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Netflix's streaming never made sense to me even when they were the only game in town. I think they benefited from a halo effect from their compelling DVD mail
by mcpackieh 3y ago
Netflix's streaming never made sense to me even when they were the only game in town. I think they benefited from a halo effect from their compelling DVD mailing service which actually had a ton of great content. But eventually people figure out that the streaming service only has a few thousand movies, which means the odds of the particular movie you want to watch being offered is very low.
- jfengel 3y agoI used to work in a video store, and even though we had a lot of movies available, most people only wanted a relatively small number of new releases. I really miss when Netflix DVD had a truly vast back catalog of obscure films, but I suspect a lot of them didn't circulate all that much. With streaming, the movies that people want always seem to be available somewhere. You might have to subscribe to a half-dozen services to get all of them, or rent them a la carte. Each of those services has some back catalog as a kind of nudge to keep watching this service rather than cancel and jump to some other service while waiting for the next big movie to come out. But they don't seem to expect any individual item to get much play. Netflix in particular seems to mostly want to cut out the middle man and produce its own content. A lot of Netflix's most popular items are their own. I'm not sure I understand the economics of that -- they're spending major-studio-money on films ($100M+) and then using it as a "loss leader" to for their all-you-can-eat service.