4 ms·

Netflix accomplished two things: 1. They muscled into the "prestige television" club for $100MM. It may be overpriced, or it may be underpriced, either way it'

Netflix accomplished two things: 1. They muscled into the "prestige television" club for $100MM. It may be overpriced, or it may be underpriced, either way it's very good for consumers. 2. They validated television is the new book. You gorge on 13 hours of good television the same way you gorge on 13 chapters of a good book. This is very good for show creators. A triple win aligning interests while getting to say f-you to existing preconceptions. This is what "disruption" looks like. Now I'm just sad I didn't buy NFLX after people freaked out over Qwikster.

geuis 14y ago
Hmm, television as a book. I get the analogy. It's kind of like applying book serialization to video. You quickly read a book and as many sequels exist when you first pick it up. Then you have to wait for the next season, i.e. book, to come out.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  New normal are streams of everything.
- jseliger 14y ago
  I get the analogy and see the value in it, but I'll point out where the TV isn't like a book: 1. Books are obviously composed of text, and, when you read, you're also imbibing the rhythms of the language you're reading (see http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071... for more on this). 2. Related to number one, many more of us need to write than need to shoot and edit videos. Reading skill is related to writing skill. 3. You'll read far more words in a given block of time than you'll hear in video. Reading is much more information dense in this sense (whether a minute of video is worth a thousand words can be debated elsewhere). 4. It's easier to quote and store text than it is video. Notice the word "easier:" I'm aware that it's possible to quote and store video. Related to this, I use the scheme Steven Berlin Johnson describes here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... .
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    I'll defend. 1. House of Cards was 13 "chapters" that have definite rhythm and flow. Every hour was a mini three act play and it would make sense considering at the end of the day, video is just scripts brought to life by an accomplished playwright, accomplished director, accomplished talent, and accomplished cast. 2. We don't live in that world anymore. We're a civilization on an escalating need for input stimulation. It's an addiction, you're either the pusher or you're user. We've transitioned on the web from merely just hypertext to multimedia and real time, like how we've transitioned from typing in boring text updates to photo updates, and how we've moved from just merely chatting to video chatting. 3. But you experience much more in a given block of time than just pages on a book. And look at the movie industry versus the print industry. And the impact of a well crafted moment in a show, I posit, is much more powerful sometimes than a page can deliver. 4. Surf Tumblr for a few hours and you'll understand how things are done these days. Kids don't just share quotes anymore, kids share GIF screen caps of their favorite moments in the movie or show they like. And there are better and better tools each season to make screencapping creation/sharing easier by the day. Look up what IntoNow is doing with their community and how they're getting people to interact in real time to individual shows. Writing's on the wall: People don't read anymore, quoth Steve Jobs.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      > And the impact of a well crafted moment in a show, I posit, is much more powerful sometimes than a page can deliver. Depends on the writer. I've been haunted by single lines in novels for years. > Surf Tumblr for a few hours and you'll understand how things are done these days. Kids don't just share quotes anymore, kids share GIF screen caps of their favorite moments in the movie or show they like. In David Brin's uplift series, he posited that the "uplifted" sentient dolphins would mimic echolocation signals to beam images and short imagined movies directly into each other's heads. It's like we're becoming David Brin's dolphins. Someday, our tools will be so powerful and the interfaces so slick and efficient, we will just instantly produce little movies and beam them into each other's brains. We've already seen the effect of video on speech and syntax: "It was like..."
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Seems to me like the costs are wildly different though.
_delirium 14y ago
On the 2nd, wasn't that validated by the 1960s at the latest? That was a common perception at the time, anyway.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  This is a different behavior entirely. In the "couch potato" case people are just spending all day watching whatever is on, which might become a fundamental feature of their life. In the "netflix enthusiast" case people are spending chunks of free time consuming entire TV series, and often it's a thing that they'll do occasionally instead of continuously. This has very different consequences in the impact such behaviors have on someone's life.
  - GFischer 14y ago
    A bit tangential, but I really hope some service solves the "couch potato" use case for streaming - I love Netflix, but I miss cable tv's channel jumping. I want someone to curate and select shows for me, and show them in a channel, so I can just browse (an improved Cable Tv experiencie, hopefully ad-free, but probably not :P ). I also miss live (or slightly delayed but current) sports - that would be a killer feature for Netflix.
    - alaskamiller 14y ago
      Like a MTV VJ.
- davesims 14y ago
  Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using. Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels. This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia. What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.

geuis 14y ago

Hmm, television as a book. I get the analogy. It's kind of like applying book serialization to video. You quickly read a book and as many sequels exist when you first pick it up. Then you have to wait for the next season, i.e. book, to come out.

alaskamiller 14y ago
New normal are streams of everything.
jseliger 14y ago
I get the analogy and see the value in it, but I'll point out where the TV isn't like a book: 1. Books are obviously composed of text, and, when you read, you're also imbibing the rhythms of the language you're reading (see http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071... for more on this). 2. Related to number one, many more of us need to write than need to shoot and edit videos. Reading skill is related to writing skill. 3. You'll read far more words in a given block of time than you'll hear in video. Reading is much more information dense in this sense (whether a minute of video is worth a thousand words can be debated elsewhere). 4. It's easier to quote and store text than it is video. Notice the word "easier:" I'm aware that it's possible to quote and store video. Related to this, I use the scheme Steven Berlin Johnson describes here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... .
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  I'll defend. 1. House of Cards was 13 "chapters" that have definite rhythm and flow. Every hour was a mini three act play and it would make sense considering at the end of the day, video is just scripts brought to life by an accomplished playwright, accomplished director, accomplished talent, and accomplished cast. 2. We don't live in that world anymore. We're a civilization on an escalating need for input stimulation. It's an addiction, you're either the pusher or you're user. We've transitioned on the web from merely just hypertext to multimedia and real time, like how we've transitioned from typing in boring text updates to photo updates, and how we've moved from just merely chatting to video chatting. 3. But you experience much more in a given block of time than just pages on a book. And look at the movie industry versus the print industry. And the impact of a well crafted moment in a show, I posit, is much more powerful sometimes than a page can deliver. 4. Surf Tumblr for a few hours and you'll understand how things are done these days. Kids don't just share quotes anymore, kids share GIF screen caps of their favorite moments in the movie or show they like. And there are better and better tools each season to make screencapping creation/sharing easier by the day. Look up what IntoNow is doing with their community and how they're getting people to interact in real time to individual shows. Writing's on the wall: People don't read anymore, quoth Steve Jobs.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    > And the impact of a well crafted moment in a show, I posit, is much more powerful sometimes than a page can deliver. Depends on the writer. I've been haunted by single lines in novels for years. > Surf Tumblr for a few hours and you'll understand how things are done these days. Kids don't just share quotes anymore, kids share GIF screen caps of their favorite moments in the movie or show they like. In David Brin's uplift series, he posited that the "uplifted" sentient dolphins would mimic echolocation signals to beam images and short imagined movies directly into each other's heads. It's like we're becoming David Brin's dolphins. Someday, our tools will be so powerful and the interfaces so slick and efficient, we will just instantly produce little movies and beam them into each other's brains. We've already seen the effect of video on speech and syntax: "It was like..."
sliverstorm 14y ago
Seems to me like the costs are wildly different though.

_delirium 14y ago

On the 2nd, wasn't that validated by the 1960s at the latest? That was a common perception at the time, anyway.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
This is a different behavior entirely. In the "couch potato" case people are just spending all day watching whatever is on, which might become a fundamental feature of their life. In the "netflix enthusiast" case people are spending chunks of free time consuming entire TV series, and often it's a thing that they'll do occasionally instead of continuously. This has very different consequences in the impact such behaviors have on someone's life.
- GFischer 14y ago
  A bit tangential, but I really hope some service solves the "couch potato" use case for streaming - I love Netflix, but I miss cable tv's channel jumping. I want someone to curate and select shows for me, and show them in a channel, so I can just browse (an improved Cable Tv experiencie, hopefully ad-free, but probably not :P ). I also miss live (or slightly delayed but current) sports - that would be a killer feature for Netflix.
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    Like a MTV VJ.
davesims 14y ago
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using. Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels. This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia. What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.