nerdrage

The internet was invented by the US government using our tax dollars well okay our parents’ and grandparent’s tax dollars but still. You’d think Americans could get some benefit from our tax dollar investment and not just be reamed by corporations.

I’m less concerned with the corporate content of the internet – you can avoid that if you want – than our lack of affordable internet access due to corporations having bribed our corrupt politicians. That’s where government intervention could be useful – return actual competition to the ISP business.

They need to pay me if they want me to watch ads.

But once you get thru BCS and Russian Doll, then what? The amount of appealing Netflix shows is definitely dwindling over time while their competitors are churning out a lot of appealing stuff.

AppleTV+ isn’t intended to directly make money off subscriptions. It’s brand building/customer loyalty to support their real business of selling gizmos. They’re making shows and movies that appeal to people who buy Apple products, and since that’s a global audience, AppleTV+ will be global, but won’t ever be as broad-based as competitors because their customer base isn’t representative of the global population.

Amazon is the same: they use streaming to increase eyeballs on their real business of selling you stuff. They could start making shows that directly sell you stuff. A gardening show where, if you see a plant or trowel you like, you hit pause and the interface comes up to let you buy it from Amazon. I keep wondering why they haven’t started doing this yet.

I’ll check out HBO Max someday (maybe cancelling Netflix first to "make room") but I keep hearing bad things about HBO Max being buggy & crashing. I’ve waited this long for everyone else to be beta testers, maybe I’ll wait a bit longer.

The fact that Netflix can’t make "fewer choices of better quality shows" is their problem. Their competitors have structural advantages over them.

They can’t mimic Apple, which has the advantage of not needing to make money off streaming. Not sure what they’re doing but it seems to be using streaming for brand building/customer loyalty for their real business of selling gizmos. So Apple can focus on just premium shows and movies, aimed at a particular audience that overlaps with the Apple customer base, chasing Emmys and Oscars. They can ignore all the lowbrow genres like reality TV and true crime.

HBO Max (and Disney+, Amazon and Paramount+) have huge franchise brands that let them garner a lot of attention without having to overspend on a vast range of content. Amazon also has the Apple advantage of not needing to make money directly from streaming. They use streaming to get eyeballs on their real business of selling stuff.

One new Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, DC, etc series generates a lot of attention and interest, while Netflix funds much more content just to randomly find a Squid Game. They can’t predict where their next Squid Game is coming from, which also scares off investors, who want reliability, and their stock crashes, which gives them less money for content production.

Looking at that list, I checked out a few of them – Bridgerton, The Witcher, Inventing Anna, 13 Reasons Why, and You. None of them appealed to me. The others are on my list to check out someday (Stranger Things is the only one I’ve watched more than a few minutes of) but AppleTV+ and HBO Max also have some appealing content and I’ll probably check those out first.

Maybe Netflix has broad appeal to somebody but looking at their stuff, I see one reject after another and it’s getting so that it’s not even worth giving something five minutes of my time, the odds of it being good are so low.

And Netflix really needs to stop recommending something to me with "98%" confidence that I watch for five minutes and bail on. Utterly destroys their credibility. If I can’t use their recommendations to find stuff, I’ll never find anything at all and then I’m gone.

The quality is better because they have the luxury of focusing on less content production, because they have huge franchise brands. Disney doesn’t need to churn out dozens of shows just to find one random hit. Every Marvel or Star Wars series or movie is guaranteed a sizeable audience, simply because it’s Marvel or Star Wars.

I’ve been skeptical of Netflix’s notion that they can create a lot of localized content all over the world and not get eaten alive by content costs. Netflix charges different prices in different countries, based on what the market will bear, and a lot of places it won’t bear much.

In India, Netflix can’t even get people to pay $3/month. Disney+ racked up a lot of new subscribers in India, but they pay about 76 cents a month. Obviously Disney can’t be making a lot of pricey localized content in India at that price, and neither should Netflix. The way to go is cheap localized content plus big franchise brands as the core attraction. Without the franchise brands, Indian subscribers would just stick with local streaming platforms. They can get everything from homegrown services except for Star Wars and Marvel, so the franchises are the strongest selling point that Disney+, HBO Max etc have when expanding globally.

I think Netflix has known this too, because they keep trying to make their own franchises: Bright, Jupiter’s Legacy, Cowboy Bebop, etc. They keep failing. Maybe you just can’t create a true franchise on streaming and you need to use the big screen, like Warners did with Dune. New franchises like that are a rarity but once you’ve got one, you’re golden.

It’s too late for this, but maybe Netflix should have plowed a lot of money into turning, say, Hyperion into a blockbuster movie on the big screen (with a theatrical window and serious marketing push) and then they’d have a franchise they could use for streaming series as well. But as it is, I just don’t see what move Netflix can make now. Ads, password crackdown, games…it’s all just dancing around the real issue that Netflix competitors can do something they can’t.

They told their employees to stop whining about Dave Chapelle and if they really can’t stand working on non-woke shows, there’s the door. I can understand that. Chapelle has a following of millions. Some Silicon Valley tech worker can be replaced by another Silicon Valley tech worker. Tons of them around, you wave money at them, they come running.

Put the focus groups online. Just upload a premiere episode of a series and let the masses vote on them. It would be interesting to see whether people have any taste at all. Probably not.

Their focus groups must have terrible taste. Maybe that’s why Netflix has nothing but crap nowadays.

No need for ad-supported tiers. I can lower my costs by not subscribing to multiple platforms at the same time. 2-3 are just fine, especially if one is Amazon, which I’d get anyway.

Netflix needs to make more comedy that isn’t a standup show.

Livestreaming is going to be more about game-like experiences, like reality TV. Why livestream Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, it’s just as good if you wait and watch later.

Yeah this is not looking good for Netflix. Games, merchandise, ads, livestreaming. Too scattered.

They left both broadcast and cable, and there was more interesting/arty stuff on cable. The problem was price, ads, lack of control. No longer having to subsidize sports was a big incentive.

Netflix is scrambling. Their fundamental problem is that they face competition from companies that can make Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings, James Bond, etc content and use that to solve the "I can’t find anything to watch" problem. If you have a big brand, people know whether they like it or not. No more confusion.

So now Netflix is trying all sorts of stuff and this is just the latest panic move.

TVs are still being made with TV tuners built in? Wow.

The better solution is to stop pumping billions into shit content. Netflix’s problem is that they can’t actually tell the shit content from the good stuff.

Netflix needs to get out of their drunken-sailor spending phase. It was fun while it lasted but they have actual competition now. Sports is very pricey and they’ll never be able to own the content. They can only rent it, and the NFL etc are a bunch of greedy jerks.

How many people here want to see their subscription price go up even more because of sports. I avoid any streaming platform tier with sports so I don’t have to pay for something I’ll never watch.

There should be a HUGE amount of potential growth overseas. They’ve barely tapped into Asia. The problem is, Netflix’s content strategy may not actually work. They create localized content but can’t resell it all over the world. And that localized content competes with homegrown local content, which often is free/ad-supported. That works a lot better in places where $10/month is serious money. Can Netflix make content cheaply enough to offer free/ad-supported accounts in countries where that’s the standard?

Compare that with Disney, which can make Moon Knight and Obi-Wan and resell them all over the world because they’ve already created a global fanbase with Marvel and Star Wars movies. And now HBO Max can do the same thing, spinning off series from their DC movies. Amazon is buying MGM and Lord of the Rings rights to do the same thing. Focusing just on big-IP means much more efficient spending. And if you want premium content, not just superhero pablum, Apple is capturing that market (HBO Max is also trying to keep up there).

Netflix might be forced out of the business it invented in the end.

I don’t think cracking down on password sharing will have much of an impact. The people on the "free" accounts could easily decide to live without Netflix, or to fill their entertainment time with a competing service. Both AppleTV+ and HBO Max look like they care about quality a lot more than Netflix does.

As for ads, what countries are they going to launch in? What happens will be very different in different places. In America, they’re risking cannibalizing their paying subscriber base when they decide to downgrade their accounts. In countries where they can’t get traction because people can’t afford $10-$15/month, ads could make a real difference, but launching ad platforms all over the world is tough because the advertisers will be different and want different things.

How are you going to avoid being run over by obnoxious SUVs everywhere? I don’t find my little hybrid car "joyless" at all and it sure provides more defenses against the hulking behemoths. Maybe skyrocketing gas prices will convince the behemoth owners to downsize.

Depends on what you’re reading. I’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm for Moon Knight (mainly in postings maybe but that’s what counts vs reviewers – listen to the paying customers).

Disney is hit or miss with Star Wars and Marvel. Half their stuff is good, half not so much. But even that’s more than Netflix has. They make Jupiter’s Legacy and Cowboy Bebop. Flop, flop. They just need to try more and more frequently, but I’m not sure they can afford it.

The successful services aren’t making content for early adopters. Here are the successful strategies, keyed to the companies’ existing strengths, not the audience:

Disney, Warners/Discovery, Amazon – using big IP to make series that attract enough attention that they can afford to plow a lot of money into them, so they all look high quality. WandaVision, Mandalorian, Loki, Moon Knight, the Game of Thrones spinoff, the Lord of the Rings spinoff. (Not to mention having a huge back catalog of classics that goes back to Snow White and Casablanca.)

Amazon again, and Apple – don’t care about making money on streaming because they just use it to support their real businesses.

Apple is the only one who isn’t mainstream, because they are focused on their specific audience. They’re skewing heavily towards premium content for Coastal elites, the audience that crosses over well with the Apple customer base. The others are casting a far wider net.

Paramount+ and Peacock are trying to copy the big-IP strategy but they’re too small to make it, especially now that people are getting hip to churning thru services and just skimming the best content off the top before moving on.

Other than Apple, the competitors are mainstream as all heck and that’s what Netflix can’t compete against. They aren’t mainstream enough – no big IP. When they try to create their own IP, they get Jupiter’s Legacy and Cowboy Bebop.

Creating huge IP isn’t easy, granted. Warners may have done it with Dune, but that’s very rare. That’s what Netflix needs – a Dune type franchise that can make serious box office money and then be used for spinoff streaming series. But they’ve scattered their resources so widely that it’s not even plausible for them.

Should Netflix roll the dice on turning, say, Hyperion into a big-screen success and then capitalizing on that? The odds are against anyone successfully doing that and Netflix can’t afford to plow thru a lot of expensive failures. I think Netflix may be stuck here, watching other companies beat them at the game they invented.

I won’t even use Twitter for free. So Twitter Blue basically gives you ad-free news stories? Err I guess Elon hasn’t heard about ad blockers…

Tell the CNN+ employees! Two weeks and they yank it?

Not me. My next streaming tryout is AppleTV+! I’ll probably keep it for several months given the backlog of good content that’s built up.