Ex-Netflix here. When I was there we had two metrics we cared about: hours watched and retention. Whenever we introduced a new feature we carefully measured it's impact on those two metrics. Ultimately, retention was the most important metric, but hours watched was a leading indicator for retention.
I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity.
Either way, it was nice having very clear goals. Netflix was a great company to work for.
I just cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. I find the entire platform to be anti-consumer. Auto playing videos with sound, automatically playing the next episode to encourage binging, changing cover art to give you the illusion of fresh content always arriving, television series that are 10+ episodes long for no reason other than to extend hours viewed.
Don’t get me wrong, Netflix does have some good content, but I finally realized that the way the platform is designed is gross.
What's seriously making me consider cancelling my subscription is the fact that they autoplay trailers on the kids channel. I don't want my daughter getting addicted through the ML algorithms on the site, period.
What's seriously making me consider canceling my subscription is that it's slowly but surely becoming a worse service over time.
It's clear that rising licensing fees are eating it alive, and its response, to create more original content, is mostly failing. Original Netflix series and movies are, by and large, fairly awful. The exceptions are notable but rare.
Next year, when the mass exodus of Disney content occurs, there will be a noticeable drop in the number of good movies on Netflix -- I'm predicting that I'll likely be one of many canceling Netflix in favor of Disney's streaming service, and that will be an inflection point in the beginning of Netflix's end.
Netflix original content is not enough to sustain it, and soon it won't have much else.
>Original Netflix series and movies are, by and large, fairly awful.
I've found it's not worth watching anything on netflix, originals or not, unless it's something I already know is good or if the rating is above 7/10 on a couple different review sites(even that's fairly unreliable).
I also find a lot of shows start good...are full of story dragging filler in the middle then end either in some kind of cliffhanger or just don't bother wrapping up most of the story.
I understand why they end that way....but most of the things i've watched like that don't end up with a second season...it just ends up feeling like I wasted a bunch of time with a story that will never conclude.
Not to mention the strange recommendations, the way netflix alters cover art depending what demographic they think you are...and something strange I asked about but was told I was crazy for thinking but..
But I have suspicions netflix associates unrelated accounts used on the same network in some way.
My girlfriend had been watching a series on netflix using my account, under my name on the roku app through the television.
She recently got a new laptop that came with a netflix app and used her parent's account to sign in. The two accounts have completely different information associated with them, my account had never been used on her computer, her parents account had never been used on the tv and thr show had never been watched on her parents' account yet when she started the show on her computer it started off at the exact minute she'd left off on the tv.
The only two things the two devices had in common were that they were used on the same network in the same house.
But I was told by multiple people I just have been mistaken and netflix doesn't work like that so what do I know?
There is too much awful garbage on Netflix. I don't want to waste my time with it, but it's right there--presented front and center. I can't count how many times I've started something only to exit it within the first few minutes. Or never made a choice in the first place.
I'd prefer a service with a few really good shows. Something a la carte.
> the suggestion algos (for me at least) have gotten worse.
They were ever good? At least for me, and with spending a lot of time rating, telling Netflix which genres I liked and which I disliked resulted in Netflix recommending I watch series of genres I explicitly told it I didn't want.
Their recommendations always were as bad as Amazon's which is to say the dumbest possible implementation (at least for usefulness for me as a viewer, I assume they both have reasons for it)
> Original Netflix series and movies are, by and large, fairly awful.
I disagree strongly. There are quite a few Netflix original shows that I like. The wife and I just finished watching Travelers last night, and it the 3 seasons were fantastic.
Why bother making that distinction when Netflix doesn't themselves? If they're going to put everything they license on the same level as Stranger Things or Roma, doesn't that show that they want all those "Netflix Originals" treated the same in the eyes of viewers?
At a base cost of 8 bucks a month, do you see a large number of people canceling it, vs. supplementing it with something else? In my case, I'm paying for netflix, hulu, amazon, and youtube. So adding one more item would be similar to changing up a cable tv package.
You probably make a lot more than most Americans (I'm assuming you're American since from what I hear Netflix content is really bad for everyone else).
Everyone I know already shares accounts because it's too expensive to have all of them. Adding another streaming service is hard to swallow. Does anyone have an idea how much Disney will charge? I feel it won't be as cheap as the entry level Netflix sub but who knows.
All of those add up to under $50/month. When I was a kid, everyone around (in small town midwest) had a cable package for over $100/mo and many were by no definition rich.
when you subscribe to cable tv, you pay for content and delivery, so i think it is far to compare the price of streaming service including the price of internet
While I get that that's more money than a lot of people have to spend, all of those combined are cheaper than a typical non-basic cable or satellite plan even today - after they know they need to compete with streaming services. It's a lot cheaper (especially adjusted for inflation) than those services were 10 years ago. So anyone that could afford content then is probably able to afford it now, but they have better options - so they might choose not to.
I've checked out Netflix in Russia, all the current and 1-2 y.o. shows are available with some random films. Also, the only language available to choose (except English and original if it differs) is finnish!
$8 a month is for the standard definition plan, which I doubt many people have at this point. The most popular (HD) plan just went from $11 to $13.
Subscribers might add Disney+ without dropping Netflix, sure - but all those services will reach a saturation point eventually, and subscribers will eventually have to choose which services they want to drop. Netflix still brings more to the table now than many of its competitors, but it's on a long, slow downward slide that will almost certainly accelerate this year.
I think they'll be OK this current price increase, but not the next one. I'm sure they have a good model on cancellations after price increases and they'll make up for the loss with the increased price. But I think a lot of people are going to start examining if they want to continue paying for Netflix every month without thinking. More people will likely cancel and re-subscribe periodically when they hear about a series or movie they want to watch. And the more competition from other streaming providers, the more people are going to be examining their total spend per month on streaming services, which if you have a lot of them, is beginning to approach a traditional cable television bill.
The price increase really wasn't the main driver for me; it was more that Netflix continues doing the exact same thing -- manipulating its users through user interface trickery, and continuing to spend money on content that is not very good. The more shows, including original series that I pass on, the more I realize that I'm paying an increased monthly cost to finance Netflix's overspending on B-rated content that I won't even be watching.
I also think Netflix took away the wrong thing from the Bird Box "success." Yes, a large percentage of Netflix subscribers watched at least 70% of the movie, but I think it was 1) to see Sandra Bullock, who is a great actor and 2) it came out over the holidays when you often want something in the background to watch because there isn't a ton of things to do that the entire family can do together. For me, I'm a fan of Sandra Bullock so that is why I watched it, but the rest of the movie and story was not that great or anything unique.
After I cancelled Netflix, I signed up for YouTube Premium instead, and I feel much better about it. You can turn off auto-play and video previews don't have sound. YouTube music isn't quite there yet, but it's getting better, and the iOS app is solid. And their recommendation engine is actually good. Plus I like that I can watch ten or twenty minute videos on an infinite variety of things instead of committing ten hours of my life to a Netflix show.
If Netflix had any faith in their own content, they would introduce some kind of impartial review system (either user-based, or Rotten Tomatoes, etc). Netflix's "% match" system is a complete joke; I frequently see 90% matches and start watching and go "why in the world was this recommended to me?"
Disney will also be launching their streaming service this year, and it will be rumored to undercut Netflix pricing. Plus Disney will now have all the Fox content, some of which is on Netflix and might be pulled down the line. I think Disney+ will also be more appealing to people with kids over Netflix, which tends to be more adult-themed.
The other issue they're going to run into is that they have almost reached peak saturation in developed markets. In order to continue getting new users in developing markets, where those people will be more price sensitive, they cannot keep raising the price. I wouldn't be surprised if they begin segmenting the pricing by region, or creating lower cost plans that only have limited content, or more restrictions.
Ah, I just found it, but it's on the website only under "playback settings." You cannot turn it off from the app clients, or at least not from the Apple TV one. I think this still shows an intentional act by Netflix to make this hard to do, because most people are not using Netflix from a web browser / computer.
You also cannot turn off the auto-playing previews with sound.
For me, turning off auto-play worked on both my Roku and Visio TVs. I actually turned it off on a per user basis.
As for the auto-playing previews, my partial solution is to hit the mute button when browsing the Netflix home screen. Still gets annoying when trying to read the text description of a show, but it disappears from the screen too fast and replaced by the preview.
I've also had the situation where the trailer would be for a tv show for older kids and it scared the crap out of my daughter (likely we don't let her watch on her own so we could shut it off). We are trying to limit her exposure screen in general, but commercials in particular, which is why we thought netflix was a good option...
Yeah I have a similar concern for my little one. I do find Netflix better than YT Kids though. Just like adults will watch others play video games and enjoy it, toddlers apparently like to watch others eat candy and unwrap presents.
I think he is not complaining about more content being produces, but the same content being diluted in more hourse than needed in order to inflate some metrics.
British TV, especially BBC and Channel 4 have always been exceptionally good at knowing when to kill off a series at the right point. Just compare the difference between something like the UK Office vs the US Office or the BBC version of Sherlock vs the US version called Elementary.
Another example, the BBC Series the Bodyguard (a different concept but similar enough) or Israeli Homeland vs US Homeland. The US has made the mistake on a number of times of taking a great concept and dragging it out too long. Maybe one of the few that was justified was House of Cards, where the longer US version was (arguably) better than the UK version...
The US version of The Office is apparently by far the most watched show on Netflix (US). Even if you acknowledge it went on probably one or two seasons too long (which isn't an uncommon opinion, to be fair), 7 seasons is far longer than most BBC shows last.
And, as another poster noted, I would argue that a lot of people think the BBC version of Sherlock has definitely gone on way too long.
I think British TV has actually started taking influence from American TV over the past decade or so (or at least realized that Americans are watching and have started to cater to those audiences). Downton Abbey I feel also similarly went on probably a couple series too many.
Wow, you mention the one time where a US show manages to give a character depth while the British version utterly fails at that and instead decides to keep it alive with cheap gimmicks.
Which of the GP's examples are you talking about? You could be agreeing with them on House of Cards or disagreeing with Elementary/Sherlock or The Office - it's not clear which.
I'd argue the same with House of Cards; the longer format was enjoyable at first but it definitely went on too long, and I think lost some focus along the way.
>Wait, one of the reasons you've cancelled is companies that make media to get people to watch... make... MORE of it?
it's not a bad reason at all. I prefer to buy media that respects my time and does not painstakingly try to get me to maximize my engagement with the service, because that's probably not very good for me.
Yes, I prefer paying for a service that respects my life and my time instead of one that treats me like a junky looking for another fix.
Back in the day Lay’s potato chips had a campaign called “bet you can’t eat just one” which clearly encourages overeating. And yet today we see companies, like Netflix, embracing binging as some innocuous thing. We say binge eating and drinking is bad now, but binge television watching is universally ok?
Padding and pointless busywork are a common complaint in video games. Personally I'd rather they cut the fat and leave the experience shorter but more striking and memorable.
A lot of TV shows have the same issue, Netflix originals (I'm mostly talking about the Marvel ones here) seem to meander a lot and could use some ruthless editing.
Can definitely tell scripts that honestly only have enough content to be a 90 minute movie at best are being extended and shipped as series for these metrics.
There is a setting in the account to be able to turn off auto-play, after doing that I noticed I drastically reduced the time spent watching videos. That little bit of effort just to hit the play button made a huge difference to me.
Only on the website, which almost nobody I know uses except to adjust billing information. Why wouldn't they expose this choice in the app client? Amazon Prime exposes it in the app. YouTube exposes it in the app.
That is clearly a deliberate move by Netflix, because they know it will reduce binging and reduce the metrics they so covet, like total hours watched per user.
My favourite thing about Netflix is how notoriously bad they are about fixing bugs in their Windows 10 player.
Hit pause at the end of a show to stop the playback, maybe for a quick bio? Fine! Then - you might have moved around in the house by now - it suddenly starts playing again!
Why? Because the auto play next episode timer isn't cancelled when hitting pause. Once it's counted down, playback of next episode starts irrespectively.
That's some genius systems development right there. I'm sure a lot of binary tree reversals were tested for to get to this level.
I wish the app would manage to adjust the display refresh rate to match the content's framerate in fullscreen. Just recently I tried to watch a highly rated, cinematic sensation like Roma on my projector and was surprised that I had to guess and set the proper output settings manually.
Setting the proper refresh rate is a solved problem for any decent software or bluray player but it seems to be completely ignored in most Netflix clients on countless different devices. (I hear the Apple TV does this well though)
I hear you! Also, until I figured out to engage Windows' tablet mode from the Win+A menu, when on my primary computer with a curved 21:9 I'd get a wide aspect movie squeezed into the 16:9 portion of the screen - a tiny slit of image surrounded by black frames. Ugh.
I don't have any experience with those wide screens and how they handle movies but I'd imagine they are very much suited for that kind of content if the player handles it properly.
Concerning the frame rate issue, I was really surprised that most people just don't care or notice at all. After some research it turns out that only about a dozen of Netflix clients on various bluray players, streaming boxes and TVs handle proper refresh rate switching. If your device's Netflix client supports it is apparently pure guess work and anything but certain. Instead they just seem to rely on the display's frame rate interpolation algorithms to fix an issue that shouldn't be there in the first place.
I can live with that for mindless, forgettable content, but if you're trying to sell your service as the future of cinema and put effort into high prestige projects like "Roma" or "The Other Side Of The Wind" maybe they should get the basics right in order to offer a worthwhile big screen experience.
Yep 34" 21:9 screens are rather ideal for watching movies, when at my desk in its sweetspot with headphones. Not quite as comfortable as couch and the Samsung 65" big screen for multiple people though!
And then: I read you, again. The attention to proper detail just isn't there - unless you can wrap it up with a hot buzzword such as _HDR_!
The interesting thing about these sorts of goals is that there’s no accounting for saturation of customer engagement and diminshing returns.
When your only goal is to make a graph go up and to the right, what does a plateau mean? And then after the plateau?
I’ve had a number of managers over the years, and some of them could only think in those terms, and refused to think in other ways. Decades later and those jobs are long gone, and whether there was any respect between us is long since irrelevant, but by now, those kinds of goals often come across as strong signal to me of a built in concept of disposability. Proof arrives with the fact that I’m no longer at those places.
If the graph is only allowed to go up and to the right, your days there are assuredly numbered.
Infinite growth is unnatural after all. On a side note, it's fascinating hearing investors worry about Apple's growth slowing (possibly declining even) while throwing around figures in the tens, if not hundreds of billions
You’ll get to a point where the Netflix staff would have to down tools and watch Netflix all day to get get the last bit of growth! I guess that’s after they’ve convinced all mothers to stick their newborns in front of Netflix.
Wouldn't the ideal Netflix customer watch 0 hours (thus consuming none of the company's resources) while still paying their monthly subscription? :) OTOH active viewers probably refer more friends and family to become new Netflix customers.
Also ex-Netflix, and no, that was not ideal. We worried about those folks because they were the ones most likely to quit and the least likely to tell others about the service.
The cost of actually delivering the video was so tiny it didn't matter. To put it another way, you could watch for the entire month continuously and it would make no difference to the bottom line.
The videos were fixed cost licenses, not per view, so it didn't matter who watched it or for how long. The actual cost of sending bits over the wire was trivial.
> The cost of actually delivering the video was so tiny it didn't matter. To put it another way, you could watch for the entire month continuously and it would make no difference to the bottom line.
I think cable tv is much simpler to deliver as you only have a few channels. Netflix has tens of thousands of videos so they can't just broadcast everything (I don't think cable TV is broadcasting all their channels either, I don't know how they do it in practice).
> (I don't think cable TV is broadcasting all their channels either, I don't know how they do it in practice)
Actually they do. Just a whole lot of MPEG-PS, several of which multiplexed into a single frequency channel (sometime called transponder channel, even in the context of cable, although the term comes from satcom), and then on the order of hundreds of frequency channels between 100MHz to 1000MHz (roughly speaking, it depends on the regulatory domain, frequency allocations, and doesn't stretch all the way to the limits of the range).
If the cost is so tiny it doesn't matter, why does Netflix have that annoying "Are You Still Watching '<showname>'?" pop-up that's shown after a few episode have auto-played? It's annoying when binging shows, and I always assumed it was a money-saving measure.
It's in case you've fallen asleep, so you don't suddenly wake up to find you've "watched" three seasons of whatever show you were on. This is only displayed if there's been no input on the remote for some number of hours.
I think it does this after 3 episodes of no input. It's a compromise; they don't want to do this after every episode, but they also don't want you to wake up having watched every season of the show.
It would be nice if it was configurable, though. In fact, it might well configurable; I've never really checked, because the current setting is fine by me.
> "The cost of actually delivering the video was so tiny it didn't matter..."
I don't want to get off topic but isn't this the ISP argument __against__ net neutrality? That is, they (and their collective) customers are bearing the cost of delivery, not (e.g.) Netflix.
The cost to an ISP of delivering a single bit is also trivial - the capability to deliver a bit very quickly is the cost - which is what their customers are paying for.
Net neutrality is about being able to charge both ways.
It's part of the US government but does not receive taxpayer funding.
"Zero tax dollars used. The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations."[1]
"The USPS in its current form runs like a business, relies on postage for revenue and, for the most part, has not used taxpayer money since 1982, when postage stamps became “products” instead of forms of taxation. Taxpayer money is only used in some cases to pay for mailing voter materials to disabled and overseas Americans"[2]
I'm no expert on any of this stuff. From what I can tell from searching online, the USPS is required to fund their own pensions[1]
> "for the most part."
This was explained. The government pays to mail voting materials to some people. How is that different from any branch of government buying some stamps to mail some letters and packages?
Their "monopoly" gives them the exclusive right to put things in mailboxes. In return, they are legally required to serve every single part of the country equally, at the same price. They also can't set their own prices.
I have no earthly idea how much this "monopoly" costs taxpayers and it hasn't stopped UPS, Fedex et al from providing plenty of competition. I think taxpayers, especially in remote and rural communities, are coming out ahead in this bargain but again, I'm not an expert.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with net neutrality which is where this discussion began. Pretend USPS doesn't exist - does UPS or Fedex charge the sender and receiver for shipping the same package?
How do they not pay for the cost of delievery? They pay for internet connectivity like everyone else. And they even have caching servers installed at most ISPs to optimize their bandwidth.
The issue is that ISPs want to double-dip. The cost of delivery is already paid for by customers, there's no reason to charge the company a separate fee. Why should it matter where a bit originates from as long as it's going to a paying customer?
While the cost of video delivery is negligible, there are definitely increased costs for delivering 4K video.
It takes more storage on the CDN box, and also takes more bandwidth on the outbound network port. That means you need more CDN boxes and more hard drives, which means renting more space and power and cooling. Also, you need to be closer to the customer for the 4K video since it's so high bandwidth, so that means more CDN deployments.
You also have to get the 4K video to the CDN, which is more costly because of the extra copies and the large files.
You also have to create all the 4K video files for all the devices, which takes a lot more processing time in the video pipeline.
You also need higher res files from the studio, so of course they charge more for that since it costs them more to move the large files around, store them, and create them in the first place with better camera equipment and editing equipment.
The plan that gives you 4k also gives you 4 parallel streams instead of 2 (or 1 for the cheapest plan), so it's popular with people who share the account with others. But 4k/HDR is also a value-add that they charge for, but it doesn't mean that it costs more to provide it.
4K content is better than HD content - to someone, on some axis of "better". How is that an "artificial increase" then? The customer is receiving a higher quality product for a higher price but isn't forced into the more expensive plan; it seems perfectly fair.
You missed another important piece of the comment you quoted: "The videos were fixed cost licenses, not per view, so it didn't matter who watched it or for how long"
In other words this was about the marginal costs of delivering content to additional viewers, not fixed production costs.
The customers are paying for the service. They bear the cost.
The idea that ISPs bear the cost of Internet traffic which benefits tech companies is at the centre of their agreement against net neutrality, and it's a fallacious argument.
The ISP is free to decide the price and the quality of the service offered. That's how they recoup their costs, by charging their customers the correct price for the service.
Maybe I was not clear enough, I was not defending ISPs. What I meant was that they will bear the extra cost if every subscriber maxes out their bandwidth usage so the cost (and prices therefore) will go up.
What customers pay is an averaged out bandwidth usage from my understanding.
The customer has already paid for a dedicated bandwidth. If the ISP has used an outdated model that doesn't account for current usage, that's their problem. That's how business risk and models work.
They can, and should, respond by modifying their plans accordingly. Once the consumer's contract is up, renew them with a more modern usage model. Until then, you eat the cost for not doing your only job.
The theory that "we didn't build in a margin of error and therefore someone else is responsible" is dangerous to society.
ISPs SHOULD see losses. Their investors aren't entitled to guaranteed profits.
But if everyone uses their connection in inefficient ways (such as letting their video streaming run for hours unwatched) everyone will simply end up paying more at some point.
Only in the United States, because of the lack of ISP competition.
In Europe, as usage goes up, prices stays flat, because ISPs there know that the cost of a marginal bit of data is almost nothing, and they actually have to compete with each other on customer service and price.
The idea that everyone should simply pay the same regardless of use is wrong.
Cell phone plans have data tiers and pay-per-use. There's no reason cable companies can't do this either, except it prevents them from fudging costs.
I probably use as much bandwidth as anybody else, and I'd prefer to be accurately charged for it rather than have my provider pull shady net neutrality things or try to become an ad network or buy a media company to "bundle" their services or sell my data to third parties to juice their income.
I don't necessarily disagree but go back to any of the discussions on here about data caps and read all the screams about stifling innovation, etc., etc.
I see both sides. Honestly, I think there was a better argument for it when the heavy users were a small percentage of users downloading a bunch of "Linux distributions" on bittorrent. Today, it's more likely to be a family that uses Netflix a lot.
Metering would change usage for better or worse and the fact is that a lot of domestic phone plans don't have caps, or at least meaningful ones any longer, although they may throttle data at some point.
I have often wonder why Netflix doesn't uses its Fast.com to offer CDN services.
They could also have offer their Encoding System as Services. I upload a video file, sets a few requirements and I get Netflix Quality encoding in return without me fiddling anything.
The answer to both of those is "because Netflix is a video delivery service, not an infrastructure service". It would be a whole new skillset for the company to offer such a service. Running those things, and selling them, are two very different things.
I guess so, It is just a nice idea. It was one day I notice how Fast the response time were in Fast.com compared to others. I am not even sure if Google Edge Node in the ISP even works with the GCP CDN, because their performance don't seems to be leading the pack.
The Market for CDN and Online Video Encoding that Netflix could get are properly in the sub annual $1B range, may be too small for Netflix to even consider.
I just thought the more traffic passing through those FreeBSD Server the better.
It's only incompatible when ISPs actually act on their natural preference for consumption to go towards in-house edge caches. It's not that much different from the ancient art of configuring http servers and caching proxies to get along well (back even caching proxies were still a thing).
So Akamai, CloudFlare et al. will locate servers in a large ISPs data centre. TIL, I just assumed once a resource had been cached then they'd effectively have that collocation (logically); I'm surprised if avoiding the cost of the first hit really saves anything for static content.
Obviously anyone streaming video, it's different.
I wonder if BBC iPlayer (major streaming service in UK) collocate with ISPs.
Will those servers have a local (to the ISP) IP, or do the Akamai IPs get physically routed to the AS?
It is a CDN, but what's new is that the openconnect appliances are distributed not just in datacenters, but directly to ISPs. Traditional CDNs aren't in your ISP.
Do Akamai has Servers right in ISP's DC / Network? I know they are within 1 hoops in lots of places, but never heard they are actually inside ISP's network, which is what Netflix OpenAppliance and Google Edge Node has done.
There's basically 2 costs to running a network, buying routers/switches/laying cable, and electricity.
The only thing that matters is peak usage because then you have to buy faster network equipment. If I buy 100MBit internet from my ISP, they basically need to spend, once, whatever 100Mbit of a port looks like, 1/10th of a gigabit port, 1/100th of a 10G port etc. They only have to do that once, yet I pay them every month, they're fine.
You’re only seeing part of the picture there. Hardware is approximately a one time cost, if you ignore upgrades and maintenance, and electricity is a consideration, but the other part is bandwidth to get data to that port.
ISPs also need a way to get your packets off their network and across to other people’s networks, which are possibly on the other side of the globe. A lot of this is done via peering agreements with other providers, where both parties will agree to connect their networks at a common data centre without charging for data going across that link, but there will still be some data that needs to go across transit providers - these are the companies providing things like transatlantic fibre, or interconnects between different parts of the US. They charge for a pre-agreed amount of bandwidth, and when you burst above that it gets expensive.
These agreements are the core of the net neutrality debate. Traditionally peering agreements would see both parties having a roughly equal amount of traffic going back and forth, however in a world with services like Netflix what you see is a huge amount of bandwidth being used on side of the link. This is why ISPs think Netflix and co should have to pick up the cost of those links.
I don’t agree with that stance since the reason ISPs have customers is often the ability to access those services. However, it’s not quite as clear cut as people make out.
But the same rule that basic cost equals hardware + setup + energy + maintenance also applies to the upstream provider, and their upstream provider, all the way along the selected route including the biggest interchange touched. The economic arrangements are different, but the cost base is just that.
Sure, and they purchase very expensive equipment to cover the peak bandwidth demand then spread out those capital costs in the form of a monthly bill.
If you want more bandwidth, it's "free" as long as there is room available, otherwise the whole chain needs to upgrade so as not to degrade the service of other customers. On a competitive market, the margins available and the prices should tend to go as tight as possible and the economics will lead to pay for usage.
They bear the cost to build the infrastructure, but their cost to deliver data is negligible. As long as their infrastructure can handle the maximum capacity spikes, they're basically printing money.
I used to work at a company that called these customers ‘zombies’ because you were afraid that any next marketing communication would ‘awaken the dead’ and trigger an unsubscribe. They’d even go as far as to not send marketing emails to ‘zombie’ accounts that had been long time inactive.
Bringing this back to Netflix, I imagine they would be concerned about a 0 activity customer leaving at any given time. Probably hard to forecast future revenue for them too.
In related news, MasterCard announced they were going to start forcing subscription providers to contact you monthly with a bill so this might be the beginning of the end for easy revenue from inactive users.
Ideal maybe, but if they want to maximize revenue they need to optimize around the marginal customer. Marginal customers most likely exhibit strong correlation between hours watched and retention.
Ideally of course because it's more revenue and less operating expenses. Similar business model of a gym, where they want many subscribers and nobody coming in, while making it difficult to cancel the membership.
I’m not sure that’s true. Unlike a gym which has a fixed amount of space, machines and resources, Netflix can distribute a fixed price production (tv/movie) infinitely. So it’s therefore in their best interest to make sure that customers are always bingeing.
Fair point and agree. It's not really comparing apples to apples. Netflix would want many binge viewers in order to retain their membership and get their friends to sign up to watch the same shows they're watching, while gym members don't necessarily convince their friends to sign up to their gym the same way they would if it were Netflix since it's more personal than social. There's a sweet spot between consumption and retention, just like how gym's don't like that one guy who's there for 12 hours a day taking up resources but would prefer someone who barely goes once a week which is enough for the customer to keep paying for the monthly membership.
interesting point. the problem is that no interaction means no data. and along the motto "if you can't measure what's important, you make important what you can measure" a more concrete metric needs to be used. even if - ironically - the optimization is opposed.
I was going to use that motto for a completely different email with my faraway manager but I found that the more popular version was "Measure what's important, don't make important what you can measure." It's attributed to Robert McNamara https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613247
sure but if you optimize you have to optimize towards a number. Now that number is either 0 in this case or x which is close to zero. Now which x would you choose? And if you choose an x (let's say 47 minutes and 23 seconds) you'll lose data moving towards it.
Ex-video game developer here. The games industry uses those exact metrics to measure their success.
I decided to leave the games industry after it was revealed that our latest release had a 14 year old kid who was playing, non-stop in 48-hour bursts .. and the game company execs loved it. Like, they were ecstatic that they had this 14-year olds' attention like that.
That was enough for me to realise that the video game industry is destructive, and has evil intent for our society...
Maybe computer games should show a pop up after a couple of hours of play, suggesting it may be a good time to take a break. Preferably at a nice save point.
I always wondered how some companies can rely exclusively on data like A/B testing to make decisions. Isn't that incredibly slow? In my experience there are thousands of decisions to make every year in a high growth company and there is just not enough time to test everything. This is why the best software companies that we are all familiar with revolve around an individual with incredible intuition/vision. If it was possible/practical to just rely on a bunch of A/B tests, every company would be successful.
Not really. With the amount of users these companies have, you can get statistically valid results very fast (and you can run hundreds of tests in parallel).
When I search on a specific title, I get anything that roughly matches any keywords in combination, then also any title that remotely associates (even conceptually):in any possible way with any individual keyword.
But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
Specific example from earlier: look for the 2007 film "Sunshine". Then, go plug "sunshine film" into duckduckgo and see what comes up as the very first item.
>But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
That's by design, not accident. The Netflix catalog is much, much smaller than most people think, especially for films. They have just under 6,000 titles available in the US, but a large proportion of that is cheap filler that most viewers will have no interest in. Searching the catalog using a third-party tool reveals just how thin it really is.
Netflix have focussed on recommendations over search because it makes their service look better. If you search for something, the odds are that Netflix don't have it. Recommendation allows them to promote their original content, which is Netflix's main moat - if you're hooked on Stranger Things or Orange Is The New Black, you're far less likely to cancel your subscription.
Do you really think that’s not on purpose or surprising? If you show them recommendations instead of an empty search result they might want to watch something else or get inspired to use other search terms to find some other result.
That may sound like a bad search for engineers but for the user it’s probably what they want and what Netflix measured.
Being an engineer is no excuse for not understanding basic product design nor being unwilling to see/accept how a feature benefits users.
(I'm saying that to agree with you, not to correct you)
This example is particularly good because they didn't even say "I get it, but I don't like it" or "I think it'd be better if..." Rather, they went straight to "wait, netflix devs are supposed to have skillz?" and "this must be incompetence", an assumption that represents one of the more toxic parts of our community.
I think the way they do it is very elegant. They surmise the film you want and if they don't have it, they put it in the top bar as "find films related to X". That way, they can push you into consuming something else even if they don't have what you were originally looking for.
Probably causes some customers to watch into some of the crappy search result titles, to see if it's the thing they wanted. Hence, the "hours watched" metric goes up.
Probably not so much toward retention (I'd have quit over this were I not getting it free) as toward redirecting you to content they already control at little or no variable cost.
Startups that are still searching for product/market fit don't really do much A/B testing - the user populations are too small for anything statistically relevant. They rely more on intuition, or as some would call it, blind luck.
In some ways, what an entrepreneur does is very coarse-grained A/B testing anyways. If you launch 50 different startup ideas and they all get zero traffic, and then you launch the 51st and it has 100 users sign up over a weekend, then there's a good indication that you should go with the 51st idea.
It's also what venture capitalists do at the level of companies. Fund a hundred companies, and then watch them. Pour more money into the ones who appear to be succeeding.
I doubt there are companies exclusively rely on A/B tests to make decisions, but even if there were, someone has to think about hypothesis and design the right experiment to then confirm with data. You can't just have a computer running around and make experiments and confirm them for youº.
--
º: you kind of can, if you have enough fresh data, to search for and derive statistically significant results automatically.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the secret behind this kind of success is just properly designing experiments. Again, if this were true, the best founders would be data scientists. But they're not. They are visionaries. So I reckon it must be the vision.
Vision is obviously necessary - but a big problem folks run into is failing to recognize when something is not working. A/B testing is one way to keep yourself from falling into the trap of thinking 'I know better than my users what they should want'
That's more of a systemic problem, it's debatable how beneficial getting people addicted to Facebook, YouTube's next video, or any of a number of engagement platforms is to humanity. But everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big.
An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension:
Littering, theft and pollution are also systemic problems that many separate actors contribute independently to - and no individual litterer, thief or chemical plant could solve the problem entirely by cleaning up only their own actions. That's why, for thousands of years, societies have agreed that litterers, thieves, and polluters are not culpable for their actions, and why no serious effort has ever been made to bring them to justice or discourage them. After all, you might complain when you see a mob boss using underhanded methods to get ahead, but cooler heads know that touchy-feely mob bosses don't get as far in their careers; they can't be blamed.
In my opinion, anti-litterers tend to be over-idealistc academics with no grasp on the real world. If I were to stop throwing cigarette butts out my car window, I would have more cigarette buts inside my car. They must not realize this, I guess, because idealists don't go on road trips. Besides, if I don't cover a square inch of grass with a chip bag, someone driving behind me will.
>everyone does it, and the ones that dont, don't make it so big.
Socrates was famous for posing this argument at Greek garden parties. Eventually it took root, and that's why the Athenians (and all societies inheriting their legal tradition) took every law off the books.
--An excerpt from the moral philosophy of Goatee Spock Evil Dimension
I think some of them are ignorant about the effects. Many smokers I have spoken with over the years believe that the butt / filter is just cotton and tobacco and paper and will decompose very quickly.
I'd like to see more education about this, and the amount that end up in the oceans.
Someone developed a backpack that can keep strong odors inside, there should be ashtray inserts and portable small proof boxes that smokers can use, so that their car does not get the old smoke-butt smell which is way worse than the smoked in the car smell - which I gather is one of the main reasons to get the butts out of the car as fast as possible.
I'd also like to see a change in how cigarettes are made, requiring the butts to be faster to break down / decompose.
Surely these things are possible, and less litter in the future as well.
Tragedy of the commons where the commons is human attention. Notifications are one of the ways to train people like pavlov’s dogs to check your app. If you don’t use it others will.
True and not true. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter make their money from advertisements. Netflix gets paid directly by the consumer. It's not obvious to me that it's in Netflix best interest to optimize the same metric as companies that rely on advertising revenue. If Twitter was paid, I'd already unsubscribed several times because I occasionally will try to "get off Twitter". It's a wasteful, unproductive time sink that makes unhappy in top of it. That's why I uninstalled the Twitter app. Now Twitter on occasion pulls me back in because I can just go to their website.
Netflix to me is a totally different beast. I feel many interactions I have with the platform are feeling more like a time sink. The interface feels increasingly optimize for wasting my time. It gets harder to distinguish shows I've already looked at from ones I haven't. They suggestions are more unreliable than ever. It's downright impossible now to decide at what point the obviously is nothing left on the platform I want to watch. In addition to the UI more and more of their content feels like generic, insightful material to keep you got to the screen. Not sure when that changed. I think it happened in tandem with Netflix being less about movies and more about tv shows. Not to mention the DVD to streaming move.
The more Netflix wastes my time like Twitter or YouTube the more likely I am to clean it from my life. Those services do not spark joy they just waste my limited time. No real reason Netflix cannot do better than them and treat me with dignity and respect, like a real customer and not like the product because in fact I'm not their product.
I had the same gripe about working at Twitter- the two main metrics were daily active users and user active minutes. User research was way understaffed so a lot of the side effects of optimizing metrics remained unchecked
So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it...
Most of our forays into Netflix these days are precision strikes. We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos. We no longer browse.
For a while I had my TV setup with variable framerate to match the content being played and of course the Netflix UI and Video operated at different framerates so every time a video would kick in the screen would blank for a few seconds and when you navigated it would blank back.
I really love how Hulu's current web interface makes it really easy to toggle Autoplay on/off. I hate how Netflix makes me search through account menus.
Hulu's current interface definitely isn't perfect, but I love the convenient toggle for Autoplay; and I love being able to search for episodes by name. As a fan of Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I can remember an episode's name waaayyy more easily than I can remember its season/episode number
Maybe it's just in my head, but I feel like Netflix doesn't care what I want or think anymore. I feel like they've taken the position that their metrics and projections know better than I do.
> So that why the auto play video feature just won't die despite everyone loathing it...
Everyone loathing it? Is this really a thing? I never actually seen anyone complaining about it on Netflix. I've seen people complains about the "Are you still there?", my SO also often complains that it's "too long" between episodes and ask me to press continue with the remote.
I do hate the autoplay from Youtube personally, particularly since I've on Youtube premium (my phone just keep playing videos in the background, that's quite annoying and I'm really lucky it only has happened while I was on wifi). Still I haven't seen any people complains from it and I do know it can be easily deactivated on the website at least.
> We know what we want to watch and we race to get to it without triggering those stupid autoplay videos.
Are you on a special version of Netflix? Are you actually talking about the trailers that play on the background while you browse? You don't like that feature?
This seems like a particularly dangerous linear extrapolation in a nonlinear world. Shouldn’t you all have just had a minimum engagement time that you wanted customers to hit? Like ten hours a month should make you feel comfortable enough that the customer will not be canceling anytime soon. But 200 hours a month might mean you’re causing problems to their lives that they will address by canceling. Even the auto play feature just seem like a standard hack that Goodhart’s Law would predict. User hours may be a good metric to indicate user retention when it’s measuring people’s voluntary use of the product, but could become inaccurate when it measures their psychologically manipulated use.
Hmm not that I remember. Maybe if it hit the end of the season? Though it's actually been a while, at some point last year I felt like I'd run through all the interesting content on Netflix. Now I do the same thing on YouTube.
It's more like a screen saver. You haven't interacted with the app in X amount of time, it suspends loading the next episode until you confirm you're still there.
Hell, YouTube too does that on Android, pausing playback after ~1 hour.
I was quite annoyed when I saw it for the first time - I had music playing over my Bluetooth headset while cleaning my bathroom, so it was quite inconvenient to tap on the phone when YouTube suddenly paused it to check if I'm still there.
If it is a setting that can be disabled it would make sense even for Youtube Premium imo. Accidentally leaving it on would result in a lot of data for the user, potentially missing/losing where they are, would quickly drain the battery, and so on.
>I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity.
Ah, come on. We need entertainment. Netflix is far and above what cable companies have been doing for a long time in terms of effort and not being scummy. Bringing joy to people is good for humanity. Don't let it weight on you.
Nearly every place a person can work the product is designed to get people to buy more of it.
Netflix is chips, designed so that you can’t just eat one. Every product from packaging to taste to price to whatever is designed to manipulate us. We should definitely keep businesses in check but ultimately it is our responsibility whether we eat two chips or the whole bag.
Watching Netflix can be beneficial. There is really good educational content there. It is awesome for humanity and can help people in different situations. I am really surprised to hear that one can ask themselves if it is bad for humanity
With my 10 year old, he’ll need to watch some minimum amount of educational content online to
balance out the other stuff.
Generally he does this (or plays math/word/science games). And if he doesn’t, strangely our internet connection gets slow on his devices. Shucks, I guess it’s time to read a book.
It's not really addiction that worries me, it's habituation.
TV is absorbing, as a child with 3/4 channels there was often a time when the was nothing of interest and that helps one week interest elsewhere (aka boredom). If there's no point at which there's nothing interesting to watch it's easy to sit and absorb stimuli out of habit.
Maybe addiction can develop, does develop? If you do an action habitually you're still doing the same physically as perhaps you would as an addict.
Netflix user here. Honestly, people are going to watch TV no matter what. No amount of wishful thinking will make people do something more productive. Better Netflix than competitors, no?
I’d argue that, for at least some people, streaming/TiVo/etc. can lead to more deliberate TV watching rather than plopping yourself down and begging out. I guess the counterpoint is there’s all this TV just sitting there for the watching but I’m honestly not sure which predominates. Many
People historically watched a lot of TV, of whatever type happened to be on.
One issue I have is autoplay -- when a program stops you get a pause and time to think if you want to do something else. Which is why they don't let it stop ...
Continuous play is difficult with kids; you have to poll the TV viewing, rather than getting an interrupt. It's literally the only bit of Netflix I'm personally not happy with.
There was a time when people didn't watch TV. They used to listen to radio. And before radio they used to read books. It's entirely possible that a new form of media will come along, hopefully less focused on passive consumption of content.
did you ever resolve your moral dilemma? having done a very similar thing for another company, i felt the same way. ultimately i decided it was probably a net neutral, or possibly a slight minus, which definitely weighed on me. but the real reason i quit was because i decided it was incredibly lame. its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus, why even bother with questionable jobs? curious where youve landed, thinking wise
I always felt that it was a positive. I'm giving people hours of joy, allowing them to escape from whatever it is they are escaping from. I never even considered it a problem.
I was glad that I didn't work somewhere where the consumer was the product, and that we didn't really have to exploit anyone to deliver our product. Of all of the FAANG companies to work for, Netflix seems to be the one with the least things to complain about.
Could you give examples, I don't consider auxiliary workers to be really part of an industry (like non-specialist janitors aren't part of the satellite sector, say). Other than those roles I don't see how you can flit between industries chasing an ethical posting.
Let's say I'd like to work in environmental science .. what role can I walk into?
perfect example- i do data vis for carbon emissions on volunteer basis. there are lots of oppotunities like that that you could probably get paid a bit to do. email proffs working on cool projects and see if they need some cheap tech help. i repair and sell used electronics on ebay to make some money
> Fortnite is different, because it's not even about the game at all: it's a place we're all going together.
> Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it's become the coveted 'third place' for millions of people around the world.
The thing that bothers me about subscription based models is that there is a non linear relationship between value to the customer and revenue. At some inflection point, increasing the value customer gets out of the product does not result in new subscriptions. Wherein, in pay per use models, existing customers will spend more when they get more value out of the product.
I have no idea how far away that inflection point is (there are 7+ billion of us, after all), and if this is even the right way to think about subscription based business models. But this is something that always bugged me about them.
We really don't have a good model for digital goods. In theory, the cost of goods should be roughly equal to the marginal cost of creating them. With physical goods, this mostly works out: amortizing the fixed costs and profit margin result in just a relativly small markup on the marginal cost.
With digital goods, and their near 0 marginal cost, this system fundamentally breaks down, and we are still just hacking together whatever solution we can get to kind of work.
This is not unique to digital goods. Products that rely on intellectual property have worked the same way for centuries. The cost of movies, drugs, books, etc. have nothing to do with their marginal cost.
I don't think gizmo686 had fully fleshed out their argument.
Digital goods do seem to be doing some wonky things that our previous models don't handle well. There is a combination of near zero marginal costs, near instantaneous global distribution, and near zero transaction costs. Before the internet, books and movies did not have those three properties.
It's not even just an intellectual property problem either, but one of any market with artificially constrained supply. See for instance OPEC-created oil prices and De Beers-created diamond prices.
In a way, you could argue that iTunes was the fracking of music sales, and that other markets need something similar.
The cost of goods should be the amortized startup cost plus the marginal cost. Startup costs can include the R&D and so on. “Intellectual property” is just one framework by which the startup costs can be recouped, but at the price of a major impedance mismatch.
Instead, the startup costs can be paid for in a collaborative framework (open source, wikipedia, and so on) and the growing snowball of results freely used and remixed in common by all, producing more results.
Then the marginal costs would be simply hosting and support. The questions of “but then who would make XYZ” have already been answered.
The question, though, is will we still have famous authors and heroes, or will our digital products be made 95% by the crowd. I think the latter. Wikipedia and open source have very few famous personalities - just the BDFLs that launched and run the project, and not specific creators of content.
For centuries, IP-based goods have had a significant marginal cost.
With the printing press, this cost went down, but it still took a significant effort to create a copy; giving that copy some independent value.
Digital media has practically zero marginal cost. So long as you are connected to someone with data, it is trivial, and practically free to copy that data.
There are efforts (DRM) to fill the void of marginal cost; but they are hacked together, and fundamentally flawed.
Price shouldn't be based on the cost of production, but rather the value derived by the buyer. As a consumer, I don't care at all what the manufacturer paid to make the thing. I only care what I get out of it and whether the money I gave is worth the value get out of it.
But in a competitive market, the price should converge toward the cost of production, or there would be arbitrage. At present, the price of digital goods is set by IP monopolies which are almost certainly mispricing them. But the alternative, due to the free cost to copy (vs. cost of production), would be zero.
The proper way forward should involve an IP protection regime where the period of protection is somewhat correlated with the time to produce rather than something arbitrary and fixed.
I'm not an expert, but : didn't that way of thinking lead us to all the modern ecological and ethical catastrophes ?
"Don't think about the cost, think about yourself".
As a consumer, I think about systems, and my actions have different outcomes on different horizons. If you don't tell me the complete truth (for example, by buying now at your specific price, I'm sacrificing options for the future), it is not fair.
It would be nice to have a standard forcing producers to add information about their products, to educate consumers. Like bio-labels and nutrients information on a food products.
I don't know how it would work for software. Maybe it would show to everyone that softwares should basically be free and open for the mass
>Price shouldn't be based on the cost of production, but rather the value derived by the buyer.
As to what price "should" or "shouldn't" be based on, I'm confused with the meaning here. Are you saying that we ought to change society such that this is true, or that when accounting we shouldn't consider the cost of production?
>As a consumer, I don't care at all what the manufacturer paid to make the thing.
This is exactly true, and actually this was recognised even by the classical economists and Marx: value (in labour hours) works behind the backs of both producers and consumers[0], because it is precisely socially determined by the market. Consider that if you spent hours making shoes nobody wanted, there are two explanations as to why you stopped eventually: (1) nobody "derived value" from them, (2) the labour embodied was not socially useful. These two claims are not actually in contradiction with one another.
A society in which price of a freely reproducible commodity (or some quantity transformable to price under the right conditions) is dependent on the cost of production is precisely one dependent on the value derived by all the buyers. You don't need to care about how long it took, because that's taken for you through the abstraction of labour. Nobody knows how long it took since to work out such a thing would be as futile as adding up the prices of the labour and tools required to make the good, the labour required to make those, the labour required to make those, to extract the raw materials to make those, to produce the electricity to power the machines etc. - all of this is taken care of and reflected in the final price.
Your argument is similar to the one put to Ricardo: pearls don't fetch high prices beacuse men dive for them, but rather, men dive for them because they fetch a high price. The fact that they fetch a high price is explained away along the lines of "people just find them desirable, it's just a matter of subjective preference/utility". Cockshott[1] asks us to think about it more: would the pearls fetch such a high price if they just washed up on the shore? And indeed, rich people wouldn't even want them any more - they want to be seen wearing something expensive that required a lot of time and effort to procure.
So Ricardo really says that the precondition for a commodity having "value" is that it is an object of demand. Marx roughly agreed, to which his theory of socially necessary labour time appears.
[0] "The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom." - see also the theory of commodity fetishism which obscures the real concrete labour content in favour of its abstract representation in the Price-form.
[1] "Neither does it matter what people are willing to pay
for X. The market will be in equilibrium when demand equals supply at a price in line with labour content. If you’re not willing to pay that much, you don’t get any. If you’d be willing to pay a lot more you are in luck, you don’t have to. In the limiting case where nobody is willing to pay a price for X that corresponds to its labour content, X doesn’t get produced."
> Are you saying that we ought to change society such that this is true, or that when accounting we shouldn't consider the cost of production
Well, copyright was intended to "change society" to treat every copy as valuable as the original.
My issue with copyright is that it compels me to value something at exactly the price that the author demands; even though creating an exact copy neither costs the author anything, or even involves them.
The thing that bothers me about subscription models is that they reverse the power dynamic between a business and a customer. They are fundamentally 'pay us and maybe we'll produce something worthwhile, if not you can unsubscribe after you've already paid'. And it should be the other way around: 'we produce something and if you find it worthwhile, pay us'.
Asshole corps will always find ways to milk you dry but it might just become easier with the subscription.
From a purely intellectual perspective, this is one of the more interesting aspects to these new models. Effectively, your business model is, "what's the highest share of global discretionary income we can take while blanketing the planet with our product/service?" What you sell just needs to be good enough to keep retention at a level that enables this blanketing. Throw-in the addiction aspect to these new models as well as the monopolistic tendencies inherent to them, and what you end up with is a vision of taxing the globe for the relevant industry. To me, Netflix seems like a global tax on entertainment in some weird way (obviously, not a variable fee, so perhaps a 'toll' is more accurate).
I prefer buying media from Google Play and iTunes Store. Watching specific shows that I decided to buy seems like more of an entertainment event.
That said, I think Netflix is a good value, but there are very real opportunity costs to realize at the end of a weekend that I ‘binged’ on a series for 4 or 5 hours. Time is our most precious resource.
People are bad judges of value. Companies push subscriptions because people always over-susbcribe for the value they get. But even if they don't, just by virtue of a prepaid subscription, the sunk cost makes people consume more than they would if it were a metered service.
In fact the addition issue is tightly related to the subscription model. For Google and Facebook it's because the "subscription" is free. For Netflix and other consumptions it's because it's paid upfront. If every piece of content required a conscious decision of paying, people would automatically value their consumption properly and stop using.
I never paid for shows on itunes or wherever that had per episode prices, because I could never justify the cost. That's why I use subscription services. For the price of say 5 episodes at current prices, I end up with more than 3-4 episodes of value on Netflix.
One fix is to have strong competition from multiple services. Along with low switching costs and no lock-in. Then need for customer retention drives quality.
(This is another case where long copyright terms hurts consumers. If every streaming company could carry all movies over 20 years old, it would force them to compete more strongly.)
Their latest price increase is undoubtedly because their cash burn is really really high. Even despite their increase in prices they noted their burn rate would remain the same...which means they are spending a lot of money content.
Except if their increased value to the customer didn't give them this pricing power, you would expect increased prices to cause an overall drop in prices.
Prices are more about what the market will pay than about what a company needs to charge.
At least I see some interesting new original content now.
I wish they would try to create less, but more expensive content.
The superhero series are for example boring for me because they are cheaply produced (I usually watch them _just_ because of the animations).
Let me put it like this: I'd happily double my subscription payments (and I'm on the max tier already) if they offered the entire Babylon 5 series, just to show my support. Hell, the only reason I started using Netflix in the first place is because they had all Star Trek TV shows, including the remastered version of TNG. I also know I'm not the only one in my circle of friends who started using Netflix because of Star Trek, and who would fork extra money for some 80s/90s sci-fi shows, just to show their support.
thing is, that's the sort of thing that the original IP owners are trying to put on their own subscription services. I expect you'll end up finding them somewhere that's not Netflix. That's why Netflix is spending all this money for original content. They don't wanna be left with nothing as warner brothers, NBC universal, disney, etc all launch their own streaming services.
Yeah, I know. There's an ongoing process of balkanization of video streaming that started recently.
I just hope all those IP owners get what's coming to them for this failure to cooperate - namely, that all those HD streams get ripped and put on torrents, where people who don't have patience for this bullshit will be looking for them now.
Yes. We have entered a time where there is so much content no one can watch it all when it comes out. I routinely find older shows on Netflix/Prime (either original or network) that I missed when they came out. If I only watch TV for 1-2 hours/day, I now have weeks-months of content.
Same thing with movies. I just watched the new Han Solo movie on Netflix. It was decent, but I would not have ever watched it other than possibly on a flight.
My impression is that the "water cooler" effect is still very important for Netflix. "Hey, have you seen that new X show on Netflix with actress Y? Oh, you don't have Netflix? Let me send you an invite!"
It’s because one of their primary metrics is hours viewed. Netflix needs you constantly watching hours and hours of content so you feel you’re getting “value” and don’t cancel.
To do all of this, they constantly need to be financing new content, despite the fact that a lot of it isn’t very good.
The fact that the first hundred or so comments here are just talking about problems with Netflix is a perfect illustration of a generational disconnect.
The article is about fortnite becoming a leading entertainment category. This has far more to do with fortnite success than Netflix failure.
Not really, Minecraft is a completely different game and Epic made fortnite battle royale in ~month or less and it blew up. The base game was dead for about a year
This is weird though, because I'm sure there's not a linear relation between "screen time" and "subscription retention," or at least I wouldn't assume so. And given that screen time actually results in server expenses, ideally they would almost want to minimize screen time while maximizing subscription retention. Compare this with TV, for example, where screen time = commercial time.
If I go from playing 1 hour of fortnite a week and 19 hours of Netflix to 19 hours of fortnite and one hour of Netflix you better believe I'm cancelling my Netflix sub. Between 1 and 19 is a flipping point for a significant enough of users that it concerns Netflix.
Not sure what is weird about that.
I doubt server / network costs, while significant for netflix are worth the trade for less viewership or the reduction to being in the mind of their users.
I'm curious how Netflix seems to have failed to innovate at social media consumption in their platform.
If they're really worried about Fortnite, why haven't they made an effort to actually leverage network effects past cost scaling?
My primary reason to get Netflix if my friends have Netflix is so we can talk about the same (Netflix-only) shows.
But why not offer synced or simultaneous viewing with friends groups? Or per group commenting on episodes? Or anything that offers a truly different viewing experience that I can only get on Netflix?
I mean, Bandersnatch and Bird Box were all over Twitter for a few weeks after they came out, and their particular Twitter account is pretty engaging. I think a lot of us are thankful that Netflix hasn't adopted the Stories feature of most social media platforms. For the most part they follow the Unix philosophy of just doing one thing well.
If only... there were some sort of live streaming website, when thousands of people could get together and watch content at the same time, maybe even with a chat system.
Since the topic is fortnite, perhaps such a streaming website could even include gaming content!
You're right, and I am surprised Amazon hasn't come up with something like that... or at least acquire a smaller company that does it already, if they can find one.
That might not be true, if netflix offers something unique to justify the subscription. Eg a lot of people probably used to have netflix just for shows like house of cards, and the rest was just a bonus.
In the same way that I used to keep an xbox live subscription just for halo; any other game with online was a bonus, but not sufficient to justify subscribing. (CoD would be other reason, if I had ever cared for it)
However, I assume they depend on both, as at this point, the additional arbitrary selection of movies is the only value to me; particularly the fact that although I’ve stopped depending on it for significant screen time, the fact that its been dependable for one-off usage is sufficient value. (Im personally down to probably a single movie or two on netflix per month, maybe even less). But this is only a trait learned over time; any newcomer wouldn’t see this as valuable.
There a ton of product placement in Netflix originals. Hell, Bandersnatch had an option to choose whether the character ate Kellogg's or Quaker cereal. (Although it wasn't a paid placement.)
What country are you in? I've never seen a commercial on Netflix in the USA, Japan, or a few weeks in Europe. I guess there's probably some product placement here and there, and the auto-playing trailers are almost as obnoxious as ads?
Product placement is pretty common in Netflix's own shows, however they do it well so it doesn't feel like an ad. For example KFC in Stranger Things and Dunkin Donuts in House of Cards.
That ignores the reason you spent 19 hours on Netflix in the first place.
If you are still finding content that you are interested in, you will likely keep your subscription; even if you spend significantly less time using it.
You don't need to binge watch a series of events day to find value to keep the subscription.
Nobody seems to have posited the real reason, in my opinion: High screen time turns users into dedicated evangelists for Netflix content who in turn promote the service to their friends and family.
Growth is fueled by assimilating otherwise normal people into the Netflix zombie botnet.
Case in point: 'Netflix and chill' is now a relatively established term. You don't become part of people's vocabulary if you're not an ingrained part of culture.
That may have been true 10 years ago when netflix's sole focus was growth, but they are pretty much a dominant player at this point. Once you get to a certain saturation level or market share, it's more about customer retention than growth since there is less room to grow and it's more costly.
The problem is that there is a fixed amount of time in a day and people's focus is a zero sum game. If more people are playing fortnite, less people are watching netflix. If more people are watching youtube, less people are watching mainstream tv.
There are only X amount of watch time for this world. The battle between all media companies is over that share. It's the cause of tension between traditional media and social media and why traditional media has been so forcefully demanding a privileged place within social media. There is only a finite number of hours for people's attention.
To propose a less cynical alternative, high screen time means users are deriving a lot of utility from the service and are unlikely to end their subscriptions.
I've heard from Netflix employees that retention stabilizes once a certain number of hours per month are watched on an account.
I think that optimizing for time watched is genius for Netflix for exactly the reason stated above. Of course it helps drive retention, but the ultimate benefit is netflix-izing our culture so that a subscription is just necessary for our social life.
Has Netflix, or other stabbing services, increased screen use overall? If Fortnite is a competitor doesn't that show to some extent that viewers limit screen time: or is it only natural limits (job, school/work, hours in a day) that are in effect?
1. I assume screen time translates to a stronger position in the market. Revenue-wise it might be negative, but I assume they have metrics showing that the less screen time a subscriber incurs, the more likely they are to cancel their subscription.
I'd suppose there is a ceiling to this. I personally would imagine it's just as likely for someone to cancel their subscription if they watch 5 hours a week then if they watch 20-- they probably won't, but I'd suppose at some point is just about holding a strong position? Forming habits? Someone who watches 5 hours a week might be watching one or two shows, will run out of things to watch, and might will jump ship if they find that next show somewhere else. Or they might have enough things to do outside of Netflix they'll just do more of that after they are done watching.
2. Which brings me to my second thought. In general, in my opinion it's wrong and creepy that Netflix has this wide view of what it's competing against. Including sleep [1] and now Fortnite is getting kind of borderline "anything that people do with their free time" at this point.
Sleep: it's general economic downtime. It's time everyone could spend doing something else, but you don't see KFC competing against it. Imagine-- "People are sleeping too much! That slows digestion, so they get less hungry. We gotta compete against that!"
Videogames: Not saying Fortnite is the healthiest of activities, but sheesh, not all screen time is the same. Sometimes I get tired of passive consumption and want to do something that will at least require me to press some buttons and strategize a bit.
>minimize screen time while maximizing subscription retention
Gyms essentially do this. The number of people with memberships will be 20x the gym's physical capacity, in part because people get memberships and then never show up. Some gyms target that kind of customer.
Because for many, Netflix subscription is a shared good. E.g. I pay for the highest plan, and let my wife, my mom & my siblings use it. I'm not going to ask all of them every month if they're using it; I just pay $15 and everyone can watch whenever they feel like it.
There's a lot to be said for reliability factor too. I could pay for just the middle tier and handle occasional collisions (more people wanting to watch at the same time than the service tier allows). But it's easier to fork out extra $5 and avoid the issue altogether.
1. I "feel" like there might be something I want to watch at some point. Just kinda in the back of my head.
2. Its 10$/mo that I'm not even going to notice missing.
As their price increases I'll likely cancel. There is something about being at or under 10$ vs being over that triggers me to reevaluate even if I still wouldn't notice the extra couple bucks.
I'm not saying they're not related, just not linearly so. For one, screen time is scalar and subscription is binary. My screen time only needs to be high enough for subscription binary to remain active across time. It's possible that screen time is simply the most highly correlated and easiest to track metric they use, which is likely. Another possibility is that they do recognize that screen time probably has logarithmic falloff as it correlates to subscriptions, Fortnite is eating enough of the screen time away that it's in the range that is highly likely to influence whether or not they keep their subscription.
Yeah, neither of those make sense to me. You can easily cancel netflix online and the last gym membership I just called and cancelled because I was moving. I've heard about gyms "requiring" you to cancel in person but I feel like a threaten to do a charge back would get them to cancel over the phone.
Why are people paying for subscriptions they don't use?
I mean I use my gym membership, but I think the analogy is wrong. People don't use their gym membership because it's just an office to do (body)work in. Netflix is entirely consumable for the purchaser, not much work involved. Laziness might still be the answer in common.
Anecdotally this rings true. However, I could easily see Fortnite being a fad. A year from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see the bulk of Fortnite's audience having moved on to something else. Remember Candy Crush? Pokémon Go? Words With Friends?
If Fortnite gets replaced by another similarly popular fad after a few years then people still aren't watching Netflix. That's what Netflix has to compete against. I'm quite sure that's how the quote is supposed to be understood—not that Netflix expects Fortnite specifically to be their top competitor for the next decade.
Which is another way to say that Amazon is their competition, considering Twitch's integration with Prime - and Amazons investment into gaming with Lumberyard and AWS. I suspect Unity was acting defensively against AWS with their license change, with Improbable caught up in the middle. Just speculation.
But it is not the juggernaut it was at it's prime. I'll never forget that 4 to 6 day stretch when you would watch random people playing it on their phones. In parks, malls, supermarkets, Costco! It seemed like everywhere I went there would be at least 6 people playing it.
I don't think I ever experienced something like that before. A really visual, tangible fad.
In 3 years, people will still be playing Fortnite, but nowhere near in the same quantities as today. I think you're missing the point of the post you're replying to.
As another example, Minecraft apparently has about 90 million users 7 years after its release. Games for kids get a constant supply of new players, so it could be a fad or not depending on what else catches their attention.
As was once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything.
Tho Minecraft was something like the "proto Fortnite".
All the casual gamers I know spend their time on Minecraft, at least until Fortnite came around, then they've pretty much all transitioned to Fortnite, with Minecraft now being the "if Fortnite doesn't work" replacement.
Minecraft doesn't have a single huge social/multiplayer server so when players reach their teens they tend to migrate towards more social games with lots of players, Fortnite being the prime example, and Roblox being another (cringe). The current dominant Minecraft server, Hypixel, is developing it's own 'voxel-based' game called Hytale. It will be interesting to see how that goes once it is released.
My 12yo has grown out of Minecraft, but 6yo shows signs of growing interest. This week, she discovered redstone and pressure plates and went automating every door she can find in old builds she normally doesn't care much.
Minecraft will have endless supply of users in the future, and when they're done with it, there will always be a next step waiting. That's why Netflix will always have trouble figthing with those.
Are there studies showing that? Switching seems perfectly natural. If a good game comes out I'll play that. If a good TV show comes out I'll watch that. And since my free time is limited, if I pick one it means I'm not doing the other.
I'm not saying Fortnite's audience will shrink to zero. I predict it will shrink though, just like the above mentioned titles that are shells of their former glory. The growth can't last.
Maybe I should have said FarmVille or DrawSomething...
Some entertainment transcends time and just grows its audience perpetually. Think Star Wars, The Beatles, James Bond. Some things never go out of fashion.
I'm not seeing the connection. You are comparing franchines that have been repeatedly rebooted, remixed and recommercialized for decades to a single title released only a couple years ago. None of the things you listed "transcend time" in their original form.
By "transcend time" do you mean "remembered and respected"? None of what you listed there is anywhere near the height of its original popularity, not even close.
In terms of profitibility the beatles catologue continues to grow in value as the songs can be found everywhere from commericials to chants used in rallys. The height of beatlemania in the press will never be seen again but they are changing into folklore and will be recelebrated as legend after they all pass.
I dont know, they are known, but they are not a craze in the art world now. Nothing remains constant!!
I generally interact with a lot of school students. All enjoy the current music, and some adventurous person has to go out of the way to even try the beatles.
I would love to understand this point more, if only because it's so contrary to my own view. The argument from most Beatles fans (other than "you don't get it, man" which is by far the most common) is something about how different they were.
What about their music is better to you? Is it their longevity or the volume of music they made, do they have several of your favorite songs/albums/performances? Is it something peculiar to their style that you really liked, or do you see them as more technically proficient at composition or perhaps it's their musical skill?
I'm not a long-time Beatles fan, but I've been going through a bunch of major popular music albums from the 50s on up in chronological order over the last few months, and gave IIRC seven Beatles albums at least one pretty close listen each as part of that project. Their qualities that still make them stand out as really damn good:
1) Their albums are eclectic. They're are all over the place in the best way. You listen to someone like Hendrix or Metallica or whoever and you're kinda in for just the one thing. Maybe with some notable variation here and there, but they're not gonna go way off some totally unexpected direction. They may be great, or they may just play the kind of thing you happen to like a lot, which is fine, but that's pretty much all you're getting. The Beatles may, by contrast, have five songs each with very different sounds and emotional content in not much more than ten minutes, somehow without giving the listener whiplash.
2) They do that thing great artists (in other media, too) do where they have complete confidence that they can come up with more good ideas, so they'll toss out great stuff and move on like it was nothing—they don't cling to good ideas, because they know more are coming.
3) Contributing to all the above, the creative input of various members of the band shining in different songs.
4) Legit good songwriting, music and lyrics. Rubber Soul, which is the album I keep coming back to (not sure I'd defend it as their best? The White Album is ~1.5 LPs worth of top-notch stuff spread over two LPs and it's hard to argue against it) has a some really good, understated moments of humanity and humor in just the first few tracks—lyrically, they know what to write and, as importantly, what not to. The Beatles could be blunt as hell when they wanted, certainly, but could also achieve sublime subtlety. Even their more straightforward songs often have one or two little thorns to catch you as you go through. The music itself is, as mentioned, eclectic but mostly very good despite ranging freely across instruments, styles, and continents. Haha, I've got that fuzzed-bass part from Think For Yourself stuck in my head now just from thinking about this. So, so good.
Going through those albums has been one of my favorite experiences to come out of this listening project. I'd barely heard anything but their radio hits (to be fair, there are a lot of those) until last year. Now they've got five albums in my regular rotation[0].
[0] The Beatles (The White Album), Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Let It Be, Sgt. Pepper's—I've given Revolver two full listens and just cannot understand why people like it. I like a couple songs but most of it... bleh. I'll hit it again in a few years but for one that's often put up as their best, man, I don't even like it. Go figure. Magical Mystery Tour's (US version) back half is incredible, since it's just a bunch of their previously-released between-albums singles, but almost the entire first side sucks.
Of your original three examples of entertainment that "transcends time and grows its audience perpetually", none of them predate 1950. That's a terrible record for a phenomenon that "transcends time". This should be enough by itself to tell you that you're talking nonsense. What are the odds that 100% of literally timeless entertainment was developed in the last 70 years? Tell me about the timeless entertainment developed between 2200 BC and 1200 BC. Tell me how its audience today is bigger and more enthusiastic than ever.
Or is it possible that people have an easier time appreciating cultural products from 30 years ago than 3000 years ago?
1. Is not and has not been considered entertainment.
2. Is considered obsolete by both Christians (preferring the New Testament and a variety of more or less formal commentaries) and Jews (preferring the Talmud and its very formalized commentaries).
In what sense is it supposed to be timeless? How can a timeless work be so outdated as to embarrass its notional devotees when you bring it up?
Fortnite is a whole other beast, the game is out there for actually more than a year and is still kicking ass and being on top by a margin, none of the above was anywhere similar, and yet, they are still a thing.
It’s more than just this. House of Cards was made, in part, because of a whole bunch of data showing a certain demographic watched a lot of political thriller stuff and stuff with Kevin spacey in it (to massively simplify)
Netflix is wisely concerned about every other entertainment provider, not just TV or YouTube.
A few comments have wondered about Fortnite being a bubble, which it certainly is.
But keep in mind that Fortnite did something very similar to Netflix...they dropkicked an industry bent on selling blockbuster titles which just rehash the same content from the previous year. They upended the business model.
So of course Fortnite will diminish in popularity over time. But Netflix knows enough not to dismiss their business model, their stickiness, and it’s implications for their future.
> But keep in mind that Fortnite did something very similar to Netflix...they dropkicked an industry bent on selling blockbuster titles which just rehash the same content from the previous year. They upended the business model.
No, they really didn't. Fortnite did absolutely nothing new. They literally copied the models that were used by League of Legends and Player Unknown Battlegrounds, and many other games.
Epic Games wasn't the kicker. They were the kicked.
Fortnite's popularity is only an incremental step up from the games whose models they imitate. Right now as I type this the number of viewers for Fortnite is 168k. Dota 2 is as 118k. League of Legends is at 106k. At times, Fortnite is below rather than above these games. It varies.
> A few comments have wondered about Fortnite being a bubble, which it certainly is.
Bubble doesn't mean popular. It means speculation leading to inflated value not backed by real value.
There are cycles fueling Fortnite's popularity. The biggest part of this has nothing to do with Fortnite itself and everything to do with people watching others play video games. It used to be that streamers had few people watching them. Now people can make millions because there are that many people watching.
This utterly changes the content creation dynamic. It incentives good content, because good content gets rewarded with money. If you watched online streamers several years ago, many of them were awkward. These days, many of them could very easily be a radio host or walk out onto a stage and do comedic impressions. They are entertainers as much as gamers.
Fortnite is just an incremental step in the virtuous cycle free to play games enjoy. Free advertising produced for good games by extremely talented content creators leading to more players and viewers.
I think Fortnite’s accessibility contributed also to its success as well. A player each on a computer, phone, and game console could all play together. Combined with being free-to-play as well as generally a low time investment (short matches, many enter/exit points, etc) it’s a very accommodating game for socializing.
>Fortnite's popularity is only an incremental step up from the games whose models they imitate.
For the context of those viewing on Twitch, yes. But Netflix loses a viewer if they decide to play Fortnite rather than continue subscribing to Netflix.
Fortnite is ridiculously popular, especially in the 14-24 demographic. I haven't seen (or looked for) good unbiased numbers, but I'd wager Fortnite is multiple times more popular than the next game in terms of daily active users.
Of course, gamers are fickle and friends who play Fortnite have been complaining about recent updates so this could change in months.
The few top games do have an order of magnitude more players than the next.
Current player - Game
981,175 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
792,842 - Dota 2
638,022 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
119,344 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
90,968 - Grand Theft Auto V
i was at a company that was acquired by disney. In the welcome speech, the person(Iger maybe?), asks us who we think disney's competitors are. Everyone thinks of the obvious ones, but the eventual point was that anything that takes a person's attention is competing.
I always figured that a lot of men my parents' age watched NFL because they played football when they were younger, so there's some vicarious enjoyment.
When I was growing up, and I think this is even more true now, there were way more kids playing video games than football, and this was in the Midwest. The barrier to entry is just so much lower. So I think it's not impossible for streamed video games to one day be more popular than traditional sports.
I think there's a lot to be said for this. I just don't have the energy or time anymore to commit to sitting down and finishing a game, but I love watching them being played while I'm having lunch or something. I don't so much just sit down and watch the whole thing like a football game, but I think it scratches a similar itch.
While the cat's probably out of the bag by now, if it were a service I had to pay for I likely would.
I just want to add that in my personal experience, it's also easy to fall out of a fanbase due to the game having too much complexity thus making it too hard to achieve balance between competing mechanics. A case in point is League of Legends which has to nerf and buff their characters constantly and is always adding new characters which in turn spawn new imbalances, these changes can be too fast for the casual follower to understand the games as time pass by.
This is one of the places Rocket League truly shines. The only changes in the meta happen slowly, organically, and (almost) exclusively at the very high end.
Low skill floor, crazy high skill ceiling, no randomness, no pay-to-win, short matches, and ELO-based matchmaking is the recipe for the perfect competitive sport replacement.
It’s interesting in a subscription environment that engagement is still seen as the primary draw. Clearly the bean counters have seen that if a user engages with the platform more than x hours per day/week/month they’re y percent more likely to keep the service. But this sort of implies that people only want the service when they are actively watching something - I wonder if there’s an a la cart opportunity there, if media was “rightly” priced in comparison to a binge watch on Netflix ($2 an episode is probably FAR too high).
It still comes down to content - if you have something all the time that is new an everyone wants to watch, then you get to keep the money flowing.
The various discussions here have me curious if the widespread practice of netflix account sharing (which I believe is forbidden but not really enforced to a degree that they clearly could if they wanted to) actually helps maintain subscriber count by sort of averaging out demand among a pool of people.
If I suddenly am not using netflix more than an hour or two per month because my attention is elsewhere, I would be pretty likely to cancel my subscription, but if someone else were using my account and I either knew they used netflix quite a bit, or their usage was currently unknown to me, I'd be way less likely to bother cancelling my account.
I think it’s a form of voluntary price segmentation. If you’re in a rich family, everyone has their own account. If you’re in a poor family, you could have 10 people on one account. The middle class does what you’re talking about, maybe shares it between two people but you have a higher retention rate. This way Netflix gets as much as it can from everyone.
All the ala carte options are too expensive. Itunes charges $6(!!!) for new rentals. It is trivial to find six higher quality movies in the $1 purchase bins at walmart and target or at redbox.
Right - do if Netflix with a $13/mo subscription gets you 20 movies you want to watch vs $60+ ala cart, why wouldn’t there be a micro transaction type thing where those 20 movies are paid for at their actual value?
How do you calculate actual value if you aren’t even getting a resalable asset? Whatever the price is is evidentally the actual value. In this case, a recurring price.
A la carte just doesn’t make sense with DRM; there’s no way to compete to determine a fair price.
I really don’t know to be honest. I’m just wondering if there’s opportunity between the people who won’t commit to a sub but still want to watch at a price similar to a tightly managed sub.
> It’s interesting in a subscription environment that engagement is still seen as the primary draw. Clearly the bean counters have seen that if a user engages with the platform more than x hours per day/week/month they’re y percent more likely to keep the service.
The first sentence is not evidence for the conclusion. It's very possible that engagement is seen as the primary draw for no other reason than that that is how television measures success, and Netflix is a television business.
It's also possible that someone decided to check whether the traditional metrics still made sense for Netflix, but it's certainly not something you should just assume.
Netflix was up until a few years ago a content provider but not a content producer - they became one so that they could survive the time that they could no longer provide enough content.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption that a publically traded company cares about retention rates for their primary product - of course it’s not the whole picture but it’d be rather radical for it not to be a factor.
Not true - the top comment in the thread who is ex-Netflix says the engagement and retention are the top 2 metrics and engagement is a leading indicator of retention.
That is evidence that the value of engagement as a metric has been investigated. It's not evidence that engagement and retention aren't separate concepts; it's an explicit statement that they are.
Yes, but people might have limited amount of time they spend watching entertainment. If that time's spent watching Fortnite, it becomes a harder decision to keep shelling out $10.99/month (or now $12.99/month) to subscribe to a service you're not using.
I believe this. I've been very heavily into games before after being very heavily into watching TV shows and movies. I would always try to talk to my gaming friends about movies and shows and they would all basically say the same thing.
"Who's got time to watch that stuff?" They were always so busy playing games that they didn't have hours every day to sit down and watch stuff.
If Netflix could find a way to hook this demographic, they could expand considerably.
For all the Netflix bashing going on here. Netflix has no ads in the middle when I watch a series. NO ADS. I’ll happily pay for HD content without ads.
Have you tried amazon prime videos. Their app crashes my TV. Their streaming is garbage even though I pay for HD. HBO is the same. Netflix delivers for what you pay.
In the games industry I've heard discussion of the "real" competition being other forms of screen time for a very long time.
Video games are a complex and involved way to spend ones time that requires a lot of commitment and attention in comparison to things like Snapchat, Netflix and Youtube.
Not apples to apples comparing gaming to TV boxsets and movies, So what are they going to do buy up any competition like the rest of corporate monopolies. Bigger concerns for them on the horizon from decentralization platforms https://www.thetatoken.org/ , plus A.I. algorithms, Netflix implements policy changes funnelling, and corralling users extracting data for venture funds requiring big paydays soon! Squeezing users for cash limiting devices using ip residential address, stopping friends sharing costs. Yes in the end they cannibalise themselves.
I wish they were to focus on the quality of the time I spend with the service rather than quantity. Time wrestling the UI for certain doesn't count. Time watching a show I forget entirely a month later..? I want to spend as little time possible and get the maximum value from it. I want my life to feel enriched from it. I don't want to feel like some junky who wastes they precious limited time addicted to mindless candy.
Edit: I know eyeball time is a lot easier to measure. But figure it out! I hear Netflix has some good, talented people.
Watching Fortnite streams on Twitch definatly ate some of my Netflix time (along with bad Netflix content).
I am paying for Netflix, HBO Go and Amazon 'whatever they call it' and the fact that I am watching Fortnite streams means that these services just do not have good fresh content.
> the fact that I am watching Fortnite streams means that these services just do not have good fresh content.
I don’t think that follows at all. We most likely just do what’s easiest.
Just like one wouldn’t suggest that there aren’t any worthwhile books or things to do in life just because you spent the day watching Fortnite streams or shooting heroin.
Its actually not that "Fortnite steals their users"
its a collective shift from TV media to
interactive content and especially streaming where users produce content for other users, such as livestreaming fortnite sessions.
I would not know, since I don't use both. As of late I found in between HD antenna channels having better older shows than new crap. Heck with a ROKU I can see most all free or pay a small fee to rent some movies!
Netflix might be regretting not buying out Twitch.
I can see Netflix releasing "Netflix Original Games" or will they move more into game streaming first by paying famous gamers to stream exclusively on their platform, on that front will Netflix move into user-created content like YouTube?
I'm not certain it would be a good move. Its one thing to deal with a limited number of in-show-business creators that give you files to put on your CDN, but quite another to deal with many, many random approach creators who stream content with an unknown quality or controversial nature. It is a non-trivial expansion of their infrastructure.
The individual game is (very probably) a fad, but if/when it wanes in popularity, do those users resubscribe to Netflix or continue watching/playing games for their entertainment?
netflix self produced content is 99% garbage or very low quality heavy dollar movies like birdbox or IO. the script, the acting, the story is a 20year stepback and it feels serve only one purpose: please self justice warriors, putting minorities in strong roles and calling it a movie. the metrics they use are laughable - it is not because everyone watched a movie with sandra bullock in it that the movie is any good. that was all that was available as new content for netflix users and the scarcity of content made them watch a shitty movie.
It takes time for people to realize they could spend the time in better things in life
Once they do/ get bored of the old stuff they move on... hopefully to something productive than passive consumption or winning imaginary trophies..xD
> hopefully to something productive than passive consumption
Thanks for the moralising but I’m very safe for saying you have absolutely no insight into whether or not I’m watching a suitable amount of Netflix, how much it helps me unwind, and how I’m spending my non-Netflix time.
I always had a bit of a moral dilemma working at Netflix because my goal was to get people to spend more time watching Netflix, which I didn't really think was good for humanity.
Either way, it was nice having very clear goals. Netflix was a great company to work for.