
Netflix Is Forcing Hollywood into a Talent War - angpappas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/netflix-is-forcing-hollywood-into-a-talent-war
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Translation:

Hollywood was underpaying producers relative to the value they generated.
Netflix saw an opportunity and signed deals with producers more in line with
the value they generated. Because of this competition, Hollywood is now paying
producers more.

Sounds like an unequivocal good thing for film and television. Talented
producers get paid more. More money is being invested in films and shows.
Obviously, films and shows are making enough money to justify these deals.

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Latteland
It's a great thing for the real creative leader types. I've wondered if this
would happen in software. Of course we are amazingly well off by the standards
of most fields. I still feel based on the value we give companies that there
is room for compensation to greatly increase.

In the movie and tv biz, I think everything is basically unionized for regular
crew and actors, so they have basic decent pay. Is there any down side to
this?

~~~
xiphias2
With the low interest rates cheap capital is accessible to selected companies.
The cheap capital is used to acquire monopoly position instead of just
competing for talent.

I don't think the biggest problem is that software engineers are under-
compensated. It's more like assets are overpriced, so we're not able to buy
houses.

~~~
IMTDb
> It's more like assets are overpriced, so we're not able to buy houses.

Do you realise that you can buy assets, and houses, outside of California ? I
promise you that it's really really easy to buy a house as a software
engineer.

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ggregoire
I wish Netflix would force HBO Go and Amazon Prime Video into an UX war. It
drives me crazy how bad the player and the general experience are on these 2
services. You can’t even pause with the space bar on HBO.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I could not disagree more. Prime Video is by far the best user experience for
me, and Netflix is by far the worst. I can't stand how Netflix displays
related results when they don't actually have a particular result in stock. I
cannot stand the auto-start feature where if you're browsing and idle too long
on one item, it will start playing a trailer or synopsis. The sideways scroll
under different heading is horrible (this is bad on all of the services).

Amazon's search works so much better and feels less algorithmically
personalized (something which I believe is a horrible anti-feature in all of
these services). And because Amazon can support letting me buy or rent content
that isn't stocked in the Prime Video service, the search results are _so_
much more useful to me. Often in Netflix, I just want to know _if_ they are
carrying a certain title right now or not, and don't want to be presented with
alternatives that are "similar in spirit" to whatever I was searching.

I also find that the "continue watching" section on Netflix frequently does
not appear as the first row, and there are all sorts of "trending" or
"critically acclaimed" rows that I have to scroll through to get back up to
the "continue watching row" at the top. While on Amazon, this section is
always at the top, and automatically updates with shows that have released a
new episode since the last time I signed in.

Netflix already feels like an outdated brand to me, like it's the cheap way of
doing a streaming platform. I get it that network-specific apps like NBCSN
sports apps and HBO Go, etc., these probably will suck because it's a network
that is probably utterly incompetent at investing in technology.

But Netflix really disappoints me. I think in the long run, Netflix will not
be remembered as fondly as it is now, though we all benefit from the huge
bidding war on talent creating great shows.

~~~
armandososa
Ok. Maybe GP should have said UI instead of UX, but still, the spacebar to
pause is a bigger deal for me that everything you mention.

It's like not having the light in your fridge go on when you open the door.
It's not important for the actual purpose of the thing but it is something one
has come to expect.

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mlthoughts2018
I literally don't know anyone who watches Netflix on a device with a space
bar. I mean, I get it. For you that is important. I couldn't care less, and
would never watch any of these things on a laptop. I usually watch them via
devices that are connected to a regular TV. Otherwise, very occasionally on a
tablet or phone.

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mindcrime
_I literally don 't know anyone who watches Netflix on a device with a space
bar._

Hi, I'm mindcrime. Now you know somebody who watches Netflix on a device with
a spacebar.

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mlthoughts2018
Wasn't disputing that such people exist, which is why I said I understood it
was important in my comment.

The point was that someone replied originally by saying the need for space bar
to pause a video trumped everything else, and my goal was to emphasize how
there might be _utterly gigantic_ subpopulations of streaming service
customers for whom such a feature would literally never be relevant. So that
perhaps it's not a useful feature by which to judge the overall quality of
different providers, even if you happen to be one of the rare people who
really relies on it.

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JansjoFromIkea
> “The increased volume at other places has worked in our favor,” says Casey
> Bloys, the head of programming at HBO.

I do hope this is the case but I'm not convinced. Netflix's approach atm seems
very strongly geared towards the middlebrow, which is perhaps the area their
algorithms perform best. It's probably not very economical for them to target
someone like me when there's still droves of people watching network TV.

I'm not totally sold on the Deuce but it feels like far more of a prestige
product than anything I've seen on Netflix. When someone signs with HBO, they
know they're gonna be given the opportunity to develop with top notch people
whilst retaining control within a proven system. Whereas Netflix seem to be
exclusively focusing on throwing money at the problem. For example, Netflix
have made several attempts at a cool 30-minute dramedy type deals, absolutely
none of them come close to something like Insecure in overall quality. The
most noteworthy one (Master of None) has some bizarrely stiff writing at
points that would've been helped hugely if Ansari had been paired up with some
experienced writers.

Netflix don't do themselves any favours with the notion that things will get
lost in the pile. A director selling anything that hasn't a sizeable and
obvious audience tends to get absolutely buried on their platform (e.g. Noah
Baumbach's last film's only publicity seemed to be the references made to it
following Dustin Hoffman's sexual harassment allegations)

~~~
empath75
Maniac is a prestige show.

~~~
jasonrhaas
I'm 4 episodes in and I still don't know what the show is about. It seems like
its trying hard to channel some kind of weird, blade runner light vibes, but
its doing a pretty bad job. Honestly if it didn't have some name brands in it
(Jonah Hill and Emma Stone), I don't think it would getting the attention that
it is.

~~~
wwweston
It's definitely a show that unfolds in a lot of directions and that doesn't
make it easy to zero in on a predictable narrative. Personally, I _like_ that
it managed to do that -- while still actually having a narrative arc and sense
the writers had done their homework, unlike, say, Lost and Twin Peaks, which
are probably two reasonable analogues.

Also, like a lot of character dramas, the most direct "about" is your
investment in what happens to/between the characters. But I think you could
fairly say the show is an exploration of how we come to grips with limited
control over our minds and emotions.

~~~
JansjoFromIkea
An even closer one would be the Leftovers seeing as it shares a few key crew
members (well, Theroux and the lead writer worked on the Leftovers, at least).

The Leftovers was basically Lost done right, very very clear from the onset
that it's about people's reactions to the craziness than the underlying
reasons for it. Maniac feels like it has some unnecessary stuff tacked on, the
premise has a Charlie Kaufman copycat element to it all that feels like a
necessary gimmick as opposed to something which naturally fits into the world.

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cylinder
Most of these shows are junk. If you don't like comic books or dark murder
based series you're not too happy with Netflix these days. It's going to be
one big ABC now. What do you expect when you hire one person to churn out
seven shows at once? Where's the creative risk taking? Shonda Rhimes? Ugh.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It’s funny, before the ads annoyed me. But now I’m wary of investing time into
any shows because I’m afraid of all the extra time they waste with filler
content like unnecessary drama or actors looking at each other’s faces,
presumably to make it feel like you’re getting more minutes of content for
your money. But I feel like it’s wasting my time.

At least I have the option of fast forward, though more likely I’ll just stop
watching everything except the most highly acclaimed stuff. And/or I’m getting
older and just not entertained as much by it anymore.

~~~
krige
Because of this, I have stopped watching new series on Netflix, and instead
use it to re-watch older classic movies and series. YMMV on if it's worth as
much but it's enough for me, at least for now.

~~~
JansjoFromIkea
Netflix's classic movies selection is pretty terrible though, isn't it? I know
I checked a couple of months back on the UK library for some noirs and I can't
remember exactly but I think there may have only been 1 (Touch of Evil iirc)

~~~
richmarr
US content is much deeper than UK, most likely due to (a) operating for longer
in that market and (b) better economics for going hunting for licencing rights
for not-even-that-long long-tail content.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, here's an eye-opening post from someone at the
British Film Institite, explaining the rediculous lengths they had to go to
just to do a screening of Kathryn Bigelow's "Point Break"

[https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
magazine/com...](https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you)

(and the follow up when they eventually managed to get rights to show the
movie)

[https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
magazine/fea...](https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
magazine/features/point-break-quest-rights-kathryn-bigelow)

~~~
JansjoFromIkea
Neat article, thanks!

RE: Netflix US, if this site is accurate the US is actually worse than the UK
for films from the 1950s
[https://unogs.com/?q=-!1950,1962-!0,5-!0,10-!0,10-!Any-!Any-...](https://unogs.com/?q=-!1950,1962-!0,5-!0,10-!0,10-!Any-!Any-!Any-!Any-!I%20Don&cl=78,&pt=&st=adv&p=1&ao=and)

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debacle
How is a company with a P/E of 150 whose competitive advantage has been all
but obliterated going to force a lemonade stand, let alone Hollywood, into a
talent war?

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En_gr_Student
first time in a long long time. Perhaps it will improve quality.

Yay netflix!

~~~
forapurpose
It seems to happen regularly: First there were only the major studios, which
each controlled their own talent from directors to actors. Then the talent
became independent of the studios (I don't know when or how that happened).
Then TV, then HBO and independent studios, then cable TV with hundreds of
channels needing content, then streaming and also the infinite channels of the
Internet, including YouTube and Twitch stars.

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lesserknowndan
Given the quality of big budget films like The Last Jedi and The Predator, I
would say they have attacked the wrong target.

Or maybe the battle has already been won.

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mateuszf
The Last Jedi was pretty pretty good to me.

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the_clarence
It had a lot of special effects, that’s all I can say about this movie. Most
people seem to have forgotten about the plot as soon as they stepped out of
the theater.

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mateuszf
I liked the story, the houmour and the characters. Can't wait for
continuation.

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tdb7893
Huh, I hated it partially for not being very funny and the characters being
generally unlikable (and also just unbelievable in a weird way). It's cool how
people can have so different opinions on it, are there any scenes in it you
find particularly funny so I can pay close attention when I rewatch it?

~~~
stronglikedan
I liked the scene where Luke drinks milk.

