
Netflix’s Movie Blitz Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Heart - Element_
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/business/media/netflix-movies-hollywood.html
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adrianN
I find this development very sad. For a short number of years it looked like
the Internet would enable me to legally watch any movie I want whenever I want
it. But Hollywood did not want it that way. Instead streaming services are
slowly but surely becoming just another TV station. Everything is siloed again
and unless I want to pay ten bucks a month per movie studio I'm again left
choosing between movies I don't really want to see. Not long now and it'll
become strictly worse than renting DVDs in all dimensions but the small
inconvenience of having to go to a physical store.

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BurningFrog
> _Everything is siloed again_

Jeez. Extrapolate much? A _few things_ are siloed. Almost everything is
available at both Apple and Amazon.

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TeMPOraL
> _Almost everything is available at both Apple and Amazon._

In the US. I.e. for roughly 10% of the Internet-connected population.

EDIT: I originally wrote "1%" which was correctly pointed out to be wrong. I
meant 10% (the US population divided by 50% of the planet), just did an off-
by-one-zero error.

~~~
chx
According to [https://www.statista.com/topics/2237/internet-usage-in-
the-u...](https://www.statista.com/topics/2237/internet-usage-in-the-united-
states/) the United States has

> nearly 290 million internet users as of 2016

According to [https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-
populatio...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-
worldwide/)

> almost 4.2 billion people were active internet users

The US is roughly 7% of the Internet connected population.

~~~
oblio
True, but that percentage is probably going down as we speak, as
China/India/etc. are moving up in the world.

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sxp62000
Netflix is churning out TV shows at an astonishing rate, some are great, most
aren't. This has lead me to avoid clicking on thumbnails that have "Netflix"
written on them unless I've already heard of the show.

Netflix is good at making shows that are satisfying to watch, but hardly
interesting or innovative. It's like ordering fast food. Hope they don't do
this to their movies.

Quality-wise HBO is still the best.

~~~
RunningDroid
> some are great, most aren't Sturgeon's law* strikes again.

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

~~~
RunningDroid
Double newlines strike again

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shrimpx
Netflix has become nearly useless for me. The match score is useless. The
homepage is full of content that's not up my alley. They removed public
reviews? That was the only remotely useful thing to let me gauge if I want to
watch something I haven't known about via other channels.

Netflix is just a search bar for movies where 90% of searches yield no
results.

~~~
midasz
If I want to watch a specific movie or TV show I'll let my Plex server handle
it. If I just want something on the background, or browse around, I'll fling
on Netflix. I don't even bother searching around on Netflix anymore.

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newscracker
Anecdotally, I believe Netflix needs to up its game on original movies.
Compared to its original shows that have many fantastic ones, many Netflix
original movies I’ve seen have been mediocre to bad.

The larger concern still is every large content producer wanting to have their
own streaming service and not wanting to sell content to others. It’s bad for
consumers, and it will turn out to be bad for the streaming companies too,
because consumers will balk at subscribing to several individual services and
just go back to pirating content. Add the so-silly-we-still-have-this-in-2018
geographical content restrictions, piracy is still the viewer’s best friend.

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garyclarke27
Netflix should comply with the 90 Theatre window for some films, grand films
that need huge screens for the best experience. I’m a subscriber, their
subscription fee is so cheap compared to Sky it hardly registers. I mainly
watch TV shows not films on Netflix, I won’t leave if a few films a year are
shown in Theatre first, I might even get of my backside and go to the cinema -
if Netflix enables a decent film like Gravity to be produced - instead of the
usual inane superhero nonsense. I’m curious though, how does Netflix manage to
spend so much money and produce so much crap?? Recently I’ve noticed myself
watching more Amazon Prime, they seem to have a higher quality to volume
ratio, they seem to get much more bang for their buck.

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mortenjorck
It's fascinating to see Netflix's transition from the data-driven insights
that led them to the perfectly targeted, yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt
House of Cards to the critically-acclaimed, yet hard-to-target Roma.

Comparing a prestige TV series to a feature film may be apples-to-oranges, but
it's hard to miss the contrast between a show that seemed to be triangulated
from the successes of other networks' prestige dramas and a film that really
has no popular successes to support it (apart from Cuarón's pedigree).

Roma is the kind of personal, auteur work that algorithms work against. It's
an incredible credit to Netflix's new content strategy that it was produced,
and furthermore, promoted.

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paganel
> yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt House of Cards

House of Cards did a lot of things right (granted, I haven't watched their
latest season). First and I think most important of all it informed the
general public about what politics really is, i.e. a social activity involving
very enterprising men and some women that more closely approaches the works of
Machiavelli than those of Rousseau.

In other words, it made us aware that we live in the world of Putins, Bibis
and Trumps and not in the world of Bill Clintons and Obamas, the latter's
world being better described by a show like "The West Wing", which looks
totally passé right now.

~~~
mac01021
But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch.

In house of cards, it gradually becomes impossible to emotionally invest
oneself in the welfare of any of the characters, or any any outcome of the
meandering plot.

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paganel
> But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch

I totally agree, which probably means that public life has become a lot less
enjoyable to watch since “West Wing” used to air. As they say: ars imitatur
naturam.

~~~
mac01021
Is public life in reality so much different from what it was 20 years ago?

I've been assuming that most politicians are basically behaving the same, but
that public sentiment about politics has taken a turn for the worse.

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tuxxy
I can definitely empathize with some of the points made regarding the
"filmmaker's vision" as applied to Netflix.

Ultimately, I think feelings like this will degrade and leave those unwilling
to change to be forgotten. Art, in particular, is interesting to see how it
adapts to those who consume it. This puts Netflix and artists in a unique
position to make art that can entirely utilize this medium of delivery.
Whether or not this makes better content is to be seen, imho.

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shrimpx
I'm curious what you mean by "art." In my experience what is referred to as
successful artists on the internet are bootstrapped startups selling branded
content and products.

~~~
justtopost
Most of those 'artists', are just people playacting on instagram as artists. I
suspect few will find any relevance for that reason alone. The number of
people who want to appear as artists have always outnumbered actual creators
by several orders of magnitude. Actual artists are loathe to do such marketing
of 'branded content' ouside desperation and subtrafuge.

Personality marketing on social media might be an art in itself, but it sure
isn't pretty up close.

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charliecurran
Just tweeted this thread // this is a weird flex. Fun time to be a filmmaker
rn.

2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's
analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory
when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix.

3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a
larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films
courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their
first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.

4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage.

5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr.
Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties
included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-
powerful chief, Lew Wasserman.

6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr.
Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid,
what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr.
Stuber’s quick reply? “You.”

7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for
dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of
film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of.

8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that
reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to
be alive.

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jessedhillon
How is the bidding for, and production of, prestige films zero-sum?

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charliecurran
Scorsese can only make so many films at a time.

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jessedhillon
Is that the full reasoning? Seems pretty obvious that more funding encourages
riskier bets, in search of more Scorseses.

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charliecurran
You'd think / hope - but those kinds of rare throws seem to happen at peak
disruption (think the 70's), instead we get Avengers 5.

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foolfoolz
This is classic disruption but in a very high cost of entry market. Great if
netflix can pull it off. There’s so much nostalgia tied to movie theaters and
distributing movies on a streaming app alone can be foreign to some people.
But it’s definitely the future, it’s what people want.

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unixhero
Dont torget Alibaba Pictures. It's here (last installment of Mission
Impossible)

