31 ms·

Netflix is part of the FAANG acronym because they have all these highly paid engineers. Presumably those people have been doing something for the past 5 years i

• lofties 5y ago
  Netflix needs to realize, if it hasn't already, that it's not a technology company, but a production company.
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    They realized it three or four years ago when big players started pulling content. Why do you think they've been investing so heavily in their own content?
    • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
      Investing in their own content would not support them being a technology company.
    • lordfoom 5y ago
      '"The goal," says Sarandos, "is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." ' That was Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix in 2013, so they 'realized' at least a decade ago. They've really pivoted amazingly from dvds to streaming other folks content to creating their own in the last 20ish years.
      • PoignardAzur 5y ago
        Yeah, a lot of people seem to be defaulting to "Netflix didn't see this obvious thing" rather than "competing with Disney is ridiculously hard even if you have the smartest executives on the planet".
  • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    They need to be priced as one. Netflix PE ratio is 47x. Paramount is 8x. Universal is 12x.
    • azinman2 5y ago
      What’s the likelihood of any of those 3 companies pivoting and offering a fundamentally new entertainment experience? My money would be on Netflix. They’ve done it at least twice already; it’s in their DNA.
  • riquito 5y ago
    Is it? They could (hypothetically, for the sake of argument) pivot to become a PAAS for the competitors (exit the streaming market, offer to today's competitors a superior/cheaper underlying technology, let them watch fight among themselves for who get what series while they provide the plumbings)
    • shock-value 5y ago
      Their major competitors already have functioning platforms of their own.
      • redisman 5y ago
        While Netflix level performance is difficult, getting 90% there is a lot easier today than 10 years ago. And 90% there seems to be fine for consumers as long as the content is there
    • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
      I think there would be a market for that, but not one that justifies a $230 billion valuation. It would be virtually impossible for Netflix to pursue a strategy like that because they would be admitting defeat and taking a loss for their shareholders.
• romanovcode 5y ago
  > besides maintaining their CDN and tweaking recommendation engines But engineers are not product managers tho. I think this is exactly what they were doing.
  • stathibus 5y ago
    Product managers don't build things.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      Engineers have very little say in what to build.
      • stathibus 5y ago
        I think my point has been missed. You don't need that much manpower to maintain CDN. They have to either be working on something new, or sitting around doing nothing. I'm assuming they are not doing nothing so I am wondering what their product people have them working on that could be so inconsequential as to not be having any effect on their loss of market share.
      • seneca 5y ago
        > Engineers have very little say in what to build. That entirely depends on the company. In my experience, the higher the quality of engineers a company hires, the more influence those engineers have.
    • romanovcode 5y ago
      But they do direct what to build based on their findings and whatnot.
• choeger 5y ago
  Well .. they did boast a lot about their microservice architecture. Five years just strikes me as the typical time to get completely entangled in bitrot...
• rdtsc 5y ago
  > Presumably those people have been doing something for the past 5 years in anticipation of being disrupted A lot of cool technology, no doubt. Unless they start writing scripts, directing, acting, editing it might not help. It’s a bit like if a hospital had a really cool IT department, highest paid engineers, latest database tech and hardware. But it’s not enough, as their surgeons are not as good as ones from the older hospital across town.
  • stathibus 5y ago
    Where I come from, engineers are there to build things that make the product better.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      Technology is not the bottleneck at Netflix. The places where the product needs to improve are largely outside of the domain of engineering.
    • jitix 5y ago
      I think Netflix's product is not software but content. I understand what you're referring to but if Prime Video's UX is any indication, content trumps software product quality in this market segment. If I were Netflix I'd probably divest the technology side of the business (which is arguably the best in the market) and sell that "software product" as a white label streaming platform to the myriad of media houses across the world trying to get into streaming.
      • Jcowell 5y ago
        Prime video seemed like the worst example. How many people but people video separate as opposed to just having it’s because it’s included in Amazon Prime?
      • asimpletune 5y ago
        I wonder if the money they'd earn would be worth the cost of helping their competitors?
• adventured 5y ago
  I agree with your point. Netflix is in the custom content business. If anyone is confused about that and thinks their engineers will ultimately make or break the business, a rude awakening is inbound. The Netflix tech lead, if it matters much at all at this point, is perpetually shrinking. There's only so much that shuffling what-to-watch-next algorithms on the Titanic deck will do for you. Disney has an epic amount of money to throw at anything they want to, so do Apple and Amazon. Netflix stands zero chance of keeping a magic lead via a couple thousand very highly paid engineers; there is only so much those engineers can do to make a difference, only so much to optimize in that product, and they can do absolutely nothing to bolster the biggest value proposition: content wins out. I've been a Netflix subscriber for a very long time. I can't name anything they make that I care about or have watched recently. I can't name a single mega show I permanently associate with them (like I might the Sopranos with HBO etc). I agree with most everyone else in this thread, Netflix is first on the chopping block, because their content sucks. A streaming product has to be exceptionally bad to lose in the market if you have superior content (with a reasonable price); the largely tech superior streaming product that Netflix has had isn't going to be enough to beat their competition unless their content is stellar too.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    I won't say a streaming platform is a commodity at this point but it's close. Others may disagree but I don't really find a meaningful usability difference between Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+. They're a studio with a streaming platform.
    • treis 5y ago
      I do. Netflix always works for me and I don't think I've ever found a bug. HBO Max on the other hand routinely fails to stream with an error and has lots of UI bugs. Little things like if you're watching a show and go to the episode list there's no way to change seasons. That said, it doesn't matter much because HBO's crappy app is the only way to watch their content so I put up with it.
      • treesknees 5y ago
• arnvald 5y ago
  FAANG was coined as an acronym for best performing stocks in mid-2010s. Netflix has some of the top paid engineers in the world, but that's not why they're part of FAANG.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    I thought they were part of FAANG because they're an American company that accounts for a massive amount of global Internet bandwidth.
    • redisman 5y ago
      Kudos to Cramer for making such a useless and long lived acronym.
• Grakel 5y ago
  Netflix's user experience has always been bad, and it's worse than ever. Engineers also don't make content, so if they're doing any good, I guess it's backend.
  • cuteboy19 5y ago
    I wouldn't say it's bad, but they could certainly learn something from YouTube. Even with very sketchy wifi, I rarely get buffering for YT.
    • SomeHacker44 5y ago
      If you turn on "stats for nerds" in YouTube you can see the buffer size and how it is refilled, graphically. I noticed that last week. Sort of neat.
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Well they destroyed/lobotomized the recommendation system. I don’t know how much of that was command from up above but engineers were definitely involved in that.
• eor 5y ago
  Based on what I've seen in their engineering blogs, they've been spending a lot of time on streamlining the production and distribution process. I guess that makes sense for a production company. But I wonder if they're getting good value for what they're spending on it. It may so much less than what they're spending on producing content that nobody's paying attention.
  • vkk8 5y ago
    Streamlining production seems like a wrong goal in this game. I mean, who cares if you can efficiently churn out dozens or hundreds of new TV-shows and movies if none of them are good? Having one really good TV-show on the catalogue is worth a hundred crappy TV-shows. And if you manage to produce one good show, who cares if its' production process was extremely efficient. It's a long tail game.
    • usrusr 5y ago
      Being able to quickly and efficiently set up a group pitching some creative vision but lacking any experience with Netflix-sized budgets? Preferably without installing some cookie-cutter producers that make everything they touch look, feel and taste the same? That's huge if they are good at it. I'm not saying that they are, but now that streaming seems to be basically solved (it has become a commodity) this is the quality that will likely make the winners.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Anecdotally, I've heard working with netflix on the production side is not that fun. They ask a lot of you and pay a little, and you don't have creative freedom. Maybe that's the streamlining they are referring to? We will see if this helps them or hurts them by shooing what could have been good production talent for them to HBO and other competitors in town.
• bradstewart 5y ago
  At least for me, Netflix consistently has the fewest problems (failing to load, apps crashing, buffering on a 900 mbps connection, etc) of any streaming service I use. So the engineering is working in that regard.
• usrusr 5y ago
  Even in the 1980ies, owning all the best guitars, microphones and Marshall stacks (and hair products) wouldn't help you become a rock star if your music wasn't any good. In streaming subscriptions you can very much fail from bad tech, but better tech won't make any difference over good enough.
• cronix 5y ago
  The infrastructure engineers built an awesome highway, but the other half (content creators) aren't creating enough quality cars. Content creators, and the people who make content/entertainment decisions, are not the same people as the infrastructure engineers and have little in common except they both use computers.
• ssully 5y ago
  I couldn't tell you what they are doing, but Netflix easily has the best app experience out of any of the streaming platforms and it isn't even close. I've been using HBO Max and Disney+ a lot over the last few months. Plenty of good content, but I pretty consistently have issues with both of their apps.