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The author seems oblivious to the fact that Netflix's main competition are not other streaming or entertainment companies, but filesharing and unauthorized stre

The author seems oblivious to the fact that Netflix's main competition are not other streaming or entertainment companies, but filesharing and unauthorized streaming. Netflix won that competition by providing a simple, quality product, at a price point that, for most people, makes torrenting no longer appealing. The moment they try to push unskippable ads down the throat of those consumers is the exact point where a large bulk of them will reassess if spending 5 minutes to hunt down torrents and watch them uninterrupted is a better deal than paying for a service that stops your movie for 5 minutes to show ads. Sure, they could go for short unintrusive ads before the show starts. But you can't generate significant revenue with that, otherwise every TV station would do it and streaming and pay-per-view would not exist.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> The author seems oblivious to the fact that Netflix's main competition are not other streaming or entertainment companies, but filesharing and unauthorized streaming. This isn't really true. Netflix's biggest worry is Disney+, I'd have thought -- the streaming company which simultaneously has exclusivity over very nearly a controlling share of US-centric cinema/TV content and is the last to market with the most growth potential. Netflix's second biggest worry is Amazon Video, which is gobbling up studios and franchises all over the place but is at least at this point just a component part of the nearest thing to a universal service provider that the world has seen since the fall of Soviet communism.