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While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it

While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it, but some how screwed it all up. There’s at best 1 or 2 good show and no good movie Netflix has made in years. And anything half decent they cancel mercilessly without giving it a chance. This is not just in the US. The comparison of original content quality between Netflix and other services in India for example is even more laughable. In the end, Netflix is a company that used to be great and kinda made some of the most genius ideas to fight the Goliath but was undone by a single dude leading a team making poor choices on what content to make. 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? I’m assuming this is as big or a bigger blunder than Zillow, and was powered by stupid data science ideas as well, probably.

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
- afavour 4y ago
  The idea that Netflix is failing because of identity politics is just ridiculous and doesn’t hold up to even the slightest examination. It’s just another reactionary talking point that feels right enough for people to not examine it.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    I know multiple people which complained about it and made them unsubscribe (none from the USA, so these topics are neither interesting nor on topic for any of us) It was definitely a contributing factory that's for sure.
    - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      The number of people who care about this kind of stuff is very low. Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That’s only relevant in the bubble of malcontent that is mostly made up of twitter users.
      - lelanthran 4y ago
        > Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That is true. It also means that if you are going to proselytise, you're going to lose the audience who just want to be entertained.
      - Auracle 4y ago
        I think more people care than you think, but they might not realize that identity politics (or politics in general) are what’s making a show worse. Star Trek: Picard’s latest season was terrible in many ways, but it seemed like the entire plot was made just so the show runners could say “ICE bad. Global Warming scary.” That’s all well and dandy if you have an actual point to make, but they didn’t. There was no nuance because in their minds any deviation from those political beliefs are evil.
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      Anecdata at best.
    - afavour 4y ago
      For it to really be that big of a factor you’d have to explain a) why it hasn’t been a factor before now (did Netflix suddenly become “woke” this quarter? Doubtful) and b) why haven’t other streamers like Disney+ and HBO Max had similar declines? Are they less woke? By what quantifiable measure? (e.g. Disney has warnings at the start of old movies about how racist they are, it was a whole controversy a few months ago)
  - psyc 4y ago
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Case in point, Dave Chappelle's stand-up. He doesn't say what you're supposed to say about certain subjects, leading to outrage and calls to take down the show, yet it's still up. Were Netflix that left-leaning, that show would already be gone from their catalog.
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      > Case in point, Dave Chappelle's stand-up. He doesn't say what you're supposed to say about certain subjects, leading to outrage and calls to take down the show, yet it's still up. Were Netflix that left-leaning, that show would already be gone from their catalog. That's not the point. The point is "making money". Netflix is throwing a lot of money at their originals, the clear majority of which are "Woke" with a capital double-you. From all that I've read, the clear majority of Netflix originals are also losing money. Now before you claim that there is no reason to believe that the shows that lose money and the shows which are Woke are (in the majority) the same shows, let me clarify. With their 220m+ subscriber base and deep knowledge of what people watch, there is no reason for Netflix to have this much uncertainty about what will be a hit and what will not. They know exactly at which point each subscriber gives up on a show; they know which episode the subscriber saw last, they know which minute of that episode the subscriber stopped viewing at. They have much more detailed knowledge of what turns off viewers than Hollywood does, or any of the more traditional production companies. They know what genres do well, they know what mix of genres do well, they know what the viewers appetite is for particular mixes, they know what most viewers want, they know what the long tail wants. Netflix literally knows what doesn't sell, and yet they keep making shows that don't sell. The only reason for going against the data has to be due to a top-down directive from the company itself. After all, if you have data that says "this will more likely be a hit than that", and you go ahead and make "that" anyway, the only reason you would do so is because you were told to do so. Now, with all of that in mind, ask yourself what that top-down directive could possibly be ...
      - orf 4y ago
        This is total nonsense. Sorry. You’ve fabricated some weird scenario in your head where the data screams out “woke content sucks” but god damn the executives just won’t listen! And then you attribute that to the Illuminati or the Woke Agenda or even the ghost of Carl Marx. Nobody knows “literally” what doesn’t sell when it comes to film and TV. It’s a shot in the dark each time.
  - xedrac 4y ago
    My empirical evidence says otherwise. It is the primary reason I cancelled my subscription, and I've heard an awful lot of people complain about how every show has some forced social agenda. I suspect that Elon's tweet regarding Netflix, and the "woke" virus that has infected it, probably didn't help matters either. Say what you want about the guy, but he has a pretty massive amount of influence.
    - JMS2021 4y ago
      I cancelled, after being a member for 10 years. Three of my friends have gone back to torrents. The main reason... Almost everything has some fringe minority edge, a gay lead, a token trans friend and most of the stuff is "victim porn" with the usual white male protagonist. 100% reason why I cancelled and the same for my friends. Netflix, or Wokeflix is basically trash.
  - GenerocUsername 4y ago
    Any examination of Netflix that does NOT include Go Woke Go Broke is a joke. Everyone I know is at least aware of how cookie cutter and predictable the woke agenda is on every Netflix original, and it is a reoccurring topic when people finally decide to cancel
    - afavour 4y ago
      So why hasn’t Disney+, which is at least as “woke”, had a similar decline?
      - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
        It probably is but they also have far less market saturation, they're still half as big as Netflix. What about CNN+?
- lupire 4y ago
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    It's catering to a loud minority. The majority are over it.
    - quantum_solanum 4y ago
      I'm sure you watched the news from Buffalo with glee, scum.
  - psyc 4y ago
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      People who talk about things are people who care enough to talk about it, thus companies will assume that the people who do not care enough will accept woke or non-woke content equally.
      - rvba 4y ago
        Dont they fire everyone who speaks against the wokists?
        jen20 4y ago
        You realize that most Netflix viewers are not Netflix employees? (For now at least!)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bob_roberts 4y ago
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    Not even close to what I said. Read it again.
  - psyc 4y ago
    Oh please. They said that isn’t why. Anyone seen Shameless? Seasons 1-9 featured loads of gay and trans characters and plots, and they were superb. Seasons 10.5-11 were unironically woke garbage, and I had to abandon it midway into 11. I actually could not stand it anymore. The in your face preachy wokeness.
    - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
      [flagged]
  - ralusek 4y ago
    Euphoria? Excellent show. Reservation Dogs? Excellent show. Dear White People? Woke Garbage. Kill Bill? Excellent movie. Captain Marvel? Woke Garbage. You're demonstrating nothing but your own hyper-fixation on superficial identity characteristics by failing to recognize that there are plenty of "women, LGBT, PoC, etc" in all kinds of media beloved by those who are sick and tired of woke media. You think that these characteristics are sufficient for people to dislike this media, whereas the precise inverse seems to be true, wherein pro-woke people seem to be perfectly happy accepting garbage as media so long as these identity groups and messages are present. I'm not interested in continuing this conversation by taking some kind of boomer position on wokeness, I just think that you're willfully arguing in bad faith, but you already know that.
- astrange 4y ago
  > Get woke. Go broke. This has literally never actually happened to anyone. (Black Rifle Coffee just took a $4B writedown, so the opposite seems like more of a bad strategy.)
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    You're not actually serious? https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-that-support-the-narrative-go-woke-go-broke https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-that-support-th...
    - astrange 4y ago
      The only examples on there are one cafe, plus crazy people trying to claim P&G and Disney are somehow failing. Looks to me like both are closer to owning the entire planet than failing at anything.
      - anonymoushn 4y ago
        It's more shocking to claim that Disney is woke lol
- draw_down 4y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  It isn't the wokeness that's the problem, it's the bad writing that tries to cover up for how shit it is by using its wokeness as a defense. Maybe it is my nostalgia talking, but it seems that the quality of the average TV writer has plummeted in the past 20 years. Owl House is pretty woke, enough to make Disney uncomfortable with it, but it gets great reviews and has a large fan base because it is written well. Meanwhile Star Trek: Discovery is rightfully being trashed by life long Star Trek fans like myself, who are pretty accustomed to progressive themes, because it is written largely by hacks.
sjtindell 4y ago
I mean I don’t know about screwed it up. You can’t expect any artist to just consistently produce pure hits. The creativity seems to come and go, the zeitgeist and the cultural context matter so much. Nobody (except, I would argue, Marvel) is able to be really consistent with their art. They were always doomed to fail producing their own content.
- fragmede 4y ago
  HBO seems to be doing fine producing their own content so I don't see it as a foregone conclusion that Netflix was doomed to fail. They didn't have the back-catalog but they had the head start in online distribution and could have bought a studio or two as they have for video games in order to seed their back-catalog. I think a large contribution to their failure is Netflix cancelling shows after two seasons. If a show's probably gonna get cancelled before it gets a good run, why why would I bother watching it? People want easy watching, and they want a lot of it. Eg The Office, which ended up lasting nine seasons. Only Netflix knows exactly why they canceled shows, as only they have the viewer numbers, but a rumor I've heard is that after two seasons is when the production starts to get expensive because that's when a show gets traction and the production team and actors can unionize to demand more money - money that Netflix doesn't want to spend. Unfortunately, in cancelling shows so quickly, there just aren't the shows to keep subscribers on the service - especially if subscribers have to keep picking a show to watch every two seasons. There's nothing more unsatisfying than spending an hour on Netflix trying to find something to watch only not to find anything. If they had more shows that ran nine seasons, it would be easier to justify keeping the subscription just for those shows. Two seasons just isn't enough episodes to keep watching a show and by playing penny-wise and pound-foolish, they just don't have the catalog. Which is sad, because the have a ton of good short-run shows that just needed more of a chance. The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once. Their choice, but it's very supportive of my habit to cancel my Netflix subscription every time I run out of things to watch, and subscribe to a different service.
  - petre 4y ago
    > The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once The Korean studios are quite smart with this. They release 1 or 2 episodes on a weekday just like Netflix used to with Star Trek Discovery.
Gys 4y ago
> and no good movie Netflix has made in years That is very subjective. My wife and I really liked The power of the dog. And I am sure there are more. Also subjective: watching Netflix every day (I do not) will end up in watching below par stuff. No service will be able to produce that much high quality content for everybody’s taste.
- asr21 4y ago
  It was a good movie, but not a great movie. I would be surprised if you would rate that movie in top 20 for the last decade.
  - Gys 4y ago
    You are implying netflix needs to offer a ‘ movie in top 20 for the last decade’ every week or so. You will indeed get very disappointed by all streaming services.
    - nasmorn 4y ago
      You will also be disappointed by basic math given that a decade has 520 weeks.
chii 4y ago
> they had billions of dollars to create original content they had the wrong idea that original content is their strong point. It's not. It's disney's strong point. Netflix should've used their dominant position to lobby for new rules to the game - prevent exclusivity of content! They should've lobbied gov't to mandate that studio productions of content be permanently untied to a streaming service, and be available to all players in the streaming space. Just like net neutrality, we might call this content neutrality. Netflix is at it's core, a tech company that solves technical issues with streaming. They pivoted to content creation, and they aren't very good at it - sure they got a couple of hits, but they cannot possibly compete on this with actual movie studios that own IPs from a century ago to this day.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  Netflix failed precisely because it's a tech company at its core. It can't outlobby the copyright industry, because it lacks the experience, the goodwill, and the political connections. And the celebrities supporting its goals. If Netflix wants to be successful in the entertainment industry, it must act like an entertainment company and give more power to the producers and the creatives.
- jamie_ca 4y ago
  Totally agree. If streaming video could get the same terms as streaming audio/radio (standardized mandatory licensing fees) and services could compete on encoding (cost efficiency on their end) and UI/UX (which Netflix is... not great) that would be an entirely different ballgame.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  No chance that would've worked. Netflix saw themselves as a content creation company because they realized that having great content is the only way to keep growing.
- bawolff 4y ago
  I disagree - their issue was scaling it. When they started out creating original content, they were hitting it out of the park. Orange is the new black, daredevil, house of cards were all big hits. They scaled, quality was sacraficed for quantity, and their brand became very dilluted.
bawolff 4y ago
> 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? Kind of a weird example when the adam sandler movie (uncut gems) was probably one of the few critical succeses of their recent original content.
- jjulius 4y ago
  Different things. Netflix paid Sandler $250 million in 2014 for six Sandler originals under their studio, and renewed the deal in 2017 and 2020. Separately, Netflix just purchased streaming rights for Uncut Gems, which Sandler didn't write, from A24. I'm assuming it's the Sandler originals that OP is referring to.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  uncut gems is not a netflix movie. It's A24.
midasuni 4y ago
Netflix could have bought a few of the legacy companies. Amazon bought MGM, Netflix could have bought cbs/paramount, or ABC, for the cost of a series of the crown.

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago

afavour 4y ago
The idea that Netflix is failing because of identity politics is just ridiculous and doesn’t hold up to even the slightest examination. It’s just another reactionary talking point that feels right enough for people to not examine it.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  I know multiple people which complained about it and made them unsubscribe (none from the USA, so these topics are neither interesting nor on topic for any of us) It was definitely a contributing factory that's for sure.
  - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
    The number of people who care about this kind of stuff is very low. Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That’s only relevant in the bubble of malcontent that is mostly made up of twitter users.
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      > Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That is true. It also means that if you are going to proselytise, you're going to lose the audience who just want to be entertained.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      I think more people care than you think, but they might not realize that identity politics (or politics in general) are what’s making a show worse. Star Trek: Picard’s latest season was terrible in many ways, but it seemed like the entire plot was made just so the show runners could say “ICE bad. Global Warming scary.” That’s all well and dandy if you have an actual point to make, but they didn’t. There was no nuance because in their minds any deviation from those political beliefs are evil.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Anecdata at best.
  - afavour 4y ago
    For it to really be that big of a factor you’d have to explain a) why it hasn’t been a factor before now (did Netflix suddenly become “woke” this quarter? Doubtful) and b) why haven’t other streamers like Disney+ and HBO Max had similar declines? Are they less woke? By what quantifiable measure? (e.g. Disney has warnings at the start of old movies about how racist they are, it was a whole controversy a few months ago)
- psyc 4y ago
- fragmede 4y ago
  Case in point, Dave Chappelle's stand-up. He doesn't say what you're supposed to say about certain subjects, leading to outrage and calls to take down the show, yet it's still up. Were Netflix that left-leaning, that show would already be gone from their catalog.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Case in point, Dave Chappelle's stand-up. He doesn't say what you're supposed to say about certain subjects, leading to outrage and calls to take down the show, yet it's still up. Were Netflix that left-leaning, that show would already be gone from their catalog. That's not the point. The point is "making money". Netflix is throwing a lot of money at their originals, the clear majority of which are "Woke" with a capital double-you. From all that I've read, the clear majority of Netflix originals are also losing money. Now before you claim that there is no reason to believe that the shows that lose money and the shows which are Woke are (in the majority) the same shows, let me clarify. With their 220m+ subscriber base and deep knowledge of what people watch, there is no reason for Netflix to have this much uncertainty about what will be a hit and what will not. They know exactly at which point each subscriber gives up on a show; they know which episode the subscriber saw last, they know which minute of that episode the subscriber stopped viewing at. They have much more detailed knowledge of what turns off viewers than Hollywood does, or any of the more traditional production companies. They know what genres do well, they know what mix of genres do well, they know what the viewers appetite is for particular mixes, they know what most viewers want, they know what the long tail wants. Netflix literally knows what doesn't sell, and yet they keep making shows that don't sell. The only reason for going against the data has to be due to a top-down directive from the company itself. After all, if you have data that says "this will more likely be a hit than that", and you go ahead and make "that" anyway, the only reason you would do so is because you were told to do so. Now, with all of that in mind, ask yourself what that top-down directive could possibly be ...
    - orf 4y ago
      This is total nonsense. Sorry. You’ve fabricated some weird scenario in your head where the data screams out “woke content sucks” but god damn the executives just won’t listen! And then you attribute that to the Illuminati or the Woke Agenda or even the ghost of Carl Marx. Nobody knows “literally” what doesn’t sell when it comes to film and TV. It’s a shot in the dark each time.
- xedrac 4y ago
  My empirical evidence says otherwise. It is the primary reason I cancelled my subscription, and I've heard an awful lot of people complain about how every show has some forced social agenda. I suspect that Elon's tweet regarding Netflix, and the "woke" virus that has infected it, probably didn't help matters either. Say what you want about the guy, but he has a pretty massive amount of influence.
  - JMS2021 4y ago
    I cancelled, after being a member for 10 years. Three of my friends have gone back to torrents. The main reason... Almost everything has some fringe minority edge, a gay lead, a token trans friend and most of the stuff is "victim porn" with the usual white male protagonist. 100% reason why I cancelled and the same for my friends. Netflix, or Wokeflix is basically trash.
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  Any examination of Netflix that does NOT include Go Woke Go Broke is a joke. Everyone I know is at least aware of how cookie cutter and predictable the woke agenda is on every Netflix original, and it is a reoccurring topic when people finally decide to cancel
  - afavour 4y ago
    So why hasn’t Disney+, which is at least as “woke”, had a similar decline?
    - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
      It probably is but they also have far less market saturation, they're still half as big as Netflix. What about CNN+?
lupire 4y ago
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  It's catering to a loud minority. The majority are over it.
  - quantum_solanum 4y ago
    I'm sure you watched the news from Buffalo with glee, scum.
- psyc 4y ago
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    People who talk about things are people who care enough to talk about it, thus companies will assume that the people who do not care enough will accept woke or non-woke content equally.
    - rvba 4y ago
      Dont they fire everyone who speaks against the wokists?
      - jen20 4y ago
        You realize that most Netflix viewers are not Netflix employees? (For now at least!)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bob_roberts 4y ago
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  Not even close to what I said. Read it again.
- psyc 4y ago
  Oh please. They said that isn’t why. Anyone seen Shameless? Seasons 1-9 featured loads of gay and trans characters and plots, and they were superb. Seasons 10.5-11 were unironically woke garbage, and I had to abandon it midway into 11. I actually could not stand it anymore. The in your face preachy wokeness.
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    [flagged]
- ralusek 4y ago
  Euphoria? Excellent show. Reservation Dogs? Excellent show. Dear White People? Woke Garbage. Kill Bill? Excellent movie. Captain Marvel? Woke Garbage. You're demonstrating nothing but your own hyper-fixation on superficial identity characteristics by failing to recognize that there are plenty of "women, LGBT, PoC, etc" in all kinds of media beloved by those who are sick and tired of woke media. You think that these characteristics are sufficient for people to dislike this media, whereas the precise inverse seems to be true, wherein pro-woke people seem to be perfectly happy accepting garbage as media so long as these identity groups and messages are present. I'm not interested in continuing this conversation by taking some kind of boomer position on wokeness, I just think that you're willfully arguing in bad faith, but you already know that.
astrange 4y ago
> Get woke. Go broke. This has literally never actually happened to anyone. (Black Rifle Coffee just took a $4B writedown, so the opposite seems like more of a bad strategy.)
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  You're not actually serious? https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-that-support-the-narrative-go-woke-go-broke https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-that-support-th...
  - astrange 4y ago
    The only examples on there are one cafe, plus crazy people trying to claim P&G and Disney are somehow failing. Looks to me like both are closer to owning the entire planet than failing at anything.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      It's more shocking to claim that Disney is woke lol
draw_down 4y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
It isn't the wokeness that's the problem, it's the bad writing that tries to cover up for how shit it is by using its wokeness as a defense. Maybe it is my nostalgia talking, but it seems that the quality of the average TV writer has plummeted in the past 20 years. Owl House is pretty woke, enough to make Disney uncomfortable with it, but it gets great reviews and has a large fan base because it is written well. Meanwhile Star Trek: Discovery is rightfully being trashed by life long Star Trek fans like myself, who are pretty accustomed to progressive themes, because it is written largely by hacks.

sjtindell 4y ago

I mean I don’t know about screwed it up. You can’t expect any artist to just consistently produce pure hits. The creativity seems to come and go, the zeitgeist and the cultural context matter so much. Nobody (except, I would argue, Marvel) is able to be really consistent with their art. They were always doomed to fail producing their own content.

fragmede 4y ago
HBO seems to be doing fine producing their own content so I don't see it as a foregone conclusion that Netflix was doomed to fail. They didn't have the back-catalog but they had the head start in online distribution and could have bought a studio or two as they have for video games in order to seed their back-catalog. I think a large contribution to their failure is Netflix cancelling shows after two seasons. If a show's probably gonna get cancelled before it gets a good run, why why would I bother watching it? People want easy watching, and they want a lot of it. Eg The Office, which ended up lasting nine seasons. Only Netflix knows exactly why they canceled shows, as only they have the viewer numbers, but a rumor I've heard is that after two seasons is when the production starts to get expensive because that's when a show gets traction and the production team and actors can unionize to demand more money - money that Netflix doesn't want to spend. Unfortunately, in cancelling shows so quickly, there just aren't the shows to keep subscribers on the service - especially if subscribers have to keep picking a show to watch every two seasons. There's nothing more unsatisfying than spending an hour on Netflix trying to find something to watch only not to find anything. If they had more shows that ran nine seasons, it would be easier to justify keeping the subscription just for those shows. Two seasons just isn't enough episodes to keep watching a show and by playing penny-wise and pound-foolish, they just don't have the catalog. Which is sad, because the have a ton of good short-run shows that just needed more of a chance. The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once. Their choice, but it's very supportive of my habit to cancel my Netflix subscription every time I run out of things to watch, and subscribe to a different service.
- petre 4y ago
  > The other thing is their habit of releasing entire seasons at once The Korean studios are quite smart with this. They release 1 or 2 episodes on a weekday just like Netflix used to with Star Trek Discovery.

Gys 4y ago

> and no good movie Netflix has made in years That is very subjective. My wife and I really liked The power of the dog. And I am sure there are more. Also subjective: watching Netflix every day (I do not) will end up in watching below par stuff. No service will be able to produce that much high quality content for everybody’s taste.

asr21 4y ago
It was a good movie, but not a great movie. I would be surprised if you would rate that movie in top 20 for the last decade.
- Gys 4y ago
  You are implying netflix needs to offer a ‘ movie in top 20 for the last decade’ every week or so. You will indeed get very disappointed by all streaming services.
  - nasmorn 4y ago
    You will also be disappointed by basic math given that a decade has 520 weeks.

chii 4y ago

> they had billions of dollars to create original content they had the wrong idea that original content is their strong point. It's not. It's disney's strong point. Netflix should've used their dominant position to lobby for new rules to the game - prevent exclusivity of content! They should've lobbied gov't to mandate that studio productions of content be permanently untied to a streaming service, and be available to all players in the streaming space. Just like net neutrality, we might call this content neutrality. Netflix is at it's core, a tech company that solves technical issues with streaming. They pivoted to content creation, and they aren't very good at it - sure they got a couple of hits, but they cannot possibly compete on this with actual movie studios that own IPs from a century ago to this day.

jltsiren 4y ago
Netflix failed precisely because it's a tech company at its core. It can't outlobby the copyright industry, because it lacks the experience, the goodwill, and the political connections. And the celebrities supporting its goals. If Netflix wants to be successful in the entertainment industry, it must act like an entertainment company and give more power to the producers and the creatives.
jamie_ca 4y ago
Totally agree. If streaming video could get the same terms as streaming audio/radio (standardized mandatory licensing fees) and services could compete on encoding (cost efficiency on their end) and UI/UX (which Netflix is... not great) that would be an entirely different ballgame.
colinmhayes 4y ago
No chance that would've worked. Netflix saw themselves as a content creation company because they realized that having great content is the only way to keep growing.
bawolff 4y ago
I disagree - their issue was scaling it. When they started out creating original content, they were hitting it out of the park. Orange is the new black, daredevil, house of cards were all big hits. They scaled, quality was sacraficed for quantity, and their brand became very dilluted.

bawolff 4y ago

> 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? Kind of a weird example when the adam sandler movie (uncut gems) was probably one of the few critical succeses of their recent original content.

jjulius 4y ago
Different things. Netflix paid Sandler $250 million in 2014 for six Sandler originals under their studio, and renewed the deal in 2017 and 2020. Separately, Netflix just purchased streaming rights for Uncut Gems, which Sandler didn't write, from A24. I'm assuming it's the Sandler originals that OP is referring to.
colinmhayes 4y ago
uncut gems is not a netflix movie. It's A24.

midasuni 4y ago

Netflix could have bought a few of the legacy companies. Amazon bought MGM, Netflix could have bought cbs/paramount, or ABC, for the cost of a series of the crown.