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Netflix is getting huge, but can it get great?
- jv22222 9y agoI thought this was an interesting read regarding a number of different points/ideas. Netflix is like the upside down of TV is an interesting idea. Netflix takes things people already like and doubles down on them, and that's the whole business model. So, then, the main question the author ends up with: "Can Netflix ever do anything truly original in the way HBO does?" TLDR: It’s hard to be groundbreaking when your whole purpose is to take people where they’ve already been.
- empath75 9y agoyeah I guess a Korean movie about a girl and her genetically engineered super pig is retrodding well worn ground.
- giobox 9y agoIn fairness, Okja was similar to the kind of fable style tale with a near-future/modern/technology angle that Black Mirror had done for some time before (the first two seasons of Black Mirror were not Netflix productions). Almost everyone I know who watched it comments on this.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoThere are really only two stories: a stranger comes to town, and a man goes on a journey. -Tolstoy
- tootie 9y agoDid Netflix produce Okja? I think they just bought the rights.
- DanBC 9y agoNetflix isn't listed as a production company for Okja. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3967856/companycredits?ref_=ttfc_ql_4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3967856/companycredits?ref_=ttfc... They are for Bright. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5519340/companycredits?ref_=ttfc_ql_4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5519340/companycredits?ref_=ttfc...
- Feniks 9y agoNetflix has to come up with hit shows that set them apart from the other VOD services. Especially now since they can't easily buy streaming rights to already existing shows.
- pizza 9y agoWorked pretty well for them in the past - originals like House of Cards, Master of None, Orange is the New Black, Narcos, Stranger Things, Bojack, Black Mirror, etc were vastly popular and certainly drew in more users
- megablast 9y ago> Black Mirror That wasn't original, it was taken from Channel 4. The rest still stand though.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoHouse of cards was a BBC show in the 90s. All of this has happened before, and will happen again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series...
- surrealize 9y agoI thought Bojack Horseman was pretty original.
- Noos 9y agoIt's the same junk cartoon network has been peddling for years. Netflix has been spamming geek series nonstop, and it's all been crap. All of it. It's just popular crap at the moment, and they were lucky to catch the wave at the earliest rise. Iron Fist and Inhumans were what happens when they ride it too long.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago> "Netflix takes things people already like and doubles down on them, and that's the whole business model." There's a name for this, it's called "television". Netflix makes television, and they do a good job of it. They're getting better at it too despite having only started doing it for a few years. Compared to the quality standards of the '80s or '90s what netflix produces today is near solid gold. Some of it truly is great, most of it is merely good. Little of it is truly groundbreaking, but that's true of television (and video media) in general. The number of groundbreaking shows that get made every year is pretty close to zero. That's true even at places known for making groundbreaking shows, like HBO.
- wlesieutre 9y agoIf it wants to beat cable all it has to do is not be awful.
- Scoundreller 9y agoNetflix:cable::Uber:taxis
- Apocryphon 9y agoExcept without the flouting of regulations and labor laws
- vkou 9y agoThirty years ago, cable was to network television what Netflix is to cable today. I have a feeling that this time around, it will take less then 30 years for Netflix to reach the same unwatchable state.
- lev99 9y agoMy Netflix bill is creeping up. I’m up to $13.99/month. Honestly I’m probably not going to keep it if it keeps creeping up.
- 6d6b73 9y agoThere is this thing called inflation.. Things will get more expensive no matter what we do.
- lev99 9y agoI'll be okay if the price increases moves at the same rate as inflation, but the price is increasing much faster.
- r00fus 9y agoVs. a $50-100 cable TV bill that's still small potatoes. It's about the price of HBO but with a caveat that you definitely don't need a cable bundle to watch it.
- always_good 9y agoThe post seems to make its point by dismissing just about everything. Bright is "just another Will Smith movie" and Stranger Things is "pistache by design." Game of Thrones is probably just another fantasy-book-to-TV translation and The Wire is probably yet another crime drama. Through that lens, is anything going to impress you?
- IntronExon 9y agoI agree with your main point, but Bright was just the kind of expensive awful I’d hope Netflix would avoid.
- jusonchan 9y agoWhy should they avoid? I sort of liked it. And also about 86% of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers out of about 17,620 did. Not every movie has to be liked by the elite movie reviewers or editors in media news media. Some of the movies just works for folks. I'd say keep them coming. I'm only paying a fixed price and I can always choose what I want.
- IntronExon 9y agoI’m with you in that all too often pro reviewers are just jaded or pushing an agenda, but I should be clear that I personally disliked Bright. I didn’t however, mean to offend, and I should have simply said that I didn’t enjoy it, rather than make a generalization about it. Edit: the third thing professional reviewers are, is hungry for clicks.
- booleandilemma 9y agoI felt like I was getting beaten over the head with the metaphors.
- Goladus 9y agoIf I dismissed every movie or show with left-progressive propaganda I would have nothing to watch.
- 111_1_111 9y agoNetflix has already peaked. For some reason people think of them as the new hot thing, but the reality is they have been around for longer than Google. With competition in the streaming video market only getting hotter, I can't see them going anywhere but down. Any one of Amazon Video, Hulu, Disney, or HBO could unseat them. The growth expectations implicit in their 200+ P/E ratio seem way out of sync with their actual potential. If I owned Netflix stock I'd be selling it all now.
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- acalderaro 9y agoAre you intentionally ignoring the critically acclaimed pipeline of shows/movies Netflix has produced, or are you just ignorant to their actual success. They aren't _just_ a platform for content producers. They are producers of content. Competitors need to outprice them, our perform them, and outproduce them.
- on_and_off 9y agoAnecdotally I feel that Netflix has peaked in terms of content too. They are producing more and more shows I am less and less interested in. Meanwhile they still have a rolling library of titles instead of an ever expanding one.
- CaptSpify 9y agoThe problem is that companies like Disney have already out-produced them. Disney has decades of quality material ready to go
- IntronExon 9y agoFor very narrow values of quality, sure. I also hope to hell that the fragmentation or content distribution doesn’t continue unabated. Someone else posted the phrase earlier today, “Death by a thousand cuts,” and they’re right. Hulu. Netflix. Amazon. CBS. Disney. FX. YouTube Red. Crunchyroll. And on and on. It’s only vaguely workable when compared to the totslly unworkable price of American cable tv.
- jedberg 9y agoThis is all over the place. NBC and HBO are both networks. And so is Netflix. And Showtime, and AMC. The main difference is that Netflix broadcasts all over the world using the Internet, while NBC and HBO have limited reach outside of the US using cable and/or OTA signals (and over the Internet too!). House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Big Bang Theory, Gray's Anatomy. These are all just original shows of their respective networks. In Hollywood an Original Show just means that it was shown exclusively in one place first.
- pvg 9y agoIn the US 'television network' and 'network television' have specific meanings and HBO and Netflix are neither networks nor 'network tv'.
- robotresearcher 9y agoPlus the argument kinda petered out at the HBO also broadcasts on the internet part...
- jedberg 9y agoWhat do you mean? I have had in the past an internet only HBO subscription via Sling TV.
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- robotresearcher 9y agoParaphrasing: The main difference is that Netflix broadcasts via the internet while HBO broadcasts on cable and the internet. So not a vast difference.
- ghaff 9y agoAs the cable TV bundle starts to peter out, all of these entities are just effectively studios, i.e. entities with money that fund TV shows/movies with various exclusive distribution rights for some periods. One of the questions becomes what does the new bundle look like? (or the a la carte package.) Because there are pretty clearly a limited number of monthly subscriptions that most consumers are willing to pay for especially if they're in the >$10 range.
- newscracker 9y agoI need a cheap streaming service which has a huge catalog of movies and shows from other producers and distributors that doesn't keep vanishing regularly. Netflix seems to be less and less of this as time passes, and is relying way too much on original content (which is mostly great) to attract new subscribers and retain them. I don't think this party can last very long. With every content producer or distributor starting or wanting to start their own streaming service, the customer experience becomes very painful from two counts — high price and not knowing where to find a specific piece of content. As much as I hate huge companies and consolidation of companies, this is one area where some consolidation could make it better for customers. I'm not sure if this is the right hope to have though.
- ethbro 9y agoNetflix rightly saw that there was no independent end game if they continued licensing other owners' content. Eventually, revenues go up and licensing deals expire. Then, either the owners increase the price for licensing their content, or they refuse to license it and start their own service. Lose/lose Netflix realized the only blue sky was owning a large catalog of their own content, ideally used to retain users and starve other services, and then license content when they have the upper hand.
- ggg9990 9y agoThat’s not how Spotify played it. Spotify bet the farm on discovery and won, with users marveling at how good their playlist selections are. When people are using Spotify recommendations, they become immune to content creators threatening to terminate deals because their users are listening to “Spotify” rather than going and specifically searching Taylor Swift.
- dforrestwilson 9y agoImmune? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/ruling-raises-songwriter-royalties-from-spotify-apple-music-by-44/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/ruling-raises-songwr...
- ericmcer 9y agoI wonder if network pressure has something to do with the shift as well. A huge part of Netflix streaming is people watching series/old content in the background. I have definitely been guilty of putting the office or always sunny on in the background and letting it ride while I do casual work. From a networking perspective that is a terrible scenario vs. users actively engaging with a single new episode of some netflix series.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoI'm curious how you know that, is there a study/dataset somewhere that I missed? That would be awesome.
- fourmii 9y agoI thought this article was just some highbrow whining. I'm personally rooting for Netflix. I'm really enjoying the content. I thought Bright was a pretty entertaining throw-away action flick. And I love Stranger Things as well as Ozarks. Hell, I even watched the first ep of Queer Eye the other night... I love being able to watch at my convenience, and not be bombarded with ads. I also love that they're not subjected to the same restrictions as the big US networks in terms of their content, just like HBO isn't. I'm excited that they're investing so much in their content pipeline.
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- blackrock 9y agoTo be honest, a lot of the content that they are delivering right now, is not very good quality. Recently, 20 new series were delivered, and I think that only 1 or 2 are good. The rest, are not even worthy of your time. And the ratings that they use are atrocious. For example, a series is given a 4.5 star rating, but when you watch it, you ask yourself, who rated this?
- Pyxl101 9y agoWhen Netflix used a star rating system, the star rating it showed you was Netflix's guesstimate of your expected rating. It's guessing how it thinks you'll rate the movie, based on what you've watched and rated, and what other similar people have done. It's not always going to be right. In 2017 they switched to a thumbs-up / thumbs-down system, and now they show a percentage which I believe is their estimate of the chance you'll give it a thumbs-up.
- Pfhreak 9y agoNetflix series that come to mind as "I enjoyed and believe a reasonable number of people would describe as 'good'": * House of Cards * Orange is the New Black * Narcos * Stranger Things * A Series of Unfortunate Events * Mindhunter * Altered Carbon * Daredevil * Jessica Jones * Luke Cage * The Defenders * Master of None * GLOW * Wet Hot American Summer * Bojack Horseman * Castlevania * Chef's Table * Abstract * Voltron: Legendary Defender * Trollhunters Maybe I misunderstood your thesis, but the 1-2 remark seems ungenerous...
- lozenge 9y agoThe other 18 are for other target audiences. They can statistically separate groups of TV viewers and try to target each one. Besides, you might be surprised how low people's standards are. After all, 5 hours a day is Americans' average TV consumption. The world can't product that amount of high quality TV.
- snag 9y agoWhile Netflix content can be discussed, their client is flat out bad. Try to watch something on a not so great network is painful. Image quality sucks, impossible to skip/replay few seconds without minutes of buffering. Turning on closed caption? Yeah, that's no video for 3 minutes. In another hand, same network and same device, Amazon Prime Video client is great, gets the best image quality out of my network, allows me for a 10 seconds replay without issue, I can switch captions on and off quickly. Also X-ray is a great feature.
- projectileboy 9y agoIf Netflix becomes only independent content, then won’t they just be HBO? And if so, will they still command their current market valuation?
- blubb-fish 9y agoNetflix produces superb and important documentaries - it is great already!