15 ms·
Netflix prepares to send its final red envelope
- swozey 3y agoNetflix is such an interesting company. They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. Netflix pays their engineers a ton of money, no equity. We're talking 300-500k cash. As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs. I absolutely dreamed that one day I'd be capable enough to work for Netflix or Pixar on high end network lowest throughput-we-can-accomplish infra. Now it's all a joke to me. I don't even have Netflix account anymore. I've attempted to launcha a multitude of Netflix OSS projects like ConsoleMe and Conductor. I have never ever, and I'm saying this as someone who hopped onto Kubernetes version 1.1 in 2015. I have never had a worse open source experience than Netflix OSS projects. They basically shoot them out then abandon them and never touch them again. This post made me hit up their Github again and there are (possible) gems like Zuul, Falcor, Chaosmonkey.. but seriously, go try and deploy them. It's embarassing. https://github.com/netflix https://github.com/netflix
- geodel 3y agoSeems all true to me. Apart from being I did not find Netflix projects gem. In my usage and looking at their code, they seem like overwrought Java enterprise projects. The place I work they are slowly replacing Netflix OSS with other products. Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.
- swozey 3y agoMy resume has the (dis)pleasure of converting all of Netflixes OSS projects to run in containers. JVM or not. I have golang services that run at 80Mb, I have rust services that run at 20Mb. Every JVM service? I have to literally define its memory consumption with command line flags (-jvmx? I forget, its my weekend) on each deployment. Running JVMs in k8s is hilarious. I'm not grey beard Linux level yet (soon) but my god. It's hilarious how poorly they perform.
- tough 3y agoeveryone's weekend at the same time you realise
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- arwineap 3y agoI'm reading this on Monday :)
- progbits 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History Almost, but not quite. (I'm linking the "history" section because it has a nice map. There is a table further down.)
- ponector 3y agoYou never know. Some countries have work week starting on Sunday
- geodel 3y agoAgree. I maybe wrong but I think it was Netflix first which normalized generating one web service call generating 1MB worth of logs. In our place finance is kind of whopping ass of teams which are generating extensive logging and monitoring as Splunk cost goes through roof.
- sharts 3y agoSpinnaker
- tiffanyh 3y ago> “Netflix is such an interesting company.” An often forgotten fact is that Netflix started Roku as a product & spun it off.
- ksey3 3y agoThats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content. In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head. Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter. After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash. And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers. Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo. Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
- kbarmettler 3y agoI know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
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- yieldcrv 3y agoI don’t understand what the expense of los gatos has to do with anything did you go work for Netflix? was it enough to live on in los gatos? what a random selection of non sequiturs
- deaddodo 3y ago> They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone". I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though. > As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so. It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.
- google234123 3y ago> I've ever heard they never do RSUs Well...I'm surprised you didn't bother doing google search. You choose what percent of the 500k cash if stock. 0% or 90% if you want. I don't get why you are complaining about the location - all the bay is expensive and you can easily afford a 2 million dollar home on a 500k salary.
- sramam 3y agodepending on where one is coming from, $2M house in the SF Bay area can be surprisingly small.
- b112 3y agoVery much so. A $4M home is sort of an average sized house, in Palo Alto. And with barely any land.
- google234123 3y agoOk... so what? Netflix is in Los Gatos. 2M also won't get you too much for an apartment facing central park in NYC
- google234123 3y agoSo? The OP didn't talk about buying a mansion
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- gnicholas 3y ago> I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc. Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.
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- swozey 3y ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 3y agoAmen. HN is becoming increasingly brain dead, and the discourse stupid.
- BonoboIO 3y agoIt amazes me, that Netflix is capable of such top of the line engineering things (really mindblowing stuff, one machine that streams nearly 1 Terabit pers second), but is for the love of god unable to stream HD Content to my iPhone (newest firmware, all up2date). Tried everything gigabit wifi, cellular, multiple ISPs ... It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience. I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.
- jquery 3y agoIs it unprofitable? The article seemed to imply the business was still profitable, it was just small relative to the success of streaming. Or perhaps it suffers from adverse selection... the only people still using the service are the least profitable heavy users? I wish the article delved into that instead of being a Netflix puff piece.
- kibwen 3y agoRight? With $60 million in revenue, that's quite a few customers (and if they haven't switched to streaming by now, those are loyal customers indeed). If there's any profit in it at all, that's a lifestyle business waiting to happen.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoThere's a ton of smaller players that have gotten a huge bump. The era of discs via mail is far from over. https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail https://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com https://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com https://www.gamefly.com https://www.gamefly.com are the main three so far I believe. More are in the works though.
- quickthrower2 3y agoDisc via mail can win these sorts of people: * People/areas with poor internet connection. Or no internet connection (but a way to occasionally get on e.g. a library) * People who want to make watching a movie a special event at home, not just a dooms-scrolling life filler. * People who want to see decent movies :-) that are not available for streaming * People who want to rip the DVDS :-) * People who are set in their ways have a DVD connected to a big TV and don't want to mess around with tech.
- fbdab103 3y agoPlus the quality. I do not think any streaming service offers the same fidelity as a local Blueray.
- anoncow 3y agoat around 100 mil of revenue, I wonder how profitable the DVD business was for netflix.
- mk_stjames 3y agoI was an OG subscriber while in college. I can't remember what I was paying- was it $4.99 a month? And you could have out 3 DVD's at a time... so what I would do to maximize my bandwidth was rent 3 DVD's, and as soon as they'd arrive I'd toss them in a PC dedicated to ripping discs. One drive to read from and one DVD-RW drive to burn. I'd then send the DVD's back the next morning on my way out my dorm, and I think there was a queue to send more out as soon as they got those 3 back in the mail, which took 4-5 days for where I lived, unfortunately. I did this for a year or so. The movies went in one of those giant zip-up trapper-keeper things for CD's. All in total, I think I ripped about 80 DVDs. And a lot of them I don't think I ever actually got around to watching...
- blahyawnblah 3y agoThis was me in college also. I remember finding 3rd party or not-quite-matching oem firmware for my pc's dvd drive to speed up reading and burning. I think I had a Pioneer driver, all sorts of stuff was available for it.
- vel0city 3y agoMy college had a few different collection times, and the apartment usually delivered in the morning. So I could get a DVD in the mail, rip it, drop it off, and it would be picked up same-day. Netflix would get it the next morning.
- squokko 3y agoYou're not the first person I've seen with more of a movie-ripping than movie-watching habit. The thrill is feeling like you've gotten one over on the system. The reality is that you made more money for the creator of the film than they would have otherwise gotten from you ($0).
- developer93 3y agoIt feels like an ethical low risk kind of pirating.
- NonNefarious 3y ago
- tim-- 3y agoDoes anyone know the company that manufacturers the red envelopes? My email address is in my profile.
- ClassyJacket 3y agoWhen I first heard an American on the internet talk about Netflix mailing DVDs, I thought it was a joke. Kind of like if someone said TikTok existed in the 90s and they used to mail VHS tapes of people's home recordings.
- jtuple 3y agoNetflix has been around since 1997. At that time, directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world. As a non-American, how were you watching movies in 1997? And yeah TikTok/etc didn't exist then. No one hard smartphones and the Internet was text/GIF only. That said, we used to have the America's Funniest Home Videos show. People mailed in VHS recordings of their kids/pets doing cute, funny, or cringe things. This aired on TV and people voted to pick a winner. People could win $10k-100k in prize money. So yeah, proto YT or whatever was a thing, just scaled to available tech at the time. EDIT: Just realized AFHV is still around, and will outlive Netflix DVDs. *That* certainly feels like a joke. How does a network television meme show still exist in 2023???
- ClassyJacket 3y agoI did not think they were streaming movies in 1997 and I did not say I thought they were streaming movies in 1997. I thought they simply did not exist until years later when they started streaming. This should have been obvious from what I said, I'm not a total moron.
- eCa 3y ago> directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world. Yeah, a 33.6 kb/s modem vs a station wagon hurtling down the highway with a dvd is a fair fight.
- pyuser583 3y agoNetflix was founded on August 29, 1997. In the Terminator franchise, that’s the day nuclear war destroys the world (“Judgement Day”). I wonder if that was coincidence.
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- paxys 3y agoThe tech industry has such bizarre economics. If I told you I had a business with: - $120M in annual revenue - 1M fiercely loyal customers who paid every month - 5 distribution centers spread across the country - 100 happy employees, each with a tenure of a decade or longer You'd probably say that I had achieved the definition of success in the business world and should be proud of myself. To Netflix, on the other hand, this business is so irrelevant that they'd rather take it out back and shoot it in the head just to save the bother of continuing to run it.
- ekianjo 3y agoStopping services for loyal and long time consumers is insane. Even if your profit margin is lower in that business you keep it alive because you respect people who have carried you to where you are now. The hubris...
- chii 3y ago> Stopping services for loyal and long time consumers is insane it's not, unfortunately. If the business isn't making _enough_ money (where "enough" actually means maximum possible out of all of possibilities), then you are better off switching the investment to the other investment that is returning more.
- tspike 3y agoEven better would be selling it to someone who wants it.
- whatshisface 3y agoNetflix is a public company, so that investment tradeoff decision is being made about allocating money not between online netflix and mail netflix, but more like borax and mail netflix.
- sharts 3y ago[flagged]
- ramraj07 3y agoThe greatest loss is the innocence and aligned incentives DvD Netflix had. They pioneered eerily accurate recommendations (anyone remember the Netflix recommendation challenges?). You rated all the movies out of 5 stars and Netflix recommended the best movies without any limits. Because they more or less had every movie ever made in their library! Their only incentive was to make you discover the best movie you wanted to watch! Irony was that dvd Netflix still maintained this rating system at least a few years back when I used it. I paid and kept it more for the list and recommendations than the discs themselves. When streaming started Netflix’s incentives changed: if you had a rank ordered personal watchlist, you’ll notice if the movie you added left the service. Back then they were also playing this game of circling the expensive movies in and out of the service every six months or a year - if your watchlist was unordered, you eventually saw the movie you wanted to watch in that list and could see it. They end up paying only half the license fees. In the end their recommendation system couldn’t be honest because they basically couldn’t stream the best movie you’d like to see. Not to mention they’d have to openly say the movies they commissioned are likely not going to be enjoyable for you personally. So they completely gutted the recommendation system into the ghastly crap we have today which is designed to hide their selection flaws than to serve you honestly. The other frustrating thing for me to see online is when people criticize Netflix for bad design decisions - till Hastings was running the ship, I felt every bad UX move they made was in genuine service of hiding the flaws necessitated by their limited licensing abilities. And they were damn smart about it too. Netflix’s greatest downfall was their content strategy which seems to be some idea of data driven predictive crap. They likely got buoyed by the success of the first few shows into thinking they can do everything with data. For the budget Netflix has nowadays if they actually got their content act together theyd be a much larger powerhouse. Hope they do it before it’s too late. It will be missed for sure.
- pmoriarty 3y agoNetflix's streaming service has such a shitty selection of movies compared to Netflix's DVD service. The end of its DVD service is a huge loss. Sadly, many people who've only ever used its streaming service will never know what they were missing.
- santiagobasulto 3y ago> It started as a brainstorm between Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, successful businessmen looking to reinvent the DVD rental business. It definitely did not. Reed always had the online streaming business as main goal, but internet was not as fast yet. He cites Andrew Tanenbaum’s Networking book as inspiration. There’s a page in the book that says “don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of data tapes”. (I used the same textbook at Uni and I remember clearly reading that page as well, crazy)
- jefftk 3y ago"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) circa 1985) via https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
- santiagobasulto 3y agoYes, that one, thanks! I also remember one from Silberschatz's OS textbook about Deadlock that mentioned an old law which said that whenever two trains approached an intersection, they both had to come to a full stop and none could move until the other one had left.
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- wodenokoto 3y agoLast time they tried to spin it off it did not go well in terms of PR. Maybe it is easier to shut off a feature than it is to ask for it to be a paid feature? Not to be smug, but my feeling at the time of Qwikster was that if they didn't spin it off they would shut it down. Didn't expect it to live on for another decade though. https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/11/3153720/netflix-qwikster-dvd-spinoff-hastings https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/11/3153720/netflix-qwikster-...
- walthamstow 3y ago> Automated Rental Return Machine (ARRM), which processes 3,500 DVDs an hour, with the precision of Swiss watch engineers. I have never in my 33 years heard anyone refer to the precision of the engineers, rather than the watch itself. Every day is a school day, I guess.
- kwanbix 3y agoSame here. "swiss watch" is what I will use/hear/read.
- 9881337605 3y ago[flagged]
- anonymousDan 3y agoFor those in the UK, check out https://www.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/ https://www.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/. So nice to be able to order the movies/series you want instead of being restricted to Netflix junk.
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- johnsutor 3y agoI long for the days of the Netflix Instant Streaming disk for the Wii
- coliveira 3y agoNetflix completely lost its original business, which was to deliver hollywood movies to customers. Nowadays they are in the business of creating new titles, just like Disney. I much prefer the old days where I could rent practically any movie in existence. That's why I don't even bother paying for Netflix anymore.
- no_wizard 3y agoUnfortunately, as Netflix grew, it was largely inevitable that the big networks / studios were going to think that licensing their content to Netflix was a worse option than spinning up their own streaming services, they want to, at the end of the day, own as much of the relationship and the pipeline to the customer as possible, and they weren't going to get that with Netflix. Netflix ended up in a race to acquire content defensively against the dwindling prospects of major licensing renewals, for example, Disney pulled out of Netflix almost completely. The honeymoon period of just about everything being on Netflix was either dead or near dead by 2020.
- tacocataco 3y agoMy local library has a TON of dvds I go through for free. I would check yours to see if they offer a similar service. If only I could do all my banking with the library/post office...
- mensetmanusman 3y agoLibraries are the new Netflix. Most are under a large interstate exchange system where they help you acquire almost any dvd you are interested in. Get involved and you can be a part of which dvds are purchased!
- jncfhnb 3y agoTo what extent would it be legal to purchase individual copies of media and rent them out to view on a per license basis distributed digitally, not physically?
- gathersnow 3y agoI signed up for Netflix around the time I got my first DVD player in the late 90s. I watched a lot of cool movies I would never have otherwise had access to. It was fun to discover indie and foreign cinema that were not available in my local video rental stores. When they released streaming it was truly awesome. Not only was the seleciton great, they also had things like the concept of "friends" and you could let your friends see what you watched. The joy of discovering new movies could have gone the way of something like letterboxd except where you can actually see the movies. The Netflix challenge was cool too because it really seemed like they wanted to get you to find the perfect movie for _you_. But when the studios started to wise up and pull their content they chose the most user-hostile and pessimistic ways of dealing with it. Netflix used to be more than just a content pipe, they added value the form of the recommendation engine and were starting to add value in a social network of sorts. But instead they chose deception to hide the fact that their library was getting hollowed out. They killed off the budding social-media aspect. I guess content is the foundation upon which you build all of these things and when their content got yanked they had to focus on maximizing viewer experience within those limitations. But a part of me does wonder if I could find something I really like within the huge library of unknown garbage they have. The problem is that they don't seem to care about that kind of experience anymore. So that's why I am no longer a subscriber.
- khalidx 3y agoIn comparison, in about < 1 day of TV use I somehow downloaded (streamed) > 115 GBs of data. Mostly Netflix and other streaming services. Insane how far we have come, compared to a 4-9 GB DVD disc!
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agohttps://archive.ph/O81PV https://archive.ph/O81PV
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoBusiness idea I've casually had for a while now: would it be legal to build an enormous DVD jukebox, "rent" a DVD out to a subscriber on demand, and stream the physical DVD to them with the navigation menus and everything? Has anyone attempted this before?
- bigtunacan 3y agoThere's been a couple of attempts, but that wouldn't service the same customers. Most customers still using Netflix DVDs by mail are in rural areas without adequate internet or just not interested in streaming.
- tim-- 3y agoNetflix had deals with the studios. When you rented a Netflix DVD, it was highly unlikely (not impossible) that you would receive a retail disk.
- CharlesW 3y agoAereo did the TV version of this, renting each user an antenna instead of renting DVDs. Its outcome may be instructive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo: …the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Aereo's services breached copyright laws. It ruled that, "viewed in terms of Congress’ regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly", and that "insofar as there are differences, those differences concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service."
- bonzini 3y agoThe suggestion in the parent comment is a bit different because one would think that the first sale doctrine applies. Unfortunately the courts are chipping at it more and more every year.
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