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A few thoughts: 1) On the talk of saturation Netflix had somewhere around 230 mil subscribers last year. In theory the addressable market should be adults ~20
by jdprgm 4y ago
A few thoughts:
1) On the talk of saturation Netflix had somewhere around 230 mil subscribers last year. In theory the addressable market should be adults ~20 and up so somewhere around 5 bil. So not even close to saturation. Discounting say half of that imagine how much better the service could be with 10x the current subscriber base. They talk about increasing subscription price... At 10x you could half the subscription price and still increase content spending 5x which would be pretty incredible.
2) The article talks about old content not holding value as expected. I think a lot of this has to do with the near complete failure to invest in rewatchable content. They were clearly aware the value of shows like The Office and Friends in terms of rewatchability. Off the top of my head I can't even think of an attempt at original content in that lane from Netflix (Licensing and extra seasons of Arrested Development is the only thing that comes to mind). To be fair though utterly bizarrely nearly every service has failed at this kind of content for the past 5 years or so.
3) The lack of global hits is very strange. I was trying to lookup high budget tv productions in foreign countries and not sure if it is just a lack of data or they don't exist. I would think even if there is a cultural bias around kinds of shows people watch just in terms of production quality western shows would still be globally dominant. Are there any examples of international shows with 20 mil per episode budgets?
This one is definitely strange to me looking back on what I would have estimated for the world of streaming a decade ago. I would have expected a much more expected shared culture in terms of what is watched worldwide. Instead it seems if anything we have become increasingly isolated. It's crazy to think Netflix isn't even active in a country the size of China for example. I would have thought by now technology would lead to shows with viewerships counted in the billions not millions. Squid Game is apparently Netflix's most popular show ever but even that from brief research has under 200 mil views which in the context of total population still makes it incredibly unpopular. I.e. if you take 100 random humans and put them in a room almost none of them have seen it. I wonder if we will ever reach a point where anything is actually globally popular.
- thewebcount 4y ago> 3) The lack of global hits is very strange. Yeah, this part of the article really struck me: > what’s really interesting is there aren’t that many global hits, meaning that everyone in the world watches the same thing. Squid Game was very rare in that way. And Wednesday looks like one of those too, very rare in that way. I have to wonder what the problem is. I've watched more foreign-language shows in the last 3 years than in the rest of my 51 years combined thanks to shows on Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV+, etc. I'd love to see more of them, but they aren't surfacing in my searches and recommendations very frequently. I'd really like more variety in show selections. They don't even have to be big hits like Squid Games or Lupin. I'd be interested in any show that's good regardless of whether it's been a blockbuster hit. On something like Hulu, there are tons of shows that mostly fall into Police/Medical procedural, Office-like sitcom, or Friends-like sitcom. Those are fine, and some are even pretty decent, but I'm really tired of those formats. Seeing shows about other cultures has been fascinating. And just having other types of stories is nice, too.
- tedsanders 4y agoCounterpoints: - Average person lives in a household of 4.9 people[1], which means market size isn't 5 bil but closer to 1 bil - Plus, the household needs broadband internet, which rules out vast swaths of the world today, brining down addressable market further - Many of the hundreds of millions of households not signed up are in markets like India, where the price is like 20% of the price in the USA or Europe; so a 100% increase in membership might only mean a 33% increase in revenue - Further, if you capture the Indian and Nigerian and Indonesian markets, sure you have more revenue (say +33%) to spend on more content, but a lot of that content will need to be Indian content and Nigerian content and Indonesian content, so the actual increase in content spend relevant to you will much much less than 33% In conclusion, I think a +500% increase in spend on content you're interested in is not a plausible outcome of everyone on Earth signing up for Netflix. It's probably an order of magnitude less, like +50%. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/31/with-billions-confined-to-their-homes-worldwide-which-living-arrangements-are-most-common/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/31/with-billio...