> But Hastings told me that she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting that they leave the grounds of the five-star Imperial Hotel to eat at a “hole-in-the-wall that had epic food.”
Is this the person they've set to take the fall for Netflix shovelware?
Ah, yeah that's a terrible analogy for what's happening at Netflix. The complaints aren't about low production budgets. They are about the end result. "Beasts of No Nation" was a great low budget film, for example. They haven't produced something cheap, but good like that for some time.
It seems to me that they produce cheap-but-good stuff all the time.
What they're hoping for is cheap-but-great stuff, and that's going to be more about serendipity rather than effort. It's hard to tell which project is going to be disproportionately brilliant before you've greenlit it.
It happens from time to time, but as far as I can tell there's nobody with a special talent for knowing it beforehand. It's more about survivorship bias: somebody got lucky, and maybe they're a bit better at picking good stuff than the average person, but odds are their next effort will revert to the mean.
I'm OK with that. I'd rather have that then them funding a bunch of the same stars to parade around being famous rather than specially talented. That model does turn out a lot of hits, not great films but certainly popular ones. There should be room for both, but many more low-budget ones just because you can.
I see that, but I do think there's a fair amount of predictability for cheap-and-lousy-as-expected. Personal opinion, I suppose, but they seem to greenlight a lot of things with terrible writing, or casting, etc.
Yeah, there does seem to be an awful lot of "how did that ever get greenlit?"
I suspect that most of them seemed like a good idea at the time, and then got bogged down in process. I'm an actor, and I've seen that happen. A few mistakes and now you're committed to a process with too many sunk costs to abandon and no way to get back to "good".
Some of them probably seemed like possible big hits that just didn't pan out. Others seem to have been striving for low-budget mediocrity, and failing to hit that.
You are late to the game. Netflix was a game changer in the 00s for both DVD and streaming. Sometime around mid 2010s they started losing access to content as the streaming wars started (losing The Office to Peacock was a major blow to them for instance). Now they are their own publishing house but that limits the content to their primary demographics (my kids love netflix fwiw)
> Sometime around mid 2010s they started losing access to content as the streaming wars started (losing The Office to Peacock was a major blow to them for instance).
Given parent comment is someone presumably from the UK as they're discussing iPlayer, Netflix never had this catalogue. The Office US is still on Netflix in the UK.
Netflix probably lost a lot of viewers when they didn't follow through with their original content.
The OA and Glow were really interesting shows that got cancelled prematurely, without any resolution to the storylines. When this becomes a trend, it makes me not want to get into any new Netflix series, and that usually ends with me cancelling my Netflix subscription.
TBF, Amazon Prime has also done the same with some of their shows (e.g. Forever).
When I look at BBC iPlayer, the gems seem like things I've already seen on Netflix, and the rest is yet another small town police murder mystery or just outside my taste (like the British personality shows, all the house fixing/flipping).
Where BBC really shines is that a 6 episode story isn't stretched to 2 seasons à la Netflix.
Lots of good stuff ends up on iPlayer, including films.
As for the other ones, I do a month or two of Netflix each year and it's pretty much always a disappointment, though with a bit of digging there are normally 2 or 3 things I find to justify the price for a month or two.
Rather annoyingly, I find Amazon Prime Video has much more interesting content in general, though I have kind of worn that out now I think. With any of these services I might leave for a year, come back and find some of the exact same stuff is still pushed as 'popular' or 'featured'.
Really need to break bad habits around laptop use during films, then I can embrace subtitled foreign language films.
Not to get too off topic, but can you name perhaps a "top 5" of shows/movies available on BBC iPlayer right now? What I've been recommended there has always been top notch, but it's hard (for me!) to find the gems just trying to browse through what's on offer. Thanks!
(Line of Duty is a show that was recommended to me that I liked quite a bit. I'm trying to remember the couple of others, but coming up blank...)
Watch their early shows and movies. Over optimization and over production killed creativity and quality, sadly. Plus their recommendation systems are horrible. You have to literally act like a binchicken to find the good quality shows.
"Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
Where do people get sentences like -> success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
How does it even mean anything for an average student or housewife?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 63.3 ms ] thread> But Hastings told me that she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting that they leave the grounds of the five-star Imperial Hotel to eat at a “hole-in-the-wall that had epic food.”
Is this the person they've set to take the fall for Netflix shovelware?
What they're hoping for is cheap-but-great stuff, and that's going to be more about serendipity rather than effort. It's hard to tell which project is going to be disproportionately brilliant before you've greenlit it.
It happens from time to time, but as far as I can tell there's nobody with a special talent for knowing it beforehand. It's more about survivorship bias: somebody got lucky, and maybe they're a bit better at picking good stuff than the average person, but odds are their next effort will revert to the mean.
I'm OK with that. I'd rather have that then them funding a bunch of the same stars to parade around being famous rather than specially talented. That model does turn out a lot of hits, not great films but certainly popular ones. There should be room for both, but many more low-budget ones just because you can.
I suspect that most of them seemed like a good idea at the time, and then got bogged down in process. I'm an actor, and I've seen that happen. A few mistakes and now you're committed to a process with too many sunk costs to abandon and no way to get back to "good".
Some of them probably seemed like possible big hits that just didn't pan out. Others seem to have been striving for low-budget mediocrity, and failing to hit that.
It seems to be an awful lot of filler, and it's not even as if the search or the descriptions are any good.
Maybe I'm spoilt having access to BBC iPlayer?
Compared to Amazon prime, there's more things there that take my fancy. If I were to choose one I'd go for prime.
Given parent comment is someone presumably from the UK as they're discussing iPlayer, Netflix never had this catalogue. The Office US is still on Netflix in the UK.
The OA and Glow were really interesting shows that got cancelled prematurely, without any resolution to the storylines. When this becomes a trend, it makes me not want to get into any new Netflix series, and that usually ends with me cancelling my Netflix subscription.
TBF, Amazon Prime has also done the same with some of their shows (e.g. Forever).
Where BBC really shines is that a 6 episode story isn't stretched to 2 seasons à la Netflix.
As for the other ones, I do a month or two of Netflix each year and it's pretty much always a disappointment, though with a bit of digging there are normally 2 or 3 things I find to justify the price for a month or two.
Rather annoyingly, I find Amazon Prime Video has much more interesting content in general, though I have kind of worn that out now I think. With any of these services I might leave for a year, come back and find some of the exact same stuff is still pushed as 'popular' or 'featured'.
Really need to break bad habits around laptop use during films, then I can embrace subtitled foreign language films.
(Line of Duty is a show that was recommended to me that I liked quite a bit. I'm trying to remember the couple of others, but coming up blank...)
"Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
Where do people get sentences like -> success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
How does it even mean anything for an average student or housewife?
Which is also worrisome.