to trickle out the old content slowly.

int0x2e• 4 years ago

I think they realized a few years back that HBO, Disney and the other major IP holders will be pulling out entirely and setting up their own streaming services, not because Netflix didn't give them a big enough cut of the pie, but simply because they saw how well Netflix did and realized that tech was no longer an issue they'd work hard to resolve in 2020+. Once Netflix saw that on the horizon, they went into panic mode and bought anything half decent to have something to put on their library. In particular, it seems like the main thing driving one special niche Netflix created - the movie packed with multiple A and B list stars that has great production but a mediocre story at best - it gets views and attention, even though it's boring as hell...

bsenftner2• 4 years ago

These last few years have been fantastic for show developers, screen writers, and anyone in series development, as all the new streaming services are literally trying to buy the talent to make their services successful.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

bought anything half decent

The problem is, it's not even close to half-decent. It's just a huge amount of pulp that is so boring you actually ask yourself existential questions after a few minutes of watching this.

thawaya31132• 4 years ago

Arguably, MLB Advanced Media killed Netflix by commodifying streaming tech.

Using MLBAM, any company could set up high quality streaming services cheaply and instantly.

For example, WWE went from announcing they would be creating a streaming service to actually delivering a highly successful and glitch free one within months.

lf-non• 4 years ago

Yeah, I agree. I mostly gave up on netflix because their SFF catalog has been underwhelming for so long.

SFF genre has outstanding authors like Brandon Sanderson, Will Wight, Jay Kristoff, Jim Butcher etc. who are producing amazing content for an adult audience at a much faster rate than I can consume with a busy schedule. In contrast Netflix titles simply fail to catch up - there are few good titles (100 & Arcane are the last ones I enjoyed) but for those too the storylines come nowhere close to as interesting as the best works by aforementioned authors.

At some point I realized I was spending almost all of my free time in books and 0% on Netflix and cancellation was a no brainer at that point. Likely I'm just too niche for mainstream streaming services.

throwaway4220• 4 years ago

Science fiction and fantasy

matwood3• 4 years ago

And yet for some reason for years they have been aiming for quantity and not quality.

Even if we were to assume a good quality, there is still too much quantity. Netflix drops new shows so often that they never have time breath or get legs. I may see an interesting trailer, and then a week later there's another trailer, and so on. There's just so much stuff.

ghaff2• 4 years ago

Nobody knows how to reliably create "quality"--the definition of which will vary by person. Take a dozen of the top quality series on Netflix or streaming services generally and I'll probably be meh on at least half of them.

Add to that the fact that for many, TV, whether streaming or otherwise, is essentially background and they'll immediately cancel your service if all they have is a relative handful of prestige must-see TV.

afpx• 4 years ago

HBO seems to do it.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

Nobody knows how to reliably create "quality"--the definition of which will vary by person.

Try different things. Don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be afraid to fail. Do things nobody's ever done before. Create new trends. Hire professionals so that every scene gives the users some level of satisfaction in terms of plot and aesthetics. For example, in a good comedy, each scene (if not each line) should at least bring the corners of your mouth slightly up.

Instead, Netflix is doing the opposite: recycle, recycle, recycle. This is maybe fine for some genres like romantic comedies for Netflix-and-chill, you kind of expect everything but it doesn't bother you. But for the rest, Netflix has become a symbol of mediocrity to the point that I explicitly choose only movies/shows without the N letter on them.

yottabyte47• 4 years ago

Pixar? Sure their track record isn't 100%, but I'd say they know how to create quality, even if they don't always fully succeed at it.

scarface749• 4 years ago

Content is king. But so is IP. Disney competes based on its IP. Disney has multiple studios that can create series that people will automatically see based on their IP - Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and Disney.

chaostheory• 4 years ago

Imo the reason for this is because there isn’t one perfect show for everyone. If they have to cater to the world, then they have to cater to everyone’s tastes.

Fnoord• 4 years ago

Netflix is 'all you can eat', and all you can eat is about quantity ('good enough'). Also, it is a given you are not going to like/want everything. The quantity is in such abundance that they try to please everyone somewhat. I suppose you could call it spreading.

scyzoryk_xyz4• 4 years ago

No doubt about it. The question is for how long will 'all you can eat' be sustainable in the longer term. Only so long until everyone will have had their crappy experience, loses trust and/or desire to continue paying, brand becomes tarnished etc.

I'm not saying this is an end to Netflix - losing your competitive advantage and having others catch up doesn't put you out of the race. Their brand is huge.

555553• 4 years ago

I’m bored of Netflix. They have simply gone the assembly line direction instead of the direction of art, at least for some big niches. For example, every True Crime docuseries on Netflix is the same crap. Once you’ve seen three, you’ve seen them all. They get each cop involved in a big empty room, sit them on a solitary chair, put a dramatic light above them, and shoot them in 4k. Then they direct it at a pace to bore the hell out of you.

My business produces storytelling videos for e-commerce and we almost got into the television/entertainment business at one point, as it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries. Stock photography and interviews and cheap-but-good editing. You’ll notice solo YouTubers are making great documentaries. I don’t know how they are spending so much money considering the quality of much of the crap they make. High schooler YouTubers make similar quality with their iPhones.

There must be thousands of talented directors who haven’t been given their big break yet who have artistic ideas and would almost work for free to be given a chance to make a name for themselves. Give them resources and a chance and see who has what it takes.

This is only one relevant factor, ofcourse.

Unrelated: I’m currently trying out CuriosityStream so I feel less guilty for the time I spend watching TV. At least I’ll be learning something.

russelldjimmy• 4 years ago

…it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries. Stock photography and interviews and cheap-but-good editing. You’ll notice solo YouTubers are making great documentaries.

Reminds me of this hilarious video - https://youtu.be/9BUrNe3Vhtk

abbadadda• 4 years ago

That was great thanks for sharing.

ketanip• 4 years ago

lol

gernb2• 4 years ago

Someone, SOMEone, someone should make the radio? Radio, RADIO, RadioLab how to.

eternalban• 4 years ago

That was must see TV. Thanks for sharing.

belter• 4 years ago

Not only that was hilarious, but also grabbed at the same time the essence of Netflix, and all that is wrong with it. 300K a year Netflix producers...take notes.:-)

555553• 4 years ago

Yup. This is exactly what we do at work. At least the past few years, most people couldn't tell the difference. We pump them out. It's 80% as good as something way harder to make. But by now people have seen so many, maybe they're starting to tire of it.

That was hilarious btw.

myvoiceismypass• 4 years ago

Never saw this video before. It absolutely made my day. Brilliant!

stingraycharles• 4 years ago

My business produces storytelling videos for e-commerce and we almost got into the television/entertainment business at one point, as it is simply so cheap to pump out middling quality documentaries.

Funny, I stumbled upon a documentary “Meltdown”, which is about the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979.

I expected something along the lines of HBO’s Chernobyl, but it just seems like a very cheap, Discovery-style documentary?

It’s very poorly done, and I stopped watching after 2 episodes.

_zoltan_• 4 years ago

HBO's Chernobyl is not a documentary...

watwut2• 4 years ago

Chernobyl is historical drama based on real events, not a documentary. Some characters are entirely invented, sometimes multiple different people are merged into one and so on. The authors even made podcast where they explain what is made up and why

It realistic and quite close to what went on, but not documentary at all.

ErikCorry• 4 years ago

Maybe the story just isn't as exciting as Chernobyl. I mean, nobody died. Nobody even got sick with radiation poisoning. Not to be morbid, but that just isn't going to be as compelling a story.

I wonder if they just greenlit it because they had such a success with the Chernobyl series and wanted to do it again.

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

shoot them in 4k

What’s the issue with 4k?

bananamerica• 4 years ago

4K is not the issue. The issue is that they achieved a standard style of filming that is entirely unremarkable, and the only thing they have going for them is the fact that the image is crystal clear. Competently shot 4K has a certain aura of legitimacy.

theodric2• 4 years ago

I had CuriosityStream for a year, and used it for about two weeks. It's also just formulaic drivel accompanied by stock B-roll. My day is much better, and bears more fruit, when I don't waste any of it in front of a TV.

JKCalhoun7• 4 years ago

Yeah, I am little confused by all of this as well. Maybe because I don't "stream". But from the article:

“We have to have an Adam Project and a Bridgerton every month and to make sure that that’s the expectation of the service constantly,” he said.

Are there people to watch an "Adam Project" and a "Bridgerton" (I assume these are interesting shows) every month? Are there people that are some kind of stream-receptacle?

prawn• 4 years ago

Isn't this true of the broader media marketplace? If you look at Prime, once you're past some recognisable movies, you'll see a hilarious list of 3-4/10 IMDB movies you've never heard of before. They're out there and they get no buzz and are largely ignored.

On Netflix, they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick. And they're doing it in various genre because it's a diverse world out there (an Indian soapie is different to a British one, for example). While your bar might be high, someone starved of space x zombie crossovers will like something just enough not to cancel their subscription for a couple more months.

AnonCoward4• 4 years ago

I’m bored of Netflix. They have simply gone the assembly line direction instead of the direction of art, at least for some big niches. For example, every True Crime docuseries on Netflix is the same crap.

My benchmark for this genre is Forensic Files. I have yet to find another one that is this concise and informative.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

I agree. Though slightly off topic, Forensic Files was pretty biased. The educational aspect mostly makes up for it, but they make forensic science appear way more rock solid than it was back at the time. Many of the crimes featured were solved because the perpetrator was so incompetent. But every episode had to end with something along the lines of "this would have been the perfect crime if not for the science!"

Would be nice to have a show like that again with a similar format but eased back on the law enforcement propaganda.

Brajeshwar• 4 years ago

Our family cut off all of Netflix, Disney, etc. and now I have just CuriosityStream[1] (I think after hearing it on Curiosity Daily Podcast). I watch that. Our family rarely watch TV.

1. https://curiositystream.com

unnamed76ri• 4 years ago

Curiosity Stream + Nebula App are a great deal together.

JKCalhoun7• 4 years ago

So stream cutting is the new cord cutting.

johnchristopher• 4 years ago

Maybe something like Steam Greenlit for Netflix. But as some have pointed out already Netflix is in the streaming business, not the risky content creation business.

(I still fucking miss the OA and Sense8 if you follow my comment history)

eastbound• 4 years ago

Netflix is in the streaming business, not the risky content creation business.

You could say this about anything. “Walmart is in the selling business, not in the food business.” But in the end, when, in a remote village in France, 3 dads discuss at a bar about how Netflix has probably gone below TV level (which is quite a performance), then you business opportunities dwindle pretty fast.

It’s known. People discuss it for lunch. Everyone’s looking for a Netflix alternative and is discussing their experiments. Only young teens without much taste are satisfied, and not that much.

jnovek• 4 years ago

The OA, in particular, was one that I loved. It lived in this niche that I really like. Abstract supernatural horror? Lynchian stuff.

Dark was around the same time as well.

My perception of the untouchable Netflix was changed when they cancelled The OA. For one, I didn’t really trust them with multi-season serialized content anymore and, two I started to notice good content on other streaming service.

I sort of wonder if every faithful Netflix subscriber had an OA moment over the last few years? Where they lost faith in the service because of a poorly-handled choice for a show they enjoyed.

(By the way, if you dig the OA and Sense8 you might like Severance on Apple TV.)

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

There must be thousands of talented directors who haven’t been given their big break yet who have artistic ideas and would almost work for free to be given a chance to make a name for themselves.

You're assuming the general population wants artistic, fresh ideas rather than the same re-hashed tried & true stuff.

Disney pretty clearly proves rehashing the exact same thing over and over again is a never ending gold mine.

Disney probably makes $1M for every $1 A24 makes.

johnday• 4 years ago

Disney pretty clearly proves rehashing the exact same thing over and over again is a never ending gold mine.

And yet, Disney's business itself was once a brand new, revolutionary idea.

Perhaps the table stakes aren't just "making something innovative", but creating opportunities for themselves to build the next Big Thing.

d136o• 4 years ago

I thought I noticed this in one of the Netflix movies I watched with my wife:

* audio sounded odd, like it was dubbed but it did match facial expressions. It lacked any reference to culture or geography, like it was made to simply swap out sound tracks in another language. * the settings were minimized: house, hospital, vet… and not much else. This also was unnerving because it felt like it may as well have been shot in another planet.

I assumed the dialogue and the sets lack of references resulted from an effort to make it really easy to just swap audio tracks and launch it in another country with as little work on their end. I understand they’d want to do that but their cookie cutter formula resulted in a terrible movie.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

Tbh half the stuff I watch on Netflix was taken away an out on put on the many “new developed streaming platform for IP owner” sites.

rendall2• 4 years ago

Interesting that this analysis seems to attribute Holland's defenestration as a response to an anticipated loss of Netflix subscribers. I read another analysis which had the causal relationship the other way: Holland's replacement by Bajaria more or less led directly to the loss of subscribers. I'm not sure what to think, but from an outside perspective, it feels like Holland was done dirty by her boss like that. It couldn't have been a smoother, more empathetic transition?

Gareth321• 4 years ago

I quit because I didn't like how all of their shows pushed an ideological message. I'm quite left leaning on most issues, but Netflix writers appear to believe that preaching progressive messages is all that's required to make a compelling narrative. If they had the compelling narrative too it might be more tolerable, but they don't.

aqme28• 4 years ago

Do you have any examples?

supreme_berry• 4 years ago

Nearly every video is extreme left propaganda like black actor playing English queen Charlotte. That was so dumb and disgusting to watch that a lot of people canceled subscription on that time.

JMS20212• 4 years ago

In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.

PartiallyTyped5• 4 years ago

It is really funny to see comments like GP while netflix hosts Chappelle, tells its workers to leave if they don't want to work on projects they disagree with [1], and gets praised for it by the likes of republicans like Musk [2] who claim to be about free speech and what have you until they turn techno-fascist [3].

[1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2022/05/15/netf...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-praises-netflix-te...

[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525549535786717184

digisign2• 4 years ago

Try She-ra and Shadow and Bone with a kid... and note the paucity of straight characters in the first or the sweaty gay sex scenes in the second. Deemed not just appropriate, but seemingly an end-goal for children to see. At least they rate them as TV-14, but kids won't let that stop you.

Netflix finally implemented rating selection filters for profiles, but a few years too late for us. Try taking those shows away after they've already been watching them.

hericium• 4 years ago

Bubbling customers in one or two genres of content with the addition of some "trending" original series that Netflix is pushing at the time. Their support suggests creating multiple profiles to avoid bubbling. You can't even delete/replace/reset main profile - just need to skip it all the time.

Most of original content is just crap produced to fill the library. Netflix creates more and more titles, not watching material. They are cancelling their own shows with such pace that I started avoiding investing time in their new content, assuming they will promptly fuck it up.

Abundance of unnecessary sex scenes. It's almost like watching bad porn: -Ma'am, have you called about cable TV not working? (oh, they're gonna bang now); -Oh, I'm stuck with my head in the washing machine (he's gonna bang her now); -Teacher asks student to stay after class? (banging in 3.. 2...); Opening Netflix (ridiculous, out-of-place sex scenes no matter the content). Just create "soft porn" category already and let people choose.

Production aiming at 100% engagement, giving viewer no time to think. Whatever the genre, every movie or show is unnecessarily action-packed like "Speed" (1994) or "Crank" (2006) making watching feel like work, not relax. Refreshing, thought-welcoming productions like Apple's "Severance" have little place on Netflix platform.

"This show was so good I couldn't stop watching. But would I watch it again? Hey, this wasn't good at all, I got played"

DixieDev• 4 years ago

It's seems clear to my family and friends that they have some sort of checklist for writers that includes garbage like mandatory regular sex scenes. In my case, they have _finished_ a tiny tiny percentage of their shows. They tend to string viewers along with contrived new-but-very-similar problems each season, and then just cancel once viewership gets bored. No thanks, give me a show that has an ending.

I think Disney has been better with their series in this regard. I've been watching a few shows that were planned with many seasons in mind, but instead of abruptly pulling the plug when viewership was lower than expected they gave them a final season that writers have been using to wrap things up really well. I can start a new show from them with a bit more confidence it'll get finished.

oriolid2• 4 years ago

You're so right about the sex scenes. Just before pandemic I saw Caligula. Back in the day it was notorious for the gratuitous sex and violence, and now it felt like yet another HBO show. I haven't had Netflix for a long time, sounds like it's the same but worse scripts now.

watwut2• 4 years ago

The shows I watch on Netfix don't have this property? There is some sex, but definitely not that much.

Not that netflix is super good, but just that stuff I watch or get recommended is much different then yours.

hackernewds• 4 years ago

It's possible it caters to their watching habits. I don't get those shows recommended either.

matwood3• 4 years ago

Abundance of unnecessary sex scenes. It's almost like watching bad porn:

Weird. I've always felt Netflix moved away from sex scenes/nudity compared to something like HBO. It was so clearly different I thought it was a Netflix thing to avoid it.

noisy_boy• 4 years ago

If I had only two features that I would have Netflix implement, they would be:

- to add a setting to not show me stuff I've already watched (so that others who don't mind that, can continue to see their seen stuff).

- add a "don't show me again" toggle (I know I can dislike but maybe I'm just tired of seeing that one particular video and am fine with other such content)

heisenbit• 4 years ago

Yesterday while on Netflix with my fire stick getting bored I wanted to leave. Suddenly I have to search the app exit button and it turns out it moved from the main menu on the left to the bottom right of the screen. A dark and desperate move.

First time I thought seriously about leaving for good.

mejutoco• 4 years ago

IMO once the netflix model was validated it was impossible to license enough good titles (they knew they were valuable).

Netflix pivoted to making their own shows under the premise that they have all the data. This is outside of their tech expertise and creates average content.

I believe netflix should create video editing tools (commoditize your complement) and make it easy for almost professional film makers to upload content. The area between youtube and professional films could discover lots of talent and keep those rights cost cheap.

jmacd• 4 years ago

I highly recommend you check with your local/regional library to see what streaming services they will give you access to for free. My local library in Canada offers a couple of services that have a really interesting catalogue of films from all over the world as well as some recent classics.

This is not the latest and greatest, but much of the content is far more interesting.

The children's content on them is extremely good. If programming for kids is keeping you on Netflix, some of these (Kanopy, Hoopla) could easily eliminate your need for a paid subscription.

gpayan• 4 years ago

Interesting how we don't hear much about "big data" which - we were told back in 2013 starting with House of Cards [1] - was key to Netflix's success in picking new shows to produce.

This part of the article is telling:

It’s why five or so years ago, anybody with a hint of success in TV (or movies) started getting a call from their rep saying, basically, “Netflix would like to write you a big check.”

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-...

dudul2• 4 years ago

I'm also very puzzled by how the quality could degrade so much. I was sure that they had cracked the "formula" to create good content via big data analysis after House of Cards.

My guess, and I have nothing to back it up other than external empirical observation, is that they didn't like what the big data revealed. The output didn't fit The Message, or The Ideology. So they ignored it. They decided to use the good ol' twitter mobs to Gaughan the success of a show/concept instead.

dudul2• 4 years ago

* to gauge the success

conradfr3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure you really needed Big Data to bet on an adapted successful TV show with a successfully actor directed by a successfully director.

bruhhh• 4 years ago

this is sorta of elitist article that people cant relate to. One of the major reasons why people are leaving netflix is because their sub is expensive af compared to all the other streaming services. I could sub to 4 different major streaming services for cheaper than the mid-tier sub on netflix. I'm glad to see them lose sub and look forward to see their complete fall for being greedy tools

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

Didn't they want to make second screen content? Thus relatively unengaging content?

alangibson• 4 years ago

Fragmentation of must-watch content across many streaming services will drive a lot of people back to torrenting.

Netflix was beloved because it was convenient, meaning everything you wanted was in one place. Now the things you want are spread out across many services.

By comparison a good tracker that has everything you want is more convenient vs searching a half dozen services.

stormdennis• 4 years ago

I used to subscribe to Sky Sports. It had everything I was really interested as well as lots that I never watched. Then the market fragmented and rights to certain sports were distributed among three broadcasters. Suddenly I could no longer watch many of the games I was interested in, I'd have needed three subscriptions instead of one. The fact that Sky didn't reduce their price didn't help. I ended up dropping Sky and taking out a subscription with an overseas service that had all the games and I could watch via a vpn. Then they tightened that up and the vpn method no longer worked. Now I just pirate the games I want to see. It feels like the same thing is happening to Netflix with Disney, Hulu, Amazon etc.

gandutraveler• 4 years ago

It's what happens when you believe that tech can solve everything. Netflix thought they can automate makings shows with some predefined story templates. I mean it works for few shows but then people notice the pattern. Creativity should be organic.

papito• 4 years ago

HBO is still the master of curation and talent scouting/development.

While Netflix throws tens of millions of dollars on brainless scripts and big stars, HBO diligently shepherds the material it likes to completion, with talent that is great but that will not break the bank. HBO does not use stars - it makes stars.

For all the talk of Netflix not being a family but a team, it sure does sound like their content division management is pretty "tight", regardless of results. Did they think they were going to coast on the House of Cards forever?

somehnacct3757• 4 years ago

The main reason I avoid Netflix shows is that their formula insists on a cliffhanger season finale, but there is no promise of another season. Many shows quite literally have no conclusion, ending in their version of the second act.

Sci-fi nerds are somewhat used to this; it was a problem even when cable tv was the dominant model. Netflix has somehow managed to bring this sour note to every genre.

danpalmer• 4 years ago

There’s another issue at play here: competition for time.

There are competitors, that’s a given. People subscribe to multiple services because one does not have all the content. That’s a given.

Therefore Netflix is competing for the time that viewers actually spend watching it, vs watching other services they pay for. If they end up watching less Netflix than, say, Disney+, guess which one they’ll cut if there’s a cost of living crisis?

In this market, I believe the best strategy is a small amount of high quality content. Disney+ is probably the best balance of this, and Apple TV+ is probably not a bad bet either, considering it’s also the cheapest service.

fma2• 4 years ago

I hate it when people who have no context of the economy throws in the stock price as a point of data. Author is clearly bias. What tech stock has not plummeted in the last few months?

If you want to include financial data maybe consider that Walmart and Target both had lower profits, lower revenue resuting their stock price plummeted the most in decades?

What "bad habits" do they have? Target and Walmart are bellwether for consumer spending. If consumers are buying less essential items, maybe a stresming service is going to get cut too? Maybe....just maybe....people can't spend as much money anymore?

fma2• 4 years ago

Wasn't able to edit my original comment - wanted to clarify their revenue increased year over year, but missed expectation.

nemo44x2• 4 years ago

It’s more about how TikTok has taken over such a huge portion of the engagement hours basket. Hard to justify a paid sub when there’s a tool that sends you content for free and the only choice you have to make is to not watch something.

Parents: don’t let your kids anywhere near TikTok.

samhw3• 4 years ago

How on earth is TikTok a competitor to Netflix?!

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

Does anyone else remember when the Amy Schumer comedy special got panned, and then Netflix got rid of the star ratings? They put placating Hollywood and traditional creators over serving customers. When you focus on securing supply over meeting demand, you lose touch with the customer. These poison seeds were planted long ago, and only now are we seeing them bloom.

mkl95• 4 years ago

Netflix's algorithms are very good at offering interesting content for a short period of time, like a few weeks.

Even when I'm crunching at work and can only watch Netflix a few hours a week, I end up running out of interesting content.

What follows is several weeks where I find out some movie or show that was released last year is not available on Netflix yet, or some old stuff is not available.

Eventually Netflix release some decent content, which temporarily fixes their APIs responses. Rinse and repeat.

bezospen15• 4 years ago

So much talk of Netflix but nothing about YouTube TV which is 3x the cost

batiudrami• 4 years ago

YouTube tv has live sport; completely different value proposition.

oxfordmale2• 4 years ago

One of my Netflix bad habits is fast forwarding through predictable scenes. A lot of their series appear to be padded out to make up a series instead of a long feature film, and as a result I find myself fast forwarding through at least 50% of a series. Time wise I am watching it all, however, engagement is self evidently lowrr

bdavisx• 4 years ago

But that's not unique to Netflix - I can remember thinking how much better '24' would have been w/o all the filler crap - but then they wouldn't have been able to make a "real time" TV show (well, they could have, but they didn't). Also I tried watching the reboot of "Kung Fu" a few weeks ago - wow, there's more Asian family drama filler than there is actual "Kung Fu". It seems like the filler stuff is everywhere now.

But then again, back in the day of network tv shows when they did ~26 episodes per season, there were entire episodes that felt like fillers.

oxfordmale2• 4 years ago

Not unique to Netflix, however, most other streaming platforms also broadcast their series on old fashioned television channels.

Netflix may solve this problem by introducing adverts on their cheaper plans.

MrMan3• 4 years ago

After years of ignoring Netflix I love derry girls and the viking shows

MrMan3• 4 years ago

This isn't technically, it's content creation. An ancient business, and its hard to scale. Get the right magic group of executives who get lucky buying the right properties and you are a hero. Miss, and a bunch of HN users are actively angry with you.

mrbonner2• 4 years ago

I have T-Mobile pays for the very basic Netflix as part of the deal. I just canceled the ultra HD package ($11+) more a month. There is no way I could outright get rid of Netflix so I just stuck with the basic account for now.

mrbonner2• 4 years ago

How about Netflix has this user created content like YouTube. It’s free with ad supported but for users who has paid plan the ads are removed. I would keep a paid account if the user created content in Netflix becomes popular like YouTube!

Claude_Shannon• 4 years ago

Netflix just has nothing interesting, and you have to sift through endless mediocre movies. Once I'm done with Arcane and then Love, Death & Robots, I'll unsubscribe. Just simply not worth it.

zumu• 4 years ago

It's hard for me to even know if Netflix has anything I'd like to watch these days. They've stripped back the browsing features so far, it's hard filter through all the trash, and I wind up just giving up.

tbrockman• 4 years ago

Everyone talks about their content being the problem, but it seems weird to me that Netflix’s original differentiating factor, platform and distribution, isn’t what they capitalized on. They could have sold their infrastructure and technology as a service before any other media company had a chance to build or buy their own. Now we have shitty platforms with great content, and vice-versa, instead of the best of both worlds with Netflix powering it all.

FunnyBadger• 4 years ago

All organizations mature into "fat, dumb and happy" which ultimately seals the doom of 95% of them.

Even companies that were wonderful to work for (e.g. Hewlett-Packard when Bill & Dave were alive) have shriveled to irrelevance and horror. It happens.

It's what's convinced me that leadership is all their is to prevent this - the 5% of organizations that thrive longer all have charismatic and ethical leadership that is focused on the mission being done "correctly". Every time.

Netflix’s bad habits have caught up with it

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