"Netflix is also looking at making its ad tier more attractive to advertisers, including by bolstering its sales teams and ad operations to “meet brands where they need us and how they need us.”
“We’re focused on the long-term revenue potential here,” said (Co-Ceo) Peters. “We’re very optimistic about it. It’s a huge opportunity."
Seems about what everyone was predicting, and inline with making the watching experience worse. It's surprising they added subscribers. I wonder how many were due to deals with Phone providers etc.
Peacock, Amazon Freemium, etc, have proven that people are ok with eyeballs-on-ads as a payment method. If Netflix opens a free/cheaper tier, it won't make it "worse" for existing paid viewers, it'll just make the service more accessible.
We'll have to see if they end up putting ads in the existing paid service tiers.
Amazon already did, while simultaneously introducing a new tier for $3 more per month. Next, expect ad-supported plans to show progressively more ads, and the cost of others' ad-free plans to rise.
Amazon is also charging less than half of what Netflix does, for 4k, and is still the cheapest of all the streaming services. I naively assume they're feeling the pressure more than Netflix does.
Although there’s a few great series and movies in the catalog, even at half the price it’s not great value. I’d be very surprised if more than 5% of its subscribers only subscribe to Amazon Video, vs. getting it as a freebie with Amazon Prime.
Prime literally just started pushing ads to existing customers and charging $3/month extra for no ads. That’s literally making it worse for existing paid viewers. I have no reason to think Netflix would do otherwise. They all end up doing the same crap the second one of them pulls it off, historically…
Peacock lost billions of dollars in 2023. Amazon Prime Video is a bit weird because amazon can absorb its giant losses, and prior to this last quarter they were absolutely dumping money into productions that didn't make sense, chasing game of thrones by burning money. Netflix, meanwhile was profitable.
Why is the profitable company chasing the business practices of the companies that are burning billions of dollars per year?
> Why is the profitable company chasing the business practices of the companies that are burning billions of dollars per year?
Peacock was an example of how a large group of people prefer ads to paying, which means it wasn't worse for them. This was in the context of my comment of Netflix potentially adding a "free" ad supported tier, which could make the content available to those people who couldn't/wouldn't pay.
But, as you point out, them not being profitable suggests that "free" with ads isn't sustainable, meaning a Netflix "free" tier probably wouldn't work either, assuming they were similar to the 15 minutes/hour of ads that Peacock has.
Really I would say the exact opposite, at least with regard to YouTube. Their Apple TV app is genuinely the only bad Apple TV app I've ever used. Constant problems with audio de-sync, random freezes and blank screens. By comparison I don't remember the last time any of the others I use (infuse, Max, D+, Prime) have had any issues at all.
Agreed with Apple TV app. YouTube likes to set my video quality to 480p by default. When I manually change it to 1080p for a video, it turns my 1.5x playback speed to normal. Finally, it will desync my audio if I change it back to 1.5x.
I’ve gone through this process 1000 times over the last year. It’s become muscle memory on my remote. YouTube still hasn’t fixed it.
one of the worst apps on apple tv. it got to the point i don’t even try to like videos. or rewind them. or do anything while they are playing lest i cause a restart. buffering. a random video to start playing, etc.
I don’t doubt it obviously, but I wonder what triggers it as I’ve never experienced any of these personally on the Apple TV app. I got other reasons I dislike it, but many of them stem from YouTube itself being more terrible than ever.
I was thinking about this recently as well. People generally underestimate the engineering effort and infrastructure needed to achieve what Netflix has which is essentially that it offers a smooth, fast video player on all nearly every platform, including my toaster. You realize how (apparently) difficult this is especially when it comes to fast forward and rewind. This is a mostly seamless experience on Netflix (and YouTube as well), but extremely janky and frustrating on Prime Video as well as Disney+. Getting to the precise spot you want on Netflix (and YT) is easy both on mobile as well as when using a remote on TV, which is typically a pretty awful experience. I get super frustrated when trying to fast forward and rewind NBA League Pass on Prime, though I wonder how much of this has to do with them doing less caching and/or still image grabbing for less watched things? All I know is that I wish I could have this subscription on Netflix and have considered moving it over to YouTube TV.
The insane one to me is how bad some platforms are at simply remembering which episode of a show you're on. Hulu and Prime are the worst offenders. You finish an episode and even start the next, but later, it will show you at the finished episode with 2 minutes left. It's maddening.
Max is the one I hate the most. I watch most streaming content on an Android TV; on Max, you can only go forward or back 10 seconds at a time, and holding the button does nothing.
I often fall asleep watching things, and so want to skip to near the end of an episode to see what I remember. 30 minutes is 180 individual clicks on the remote.
Holding the button fast forwards, you just have to hold it longer than one would reasonably think to hold it (well, or something is plain broken for you specifically). Doesn't much matter though since FF is capped at a low enough speed you're better off clicking a ton.
The video player in e.g. Infuse is better than all of the streaming service ones I've tried. Infuse is good but I doubt they are special as much as just in a position to care about the quality of the player instead of IP.
I'm genuinely shocked. Apparently I know nothing about consumer behavior.
Withering library, reneging on account sharing, poor quality streams, rising prices, addition of ads and so on.
Just how badly do they need to screw their customers for it to have consequences? Is their brand recognition just so strong that they can overcome all of that?
The ugly truth is that the competition is largely worse. I recently wanted to watch a show only available via a third party thru Amazon prime, so I purchased a subscription (on top of prime), only to be served a show with adds every 10 minutes. It was truly awful
Netflix is one of the most data-driven companies there is. They know exactly how much customers care about those things, as measured in dollars of revenue, and they account for it in their product and content decisions.
As a consumer, I wish that consumers as a whole were more price- and quality-sensitive and more ad-averse, since that would make it rational for companies to offer me better, cheaper products. But based on revealed preference, they’re not, so they don’t.
Let's say relative to DVD quality. I can see how someone watching on a 6" display might not care, but when you invest in a half-decent 4K TV and pay for 4K Netflix, you wouldn't expect to see plainly obvious compression artifacts. Their color banding in dark scenes is atrocious, especially on 4K OLED TVs.
Give it time. Soon innovators dilemma will kick in and a cheaper service will appear and Netflix won’t be able to fight it because it will be locked in into their current commercial model. It will be the new Blockbuster story. I can already see the FT story title “The history repeats itself for Netflix”
If I were a entrepeneur in this space I'd call my startup "Blockbuster's Revenge"
They're keeping us a bit longer because the live action One Piece was a gateway drug into the anime, and they have a lot of it on there (just finished watching episode 316 today, a few more and we're done with the Water 7 arc).
But I was ready to cancel for the first time in years before that, as I realize I had barely touched it in almost a year, with the exception of Alice in Borderland and a handful of other things here and there.
Whenever we get through what they have of One Piece I'll probably cancel until season 2 of the live action comes out (or some other show we like comes back, like maybe Squid Game season 2).
All this growth is because A CEO is accountable to the shareholders and not the customers. Customers may be happy but if shareholders value the company at $215 billion dollars you had better find a way to get there. Until Netflix starts losing money due to ads, they have to keep pushing them. User experience be damned as long as more money is rolling in.
I think the strategy is to keep pushing until an inflection point is reached and then back off and adjust. Otherwise not trying ads could cost billions.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread“We’re focused on the long-term revenue potential here,” said (Co-Ceo) Peters. “We’re very optimistic about it. It’s a huge opportunity."
Seems about what everyone was predicting, and inline with making the watching experience worse. It's surprising they added subscribers. I wonder how many were due to deals with Phone providers etc.
We'll have to see if they end up putting ads in the existing paid service tiers.
Why is the profitable company chasing the business practices of the companies that are burning billions of dollars per year?
Peacock was an example of how a large group of people prefer ads to paying, which means it wasn't worse for them. This was in the context of my comment of Netflix potentially adding a "free" ad supported tier, which could make the content available to those people who couldn't/wouldn't pay.
But, as you point out, them not being profitable suggests that "free" with ads isn't sustainable, meaning a Netflix "free" tier probably wouldn't work either, assuming they were similar to the 15 minutes/hour of ads that Peacock has.
Although I admit this is typically the slipperiest of slopes.
I’ve gone through this process 1000 times over the last year. It’s become muscle memory on my remote. YouTube still hasn’t fixed it.
one of the worst apps on apple tv. it got to the point i don’t even try to like videos. or rewind them. or do anything while they are playing lest i cause a restart. buffering. a random video to start playing, etc.
My high seas setup can reliably stream movies that are easily 5x the bitrate of any streaming service, without a hitch.
Came back home to find that Prime has now no idea I even started watching that show. Had to binary search episodes until I found where I had stopped.
I often fall asleep watching things, and so want to skip to near the end of an episode to see what I remember. 30 minutes is 180 individual clicks on the remote.
Though I generally just resort to switching to Hulu to watch it there. Why I don't start with Hulu is one of the great mysteries of life.
Withering library, reneging on account sharing, poor quality streams, rising prices, addition of ads and so on.
Just how badly do they need to screw their customers for it to have consequences? Is their brand recognition just so strong that they can overcome all of that?
As a consumer, I wish that consumers as a whole were more price- and quality-sensitive and more ad-averse, since that would make it rational for companies to offer me better, cheaper products. But based on revealed preference, they’re not, so they don’t.
Relative to what? No one cares about this past a certain point.
If I were a entrepeneur in this space I'd call my startup "Blockbuster's Revenge"
Netflix is turning into cable TV
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/23/24047817/netflix-is-turni... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111600)
But I was ready to cancel for the first time in years before that, as I realize I had barely touched it in almost a year, with the exception of Alice in Borderland and a handful of other things here and there.
Whenever we get through what they have of One Piece I'll probably cancel until season 2 of the live action comes out (or some other show we like comes back, like maybe Squid Game season 2).
In the platform space, it inevitably begets platforms full of ads, because it’s one way to maintain that constant growth.
Eventually all platforms that are big enough end up in the same place one way or another.
I think the strategy is to keep pushing until an inflection point is reached and then back off and adjust. Otherwise not trying ads could cost billions.