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Disruption by Netflix Irks TV Foes

• pmontra 11y ago
  Access without login https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=en&tl=it&u=http:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F01%2F18%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fdisruption-by-netflix-irks-tv-foes.html&anno=2&sandbox=1 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=en&tl=it&u=h...
• touristtam 11y ago
  So traditional network are getting itchy about a new competitor that refuses to play by their rules while beating them at their own game (produced show). It reminds me of HBO debut.
• dudul 11y ago
  How is ratings relevant in on-demand model? Isn't it gonna change literally every day? I'm sure there are still people watching older shows on Netflix. The tough days are coming for Netflix. Everybody realizes they are putting down older, irrelevant cable TV networks (including these networks). They will be bullied and criticize beyond reason in an attempt to preserve the status-quo. Hope they can take it.
  • manish_gill 11y ago
    I mean, youtube videos have viewership numbers, and we judge youtube content accordingly all the time. I don't see why Netflix can't do the same, or why it's not acceptable for that data to be released for a streaming site.
    • dudul 11y ago
      You have a point, but do Youtube views really tell the same story? It's called views, not viewers for a reason, I'm sure that behind a "100,000 views" there is maybe "20,000" viewers top. Got to say, I'm not an industry expert, but I don't know if a continuous release of ratings would work. For example, most shows have a wikipedia page with the ratings. Netflix shows don't (I only looked at 2 of them and extrapolated :)) and it makes sense. Would we update the page every week? I really see this cabal as a desperate move to go after Netflix under any pretext.
    • lhopki01 11y ago
      You're forgetting the reason why viewership numbers exits. They're for advertisers. The only reason you need them is to have advertisers. The reasons they're public is that advertisers don't like trusting the company selling them ad space to also be the one saying how many viewers there are. That's why independent viewer number companies started. Netflix has no advertising so it doesn't need to release numbers. Youtube and TV both need viewing numbers to survive. Netflix doesn't need that data to be public.
      • rhino369 11y ago
        Well it might need to release that data to convince shareholders that all the money they are spending on original content is worth the hundreds of millions a year they are spending. It's hard to tell if Netflix's growth is because 1) the huge catalog of rerun content they purchase for pennies on the dollar or 2) the original content they create for dollars on the dollar. The viewership data sheds light on that. If only three million out of 75 million watched House of Cards? Then they better stop spending 100 million dollars a year on it, because it's not worth it.
        • jeremy7600 11y ago
          Except it doesn't matter because people aren't paying for the shows with the ads they watch. They are paying directly with their subscription money and Netflix can spend it any way they want. So what if only 3 million out of 75 million watch house of cards. How many shows are watched on netflix by 100% of subscribers? Or I'll even make it more fair: how many shows are being watched by more than even 10% of subscribers? Few to any, if at all. They pick up what they can afford. It doesn't matter if no one watches it, its already been paid for. (More or less, the cost is already sunk but the revenue continues if they buy properties or not. They would be even more profitable if they didn't buy any content)
          • rhino369 11y ago
            Of course it matters to Netflix. They want to spend their money efficiently. It's possible spending on original content doesn't have a positive return on value.
  • jeremy7600 11y ago
    I'm currently watching through MAS*H, so yes.
• justinsaccount 11y ago
  What the fuck is this? > Mr. Wurtzel provided data from a firm named Symphony Advanced Media, which uses audio content recognition installed on phones to recognize what is being watched and when. According to Symphony’s data, the Netflix show “Jessica Jones” was viewed by 4.8 million people [...] http://www.symphonyam.com/technology/ http://www.symphonyam.com/technology/ apparently... edit: ah, I found http://observer.com/2016/01/netflix-hulu-data-symphony-advanced-media/ http://observer.com/2016/01/netflix-hulu-data-symphony-advan... > The company has over 15,000 viewers now and expects to hit 20,000 media insiders this year So they have 15,000 people running their spyware and they extrapolate the data out to 4.8 million people.
  • hobs 11y ago
    I don't know how robust their sampling method is, but how many samples do you need in a survey to do that level of extrapolation? I was under the impression that the political surveys extrapolated with less than this.
    • cdumler 11y ago
      The answer is: it depends. I remember the lesson my Stats teacher: How many Martians do you have to measure to determine the average height of a Martian? What if I told you that all Martians are exactly 6 feet tall? The correct way to sample to is to determine the variance in the population. If there is no variance, sample size needs to be only one. If not, there are statistical charts that tell you what your sample size needs to be to have some specific confidence that some percentage of the time your sample will be representative. If your population has a Normal distribution, you can use a Z chart to calculate sample size. Believe it or not, for normal distributions and command variances, a population below 200 is all that is necessary.
    • kencausey 11y ago
      There's a difference between random dynamic sampling and fixed sampling. Not that I think sampling is ever done very well in surveying, not that it's the most serious problem.
  • 11y ago
• jeremy7600 11y ago
  Wow, that journalist just took everything everyone said at face value and didn't even question the speculations made on both sides? Shoddy. How does someone at Fx know anything about what goes on at Netflix? Besides the commonality of showing video content, the two are as similar as peaches and a sailboat.
• CodeWriter23 11y ago
  Why would Netflix release rating numbers? It's not like they are trying to use metrics to determine the price of advertising slots. The only scenario I can envision where that would help Netflix is in some potential future dust-up over net neutrality/ antitrust issue with ISPs that deliver TV programming.
  • criddell 11y ago
    I think the reason they are being called out on this is because they are claiming that their shows have more viewers than the biggest shows on cable. It seems fair that if you are going to make claims about your viewership, you should expect to be asked to back that up with numbers. That Netflix is thinking about ratings scares me a bit because that suggests advertising is on their minds.
    • wnevets 11y ago
      >That Netflix is thinking about ratings scares me a bit because that suggests advertising is on their minds. That's not what I got from the quote at all.
    • jrockway 11y ago
      > It seems fair that if you are going to make claims about your viewership, you should expect to be asked to back that up with numbers. Why? Netflix has numbers for all of its competitors, and they have their own, so they can easily factually state that their ratings are higher. If the other networks moved away from advertising, they wouldn't have to talk about ratings either. They only disclose their viewership numbers to sell ad slots, not out of some community service or to satisfy people's curiosity.
    • CodeWriter23 11y ago
      If Netflix ever brought in ads, it would be for a lower cost subscription rate, perhaps free but I doubt that. They know the wrath of their users who unsubscribe en masse when they screw up.
      • 11y ago
• Shivetya 11y ago
  why would Netflix need viewer ratings? They know exactly what you are watching but most importantly they are a paid service where each of their customers voluntarily chooses to pay for Netflix's content. If anything ratings for individual shows would only serve Netflix's interest so as to know if one show is worth producing over another. They aren't in the same business as traditional TV/Cable where the customer doesn't get a choice but instead has to take whats in the bundle. If anything they are closer to HBO
• creamyhorror 11y ago
  This is an interesting snippet that no one else seems to have addressed: Meanwhile, Mr. Landgraf said on Saturday that FX pursued “Master of None” and Netflix’s coming show, “The Crown,” but the free-spending streaming service “overwhelmed us with sort of shock–and-awe levels of money and commitment.” FX, he said, has to be profitable whereas Netflix does not have to worry about that now. “I mean, basically, we are competing against payrolls à la the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees that are three, four times ours,” he said. He called it a “little frustrating” because “FX’s earnings alone are many, many times higher than Netflix’s globally, many times higher.” If I read this right, Netflix is basically coasting on investor money, while FX is earning much more money but because FX has to be profitable, it can't afford to be as profligate as Netflix with its content production costs. Nor can it afford Netflix's asking price for its shows. Basically, is investor money is propping up Netflix and distorting the market, same as in other tech-disrupted markets? edit: I was wrong - Netflix is indeed simply reinvesting almost all its revenue (largely into producing shows), rather than relying on investor money, as petra says. So FX and other networks should consider recalibrating their strategy to focus on higher-quality content production, if the market is rewarding that.
  • petra 11y ago
    Netflix has tiny profit margins , since it uses most of it's money for growth. But it's not investor money, and they're not losing money, so they might be able to do so for a long time, like Amazon.
  • x5n1 11y ago
    In the long run imagine that Netflix has a global audience and a global market. With say 1.6 billion subscribers, the number of people who use facebook, they could definitely afford this strategy in the long run I mean having a monthly budget of some 10 billion dollars, or 120 billion dollars a year would be enough to pretty much produce an Avengers movie every month. They have around 70 million plus, so 100 million soon.
• kenshaw 11y ago
  > [Gary Newman] also said that the numbers were “within the mid- to upper level of cable dramas and within the ballpark of what I’d expect.” So the agencies that are paid to do research / competitive intelligence and rate a competitor's viewership numbers using a highly biased sample pool using a method (audio sampling) that is highly unreliable and wildly inaccurate (so much so, that for all intents and purposes, it should be classified a divining rod), has reported exactly the numbers that the TV Network execs expect -- numbers that color network TV as still favorable for advertisers? Well, I'm amazed.