I agree the barrier to entry should be low, but it apparently isn't from a tech perspective, hence this article. See the comments further up the thread. Maybe t

I agree the barrier to entry should be low, but it apparently isn't from a tech perspective, hence this article. See the comments further up the thread. Maybe the HN crowd is just unusually sensitive to app quality, but I think Apple showed pretty conclusively that consumers respond well to quality tech. It shouldn't be really hard to run a video streaming and recommendation service at scale, but, it is. That tech isn't off the shelf, you have to build it. And to do that you need to be able to hire and attract good technologists. This matters because a repeating theme seems to be that the only people who can build competent tech teams are engineers. A generic media executive will find it much harder going because they don't have any intuition for the skill gap being discussed by Hastings here. Disney+ seems to have managed it but only by buying buy theirs from a sports streaming firm that had already proven themselves effective, if I recall correctly. Obviously there's a limited number of opportunities like that. So I guess it's a question of what's harder - for an engineer to build a great content operation, or a media guy to build a great tech operation. So far it seems like maybe neither are possible, although Netflix has had some great content perhaps that's more luck than anything else? If so then it'd make sense for eventually these firms to form a truce, with Netflix focused on the retail/online store aspects and other firms creating the shows.