They lost 700,000 from Russia gained 500,000 elsewhere net -200,000. I don't know how much they normally gain but I suspect a lot are jumping to conclusions from the headline. Loosing Russia wasn't really a consumer choice type of thing.
I do wish they'd pick up a few more good Sci-Fi shows and then cancel them to confirm my personal grudge. It's so hard to waste my time on today's Sci-Fi...get off my lawn, etc, etc.
Let's ignore their Russian subscribers loss for the time being. Analysts were expecting them to add 2.7m and they added 500K elsewhere (taking the number from your comment) so they are still way off and it proves that their growth is slowing at a rapid pace because of increasing competition from Apple, Amazon, Disney and HBO.
> slowing at a rapid pace because of increasing competition from Apple, Amazon, Disney and HBO.
I don't doubt that but I do suspect other services will see some slow down too as a result of general bullshit and uncertainty in the economy. It's never really just one thing.
Then again...yeah Disney+ is a really good deal. And Amazon's numbers are inflated from other Prime stuff. I'm just an old man yelling at a screen from his arm chair because I can't trust anyone.
The other services are not charging a premium just for 4K, are not bundling 4K with 4 screens and have content that competes/beats Netflix's. They also haven't saturated the markets so you will not see them slowing down yet.
I predict Netflix will change two things business wise:
1. Ads.
2. No content dumps, instead 1 episode/week.
The day Netflix has ads is the day I unsubscribe. The price, here in Canada at least, has already doubled since I first subscribed and is getting close to a cable subscription.
Ads and high price is why everyone cut the cable in the first place. (And poor content)
It depends on how they implement it. The CEO said he was open to lower-priced tiers with ad support. I wouldn't mind an ad before each show if it meant a lower price. But if they raise the ad-free prices or start putting ads in during the shows, people will be more upset.
I think in this case it’s supposedly still accelerating but you are depressed the gas and the engine is spooling back down to idle. I think the term is Jerk
How much more growth can Netflix really muster? They really have penetrated most regions including APAC. Adding 500k is a major accomplishment when viewed thru that lens.
I’m curious as to when the forecast is from. We missed our expected q1 target by quite a margin as well because the market, and I mean any market, has been hit by the war and the inflation.
Would Netflix subscriptions really be impacted due to the war? Aside from a handful of countries that are bearing the brunt of the conflict and sanctions.
I'm already paying for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max. Sharing those with friends, and receiving Disney+ and Hulu in return. We're back to where we started, with everything dashed across a bunch of different 'networks', and I left entirely because of the steep cable bill.
Like hell I'm going to add even more services, like AppleTV or Paramount+.
Torrents are too complicated for most people, compared to the ease of buying an 'Android TV box' at a cell phone store, Craiglist or flea market, and paying $15/month for cable channels and TV/movie streaming. The UI is relatively good, worlds apart from the 2010 era when finding shows and episodes required going through a list of gorillavid.com links.
That’s exactly what I expect in about 3-5 years. I particularly have my eye on BitTorrent modifications like webtorrent which may get the viewing experience even closer to a paid streaming service.
Sci-fi is in a bad state not just on Netflix but everywhere. I hoped arriving in the space age would mean more programming, but my fear of it becoming mainstream meaning that a sprinkling of science/space in the background of whatever drama, horror, thriller, etc becomes what's categorized as sci-fi. There's very little where science plays any meaningful part in the premise or plot.
I've read my fair share of Reynolds and for what it's worth if anyone was looking to get into him, I'd recommend House of Suns but to skip Pushing Ice. The latter starts strong but kind of gets nowhere.
Another pet peeve is the grouping of sci-fi with fantasy or horror. There are few cases where there is sufficient science in the fantasy or horror that obeys some premise (e.g. differing physics) but mostly the grouping is noise.
What Netflix really needs is genre search that respects "-" as in "sci-fi -horror -fantasy".
There's Dark and Altered Carbon Season 1. Everything Everywhere All At Once just came out in theatres and that's supposed to be crazy Sci Fi (not supposed to go in knowing much about it)
> They lost 700,000 from Russia gained 500,000 elsewhere net -200,000...Loosing Russia wasn't really a consumer choice type of thing.
Management's loss "reasons" all seem valid, but don't forget the production aspect (which is much closer tied to competition)
> "In an effort to continue to gain share in the market, Netflix has increased its content spend, particularly on originals. To pay for it, it’s hiked prices of its service. The company said Tuesday those price changes are helping to bolster revenue, but were partially responsible for a loss of 600,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada during the most recent quarter."
My observation is that they are selling attention addiction like Facebook without caring about quality content recently.
Ex: Korean copycat shows and "documentaries", just because both categories tend to rate higher on IMDB. Seems like a decision a PM will make, based on metrics to improve profit, not quality - i.e. give users what they want, even if it is bad for them (or the business) in the long term (as seen with competition's content quality)
PS: Similar thing happened with Facebook back in February. The point is it might take years, but eventually the bs will catch up.
Their desperation is starting to show with the exploration of potential "low hanging fruit" revenue sources like ads instead of new growth markets (games) - as is happening with indirect competitors (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, FB); and direct competitors (Hulu, Disney and HBO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101175
The thing about public companies...is that most eventually fall into the pressures of "consistent growth" by stockholders, following the pack mentality (profit at all costs), even if sorting to unethical means.
I hope they expand their international catalog. 3%, Biohackers and Better than Us were all quite enjoyable and each had their own interesting cultural spins.
'Smoking' is really good (not sci fi, though, but I recommend it to everyone). Old Enough has been thoroughly charming as well.
I'd imagine Netflix could get a huge catalog of content's US streaming rights for pennies on the dollar because hasn't been much of a market for it - practically free money for foreign IP holders.
In doing so, they could get huge brand loyalty from bilingual folks, plus more content for people willing to watch with subs. My wife's mom watches tons of dramas on youtube, we'd get her a netflix account in an instant if we thought she would use it - UX watching shows via youtube is abysmal.
Pay for dubbing once a show proves itself without and 'relaunch' the branding to wider audiences. Netflix should have very solid stats on which users are willing to watch foreign language shows with subs, so they can do targeted homepage advertising to test the shows easily.
Dev lift should be light, really just need to add a search filter for original language/country of origin.
I'm fairly certain they're already doing that. Squid Game, Money Heist being two of the most prominent examples. I've come across more and more imported properties dubbed over, which I don't mind at all! Some are quite good, and I probably wouldn't have found them otherwise.
Fair point. I think they could get a lot more aggressive, though.
I'm conversational in Japanese, and I'd love to see Japanese variety/game shows on netflix. There are thousands of hours of content that have never been available to the US market afaik - I think I've only seen them on youtube or dailymotion when not in japan.
I wonder what the expense of subbing these shows would be. Perhaps they could do a non-exclusive licensing deal where they contribute the sub IP back to the IP holder for an even-further-reduced rate.
Right you are, I was under the impression it was a licensed IP like a number of other properties I've come across in deep scrolls through their catalog.
Yeah, Netflix is already a gold mine for me as a language learner.
As the average quality of their English language has, imo, decreased, the fact that I can easily find good content in other languages is a big selling point.
That's not the important part of the announcement, and it's not the reason the stock tanked.
The important part is subscriber loss in other countries and the projection that over 2 million more subscribers will be lost over the next quarter. Compared to a previous estimate that the company would see a net increase in subscribers by 2.5 million last quarter, that's a big letdown and the market's reaction would have been the same even if the Russia numbers weren't bad.
They still lost 700k subscribers in Russia due to Russia's war. That's a hard fact and not a bogus excuse. "Blaming Russia's war in Ukraine seems to be the new excuse for everything" is a misdirected accusation insinuating they are blaming the whole report on it and that they are completely unaffected by the war.
And I explained why it is. Don't comment unless you have something meaningful to add. Circling back to the same comment I just replied to without elaborating is just noise.
Honestly I’m one free weekend from canceling it. Gonna go back to a pc under the tv. Just need the afternoon to find the best machine for plex.
The selection of older content on Netflix is really weak on the whole and their original content is getting worse and worse.
There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours in series it really is awful tv and watching the writers struggle to spin tires to drag it to 10 hours is exhausting. Not to mention the executive meddling is extremely apparent in many of their scripts where you can tell whole sections were added at exec request because the story goes off at a tangent and then when it returns the stakes are exactly the same as before the tangent.
PC under the TV is the answer, at least I think so. I built an ITX HomeTheater/Gaming PC last year (without a GPU initially) and have started to slowly unsubscribe from all the streaming services.
Being able to just grab whatever movies I have in my list of things to watch, and play them, locally, without having to scroll through the apps has been quite the relief. Occasionally I use HBO Max still because it has some decent older movies, but I'm pretty much only using my HTPC now, and with Plex, I can watch my library across the network at home via Apple TVs in the bedroom.
Bought my mom an Android TV and installed an apk that combines a movie catalog with torrent search. Can stream or download. Pretty neat stuff, although it's targeted for russian audience (searching russian trackers).
The nonsense original content Netflix throw out is awful.
Having to watch 6 to 10 hours of a show riddled with plot holes, long drawn out rubbish narrative, and social justice content just to cloud it further. It's not great.
On top of that they simply switch off all other content if you are using a VPN, even legitimately in your own country, it's rubbish.
PC under the telly is roaring back into fashion.
Who wants to pay umteen subscriptions for bad content anyway?
I have password shared Netflix. In the last 6 months i have opened the app only once to check whether the new Jackass is on it. It wasn't there, but i rewatched Jackass 3D.
Now that they are planning on cracking down on password sharing, good riddance
I have a friend who has a NAS server with plex running 8TB of movies/series/etc... and shares it with multiple other friends (he doesn't tell me how many, but my bet is that it must be at least 50). He has his own OTT, he doesn't charge anything, in case you are wondering...
I threw down the money for Plex lifetime pass after repeatedly keying in movies and shows on Netflix search, and not finding them. New stuff, classic stuff, it didn't matter. Always just some offbrand substitute junk coming up. Their catalog is very poor now, even compared to just a few years ago.
I'm not playing the game of subscribing to different services just to get particular content, because I don't watch things often enough to justify the effort or cost. Plus this way all my physical media comes into the same library as rips, and PlexAmp is a pretty good music player, too.
I'm this friend for my group, except no local hardware - it's a shared server in Canada (a seedbox, for those who want a term to google). I maintain the understanding with friends that it's a rotating library - you request something and it will get added. But it also gets removed when you're done, or when it's been sitting there for a few months unwatched.
I've become a little tired of series with continuous plots at this point. It's really hard to create content for so many episodes that isn't repetitive, irrelevant to the main story, or hard to believe because of the piling up of coincidences. Then you often have implausible character changes and other typical series-but-not-movies problems piling up. It's an art form that seems very difficult to get right, and so it usually goes wrong.
Less is more. No filler content. GoT could have stopped 2-3 seasons before it did and I'd been fine. Star Wars not needed episode 1 and onward. The old ones were neat as they were (personally apart from that I only liked the recent movie which took place between 3 and 4, and the first season (!!) of Mando). Its like meeting your heroes: don't! Same with books. I read the The Thrawn Trilogy. It was great. I don't want a comic about it or a movie about it; I leave the memory as is. There's a remake of the brilliant series Utopia (orig. by Ch 4) and I am not looking forward to it either for the same reason. Then again, perhaps all these reboots are not aimed for me but for people who did not see the orig.
British TV in general gets it right and always has. 6 episodes per season, 2-4 seasons. Ricky Gervais’ The Office UK is a prime example, 14 episodes. The US version has 188.
Pretty much every new Netflix show will have some combination of the following:
- female characters are always independent, strong-willed, etc. Even if the story calls for someone that's the opposite.
- male characters are either generic muscle or have some stereotypically negative quality like aggression
- at least one main character is always black (and only black - don't even think about Asian or Middle Eastern or anyone that might look white), even if the story doesn't make sense
- at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
- every story line is about some part of the liberal political agenda, either gun control, universal healthcare, or immigration. Coincidentally every story features some Republican "coming to their senses" and "compromising" in order for whatever agenda item they're pushing to pass Congress.
Especially the last one is super prominent. I'll give you an example: the show Madam Secretary started off as a show about the life of a former CIA analyst turned into Secretary of State, but by the last season it morphed into a political soapbox about women's rights, immigration, and healthcare spending. A second example: Designated Survivor started off as a show about what might happen if the US Congress was all killed in a terror bombing, but then morphed into a political soapbox about gun control.
> at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
Doesn't make sense?
And being one of those things isn't shoving it into plots. If you have a typical number of main characters then it's really not notable for one to be LGBT.
As a percentage of just the LGBTQ characters, both overall and in streaming specifically, trans characters were about 7%.
I'm not sure exactly what their total character count was, but that seems to put the percentage of trans characters solidly under 1%. Which is about right for matching the real prevalence of somewhere vaguely around half a percent. I think a slight overrepresentation could be justified, too, but there doesn't seem to be overrepresentation by these numbers.
> - at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
The population where you are is likely just as LGBT but more in the closet.
I think you are being a bit overly critical. Maybe you watched a sjw show and now the algo thinks that is what you want.
Ozarks, The Witcher, Big Mouth, Stranger Things, The Crown, Umbrella Academy are some of the more popular shows that I have seen and I don't recall any straining for diversity or social justice.
The Witcher - largely ruined by americanization/caricature of the (good in the original) female characters and squashing the elf themes into modern racism/immigration framework.
The parent comments are about needlessly working in LGBTQ characters. Seems like if one of your leads transitions, you are going to have to solve that issue somehow.
So if you check context (as I recommended to stjohnswarts), you'll see I wasn't actually commenting on that one way or the other at all. I was goofing on ceeplusplus.
Ozarks feminist trash after the first season, the Witcher feminist trash in how they changed the characters from the game, stranger things is a poster child for feminist trash, the crown is literally about one of the handful of women rulers and I haven’t watched the umbrella academy.
Apart from the second bullet point there, am I the only one who thinks this shows an incredible lack of awareness? Why is it that people are so put off by inclusion?
As far as the political stuff, I can't help but think you're being over-sensitive to things that are actually rather banal and moderate.
I like inclusion when it's actual inclusion and not pandering. Like Paul and Hugh in Star Trek: Discovery. They are both good characters in their own right who also happen to be gay by complete chance. Because as a bi man that's exactly what I feel: There's so much more to me than my sexuality, something I had absolute 0 choice in.
It gets bad however in other shows when gay characters exist just to be gay and that's all they are, no character beyond that.
It's performative inclusion. If it was actual inclusion then other races like Middle Eastern/Asian/etc people would be included. But those people have been deemed by wokes to be "too white" so they're not "people of color" anymore. What exactly are you calling awareness here? Racial quotas for actors?
Madam Secretary aired on network TV for its entire run. Its production, as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with Netflix.
In a world where Netflix has produced a number of shows that are counterexamples to most of your points (wherein meeting one or another of them would happen in a sensibly written show anyway), it's weird that you're using shows as examples whose production had little to do with Netflix.
It’s not specific to Netflix, in the Apple TV book adaptation series Foundation the 2 main characters where swapped from white men to black women for no apparent reason. In the upcoming Amazon LOTR adaption the dwarf queen is black but black dwarves are not a thing in the books.
But the story still makes sense, doesn't it? If anything it now makes more sense in Foundation, where there is famously almost no mention of women in the books despite them presumably making up half the population.
I googled dwarven skin colour in LOTR and apparently it's not mentioned in the books, so I don't see any problems with a black dwarf.
The problem with foundation wasn’t what you state. The problem is that they changed the story so much from the books that it doesn’t resemble them and they got the central theme exactly backwards.
There's a simple way Netflix can stop the bleeding.
It isn't that difficult and doesn't involve any technical innovation whatsoever.
Just stop being assholes.
They made record profits during the COVID era, seeing huge subscriber increases during lockdown and work-from-home.
So they increased prices. And nickel-and-dimed customers. And got rid of the best parts of their catalog. And threw a fit about sharing passwords.
Geez. Hey I'm stuck several states away from my family for two years but God forbid we try to connect by sharing our movie and TV watch lists. Meemaw can't watch Peppa Pig with her grandson in person, so we'd better watch out for her wanting to check out his Netflix Kids list and try to connect with what's interesting him.
Netflix used to be great. Now they're just jerks with mediocre content that charge 3-4x what Discovery does.
> Meemaw can't watch Peppa Pig with her grandson in person, so we'd better watch out for her wanting to check out his Netflix Kids list and try to connect with what's interesting him.
That’s something Disney and Apple are both embracing with shared viewing sessions. It’s an excellent feature and it has been so much easier watching Disney content together than trying to count down and sync pause/play of content, so guess where we go when it’s remote movie night?
My best guess is that the password-sharing crackdown is a response to slowed subscriber growth in an attempt to keep that growth at some astronomically high target. "Got rid of the best parts of their catalog" is definitely a subjective take. I'm going to assume you're referring to much of their licensed content which is a hard-to-scale problem unless you continue to throw money at it. One of Netflix's problems is that the profits it takes today doesn't get realized into "good content" until a much later date when production is wrapped and released.
I'm not sure they have much of a choice in the matter, given the remaining movie producing companies are trying to fund/build alternatives. Netflix would gladly host all the latest Disney movies, but they aren't allowed to anymore.
Netflix was well aware of this several years ago and leaned into it, but failed to focus on quality.
The main problem of Netflix, more than competition, is quality of content.
They need to think like a Hollywood studio, and less like a Video Supermarket. You need to be a Disney or PBS , Universal or MGM, and the subscribers will pay for high quality content.
The only notable Netflix content seems to be the one purchased externally. Internally developed content, tends to follow a common amorphous pattern, that becomes very predictable as it gets extended into multiple episodes of the same script.
They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
For the genres I like Netflix is kinda a brand of content to actively avoid, their content is not just mediocre, but outright terrible, when you hear a beloved franchise will get a Netflix-made version you get sad.
One of the issues is how much Netflix content just reflect whatever crap is a fad in California politics. I am not even from US, I don't want to hear about Californian political themes in the media I consume, SPECIALLY when it is a remake of something from a country that has nothing to do with California culture! (like... Japan, or Poland...)
I enjoyed some of their original content, some they took over they did an okay job of (though they have a habit of trying to convert an episodic series into a long drawn out movie, emphasizing the running plot too much). Some definitely wasn't good.
That said, political content is pretty popular with a big chunk of their subscribers. The rest of us lose out because of it, unfortunately... I don't even know if I would call it political, more just forcing in bits of virtue signaling where it doesn't make sense.
Not here to argue, as I mostly agree, but just some nitpicking: when you have a constant, systematic, one-sided discourse, it's more than "just forcing in bits of virtue signaling" and even more than politics. It's pure ideology.
Fair enough. I tend to be pretty picky about what I watch, so it doesn't feel so constant. That said, it's pretty obviously one-sided and finds ways to creep in here and there. It's certainly not unique to Netflix, though; it feels rather endemic to the entire industry.
> One of the issues is how much Netflix content just reflect whatever crap is a fad in California politics. I am not even from US, I don't want to hear about Californian political themes in the media I consume
What are some examples of this? Of all the issues Ive seen people have with Netflix, this is definitely a very new one.
There are a host of "woke" modern themes that find their way into western media in general. I sometimes wonder if the next star trek crew will be all David bowies and Barclays.
Hard to say Netflix is worse for this than various other Hollywood studios tho.
(to clarify in anticipation of downvotes, I welcome and enjoy some of the media about trans people etc, I am just answering your question, to elucidate this issue with the services' content that some people have. Definitely not a rare or new issue, I've been listening to people go on about it for years)
> There are a host of "woke" modern themes that find their way into western media in general
I dont see how stuff like this is complained about though, especially since most shows dont actually have more than token representation anyway. Whats the actual complaint here? That the average cast of a show is slightly different now than it was 10 years ago? People complain about "woke" themes but I hardly see concrete examples of them, and explanations as to whats wrong or what should be done differently.
And fwiw I think using Star Trek as an example is funny* since the show has historically been based on diverse groups of people.
I don't think it's the identity of the characters per se, it's more subtle than that, a kind of fetishisation of identity?
In Star Fleet the fact that someone happens to be a polygamous tri-sexual trans-species cat person should pass mostly without comment.
But modern sensibilities set up a dynamic where nobody is just a character.
Everyone is seen as representing "their team" - a race, or a class. This is a big responsibility, so everyone has to take themselves super seriously.
I think we're in a transitional phase for TV. Representation is a priority (great!) but the industry isn't fully confident with it yet. It's OK, TV has always been about the zeitgeist as much as the show.
Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
> I think we're in a transitional phase for TV. Representation is a priority (great!) but the industry isn't fully confident with it yet. It's OK, TV has always been about the zeitgeist as much as the show.
> Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
This is the answer. Seems like just a bit more time is needed for things to find less wooden footing.
Wow. Fascinating that you're unable to see them, but I guess I also read about people in Russia not seeing anything amiss about their media so I shouldn't be shocked.
Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order:
Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story).
Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity.
Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior.
Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows.
As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination.
An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue.
Very good comment. When things become forced and systematic, they lose their genuine intent and just feel (because they are) hypocritical and just a marketing tool.
Are you genuinely surprised (a lot of) people complain about this? No idea where you live but at this point it became memes material.
No one complains about the fresh prince of Bel-Air having a 100% black cast. But I doubt you wouldn't mind if a reboot was made with 80% white cast because it's a show "from 15 years ago".
What many people hate is the lack of creativity and the "corruption" of already-existing shows for ideologic views.
I would say American media has always been California centric. The majority of screenwriters lived in CA near the majority of media studios and produced the majority of our media.
The complaints about CA politics in Netflix are new complaints to me.
I've enjoyed occasionally seeing places I recognize, either in terms of aesthetic or in that I've actually been there, with Georgia's film and TV scene developing.
not the OP and not so much politics but I found it decidedly weird how Sex Education which is set in a fictional town in the UK, is filmed in Wales, with an almost exclusively British cast is completely Americanized.
As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
edit: another thing I just remembered, Netflix removed what is probably the best episode of Community from its catalog because of a blackface character, despite the fact that the character is explicitly used to address racism in the fantasy genre.
Really? I thought bridgerton was extremely problematic. I mean, from a feminist perspective it shows women's dependency on marriage and it barely has a critique for it.
The one character that outright critiques the practice still ends up revolving around a guy that "she chose" but is lower class. Why did she need a man?
Not only that but the show is all about 15yos marrying 20 something dudes? Just creepy.
On the other hand I thought sex education was great with how it deals with social issues surrounding sex. I do enjoy the aesthetics of it, never really found it weird but its definitely an "american 80s" aesthetic, though that is also how young people are dressing, at least over here.
Personally I dont see an issue with exploring social questions at all, but it does most of the time a superficial analysis just ends up ignoring too many things to be of any use and ends up simply as a performative action. I think this is the case for Bridgerton but not Sex Education.
In any case, what angers me with Netflix is the way they cancel shows without giving them a way to wrap up their stories in a final season. Sure, if you have 2 seasons and you were planning 5 it might be difficult to wrap everything on a third season but it is surely better than simply leaving the story open.
Okay, so first, you are conflating America with California...
Yes, like most American content sources, the content tends to be flavored by American culture.
> As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
I would say it has fairy tale versions of racial and gender politics (which are not, insofar as they connect with real world versions, any less connected to British than American ones) bolted on to a weird fairy tale version of early 19th Century British aristocracy; it's very American, but less in the politics than the style of romance story for which the setting provides the context.
> As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto
I mean how do you say any of this is American politics and not British/Western European politics? Racial inequality, women's rights, and class structures are not just American things.
The problem isn't the questions, it's the answers. With Bridgerton you get the impression the aristocracy wasn't so bad as long as half of it is black. There's no classism or anything structural in that show. It's escapist alt-history that even romanticizes what it depicts. In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character. superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
> With Bridgerton you get the impression the aristocracy wasn't so bad as long as half of it is black
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
> Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics
You write this as if the same questions of racial and gender politics are not also significant in other parts of (a) the anglosphere (b) western europe.
> how much Netflix content just reflect whatever crap is a fad in California politics
You’re right, it’s infuriating but not limited to Netflix unfortunately. Look at Picard… a total cringe-fest.
That said, I did randomly watch an Israeli TV series about the lives of ultra-orthodox Jews, Shtisel, and despite the lack of CGI and all that, I found it an interesting watch.
> They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
Ozark seems like a directly bad comparison because it appears to be one of their last big content swings/risks (and is ending soon) from the first few years where they seemed to heavily curate their projects and who the creators were and who the talent were and give them enough seasons to tell the full story they were hoping to tell. (Ozark is one of the very few and seems one of the last to get its full number of seasons expectation and will get to tell a "complete story".) Ozark is not quite as successful as benchmarks like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, but it fills a niche and gambles on good talent pulling off a tough tightrope of "bad people doing bad things but you root for them in spite of themselves", which is still a very risky niche even with big "Prestige TV" breakouts such as the aforementioned benchmarks. (I've only finished the first season of Ozark because I have a hard time watching this "cringe" genre, but I recall it was very well made and I enjoyed it for what it was.)
Since Netflix ordered Ozark they have indeed seemed to move their Originals content much more to a algorithm-generated "shotgun" approach: building lots of single season shows (or maybe if first weekend and only first weekend views are high enough, or so it seems, they will get two seasons) and seemingly designed overall to take fewer risks (on creators, on talent, on genres). There's definitely a lot extremely generic or at least extremely low risk programming coming out of Netflix's shotgun at this point. Some of it has still been entertaining.
But calling Ozark out for being a product of the shotgun and "low risk" seems backwards when it seems so much more emblematic of riskier Netflix Originals projects than current ones.
Netflix has successfully recreated the experience of going to the local video store in the late 80s/early 90s; So many videos of unknown quality, and I am unable to choose.
Your video store lacked a recommendation engine. IME, it completely transforms the discovery process. Look at a list of random content without a recommendation engine, and you may realize how accustomed you may have become - for me, 99% is laughably, depressingly, completely uninteresting.
The video store had a recommendation "engine". It had people that worked there! Often times they had a employee's pick section. You could talk to an employee and they could help you out. After getting to know you, they would reserve new movies for you! I know it's crazy to think that a human being can compete with an algorithm. This was the video store experience you have missed and were unaware of. Thinking that "your way" is the only way is always wrong.
> I know it's crazy to think that a human being can compete with an algorithm.
Yes, it is crazy, in part because "the algorithm" (how i hate this term) really derives most of its power because it represents huge numbers of human beings making choices. The store clerk may have been an excellent recommendation engine for you, or they may not have been, but they almost certainly were not equally good (or bad) for most people.
An algorithm in a Tower Records store in '99 would tell everyone to buy Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit records. It would not suggest say Spacemen 3 or The Magnetic Fields because they don't carry them in their inventory. It will however suggest a poor alternative that meets some 'nearest-neighbours' cluster threshold in a statistical model.
Independent video stores are not so tightly tied to one distributor, so yes, a clerk that takes a few moments to hear what movies you like could point you in the right direction....even if that direction is to go a different store entirely.
Netflix had a good recommendation algorithm for their DVD catalog. Now they hide the fact that they mostly have mediocre 2-star content by making their system more opaque.
But the way their UI/UX is built, it is not conducive for exploring. They've taken so much control away from me. I have to rely on what IT thinks I should be watching.
I know one of the reasons why they do this is because they don't want people to easily see and track of how small their content library is, and how frequently content disappears.
> I feel there are plenty of good shows on Netflix.
Not sure who else feels this but for me:
There's a lack of "regular tv shows". I knew it was over when they got rid of The Office, that was pretty much the only reason I kept Netflix.
HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video, AMC (temporary) all have the shows we regularly go to. Sopranos/Frasier, Simpsons/Star Wars/National Geography, The Office/Friends, Breaking Bad/Better call Saul (just need to see how it all ends).
Heck even Prime managed to bag many of the shows that used to be on Netflix. Aliens, Tora Tora Tora and even Independence Day is on Disney Plus. Lot of movies outside Netflix.
Netflix just has these one off good shows that frankly doesn't attract across the demographic. Sure there's something for everyone but its lacking those "must have and easy to access binge reruns".
> But the way their UI/UX is built, it is not conducive for exploring. They've taken so much control away from me. I have to rely on what IT thinks I should be watching
I don’t think they want you exploring too much. It would expose how little content they actually have.
I rarely find content on Netflix through their interface.
I usually google for "best movies netflix april 2022" (or shows) and look through rotten tomatoes, metacritic, etc to see if that is something worth checking out.
Looks like I'm not alone on this. The content is total crap these days. Most studios are moving their content to their own streaming service (see Marvel) and that's hurting Netflix even further. They also focus way too much on "binge" and kill quality shows that are not optimized for binge. I can binge only on shows that either have mastered the cliff-hangers or shows that run in the background. I don't and can't binge quality shows. So the way Netflix is optimizing for they'll end up with 24 style shows. I can't justify paying for it.
(It doesn't help that they drag their customers into their fight with Apple by not integrating with Apple TV. Given their quality now I don't open Netflix by default and now that they don't integrate my global queue I legit forget to resume a show.)
I liked when they were a video supermarket, combined with their star system that had personalized recommendations based on what other people with your taste would recommend. Saw some wacky shit on my Netflix DVD plan.
This is so true.
We have Disney+, HBO, Apple, Netflix, and Hulu.
Of those, the very clear ordering in terms of taste and vision is:
Disney+, Apple, HBO >>>> HBO, Hulu.
Apple is the most amazing one to me - they came from nowhere, and are bringing original content like CODA or Severance after only a few years.
Maybe it's because Apple - the largest (tech) company on Earth still has at its core the idea of beautiful things designed by humans, and Netflix never has.
Apple has been good at quality, but the quantity's still really low. I keep meaning to cancel because I go months without watching anything on it. Unfortunately for them, it'd be an excellent one to start subbing just one month a year.
Apple is less rushed than most others. They don't need to win by yesterday. I think the same could be said for Amazon. They're not killing it like apple, but they are slowly building up a fairly decent collection of originals that doesn't feel as rushed as Netflix.
Nitpick but CODA barely counts as original content. It's an American remake of a very popular French movie "La Famille Bélier". The producers were even involved with both film.
Apple didn't even make CODA, they just bought its distribution rights after it won Sundance. Honestly, CODA did nothing for me. Derivative award season bait, felt like I was watching a fancy after school special.
Just finished watching Severance and it was mind-blowing and very thought provoking (especially the season finale). I don't know why not more people are talking about it the way they did about Squid Game.
You almost got the issue. The main problem with Netflix is they are no longer a video Supermarket, but instead a Hollywood Studio.
Netflix was great for about 10 years when it's only competition was Hulu. Now everyone has yanked their content off of Netflix and put it on their own streaming platforms.
When Netflix had ALL of the streaming videos, it was amazing, it was the Video Supermarket as you say.
Now Netflix makes it's own content and I hear nothing but bad things from other people and my own experiences of their programming is that it's substandard to what they could get from other studios.
They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.
>> They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
I think the exact opposite: Ozark was great, because it is basically a rip-off of Breaking Bad, which was made by a mainstream TV network (which has a lot of experience and research about what kind of stories people do like). The "risky content" from artists that were "set free" is a recipe for disaster: you spend a lot of money to produce a show that only appeals to some exotic audiences. Netflix has some examples of that. Only once in a while you'll hit the jackpot and have this risky content make you a lot of money.
It's also hard to create the second generation of copycats since you are in copy of a copy territory. I'll watch Ozark since its Joe brand Breaking Bad. But a copy of Ozark will probably suck.
Breaking Bad was released by AMC, which was mostly airing theatrical movies. They had little original programming prior to Breaking Bad (and Mad Men one year before). Additionally, HBO and TNT, two TV networks with more experience than AMC, turned down the idea.
Ozark is good, I love that show. But I do agree, in general, that the quality of their 95% of the content is crap and it is far below the level of Disney+ and even HBO.
I have maybe subscribed to Netflix for 2 months in the past 1.5 years. Their content is abysmal. I don't have numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if HBO Max is eating their lunch as their catalog is top notch.
I have too many streaming services ("cancel Netflix" is on my todo, plus Amazon Prime) and HBO and Hulu both crush Netflix. They're the two no-brainer general-purpose streaming services (Disney+ might compete for one of those slots, though, if you have kids—in which case you could end up with both your top-two mustn't-cancel streaming services being owned by Disney).
Disney, Peacock and Paramount want a single spot to unify their content offering. HBOMax also kinda wants that, but also has enough HBO left to target "prestige" offerings. Apple+ is being Apple and directly targeting "prestige".
Netflix isn't doing any of that. It isn't going for the best and brightest it's going for the best and brightest, and "murder shows", and crappy reality shows, and cooking shows, and, and, and: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/11561544/netflix-doesnt-want-t...
Yes, they have a quality problem. Part of the problem with the subscriber model is that these companies have to produce content to justify the monthly fees. This has led to overly long shows and movies. Stories that could have been told in 1.5 hours are now taking much much longer than needed.
A perfect example is Scorsese's "The Irishman." That movie could have easily been 2-2.5 hours yet it came in at over 3 hours. It was a detriment to the movie rather than a positive. Yet, I bet Netflix loved the extra content even though it was not a good thing for the movie.
You mean you don't want to watch Love is Blind, Love is Blind Japan, Love is Blind Brazil, Love is Blind Season 2, Queer Eye seasons 1-5, Queer Eye Germany...??
Can you give some examples of what type of movies to produce?
And what’s wrong with Ozark? I thought it’s one of the better shows on Netflix.
In my view they need more creative risky shows like the OA, Altered Carbon, Love, Death & Robots, Dark Mirror and more old HBO style content… quality and like you said not this mass produced stuff trying to satisfy the lowest common denominator, because then you will satisfy no one.
Maybe they have good shows I just don't know about. Their recommendation system seems to be crap. I browse for 20 minutes and then give up frustrated, because I can't find anything interesting.
I was just looking to downgrade my plan. Basic only gives you SD quality, which I'm OK with but only allowing one device at a time is taking the p!ss.
> The main problem of Netflix, more than competition, is quality of content.
How fair is that though? Who's to say that we wouldn't find the quality of content of CBS/NBC/ABC to be equally as bad if we had it comprehensively laid out in a nicely engineered UI like in Netflix? In the previous model, most of us didn't watch TV for huge chunks of the day and simply weren't around to see if the television was good during those chunks.
Yeah, but Netflix movies really suck and at least in Brazil and other countries, their library is getting increasingly smaller, which causes the crappy originals to dominate.
I mean, last month they were featuring a movie about f-cking hailstorms as the main attraction!
I think there's some truth to this, but there are two categories where Netflix's content is actually much better than basically all its competitors: reality TV and programming outside the US (which there is a huge amount of). I agree though that Netflix's non-reality TV programming in the US is their weakest area.
Anyone have experience commenting on how total compensation and employee retention is handled when a company's stock becomes volatile? $NFLX has gone from ~679 > ~260 in the span of about 6mo. Anyone who got their RSUs last fall has seen their TC vastly cut, but Netflix is known for paying very well.
My limited experience working at a public company has seen tons of employee turnover, especially in this extremely hot job market. I'm considering shopping around as well, but my TC has been going up through promotions, which relieve the pressure to look around a bit.
Netflix is an outlier because they pay mostly cash. But I'm currently at a different company that had a huge stock dip, and during the perf review they gave top performers a huge stock refresher (enough to get them back to their original TC, sometimes more). And well, if you didn't get one, that's like the company saying you're worth X% less now.
Netflix employee sharing public info. Comp is set in cash and you can take as much as you want (down to minimum wage) in 10-year options. They're granted monthly, have the strike price set monthly and vest instantly. This won't cause a drop in comp for people going forward, but is a hit for anyone holding options.
Actually some companies whose stock drops significantly have felt the need to issue more stock to employees to retain them. Doordash is a notable recent example.
If anyone from Netflix is lurking, I have a wild suggestion:
If I’ve recently watched a movie or series, don’t relentlessly show it in the “recommended-content-looping-screensaver”. I know it exists, because I’ve watched it. And you know that too.
I'd like a quick and easy way to get back to "my list" and "continue watching" without having to page through the feed. Neither ever seem to be in a consistent place. (I have the same gripe with Amazon Prime).
Part of me wonders if it isn’t ML gone wrong based on that very occurrence. Kids watching something dozens of times making that a valid recommendation in the models view. Sadly I don’t want to watch a late 90s action movie more than once, especially not 3 days after I’ve seen it for the first time.
I wonder if Netflix would consider not charging you when you don't use their service. Then there would be no reason to cancel and your subscription payments could just resume whenever Netflix has content you're interested in. Netflix then would have a more natural incentive to focus on quality content as well.
Charging you when you’re not using it is literally what makes the business model work. There’s a certain level of average utilization that, if achieved, would sink the business.
That is really why every company has a subscription service: there are so many sleeping subscriptions, and no set moment to evaluate if a new purchase is worth it
That is talking about after 2 years. That is very different from what I pictured GP proposting. I thought they were proposing something like "any month where you don't play a single video you aren't charged" or a similar scheme.
The upside is that you always have your account "active" and ready to go. There is no friction to playing a video, browsing the catalog. Just hitting play and you are a paying customer again. If you are going to be charged for two years there is definitely incentive to cancel your account, adding friction to any decision to resubscribe.
The downside is likely that it adds mental friction to that first video every month. It takes it from "well I already paid" to "is it worth it? I'm going on vacation for 2 weeks and won't watch much, maybe I'll skip this month" which negates the mental relief that "unlimited" monthly subscriptions rely on.
Not sure how that incentivizes them to produce higher quality content? The existing loop today is still for users to resume their billed subscription when something of interest is released.
I'm assuming that practically nobody actually cancels their Netflix whenever there's nothing to watch and resubscribes when there is and so they probably consider existing subscribers money-in-the-bank and mostly try to acquire new subscribers. If they were instead trying to get their existing subscribers to use the service every month then they should focus on content (not necessarily Netflix original content, maybe just buy a blockbuster now and then, w/e).
Let’s review. Average quality has taken an absolute nose dive. There is so much garbage it’s hard to find new/interesting things. They keep raising their prices. They charge a fortune extra for 4K when the other big streamers don’t (they have more content, but see #1). They cancel stuff so fast it’s not worth getting into. They refuse to integrate with Apple TV’s “Watch Now” unlike everyone else.
They act like they’re “Netflix, king of the hill, above all others and different from wannabes”. Like HBO vs basic cable. Like it’s 2014 still and all the other services are jokes.
It’s not. The others have caught up in many ways, or surpassed. With MUCH better prices. And the Netflix crap ratio has gotten out of control.
One huge hit every few years won’t save you. Apple TV+ is firing on all cylinders. HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney all nice have originals and great back catalogs for nostalgia.
If I could find Apple TV+ quality on Netflix I’d be happier. But I can’t. And I pay 4x as much for that privilege thanks to 4K.
> They cancel stuff so fast it’s not worth getting into.
This is honestly the key for me. From Vulture's piece on the cancellation of Babysitters' Club (a good series, by the way):
"As far as I can tell, everything Netflix does is based on how it’s driving subscriber growth.
The truth is that when your show does very well in North America, as ours does, as far as Netflix is concerned, pretty much everybody who’s going to have Netflix [in North America] has it. They’re looking to drive subscriber growth in other parts of the world where this IP doesn’t have much recognition."
If you're a subscriber, fuck you. Give us your money, shut the fuck up, you aren't getting any series you care about. You don't count for anything.
Hence most series get one or two seasons, get cut of with no warning - a shitty way to treat the people working on them - leaving unfinished stories for viewers, because being a subscriber makes your opinion and interests worthless.
This is the HUGE paradox problem with subscriber systems, once you're a subscriber they have NO reason to cater to you beyond trying to prevent you from cancelling.
Whereas if you are buying individual pieces (for example purchasing episodes from Prime or buying comic books, etc) they need to keep you hooked.
Apple TV + is so underrated and under-talked about it's not even funny.
Netflix still produces some interesting shows and I especially like the anime that they are bringing on like Thermae Roma (sp?) that was recently released. I don't think I'd ever see that on Apple TV + which is a big disappointment.
But this is why I also don't invest in Netflix. Missed the boat on growing to get here.
The Apple TV+ catalog is not very deep, but the quality of what they have is really good. It was easier to find something really good to watch on Apple TV+ than Netflix, and I think that's just a consequence of them having far fewer shows, but generally very high quality shows. Their catalog is so small that I'm out of things to watch.
I never would have signed up for them if a subscription hadn't come free with my MBP. Now that the machine is a year old, the free subscription has expired, I cancelled it. I'll pick it up again in a few months when there are new seasons of what I watch.
The problem with Apple TV+ is that you need an apple device or an Android/Google TV that is granted permission to install the Apple TV+ app by Apple. My Android TV, despite being able to run apps for Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, etc., cannot run the Apple TV+ app because... reasons.
Very untrue. My Samsung Smart TV from 2017 has an Apple TV+ app available. My parent's Xfinity cable box has it as well. It's not as available as Netflix (I remember watching on my Nintendo DS) but it's certainly not limited to Android devices.
You can browse their list of supported devices from LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Amazon, Playstation, Xbox, Sony, Vizio, Roku. And then any devices without the app that support AirPlay 2 will work from your iPhone or iPad.
Foundation, Severance, Ted Lasso are some of the most acclaimed shows in recent years.And they secured the Best Picture Oscar in their second year, which Netflix still hasn't managed.
Anime is the only reason I haven't cancelled Netflix yet. They added several Gundam shows out of nowhere. then they added Cowboy Bebop. Several other notable titles in there as well. The collection is still incomplete though, and as great as these shows are I'm getting tired of rewatching them.
It's not their IP so one has to wonder how long it's gonna take before we see the obnoxious "last day to watch on Netflix" message.
My issue with Anime on Netflix is that the subs are often trash (non-issue if you watch dubbed versions of shows, the Cowboy Bebop dub is excellent for instance). It's sometimes sad that even though the show is on Netflix, I end up using fan-subbed versions instead since a lot more care gets put into such releases
Except Unicorn (which I believe to have been there before massive addition), I think the reason Gundam saw an addition is because they signed a distribution deal for Hathaway's Flash, and since HF refers to many events in original UC continuity, people would wanted some background on characters appearing in it (notably Hathaway, and maybe Quess, Amuro & Char).
I didn't subscribe to Netflix so I don't sure what Anime are being offered right now. With the recent deals (HF, Zero's Tea Time), I would have missed/skipped them, even though they are the series I liked. Maybe I will subscribe it once all episodes are shown so that I can watch it and forget it, but I won't subscribe to it long term.
I feel like HBO's quality trajectory is downward ever since ATT bought it and fired all the old HBO bosses that built their unique library. And now the HBO bosses are Discovery channel bosses, known for shitty "reality" shows about obese people and people with 10 kids or some other nonsense.
Hopefully Apple TV+ can re-create some of that magic.
I seriously don't understand their strategy. While all their partners are pulling out to put their content on their own streaming services (and have been for years), Netflix is cancelling good shows left and right. It's like they never learned from Apple's long-tail App Store strategy. You have to cover even niche interests if you want to maintain a dominant position in a market like this. If there is ever a situation where somebody wants to watch something like x and you don't have anything good to cater to that interest, you've failed and you're voluntarily giving up marketshare. Maybe not now, but down the road as your competitors catch up.
I can’t remember the last time I watched something good on Netflix. Most of their “good” shows are good for a season or two, then seem to stall out. With the recent price increase, I dropped from the HD plan to the SD plan, as my wife mostly watches on her phone. So far so good.
There are some I like that are still on. But they’re getting cancelled because they’ve run long enough that either the creator is done or they’re not drawing necessary numbers and don’t get renewed.
But nothing new is replacing them. So over time Netflix is becoming irrelevant to me.
I’ve subscribed since early 2000s pretty much non-stop. But I’m about to pull the trigger.
I think Netflix has honed in on the "have something for everyone" strategy. Just about everyone has a show they like on Netflix, but for most people it seems like there's only a few. On your list I only liked Ozark and Money heist, plus Bojack. Meanwhile HBO creates a great show every year, and actually renews their stuff. Disney is a necessity for kids. Apple TV+ costs 25% as much. It really feels like netflix has diversified far too much, and now people are realizing that there are cheaper options that just make the stuff they like.
Squid Game and Tiger King (which has a second season right now BTW) were huge. Stranger Things was huge and keeps promising (but not delivering) a fourth season.
I think you completely misunderstand what they're trying to do. What you read as a proliferation of crap is really trying to find a 'big hit' in lots of small niches. Some niche hits will become crossover success stories, and draw people into new genres, etc. But others will quietly be classics in their small niche, often for being the first serious effort.
Of course, Sturgeon's Law is still in effect, so 90% of everything will be crap. But producing non-crap for smaller audiences builds loyalty, which is worth something in the subscriber model.
Or at least that's my read of their strategy. There's a real discovery problem that comes with it that I don't think they've solved. But overall it's an interesting approach.
No, I understand that. It’s the “throw it all the wall and see what sticks” approach. Network TV does it every year.
But Netflix isn’t trying as much stuff as network TV. They seem to be trying as much as all of cable.
The problem is at a certain point you ruin all discovery. There is no way to find something new through serendipity. It’s gone next week from the promotion so they can promote 8 other new shows.
But that means even if you find it and it’s good it won’t get and audience and will be cancelled. Unless it gets big from something outside Netflix (social media with Squid Game or some other popular but not mega hit shows) it’s a goner.
So… why even look at all that stuff? It’s not worth it.
My biggest gripe isn’t that they produce a ton of content that largely doesn’t interest me - it’s that they prioritize it in the interface and force me to wade through all of it in order to get to what I want.
They also cancel stuff so regularly, it's hard to justify investing time into a show even if you like it because half the time it's getting canceled after a season or two with a shitty cliffhanger as the last episode.
When I look back at a lot of my favorite TV shows, many of them took a while to hit their stride. Even universally liked TV shows will have rough starts where people will go, "Yea, you can just sorta skip season 1."
Over time you just get used to thinking, "oh, this is a Netflix original on Season 1, I'll wait and see if they make more content" which probably fucks with the viewer numbers and they cancel it.
There was also this element of "We have all this data so we have an unfair advantage over all these studios with pitch meetings." And it seems as if they're just another studio who isn't really in a better position to predict breakout hits than anyone else.
Of course, they also license content but that's just about spreading around the dollars from a bag of money.
Personally, I find Netflix to be worth the subscription at the moment. But there are a ton of other streaming services and I'm not going to subscribe to them all. And, while I have gone in and out of Netflix' DVD service, the back catalog has sufficiently rotted I don't find it worthwhile.
We love Great British Bake Off, but the proliferation of horrible knockoffs on Netflix is embarrassing. Just to name one example. They feel crass and paint-by-numbers. I appreciate it when these services take a risk on something weird, but this seems like the exact opposite.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with their strategy. The problem is that when 80% of the stuff they create is content that there is no chance I'd enjoy I'd prefer to just go to a streaming service that focuses on the content I want to consume. Netflix's strategy works when they have a tech advantage, but now that there are other players in the game Netflix is too expensive for the amount of content they create for each person to enjoy. They only way to justify it is to split between like 5-10 people imo, which they are trying to crack down on.
Disclaimer: don't have Netflix and never plan to, but watched some of their productions, like everyone.
No, it's objectively crap. I hate romcoms or horror movies but I can distinguish between the quality that was put in making them (objective) vs how much they affect me (subjective). And even nostalgia aside, they produce only crap.
Nearly all Netflix production is low quality.
As for the "many niches": well they all are sub-niches of the same small niche(s) because I don't see any show or movie that is not either targeted for teens, women or some (usually the same) ethnic group.
> They refuse to integrate with Apple TV’s “Watch Now”
They also refuse (or are unable) to add support on Apple TV for their interactive titles. I doubt anyone really cares, but it surprises me, and not in a good way, when I bump into it.
I got a year free of Apple TV+ with a new iphone, and I don't quite like it.
Used it to watch Ted Lasso and Foundation, and the browser experience was _terrible_ for discovery and had lots of bugs and counterintuitive things. And it was Windows+Chrome, so no excuse for having such a terrible interface.
Now I don't even care about it, and find it easier to just open netflix or youtube or something else rather than to waste time and brain cells dealing with their crap.
I’ve really enjoyed the number of shows they have. I’ve never tried the browser. I always watch on my TV, and they have apps for basically every smart TV
The UX is also pretty terrible. It takes like five button presses to resume what you were watching when it should take one, and the Android app infuriatingly maintains its own brightness slider so if you watch Netflix a lot you're constantly running into the screen being too dim or too bright.
You don't think people care about $120 a year? The average American can't afford a surprise $500 expense. Netflix is in most households in America. These aren't just white collar workers with money to spare. I think people are extremely price sensitive when it comes to entertainment.
I do think most people don't care about 120$ a year per household, yes.
The people who do care - they will pirate anyway. You don't even have to pirate - aren't there just websites that play pirated content like it's youtube?
Also, isn't youtube just free? Not having Netflix is not like not having a TV, it's more like not having the fancy cable channels package.
> I do think most people don't care about 120$ a year per household, yes.
I really, really think you're wrong. The median household income in $67,521. That's not even close to "$120 isn't a big deal" territory, and half of households have less. More than half of American households have netflix, poor-ish people aren't just pirating the content. Smart TVs and chromecast like devices make pirating more difficult. Many people don't want to mess around with casting stuff to their TV from their computer.
1. The auto-play preview feature is incredibly annoying and there is no way to disable it. If I want to watch a preview, I'll click the damn button. Let me read a description in peace.
2. The overt propaganda makes watching any new content all but impossible for me. It seems that this is not unique to Netflix, but they are the worst in my opinion.
The way I see it, a family can only have a handful of subscriptions, and it might not just be streaming that is competing for that budget. Probably less than 5, maybe 3 on average, just based on what I hear from people.
If you have kids, one of those has to be Disney. Somehow they make some great movies, with incredible longevity. Very good songs, and you might not know it but the songs are sung in dozens of languages, and translated well, by local stars. Good, modern storylines too, and nothing awkward. Plus your kids will want to watch the movies over and over, so Disney is a must have.
If you're a sports person, maybe you go for Sky Sports or BT Sport or whatever the old dinosaur is in your country. It's expensive and you aren't going to watch all those games, but a fair few people will go for it.
So what have you got left? One or two slots maybe? Between Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, that documentary one that doesn't spend enough on ads targeted at me, and probably some others.
It's hard to see how to capture that last slot, for anyone. Amazon already has a foot in the door of course.
So it's going to be a big dogfight in this space. You'll get occasional winners in terms of content but what could ever last as a permanent advantage?
Netflix for me is the only decent one that always subtitled (closed captions to the US-entric folks) their output and they do put on some decent films now and then.
But Amazon prime video? Fuck that and fuck the morons who add crud on their catalogue and don't even bother adding subtitles? Grossly insulting to an avid deaf viewer.
On the other hand, Netflix refuses to translate subtitles to my language (Serbian) for years. HBO Max translated pretty much everything, while most kids shows are even dubbed.
They literally just have to hire one person in Serbia and pay them 1000 EUR a month, maybe another one to validate.
The Altered Carbon ordeal is interesting. Like you mentioned, everyone I know who watched it loved the first season and hated the second season. I thought second season was ok. Ok, then it's immediately cancelled, I'm guessing for lack of viewership after the first season (and man, if they maintained the first season it could've been such an epic 6 season show. There was a lot of story left to tell).
But what's really interesting, maybe related to "the message" you mention, is that critics were the complete opposite of the audience and liked the second season even more! There was an article on HN recently about how critics seem out-of-touch with the audience. This was quite the glaring example.
There was just too much that changed between S1 and S2 for your average audience member. Viewers like evolutionary changes and not revolutionary changes season to season
At $8-10/month it was an always have whether I watched it or not, particularly before all the "me too" balkanized streaming platforms limped into existence.
I understand that in this changing world, Netflix needed to produce original content. IMHO how they went about it was completely wrong: they just threw money at the problem and that's just not a way to effectively create good content.
A really hard problem to avoid is to have all your content feel a bit "same-y". Netflix has this problem. They have a proclivity for one-word names (some executive think sthey'l be easier to remember), for example. Your favourite restaurant can get this way too.
Here's what they should've done: create studios to make independent localized content for particular languages. Have a studio in Spain (and probably Mexico) producing Spanish-language TV aimed specifically at Spanish speakers. The indepedent part cannot be ovverstressed.
But here's where scale comes in: for content with wider appeal, you dub it and push it to a wider audience. Some of Netflix's most interesting content has been foreign language (eg The 3%). So Netflix is doing this to some degree but it's not their core strategy. Instead they're seemingly spending most of their money on big-budget productions. Movies in particular are a loser (IMHO). Theaters is what makes movies profitable.
For some reason the voice actors that end up getting used for dubbing are (IME) universally terrible and it seems to be like the same 8 people. They're awful. This could be done so much better.
The point here is that lower-budget locale-specific content is likely to be more appealing and what becoems popular is a good indicator of what might have wider appeal.
But anyway, Netflix is now $15.50/month for HD (who is going to pay $9.99 for 480p?!?!? Or $20/month for 4K?!?!). That's more than HBO and HBO is still way better at producing original content and has a much deeper library of such content.
Personally I'll now just sign up to Netflix for 1-3 months a year to catch up on things I care about instead of having it all the time.
> Here's what they should've done: create studios to make independent localized content for particular languages. Have a studio in Spain (and probably Mexico) producing Spanish-language TV aimed specifically at Spanish speakers. The indepedent part cannot be ovverstressed.
That's what they did. Although I don't know how independent the Spanish studio is.
> News of expansion at Netflix’s Madrid studio complex, launched in April 2019 as its first European Production Hub, comes just a week after Netflix held an online roadshow to unveil seven new projects – movies, series and reality shows – including “If Only,” a Spanish adaptation of the canceled Netflix Turkish original.
Covering the next few months, the new project announcement suggested that Netflix has now achieved an unprecedented level of production in Spain that makes it one of the biggest investors in Spanish series and films in the country.
Netflix has released more than 50 titles made in Spain since 2016 and participated in more than 70 films from the time of its first original movie, “7 Years,” released in 2016. It has worked with over 35 independent production houses and has created 7,500 jobs for casts and crews.
This year’s current productions are expected to hire over 1,500 professionals and create over 21,000 days of work for extras, Netflix estimated.
If Netflix spun off their Korean dramas and charged $5/mo, I'd pay that. That was their one bright spot in an otherwise mediocre catalog.
> HBO is still way better at producing original content
Netflix can't even compete with AMC. AMC has Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire, The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul. Even USA Networks has Mr Robot. I can't name a single Netflix show that remotely comes close to a premium tier show like Mad Men. Not Stranger Things. Maybe the first season or two of House of Cards. If you forget the later seasons exist.
The cost difference for different quality was a huge mistake I feel - as I suspect most people with streaming have more than one, and if they opted for the $10 plan it will look like absolute shite compared to the other plans they have, or even YouTube.
That’s a big turn off and another reason to axe it.
I have a friend in another state who is disabled and on a fixed income. He is the only person I share my Netflix account with. I'd be happy to pay something in order to share it with him. But I don't like that a household of 6 can pay $15 for the service, whereas two single person households are expected to pay $30 for the same service.
Shouldn't the cost be per profile, not per distinct physical address?
How do people here see quality content (I happen to love the more innovativ and artistic stuff) without subscribing to all these different services?
Netflix seems to have the best general collection for my tastes - genres, various countries, etc. I read about things on other services, but I am not subscribing to everything.
I subscribe (and immediately cancel) to everything.
If I want to watch a show/movie (like Jackass Forever on Paramount+) I'll subscribe and then immediately cancel it. This gives me 1 month of the service. If I want to keep watching something on that service, I'll just resubscribe once it runs out.
Some services like Netflix and Hulu, I know I'll get enough value out of them so I don't usually bother canceling.
I hear friends complain about having to sign up for so many things to watch all the shows they want, but Apple makes this so easy I don't really think much about it. Back in the pre-streaming days most everyone wanted a-la-carte channels and that's exactly what we have now.
Many friends of mine do this. It has to be obvious, but I suppose Netflix/Disney/etc would rather have at least a month or two out of you rather than $0 or torrents.
Torrents (Knaben on EU domain) and DDL (think Pahe li MKVking PSArips), but I have to do my research, no need to do much, just once a day visit YTS (already filtered by IMDb 7+ rating) and Pahe
if I were extremely lazy then Plex share, see r/plexshares for Netflix like experience
there is also r/televisionsuggestions if you don't know what to watch
Kanopy's content is fantastic, maybe the best. It has so many gems I've never heard of. However, last I knew, it requires you have a library card at a public library that uses Kanopy, and then limits you to a few films per month.
18.3 P/E ratio (~6% yearly real profits as opposed to -8% real in a bank account) going forward by today's earnings. High morale unparalleled technical talent in the market. Founder-led. COGS (cost of goods sold) approaches nothing as content library accumulates. No brainer buy.
Why subtract inflation from cash but not earnings? You have to subtract from both.
20 PE in 8% inflation environment implies -3% return, ignoring growth.
However people tend to refer to the 10y breakeven rate for forward inflation expectations as CPI is backwards looking. Forward long term inflation expectations are around 3% atm, per the bond market.
And the reason -3% is preferable sometimes, is because you would have lost 70% buying NFLX a few months ago. Overvalued companies aren't a very good inflation hedge when discount rates increase dramatically, despite the common narrative
Say a co. is $1b market cap and earned $50m last year. 20 P/E, but 8% inflation means that $50m is now worth last years $46m real. So the company has an extra 4.6% value in the bank but also, because inflation they’re earning $54m next year, the same real value. So by a 20 P/E, they’re worth $1.08b now because inflation ate away the dollar. So you’ve gained 8% nominal, 0% real, but also 4.6% real. Meanwhile $1b in the bank is still $1b but now worth $920m, so -8% real.
That’s why you subtract inflation from cash but stock assets are mostly inflation resistant.
People can tend to do whatever they want, it doesn’t make it correct. Last year, the 10y was like 1.2% while inflation turned out to be 8.5%. Clearly the 10y is not a good reliable indicator of inflation.
Ya -3% can be preferable to a stock going down 70%. But that’s not the reason to own stock assets. You could of also owned Netflix from 2019 to 2021 and been up 250%.
What matters is the true value of future expected earnings of the company, compared to what the value is now. By my estimation, Netflix is trading well below those future earnings in this inflationary environment, even with hefty interest rate hikes that bring inflation down, simultaneously shrinking stock premiums from both sides. I wouldn’t be surprised if Berkshire bought in at this level.
Not sure what the long comment is about. It's basic and correct math that you subtract inflation from yield of a bond or stock, just as you would cash in a bank.
Equities are not immune to inflation as you say. Inflation affects different companies in different ways, and also leads to higher discount rates which hurts longer duration and higher multiple assets the most.
The nature of the inflation matters too. Only wage inflation is generally good for earnings, unless you're a commodity provider. Consumer spending power declines with anything that's not wage inflation
An overvalued stock is a worse inflation hedge than cash in a rising discount rate environment.
Netflix could be a good investment, or it could be terrible if its earnings start to decline. A company with declining earnings is even worse than a bond of the same yield
What you’re entirely missing is that stocks track inflation (and exceed it with growth) long term.
Yes, for past returns, nominal yield - inflation is all there is to calculate real yield. But using that to project future yield, without factoring in inflation’s future effect on the asset, is a mistake, as my math illustrates.
If you have a bond paying 5%, and a stock paying 5% yield, but the government suddenly prints 10% of money to the money supply and helicopter moneys it, that bond won’t budge, it’s why it’s called fixed income, the future payments are already set nominally. But that stock would effectively be worth 10% more, because the currency was debased 10%. There’s the same amount of company ownership producing tangible goods now being chased by 110% of the money.
Yes, fluctuations from CPI occur due to front loading expectations, velocity, potential from M2, interest rates, productivity growth, and macroeconomic environment. All those are different forces applying pressure at various times, but they’re orthogonal to limited company ownership chased by an inflating currency.
It’s much more certain that company value be retained independent on inflation than the 10y will predict it.
Well you’d need a few more Russia-scale service cutoffs, as this quarter was -700k from Russia and 500k additions globally, I believe. They do forecast 2m loss next quarter, not great for profit growth, but ultimately not as bad as they’re currently valued. Netflix definitely forecasted that the profit increase from price raises would overshadow profit loss from subscriber loss. They’ve shown remarkable stickiness to revenue over their tenure, it’s been unflinchingly rising forever. And as I’ve said, their costs have been massive investments into catalog, which will actually diminish over time once everyone has 1,000 shows to watch that last forever, without needing to invest in much new ones. That will bring fat gross margins for their immense revenue to further convert into profit years down the line. Even with flatlining revenue from subscriber loss, their 4x P/S means they will soon enjoy a fat 10 P/E (10% yearly return) + stable inflation adjustment in this crappy environment. That is, unless/until the share price adjusts, which it will eventually.
This is 500k net new subscribers globally. But Netflix doesn't break down into how many were new customers and how many existing customers they lost. If you could see these on a graph, you would likely see that their loss of existing customers has been climbing and their new incoming customers has been falling. Forecast this outwards, and the curves will cross resulting in a net loss of subscribers.
This is why they are introducing the advertising-subsidized tier. To stop the bleeding of customers and return to growth.
Let's face facts, streaming video on the internet is really not that hard or unique any more. It was only a matter of time before most other media companies offered their own streaming services.
So what does Netflix have to offer that is unique in today's world of streaming? Not much.
I’m currently subscribed to a bunch of streamers. I usually turn first to HBO or Hulu, then YouTube or Amazon Prime, then Apple TV+ (which has less content overall but really good shows lately), and finally Netflix as a last resort.
In fact I rarely open Netflix unless I’ve already heard about something I want to check out. I really don’t like wading through their recommendations.
With the frequent price increases, it’s getting harder and harder to justify.
Netflix was more expensive than their competitors even prior to the recent price increase. After the price increase the only way I can justify the cost at all is the fact that my account is shared across 2 households. If they crack down on account sharing I will cancel my account. I suspect that many others will do the same and the net result will not be the increase in subscriptions they are looking for.
It's probably time for them to cut back their aggressive push to create content and start spending it on external content contracts again.
Focus on a few high quality originals rather than rapid fire as much crap content.
External content has no future. Every streaming service wants exclusive contracts so that they can advertise "Only in Netflix" and spinning up a new streaming service is so easy that every content owner is just doing it. If you want new content that doesn't cost more than you will make off of it you need to start making your own.
Of course it is a zero-sum game, really just the consumers lose. (I guess some very popular content may "win" as the can demand huge exclusive prices instead of smaller prices from all providers. But that averages out across all content)
It's a losing strategy though, with whitelabeling of streaming services it's easy for a content holder to just stick their stuff behind their own label or play Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime vs HBO.
Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.
Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.
How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ran... they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.
They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.
I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.
And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.
Can Netflix improve their app:
- their chrome cast connecting implementation is worse then all the others, it never auto connects and the UI is confusing around the state its in.
- the “are you still watching dialog” is way too aggressive and generally buggy. If i resume a show from a day ago it doesnt reset the episode counter. So annoying.
Netflix' problem is that it's not indispensable. If Netflix vanished, people would find entertainment elsewhere, such as cable, YouTube, google, amazon, Disney, etc. Any major company like google or amazon can license content even at loss, so what advantage does Netflix bring.
If the goal is for that content to make netflix indispensible, I feel like it's a bad strategy to make customers accustomed to shows canceling after 2 seasons. It commoditizes the shows, so customers will be happy to switch platforms if/when their favorite shows go out and another platform has a shiny new show.
I don't understand why this company is even part of "FAANG" in the first place as you can see it is nothing more than a side project of the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google, Disney etc.
This company has been long heralded for its engineering, contraptions and its overall technology, but when it comes to competition, subscribers, pricing increases and its content it is not good enough and with the increase of prices on consumers everywhere, Netflix is one of the first unnecessary things that they will cancel.
That is even before I even mentioned the competitors like Apple, Amazon, Disney, etc, eating their lunch as a side project.
>FAANG actually began as FANG. The origin of the acronym has been attributed to Jim Cramer, the financial TV host and co-founder of The Street.com. Known for his slangy abbreviations and catchy phrases, Cramer coined the term in 2013 to represent four tech stocks with outsized market appreciation. Cramer believed that these companies belonged together because they are all high growth stocks that share the common threads of digitization and the web.
>Cramer's original term was just FANG — it didn't initially include Apple. The company joined the ranks in 2017, reflecting the growth of internet services (iCloud, Apple Music,
Apple Pay) to its revenues. So the acronym became FAANG.
>And it's remained so, even though Google's official corporate name is now Alphabet.
They know that Netflix is a side project compared to the likes of the MAMAA companies: Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, where 3 out of 5 of them are already competing against Netflix through their own side projects.
Netflix doesn't stand a chance if they continue to keep raising prices.
Well, there’s a simple reason- FAANG was an acronym to describe a group of companies’ stock market performance not their underlying value. Of course it’s a ridiculous grouping - Facebook and Google are ad tech companies, Amazon is a logistics company, Apple is a hardware company and Netflix is a Hollywood studio .
A side project of Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney. Netflix is proving to be suffocated by them and they are struggling. It's stock performance is quite woeful and has crashed 58% from its high since it was found to be inflated with hype during the 2020 lockdown gains.
A crash like that in its price is due to the hype and speculation around its slowing growth and opportunity to find any remaining lucky pumps in the stock price.
Now it's found to be in survival mode torn apart by its competitors and customers cancelling their subscriptions. It's not the end of the world when they cancel subscriptions with their competitors, but for Netflix, it is more than the end of the world. In fact it is the end of the universe and movie streaming subscriptions is their whole universe.
Microsoft is more than worthy of this 'group' rather than struggling 'Netflix'.
I think it's because they're said to pay a heck of a lot of money to engineers. Perhaps they also have similar interviews. But the acronym seems to be employment related more than what the company actually does.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription. Their show lineup is increasingly focused on series without commitment to closure and featuring heavy virtue signaling/woke content.
I respect those who enjoy this, but that's not me.
Anecdotally the other streaming services have good stuff from time to time, but behaviorally they simply don’t compare to Netflix. My wife and I spend probably 80% our streaming time in Netflix just out of habit and the sheer amount of content.
Then, every few months hbo or Hulu comes out with a show we want to watch but then once it’s over we default back to Netflix. Again you can argue that the content is crap but people have demonstrated they prefer quantity over quality. The strategy is something like a hub and spoke. Create a handful of high budget shows that are spaced out to keep people interested then fill the rest with crap.
As an aside I’ve never paid for Netflix because we’ve had my wife’s account that’s linked to her parent’s for several years. It’s borderline ridiculous they’ve allowed password sharing as long as they have. If Netflix forced the account to be split we’d pay Without a second thought. I suspect most are like us despite all the cynicism.
I think once they start instituting that change alone the sub base will expand rapidly.
Raises price every year, stops password sharing (within family), trashes contents. My nightly routine becomes surfing Netflix one title at a time, 10-15 minutes a title for about 40 minutes until I give up and just rewatch old shows, movies. I start to reconsider my subscription of Netflix now.
I am a big fan of Netflix but I do think their UI is crap. It’s hard to search for shows. They should have an insanely great recommendation system since they’ve been at it for such a long time. But it’s basically the same system they had in place for decade plus.
I'm one of the ones they lost. I suddenly noticed the experience is inferior. The search doesn't seem to even take into account the thing I typed in. Maybe it's just that they've been so utterly gutted by the loss of all the Fox content to Disney+, that they're trying to cover it up with "well we don't have that, but perhaps you would like..."
Speaking of "perhaps you would like," what do you call it when someone flashes something poorly targeted, unwanted and irrelevant in front of your eyeballs and pushes it a bit too hard? I call that an ad. I'm paying for advertising. Or rather, I was.
It reminds me of the “grandma bait” movies you’d see in the checkout line at the dollar store, things clearly designed to look like big budget movies that grandma heard the kids liked.
Netflix is another one of those "Poison Pill" companies that ensures executives can't be ousted for making bad decisions. Russia was a large source of growth in memberships, and on a whim the C-levels cut it off.
Love Bridgerton. But most of what I watch is on Prime. Severance on Apple was just too dark. Stuff like Paramount I get through Prime too. HBO made half of a really interesting series and then just walked away.
Costco is severely overvalued, seemingly either through blind index investing (QQQ) or investors following a defensive narrative without paying any attention to the fundamentals.
When they raised prices a few months ago, I saw it on the news and that reminded me that I was paying for a Netflix subscription I wasn't using. So I cancelled it.
One of the perks you get with T-Mobile US is free (or heavily subsidized) Netflix. I suspect we're not the only ones who would've cancelled our subscription if not for this deal.
I think we will see a lot of bundling by media sellers to engage in price discrimination and price obfuscation. ATT unlimited mobile network plans can get you HBO Max thrown in, Amazon Prime includes Prime Video, Apple One bundles include Apple TV+.
Different people have different amounts they are willing to pay for content, and there is zero marginal cost to serve it to them for the content's owner. The question is how can the content owner get the most each individual is willing to pay for the same content. Bundling it with infrastructure like mobile network is a good way, as well as subsidizing it with credit card offers, etc.
T-Mobile subsidizes Netflix. I was paying $3 per month for Netflix. This morning I got a text from T-Mobile warning me that they were about to start charging $4.50 a month. After getting the text, I thought about how often I watch Netflix and realized I haven't watched a single thing in the past month. Subscription is now cancelled.
Price hikes, lack of quality content, and increased competition are going to hurt Netflix in the long run. I find myself watching quality shows on Apple TV+ and HBO Max.
I think it depends on the Netflix plan you choose; we picked the lowest level (SD resolution?) and it's free for us. Agree that the constant price increases is the last thing they need right now.
Netflix is a very performance-focused company. Any employee who missed a target so widely would be fired under their cut-throat management system. Why does Reed get to stay?
I would come back if they added the entire criterion collection and made it available on DVD/BluRay. Streaming access is too much of a fire hose. I like a little build up and anticipation with my movies.
My (speculative) take: Covid crisis ended and people are going outside, and they lost subs in RU and UA (why would you have Netflix sub if you are fighting a war and are broken).
I can't help but wonder if Netflix is considering going after password sharing. It may be a short term boost but at least then we can gauge the true subscriber base.
In an effort to continue to gain share in the market, Netflix has increased its content spend, particularly on originals. To pay for it, it’s hiked prices of its service. The company said Tuesday those price changes are helping to bolster revenue, but were partially responsible for a loss of 600,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada during the most recent quarter.
Yeah, raise prices, sales go down. It works like that.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
I like to go outside and just look at a tree waving in the wind and feeling the ground with my bare feet sometimes. I couldn't do that a year ago freely, but now I can. Netflix can just freeze me in place, just like my 9-5 and then extract my hard earned money. No thanks boomers...
I do wish they'd pick up a few more good Sci-Fi shows and then cancel them to confirm my personal grudge. It's so hard to waste my time on today's Sci-Fi...get off my lawn, etc, etc.