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Yikes. A little more than half the estimate. I’m pretty sure that is the worst miss the company has ever had.
With recent news that reruns like the Office and Friends are leaving next year, it would be really funny if a large chunk of Netflix subscribers are literally subscribing just to watch decades old reruns. It could be a bit of an Emperor Has No Clothes situation for them.
That is definitely what their concern has been the last 7 or 8 years and why they've made such a massive push with original content. With so many content producers starting their own streaming services, they have to lure and keep customers the same way the other content producers will be: with original content not sourced from elsewhere. It's the only way forward for them and fortunately for them, they were aware enough to realize it almost a decade ahead of time.
Personally I haven’t found the quality of Netflix originals to be anywhere close to the same level as HBO. Their approach is more “consistently release a ton of average quality shows” and hope a few stick. Will be interesting to see if that actually work long term.
I agree for the most part. They definitely have their great content (Dark, Stranger Things, first few seasons of House of Cards, OITNB, I Am Mother, etc.) but it is incredibly inconsistent overall. I think they were more focused on beefing up their library so they had _something_ when the third-party content left the service, and hopefully get a few hits like Stranger Things in the process. With reports that they intend to slow down their investment in original content, I'm hoping they start focusing more on quality than quantity now.
Netflix is a heavily data-oriented company; if a large chunk of Netflix subscribers just watch decades old reruns then they know it. What Netflix needs to do is build content specifically for these people and I don't believe they're doing that.
My anecdote on this: My collage age daughter watches Friends on Netflix basically continuously -- she's probably watched every season a dozen times now -- when she gets to last episode it just cycles around again. This is because she keeps on it in the background when she's studying or doing school work.
What can you build for those people except reboots of those old shows, which they're doing (e.g. Sabrina, Fuller House)? They can't force NBC to license them the old reruns forever if NBC doesn't want to. There's no amount of money they can offer that will work once a studio decides it's going to reserve the content for its own streaming service.
Make new shows that appeal to that market.
Netflix content is a reflection of it's desire to compete with HBO, not NBC.
It's hard to make shows that appeal to the "leave 10-20 seasons of a show on infinite loop" demographic in a short period of time.
You need 10-20 years to do it.
You can’t make a new Office or Friends. Those were created by really special groups of people and I’m not confident today’s society allows groups like this to form.
This decade of outrage that we’re coming out of (hopefully) has crushed an entire generation of comedians and actors. Look at late night talk shows for example; they’re totally stale. Nobody has the balls to say anything, fearing the tweet storm will be turned against their production company.
It’ll take another generation before we’ll be in a place to create good shit again. Or maybe it will never happen again and the golden age is over?
You can't make a new Friends in the US anymore. But it is potentially possible in other countries.
Yeah those darn kids. Why won't they just get off your lawn. You know who said the same thing you just did? Every generation about the next generation. You can literally go back to how people were complaining books were causing corruption in kids and how things used to be better when. There are more comedy shows available than ever before on television and see the push off s button. Comedy is alive and well, it's just that comedy changes over time and what you find funny, the kids don't find edgy or relevant. Remember when Dane Cook was funny? How about Rodney Dangerfield? Hell, Richard Pryor before Eddie Murphy (Raw is still an amazing set). Comedy will always change and it's a reflection of the society that exists at that time, not the past. Plenty of comedians say really crazy things that don't create a tweet storm. Chris Hardwick survived a tweet storm based on some allegations from his ex and he's doing just fine now. Aziz Ansari seems to be humming along just fine too. I think the real point is that the kids are okay. You don't need to worry about their sense of humor it's still firmly intact.
Yes, they are doing this (Fuller House, Gilmore Girls), but Sanrina is about as far from a reboot of the 90s version as you can imagine. Horror/drama remake, not sitcom - more akin to Riverdale.
I know that a significant portion just bing rewatch the Office and Friends, however they do not own the rights and these will go back to NBC who will just host them in their own streaming service.
This is the main issue facing Netflix. The more their competitors wise up and take their content elsewhere people will be more reticent to pay for a sub fee since there are now way too many options to choose from.
I'm a subscriber, but there isn't much to watch now that i'm done with 3%, stranger things and moneyheist. Still they have word party, which is excellent
Ozarks, Narcos, The Octonauts ?
I thought Netflix was lacking in content for a long time so I ended up watching fringe shows outside of my typical viewing habits and was pleasantly surprised with the high quality production from:
I'm looking forward to the next seasons of Altered Carbon and Lost in Space the most which seem to have been delayed. Other than Netflix's popular block busters, my other favorite shows I can recommend include: Narcos, Lucifer, Travelers, Outlander, Better Call Saul, Ozark, Sabrina and Dirk Gently's.
Travelers is awesome, but I wanted another season. Dirk Gently's too
I just recently cancelled my Netflix subscription after 10+ years of being a customer (after they raised the prices, yet again).
For me, the problem is they are just throwing too many darts at the wall at this point. There is just sooo much garbage original content being added monthly, it seems. They are almost over optimizing/testing their shows, in my opinion. Instead of focusing on the good shows (obviously opinionated), and building up on them with new seasons, it seems like they are just investing more into new content to see what happens. Sadly, they have also been ending a lot of what I thought were popular shows on there (some of my favorites). Their catalog outside of Netflix original shows has also been dropping significantly, which many very popular shows leaving here soon (Office/Friends).
I used to spend about 80/20% time on Netflix/Hulu, now it's 100% Hulu after cancelling Netflix. The content on Hulu has been ramping up significantly for their TV department (non-originals). Plus, I love having my HBO through Hulu, and it's all in one place under 1 subscription payment.
I'll most likely re-subscribe to Netflix again in a few years just for a month or two to watch a few seasons of new content that will actually interest me (then cancel again), but until then, no need to pay them so they can produce the copious amounts of BS half-assed content like they seem to only be doing lately.
I was bummed when they canceled Marco Polo, I liked that show. They seem to be canceling way too many shows. Kinda reminds me of Google canceling products left and right, even those with tons of users...
Exactly. It discourages you to invest time in shows that seem to be cancelled so quickly. A lot of them having very abrupt/poor endings, as well.
It's pushing me to a "I'll watch it when it's done. The whole thing, not the season. Maybe, if I still feel like it by then" stance, which isn't where they want me for a monthly subscription. Cancellation imminent for that and other reasons.
This newsletter from early last week had some really interesting thoughts about this: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...
It quoted a section from an article in The Information:
It's unfortunate that even Netflix wasn't able to transition the industry to episodic production runs as opposed to season-based.
Is it possible that the best distribution is an exponential backoff of new episode timing instead of just cutting it off at "2 seasons".
The financial uncertainty would be appalling.
I left Netflix because they kept cancelling shows I liked after two seasons and continued to pump out low quality garbage. I think they might be incorrect in their assumptions at this point about just how valuable their offerings are, which isn't very. They have no real good movies, not even old movies, their television shows aren't generally worth getting invested in because they'll cancel them unless it's a super big hit. Why bother sticking around when Hulu or Philo offers more for the same money?
I didn't watch Marco Polo, so I hope it didn't leave you on a cliff hanger, but I would look at it as a good thing.
I feel like a majority of shows in the U.K. tend to only go for a few seasons then stop. Compare that to typical shows in the U.S. getting beaten to death, having most viewers think the show might have gone one season too long.
That could mean the stories are written to wrap up mostly nicely, instead of leaving cliff hangers to lead to the potential next season.
Compare Weeds (8 Seasons) to Breaking Bad (5 Seasons), B.B was written to not drag on forever. The recent GoT season finale, where lots of fans went a bit overboard with their reactions when the show runners ran out of their own original ideas. LOST, anyone?
My best example is looking at Black Mirror. When that was mainly for a U.K. audience the first two seasons could have ended and that would have been the best two season show. Netflix did swoop in and that gave us White Christmas(?), but the show has definitely been tailored to American audiences and maybe the premise is being drawn out too much at this point. Don't get me wrong, I love me some more Black Mirror or any of the other shows listed above, but sometimes a story needs to end even if it means its shorter than you expected.
I've been watching more Hulu just because it comes with my Spotify subscription. After years of Netflix having different shows is great.
Can't have more good shows if you don't make new shows.
The writing's clearly on the wall - the major content providers are cutting Netflix off. They need a large stable of good-enough content, and quickly. Some of that new content will be crap, just like on the networks. Some will be awesome. Some of the awesome stuff will get enough viewers to stick around.
That's fair, and I understand that point as well. But when it feels like R&D is starting to steal from the good money makers, that seems like a problem to me. That the effort/focus is in the wrong place and more resources are going into the wrong bucket. But again, this is just from an outside opinion with no data to back that up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Fargo and Better Call Saul are FX shows, not Netflix Originals
Outside the US they're only available on Netflix and are marketed as "Netflix Originals".
That's true for streaming only, and with a few exceptions.
I’m writing from the UK. Netflix handles that here and they schedule the episodes weekly. In Europe they’re Netflix Originals because we don’t have FX or AMC or CBS or whatever, but the new and popular ones don’t get aired until the US has aired. So our fix of, say, Better Call Saul, comes on a Sunday or Monday.
Strange, they must have payed a pretty penny to slap that label on it.
I replied to half of that already through the other reply to this... in the EU we get Better Call Saul and we get Fargo... but not Legion!
Who wouldn’t want more Noah Hawkley.
They do this relabeling a lot for shows where they get exclusive rights in a particular country. For example, a lot of Korean fantasy stuff is released in the US as a "Netflix original".
I thought Better Call Saul was an AMC show?
Netflix is a bit different in that (recently) they seem unusually reluctant to renew shows after the second season. People speculate that this is a rentier play, new customers don't value season 3+ as much as existing customers. Netflix expects new content to bring in new customers and they hope to be just good enough for existing customers that they don't cancel.
Doesn't hulu have ads? (this means untrustworthy to me)
They have cheaper plans that do have ads, yes. But it's a pretty cheap add-on to be ad-free.
Your comment reminds of this wonderfully written post by Roger Ebert[1]. It's not the same topic, but there is something to be glanced at in his writing where he eludes to choice, editorial-ism, and doing a story regardless of what the audience wants.
[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-ne...
This is the worst, most opinionated, garbage article I've ever read. I feel like I'm reading the article from the Simpsons, 'Old Man Yells at Cloud'.
In reference to 'Braid': 'She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.'
Anyone who needs to stoop to the level of insulting something to convince me it's not legitimate is not presenting their argument in an intelligent or unbiased manner. You wanted people to read this? I'm not even sure how it's relevant, but I can't get past how awfully written it is.
Sure, no worries. You probably don't know about Roger, who is a good writer actually and much humbler man than what you thought out of this post.
And I think you just misunderstood the statement, his fortune cookie reference is to the story in the game, not to the person referred to by "She'.
I think Netflix is trying to pump out as many original series as they can because Disney+ is on the horizon and they already own Hulu. Netflix’s best bet is to pump a lot of money into new content since non originals will be more expensive for them, but going the HBO route requires very impressive shows that have multiple seasons. Netflix is just throwing darts on the wall trying to achieve this.
They make shows to match different demographics and user groups. Not every show is supposed to be enjoyed by every person. It is about making a broad range of shows to meet the wants of multiple people. Going out on a limb, but I assume most young adults don't care about high brow political shows like House of Cards and would rather watch shows like The Society.
It's sort of a well-known pitfall of centralized product management. In the short term, it's less risky and more profitable to create a product that 1000 people would find passable, than to create 10 different products that would be loved by their 100-people audiences and ignored otherwise. However, in the long term this erodes people's expectations of future products and they eventually move on. That's a part of the normal economic cycle and the reason why big corporations eventually go bust.
I think, this process is happening throughout the entire motion picture industry and in the next 10-20 years we will likely see a shift to some new type of entertainment that hasn't been ruined by formalized best practices yet.
So, Youtube? Unless Google ruins it in its own way of course.
I think it's fair to point out that often they don't have a choice with those shows as the owners of the properties are jacking up the price in order to move to their own streaming services.
What Netflix should be called on is their stubborn refusal to improve the interface/search. They want to make it seem like they have oodles of content so they show the same show 5 times under different genres on the main page. They have all the information there, yet you can't do a search based on a combination of tags or genres.
I've been doing the 2 months off 1 month on thing for a while not because I don't feel their content is worth the full price but because when a company looks like it's trying to 'trick' you it loses a lot of goodwill.
Yeah, their lack of better search features and categories is really annoying
An alternative way to phrase this would be that the owners have realized that the streaming rights for their properties are worth a lot more than Netflix was paying for them.
Oh undoubtedly the quality shows are worth more when siloed off like this. We know, in the US, cable pricing is $107 a month on average and the average advertised price of internet is $60. Assuming you use the internet only for streaming that's 47 bucks that a cable viewer should be willing to spend on equivalent streaming services (with some liberal whitewashing of smaller issues and wide assumptions on the fungibility(in both directions) of entertainment).
So there's obviously more money on the table there than netflix charges. It's just a pity that these businesses are going to, by necessity (or arguably short sightedness), re-fragment how consumers gain access to shows. For every increase in inconvenience they'll make piracy a more appealing option. Especially globally where broadcasting/streaming rights are an even more fragmented mess.
I think Netflix is pursuing the Silicon Valley mantra of product development: try everything, iterate fast, fail things fast. We've seen how that resulted in eroding users trust in many Google products (chat applications especially) so I think in the end it's going to end up hurting Netflix too.
Or look at how the main complain people have about Steam (when moving to GOG and other platforms) is the sheer amount of "crap" on that platform making discoverability of high quality content very hard.
Yes, but the trial-and-error model of Netflix original content production is exactly the same as it is for series produced chiefly to be shown on major US TV channels.
The difference is, more of this content used to be licensed to Netflix, but shows have been leaving as licensing deals expire and typically end up on Hulu, which is a first-party platform for Disney (ABC, Freeform, FX, A&E) and NBC (Syfy, Bravo, USA), and a third-party platform for WarnerMedia until they finish starting their own.
Streaming services are proliferating as each vertical starts their own, and exclusivity is being leveraged to drive subscriber numbers. Discerning viewers can choose on content or cycle out subscriptions as they consume the material of interest, while casual viewers can choose on a different dimension like price per month, size of back catalog, variety of genres, search and discovery tools, or lack or presence of commercial breaks.
Netflix streaming might be like the big box hardware store coming into town.
You might be able to get lots of cheap stuff, but they will eventually destroy the market for quality fixtures or tools or paint or whatever.
I do like the DVD service.
I've said it before but I agree - Netflix sure adds a lot of original content, but I've yet to see a true masterpiece deserving its place among The Wie, The Sopranos or Mad Men and lately I'm starting to think that Netflxi is entirely fine with producing good enough content which adds and retains subscribers while never really stading out. Of course it's entirely reasonable to do so if it's a successful approach, but I can't say I like it and I don't think it leads to exceptional, high prestige content. If HBO produced their content mostly according to numbers while neglecting artistic considerations The Wire would have been done after Season 1.
Furthermroe, did you see the other discussion about Netfli/Hollywood recently here on HN? [0]
From the article:
Propably a financially sound approach, but I doubt I'll stay a subscriber much longer if that's the direction they are heading.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403587
Subscription and bundling works until there are too many Subscription. And we might one day move back to Pay Per View again.
Has the movie roster improved much over the years? I looked at it a few years ago and I could barely find a single movie I wanted to watch.
The movie lineup is still as disappointing as it was a few years ago.
No. If anything, it's getting worse with all of the other streaming options out there. A while back, I realized that HBO on average had about as many movies I wanted to watch as Netflix, with a total library size that was a fraction of what Netflix was, which made it easier to find something to watch.
I don't really want to know how much time I've spent in my life scrolling through Netflix thinking "meh".
This is a useful tool for determining if a streaming service has any movies you want to watch:
https://flickmetrix.com/
But no. Netflix's value seems to be in its original shows. So, if they come out with a new season show I'm interested in, such as The Last Kingdom, they can have my subscription for the month. The trend of show seasons becoming progressively worse, a la House of Cards, should be a concern for them.
Disney+ is really going to give them a challenge once it is available.
I have a bunch of series in "my list" waiting for "new episodes".
Favorite anime series audio is not available in English. Nor is most other originally non-English content.
Why should I renew?
You watch anime.. dubbed?
I don't think they want your kind, and I don't blame them.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Which is available on Hulu in it's entirety with way more good content for the same price.
I may be canceling soon simply over the annoying auto-play trailers when I dare stay on a show for more than 5 seconds. Really annoying at night.
I feel their Apple TV app is the worst it's ever been. I hate the autoplay trailers, and the use and feel of the app is incredibly sluggish.
Their auto-playing trailers seems to be something that I've only seen negative feedback about online. The assumption is that their internal metrics show auto-playing trailers has a positive impact (on their metrics) so they're keeping them?
This might be a case of trackable vs un-trackable. Where the thing that is trackable tells you one thing and the full reality (the untrackable) is missed.
Same here, I find it a very bullying feature.
Yeah, I'm cancelling as soon as I get a couple things watched. Will just re-sub every now and then... maybe. Would leave it on—even with the hikes it's not that much money, though they definitely serve as reminders to maybe-cancel—but seriously, what's pushing me over the edge is the damn auto-play-while-browsing crap. I hate it.
It's reduced Netflix's utility since I never browse now like I used to, and only go on when I have something specific I know they have that I want to watch so I can go straight to it.
It's the worst when trying to browse with someone else. You stop to talk for a second and the TV starts yelling at you. WTF.
Netflix's UI is user-hostile in many ways. I don't mind having these defaults, but at least give me options to customize the way I use the app. I don't want a 5-second countdown, I want 15 seconds.
I know Netflix likes to keep the UI simple, but simple is stupid if I still have to use JustWatch/IMDB/RottenTomatoes to figure out which show to actually watch and then search for it in Netflix. That's me unknowingly avoiding the Netflix UI! Netflix should be striving to become the hub, not the endpoint.
The fact that the alternatives in the pirate realm are better in many ways is ridiculous.
“Much of our domestic, and eventually global, Disney catalog, as well as Friends, The Office, and some other licensed content will wind down over the coming years, freeing up budget for more original content. [...] From what we’ve seen in the past when we drop strong catalog content (Starz and Epix with Sony, Disney, and Paramount films, or 2nd run series from Fox, for example) our members shift over to enjoying our other great content.”
Some of their original content is OK, but they do have some spectacularly bad shows.
This is an impressive bit of spin, seeing as how creating new original programming is always going to be more expensive than licensing older/original programming. So yeah, losing the licensed programming "frees up budget," but the end result will be a smaller catalog.
Making a virtue of necessity.
I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like Friends, Seinfeld, The Office - shows you can watch casually and not have to binge. My wife hates Netflix precisely because she hates binging. She wants to watch sitcoms and shows where you don't have to invest heavily. And you know, so do I. Life is hard enough without having to following tons of different plots lines and having tons of characters always die.
Anyway, we have Hulu now which has gotten quite good. I can imagine cancelling Netflix pretty soon honestly.
Technically, it seems unnecessary to stream the same content repeatedly, and financially it seems wasteful to pay a monthly fee for access to the same content. How about buying the particular shows once (e.g. iTunes) and have the data stored locally (e.g. appleTV)?
As a former quant fund manager Netflix presents an interesting problem. If you read about the quant space, a whole load of people reckon they can use ML to make money.
The problem for them is much like for Netflix.
Having a way to predict the future is not the whole story of how to decide what to do.
Netflix having a whole load of data about what people watched, for how long, their demographics, etc, is probably very useful. But it is not an obvious step to go from knowing what people saw, even predicting it, to deciding what to produce and what to present to them.
Add to that the likely fact that people often want something fresh and innovative, and you have quite some stretched assumptions in statistical terms.
Not saying this is the end, I don't know enough about the business. Just that it's an interesting jump that I rarely hear anyone talk about.
Well, driving by using the rear view mirror isn't a wildly successful strategy. Many people are surprised by the difference between testing strategies for ML working to predict physical phenoma and complex systems like the markets; you can backtest market strategies to bits and it matters not even a bit, it means nothing.
Note that earnings were released after the close of trading, so the ~10% drop is in after-hours trading, which is not necessarily representative of what tomorrow's open (and trading) will look like.
I'm likely going to remain a permanent subscriber even if there's nothing I like to watch because I never want to return to the pre-Netflix days of normal TV which I haven't watched in more than a decade but get a glimpse of it every-time I visit my folks who have both Cable and normal over-the-air TV, both of which I find unwatchable - ad-laced, cringeworthy, opinionated, political, dated and of low-effort quality.
Netflix's on-demand streaming is basically the only way I can watch long-form media content these days.
Also the economics of paying a low monthly fee for access to billion dollars worth of content per year is insane value and something I'd definitely like to see more of, so I'd like to see the Netflix model continue to succeed.
You can opt into the no-TV lifestyle as well :-)
The big question is what happens when the big Disney initiative lands (I think end of 2019). I used to be very skeptical about Disney, but what I've heard so far seems interesting.
I honestly think that Disney is going to clean house. The amount of IP that they have is just staggering, and for some reason my generation (millenials) absolutely love everything that they put out (Avengers, Star Wars, etc).
Disney also seems to place a lot of emphasis on UX, so I bet that the app that they come out with will be fantastic.
I'm cancelling my sub because the back catalog is non-existent in my region. It is impossible to find anything older than 2000 anymore. On top of that, their UI and search functions are straight-up garbage that deliberately steer you to their own trash.
Has anyone here seen the show What/If, about a biotech start-up? This is one of those shows that was one of Netflix's "dart thrown at the wall"--terrible acting, unrealistic representation of start-up/VC world, etc. Just really, really bad.
If Netflix would bring back Marco Polo and cancel 13 Reasons Why I might actually renew my subscription again, instead of comfortably moving over to Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go etc. as I already have.
I have used Netflix since back in the days when they would send you discs in the mail; now all they send us garbage content over the net.
IMHO, the problem with Netflix is: 1. Too few shows that I actually want to watch: The office, Futurama etc are no longer on Netflix 2. The original content is very hit and miss, and mostly misses. By the time I find out about a series and start watching, they cancel it. They need to realize that it takes time for people to find out about series and at times it can take two to three years. You can do agile dev with content 3. Binging one or two series is fine, but there is very little "weekly programming".Sometimes, I just want to catch one episode of something a week 4. The movie catalog is abysmal, with the exception of the Monty Python stuff 5. The UI is just actively hostile. Let me set my defaults across all shows (no intro, thirty seconds between shows etc)