In all seriousness, every now and then I open YouTube by mistake in another browser that doesn't have ublock, and the experience is infuriating - having to waatch 5+ second ads on every video I search for or look at. How do people stand it?
I spend more time on Netflix looking for things to watch than watching things.
This isn't necessarily a Netflix thing - it's a streaming industry problem - driven by short supply and high demand with having multiple competitors in the market with big bank balances. When Netflix first started, they were pure quality distribution, now they and other streamers are bleeding money in bidding wars for content generated primarily by lame "chose one word from each column" production houses. Aliens, Teenage, Investigators - out pops humdrum 8 episodes of binge-fodder.
I went to streaming to escape from the cable playbook. I anticipate that all these additional revenue tactics will result in me dropping Netflix, and others. Maybe I'll return once the market has consolidated a little. Maybe not.
The solution to this is simple: allow users to filter by a show quality metric like IMDB/Rotten Tomatoes score. A basic filter would make searching on Netflix so much easier, but instead they use an unnecessarily complex, generally useless algorithm to pick what to show you from their gargantuan library. Consequently, in order to find anything worth watching on Netflix, I have to google "what's good on netflix." It's dumb.
The experience with Netflix is really frustrating with their interface. Really.
The worse being that it is not directly UX incompetence but it is done on purpose: try to avoid that you notice that their catalog does not have so much interesting content after a few months; push in front the content that they have incentive for you to watch. Like movies with product placement.
Netflix had a 10 year head start in the streaming space. They tried to take on entrenched Hollywood studios. They had some success (some Netflix originals are some of the best TV shows) but it looks like they couldn’t really match the content generation capacity of e.g. Disney.
I think they are dead. Whats their competitive advantage? The tech is commoditized. Other streaming platforms really sucked at first but they’ve upped their game and now I don’t see much difference. What does Netflix offer that others don’t? The only thing atm is that they’re ad free. Once thats gone, its so over.
They switched from DVDs to streaming and then stalled. They should have diversified and kept going. Why doesn’t my Netflix include music and video games at this point? Who don’t I see live sports? Why am I not able to Netflix with someone in a video chat? Why don’t we have any crowdsourced content I can watch? Why isn’t Netflix used for virtual learning the world over?
IIRC there was an internal “competition”, of sorts, between the two head original content buyers at Netflix. One took the HBO approach: buy high quality content, even if it’s expensive. The other had a spray and pray strategy: buy up all the cheap crap and hope you get a few hits.
Long story short the Spray & Pray exec got promoted and the other exec got squeezed out. But now that all of the major studios have started their own streaming services (and have started being stingier with their licensing) original content is perhaps the most important driver of new subscriptions and subscription maintenance for a streaming platform. And it seems Netflix bet the house on building their library out of cheap crap like Emily in Paris and God’s Favorite Idiot with the occasional expensive (but still crappy) Ryan Reynolds action movie sprinkled in to keep things “fresh”.
Netflix made a huge mistake when they went with the spaghetti against the wall strategy and for some reason they just keep doubling down to make their already shitty strategy even worse.
Who is selling good content anymore? HBO? They run their own thing now. Paramount? They've got their own thing now. Disney? They've got their own thing now. MGM? They're streaming through Amazon Prime now.
Netflix was forced into this position by competition, not by internal decisions.
Netflix surely has a choice: to make quality movie series instead of the crap they push now. I'm the kind of person who used to watch the whole movie even if it was crap but netflix succeded in breaking this compulsive behaviour. It's just too much low quality content and the worst thing is that I can't even filter it out. Maybe there are few good movies but I'm not willing to watch all the crap just to find the very few diamonds in the mud/swamp. I think at some point people just give up and then avoid netflix like a plague. I still have a netflix subscription because it's shared with several family members but as soon as I get the OK from them I'm done with Netflix.
That makes a lot of sense. The other thing I felt as a viewer was that any time a good show managed to get made, it would get canceled after two seasons at most. It became so commonplace that I've seen memes about it.
If you're going to do spaghetti against the wall strategy, why wouldn't you continue to support shows that actually stick?
> If you're going to do spaghetti against the wall strategy, why wouldn't you continue to support shows that actually stick?
They almost certainly do, by the measures they use for sticking.
The problem is that things that don't stick by their metrics are going to feel like they stuck to the people for whom it did work, so spray and pray strategy ends up with lots of individually-small, but large in aggregate, disappointed fandoms.
> Whats their competitive advantage? The tech is commoditized.
+1. Content will become even more important as the bandwidth keeps increasing (hello, 5G!). Netflix solved some hairy problems back when streaming was hard due to bandwidth and other limitations. But as those constraints are getting addressed the content is again a hero.
As tech gets commoditised I wonder where else do we expect to see similar shifts.
A somewhat similar shift occurred last decade in India in the online retail payments space. Early in 2010s there was this rush of pre-paid wallets that enabled customers to overcome the pain of online payments. So any product/company that had superior payments experience stood to win. But then UPI happened and retail/online payments is now more or less a solved problem in India and has become a commodity. So the focus is now on quality of product/service that's delivered, payments is taken for granted.
Not necessarily. If they add a cheaper ad-supported plan without modifying existing plans they can keep growing their number of users.
But we all know that once they get a taste of that sweet ad revenue they'll start showing ads to all users.
> Didn’t cable have a similar business model. Charge + Ads.
Still does. Both OG cable and the cable-for-cordcutters streaming TV offerings like Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, etc. (even if the latter doesn't happen to sell their own ads, they are still charging for access to ad-loaded streams.)
Does cable have an ad free tier? This for me is the advantage Netflix has. Tempt people in with a cheap (or even free) ad supported tier and then offer the chance to upgrade to an ad free experience. Similar to YouTube Premium.
10 Incumbent offers mediocre service at high cost.
20 Alternative appears that's better faster cheaper stronger.
30 Alternative gains significant marketshare.
40 Consumer surplus extraction mode. Also some customers miss features from the old platform (bloat).
50 goto 10
Funny thing is this cycle seems broken. So many deep pocketed competitors have stomped in and skewed the content market by showering money on all the producers.
In turn this has drove up the pricing, enabled exploitation by subpar producers, and over-extension of streamer capital in a bid to stay competitive.
Implosion and consolidate seems inevitable, the market just isn’t big enough to support 5x Netflix sized companies.
It does seem like there should be an opportunity to fund promising content that costs more than $0 (YouTube has that covered) and less than hundreds of millions. Almost like a YC model. What happens if you find someone with a decent premise and give them a bit of money and loaner equipment to make a pilot? They could even make it into an “American Idol” style competition to get funding for more episodes/a full series.
I think the best years are over for Netflix.
The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not a „tech company“.
Their Engineering Blog is great, some really great projects, but sometimes and even more and more there are projects that left me asking: „Why so complicated“
At scale everything is a problem, but some „solutions“ seem „well we have staff, money and time for nice funny stuff“ vibe.
A lot of these arguments about Netflix's decline has been really Western-centric. I'm from Southeast Asia and the Netflix's catalog of films/shows from Asia is still unbeatable by other streaming platforms.
48 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadIn all seriousness, every now and then I open YouTube by mistake in another browser that doesn't have ublock, and the experience is infuriating - having to waatch 5+ second ads on every video I search for or look at. How do people stand it?
They are not people anymore. They are borg
This isn't necessarily a Netflix thing - it's a streaming industry problem - driven by short supply and high demand with having multiple competitors in the market with big bank balances. When Netflix first started, they were pure quality distribution, now they and other streamers are bleeding money in bidding wars for content generated primarily by lame "chose one word from each column" production houses. Aliens, Teenage, Investigators - out pops humdrum 8 episodes of binge-fodder.
I went to streaming to escape from the cable playbook. I anticipate that all these additional revenue tactics will result in me dropping Netflix, and others. Maybe I'll return once the market has consolidated a little. Maybe not.
The worse being that it is not directly UX incompetence but it is done on purpose: try to avoid that you notice that their catalog does not have so much interesting content after a few months; push in front the content that they have incentive for you to watch. Like movies with product placement.
I think they are dead. Whats their competitive advantage? The tech is commoditized. Other streaming platforms really sucked at first but they’ve upped their game and now I don’t see much difference. What does Netflix offer that others don’t? The only thing atm is that they’re ad free. Once thats gone, its so over.
Such an easy, available target.
Long story short the Spray & Pray exec got promoted and the other exec got squeezed out. But now that all of the major studios have started their own streaming services (and have started being stingier with their licensing) original content is perhaps the most important driver of new subscriptions and subscription maintenance for a streaming platform. And it seems Netflix bet the house on building their library out of cheap crap like Emily in Paris and God’s Favorite Idiot with the occasional expensive (but still crappy) Ryan Reynolds action movie sprinkled in to keep things “fresh”.
Netflix made a huge mistake when they went with the spaghetti against the wall strategy and for some reason they just keep doubling down to make their already shitty strategy even worse.
Who is selling good content anymore? HBO? They run their own thing now. Paramount? They've got their own thing now. Disney? They've got their own thing now. MGM? They're streaming through Amazon Prime now.
Netflix was forced into this position by competition, not by internal decisions.
If you're going to do spaghetti against the wall strategy, why wouldn't you continue to support shows that actually stick?
They almost certainly do, by the measures they use for sticking.
The problem is that things that don't stick by their metrics are going to feel like they stuck to the people for whom it did work, so spray and pray strategy ends up with lots of individually-small, but large in aggregate, disappointed fandoms.
+1. Content will become even more important as the bandwidth keeps increasing (hello, 5G!). Netflix solved some hairy problems back when streaming was hard due to bandwidth and other limitations. But as those constraints are getting addressed the content is again a hero.
As tech gets commoditised I wonder where else do we expect to see similar shifts.
A somewhat similar shift occurred last decade in India in the online retail payments space. Early in 2010s there was this rush of pre-paid wallets that enabled customers to overcome the pain of online payments. So any product/company that had superior payments experience stood to win. But then UPI happened and retail/online payments is now more or less a solved problem in India and has become a commodity. So the focus is now on quality of product/service that's delivered, payments is taken for granted.
Infinite growth is impossible. Stop destroying your very good magic money making machine.
Still does. Both OG cable and the cable-for-cordcutters streaming TV offerings like Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, etc. (even if the latter doesn't happen to sell their own ads, they are still charging for access to ad-loaded streams.)
In turn this has drove up the pricing, enabled exploitation by subpar producers, and over-extension of streamer capital in a bid to stay competitive.
Implosion and consolidate seems inevitable, the market just isn’t big enough to support 5x Netflix sized companies.
Their Engineering Blog is great, some really great projects, but sometimes and even more and more there are projects that left me asking: „Why so complicated“
At scale everything is a problem, but some „solutions“ seem „well we have staff, money and time for nice funny stuff“ vibe.
Like inventing batch jobs, but more complicated