
Netflix drops 10% after missing on global paid subscribers - jbredeche
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/netflix-earnings-q2-2019.html
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bluetidepro
I just recently cancelled my Netflix subscription after 10+ years of being a
customer (after they raised the prices, yet again).

For me, the problem is they are just throwing too many darts at the wall at
this point. There is just sooo much garbage original content being added
monthly, it seems. They are almost over optimizing/testing their shows, in my
opinion. Instead of focusing on the good shows (obviously opinionated), and
building up on them with new seasons, it seems like they are just investing
more into new content to see what happens. Sadly, they have also been ending a
lot of what I thought were popular shows on there (some of my favorites).
Their catalog outside of Netflix original shows has also been dropping
significantly, which many very popular shows leaving here soon
(Office/Friends).

I used to spend about 80/20% time on Netflix/Hulu, now it's 100% Hulu after
cancelling Netflix. The content on Hulu has been ramping up significantly for
their TV department (non-originals). Plus, I love having my HBO through Hulu,
and it's all in one place under 1 subscription payment.

I'll most likely re-subscribe to Netflix again in a few years just for a month
or two to watch a few seasons of new content that will actually interest me
(then cancel again), but until then, no need to pay them so they can produce
the copious amounts of BS half-assed content like they seem to only be doing
lately.

~~~
justaguyhere
I was bummed when they canceled Marco Polo, I liked that show. They seem to be
canceling way too many shows. Kinda reminds me of Google canceling products
left and right, even those with tons of users...

~~~
Deimorz
This newsletter from early last week had some really interesting thoughts
about this: [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-
hollywo...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood)

It quoted a section from an article in The Information:

> [Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when
> they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a
> show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons
> don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the
> second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend
> to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.

~~~
r00fus
It's unfortunate that even Netflix wasn't able to transition the industry to
episodic production runs as opposed to season-based.

Is it possible that the best distribution is an exponential backoff of new
episode timing instead of just cutting it off at "2 seasons".

~~~
kjsbfkjbf
The financial uncertainty would be appalling.

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JaimeThompson
I may be canceling soon simply over the annoying auto-play trailers when I
dare stay on a show for more than 5 seconds. Really annoying at night.

~~~
rexf
Their auto-playing trailers seems to be something that I've only seen negative
feedback about online. The assumption is that their internal metrics show
auto-playing trailers has a positive impact (on their metrics) so they're
keeping them?

~~~
jonshariat
This might be a case of trackable vs un-trackable. Where the thing that is
trackable tells you one thing and the full reality (the untrackable) is
missed.

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lanrh1836
Yikes. A little more than half the estimate. I’m pretty sure that is the worst
miss the company has ever had.

With recent news that reruns like the Office and Friends are leaving next
year, it would be really funny if a large chunk of Netflix subscribers are
literally subscribing just to watch decades old reruns. It could be a bit of
an Emperor Has No Clothes situation for them.

~~~
wvenable
Netflix is a heavily data-oriented company; if a large chunk of Netflix
subscribers just watch decades old reruns then they know it. What Netflix
needs to do is build content specifically for these people and I don't believe
they're doing that.

My anecdote on this: My collage age daughter watches Friends on Netflix
basically continuously -- she's probably watched every season a dozen times
now -- when she gets to last episode it just cycles around again. This is
because she keeps on it in the background when she's studying or doing school
work.

~~~
dangrossman
What can you build for those people except reboots of those old shows, which
they're doing (e.g. Sabrina, Fuller House)? They can't force NBC to license
them the old reruns forever if NBC doesn't want to. There's no amount of money
they can offer that will work once a studio decides it's going to reserve the
content for its own streaming service.

~~~
wvenable
Make new shows that appeal to that market.

Netflix content is a reflection of it's desire to compete with HBO, not NBC.

~~~
jbob2000
You can’t make a new Office or Friends. Those were created by really special
groups of people and I’m not confident today’s society allows groups like this
to form.

This decade of outrage that we’re coming out of (hopefully) has crushed an
entire generation of comedians and actors. Look at late night talk shows for
example; they’re totally stale. Nobody has the balls to say anything, fearing
the tweet storm will be turned against their production company.

It’ll take another generation before we’ll be in a place to create good shit
again. Or maybe it will never happen again and the golden age is over?

~~~
cannonedhamster
Yeah those darn kids. Why won't they just get off your lawn. You know who said
the same thing you just did? Every generation about the next generation. You
can literally go back to how people were complaining books were causing
corruption in kids and how things used to be better when. There are more
comedy shows available than ever before on television and see the push off s
button. Comedy is alive and well, it's just that comedy changes over time and
what you find funny, the kids don't find edgy or relevant. Remember when Dane
Cook was funny? How about Rodney Dangerfield? Hell, Richard Pryor before Eddie
Murphy (Raw is still an amazing set). Comedy will always change and it's a
reflection of the society that exists at that time, not the past. Plenty of
comedians say really crazy things that don't create a tweet storm. Chris
Hardwick survived a tweet storm based on some allegations from his ex and he's
doing just fine now. Aziz Ansari seems to be humming along just fine too. I
think the real point is that the kids are okay. You don't need to worry about
their sense of humor it's still firmly intact.

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dannykwells
I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like
Friends, Seinfeld, The Office - shows you can watch casually and not have to
binge. My wife hates Netflix precisely because she hates binging. She wants to
watch sitcoms and shows where you don't have to invest heavily. And you know,
so do I. Life is hard enough without having to following tons of different
plots lines and having tons of characters always die.

Anyway, we have Hulu now which has gotten quite good. I can imagine cancelling
Netflix pretty soon honestly.

~~~
thomaslkjeldsen
> I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like
> Friends, Seinfeld, The Office

Technically, it seems unnecessary to stream the same content repeatedly, and
financially it seems wasteful to pay a monthly fee for access to the same
content. How about buying the particular shows once (e.g. iTunes) and have the
data stored locally (e.g. appleTV)?

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kgwgk
“Much of our domestic, and eventually global, Disney catalog, as well as
Friends, The Office, and some other licensed content will wind down over the
coming years, freeing up budget for more original content. [...] From what
we’ve seen in the past when we drop strong catalog content (Starz and Epix
with Sony, Disney, and Paramount films, or 2nd run series from Fox, for
example) our members shift over to enjoying our other great content.”

~~~
smacktoward
_> freeing up budget for more original content_

This is an impressive bit of spin, seeing as how creating new original
programming is always going to be more expensive than licensing older/original
programming. So yeah, losing the licensed programming "frees up budget," but
the end result will be a smaller catalog.

~~~
kgwgk
Making a virtue of necessity.

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lordnacho
As a former quant fund manager Netflix presents an interesting problem. If you
read about the quant space, a whole load of people reckon they can use ML to
make money.

The problem for them is much like for Netflix.

Having a way to predict the future is not the whole story of how to decide
what to do.

Netflix having a whole load of data about what people watched, for how long,
their demographics, etc, is probably very useful. But it is not an obvious
step to go from knowing what people saw, even predicting it, to deciding what
to produce and what to present to them.

Add to that the likely fact that people often want something fresh and
innovative, and you have quite some stretched assumptions in statistical
terms.

Not saying this is the end, I don't know enough about the business. Just that
it's an interesting jump that I rarely hear anyone talk about.

~~~
sgt101
Well, driving by using the rear view mirror isn't a wildly successful
strategy. Many people are surprised by the difference between testing
strategies for ML working to predict physical phenoma and complex systems like
the markets; you can backtest market strategies to bits and it matters not
even a bit, it means nothing.

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mythz
I'm likely going to remain a permanent subscriber even if there's nothing I
like to watch because I never want to return to the pre-Netflix days of normal
TV which I haven't watched in more than a decade but get a glimpse of it
every-time I visit my folks who have both Cable and normal over-the-air TV,
both of which I find unwatchable - ad-laced, cringeworthy, opinionated,
political, dated and of low-effort quality.

Netflix's on-demand streaming is basically the only way I can watch long-form
media content these days.

Also the economics of paying a low monthly fee for access to billion dollars
worth of content per year is insane value and something I'd definitely like to
see more of, so I'd like to see the Netflix model continue to succeed.

~~~
apta
You can opt into the no-TV lifestyle as well :-)

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doodliego
I'm cancelling my sub because the back catalog is non-existent in my region.
It is impossible to find anything older than 2000 anymore. On top of that,
their UI and search functions are straight-up garbage that deliberately steer
you to their own trash.

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medecau
I have a bunch of series in "my list" waiting for "new episodes".

Favorite anime series audio is not available in English. Nor is most other
originally non-English content.

Why should I renew?

~~~
kodz4
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

~~~
cannonedhamster
Which is available on Hulu in it's entirety with way more good content for the
same price.

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tus88
Has the movie roster improved much over the years? I looked at it a few years
ago and I could barely find a single movie I wanted to watch.

~~~
misterprime
This is a useful tool for determining if a streaming service has any movies
you want to watch:

[https://flickmetrix.com/](https://flickmetrix.com/)

But no. Netflix's value seems to be in its original shows. So, if they come
out with a new season show I'm interested in, such as The Last Kingdom, they
can have my subscription for the month. The trend of show seasons becoming
progressively worse, a la House of Cards, should be a concern for them.

Disney+ is really going to give them a challenge once it is available.

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victorkilo1
IMHO, the problem with Netflix is: 1\. Too few shows that I actually want to
watch: The office, Futurama etc are no longer on Netflix 2\. The original
content is very hit and miss, and mostly misses. By the time I find out about
a series and start watching, they cancel it. They need to realize that it
takes time for people to find out about series and at times it can take two to
three years. You can do agile dev with content 3\. Binging one or two series
is fine, but there is very little "weekly programming".Sometimes, I just want
to catch one episode of something a week 4\. The movie catalog is abysmal,
with the exception of the Monty Python stuff 5\. The UI is just actively
hostile. Let me set my defaults across all shows (no intro, thirty seconds
between shows etc)

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Yossarian69
If Netflix would bring back Marco Polo and cancel 13 Reasons Why I might
actually renew my subscription again, instead of comfortably moving over to
Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go etc. as I already have.

I have used Netflix since back in the days when they would send you discs in
the mail; now all they send us garbage content over the net.

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eugene2012
Has anyone here seen the show What/If, about a biotech start-up? This is one
of those shows that was one of Netflix's "dart thrown at the wall"\--terrible
acting, unrealistic representation of start-up/VC world, etc. Just really,
really bad.

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kelnos
Note that earnings were released after the close of trading, so the ~10% drop
is in after-hours trading, which is not necessarily representative of what
tomorrow's open (and trading) will look like.

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simonebrunozzi
The big question is what happens when the big Disney initiative lands (I think
end of 2019). I used to be very skeptical about Disney, but what I've heard so
far seems interesting.

~~~
jdhn
I honestly think that Disney is going to clean house. The amount of IP that
they have is just staggering, and for some reason my generation (millenials)
absolutely love everything that they put out (Avengers, Star Wars, etc).

Disney also seems to place a lot of emphasis on UX, so I bet that the app that
they come out with will be fantastic.

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tschellenbach
I'm a subscriber, but there isn't much to watch now that i'm done with 3%,
stranger things and moneyheist. Still they have word party, which is excellent

~~~
mythz
I thought Netflix was lacking in content for a long time so I ended up
watching fringe shows outside of my typical viewing habits and was pleasantly
surprised with the high quality production from:

    
    
      - The OA 
      - Dark
      - Sense 8
      - Black Spot
    

I'm looking forward to the next seasons of Altered Carbon and Lost in Space
the most which seem to have been delayed. Other than Netflix's popular block
busters, my other favorite shows I can recommend include: Narcos, Lucifer,
Travelers, Outlander, Better Call Saul, Ozark, Sabrina and Dirk Gently's.

~~~
thiagomgd
Travelers is awesome, but I wanted another season. Dirk Gently's too

