
Netflix and Amazon are struggling to win over Indian viewers - mmaanniisshh
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/netflix-and-amazon-are-struggling-to-win-over-indian-viewers.html
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webbrahmin
I am a Netflix subscriber in India. The monthly subscription fee is Rs 800.
Which is very high by Indian standards. A very small portion of Indian
audience has taste for American shows. Some of Netflix's Indian shows have a
political/ideological undertone which is not liked by a segment of audience.
Netflix and Amazon both suffer from a very limited collection of Bollywood
movies. These are some reasons IMHO.

~~~
Simon_says
What's the political/ideological undertone?

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whatyoucantsay
Netflix and its leadership are hard left. India, as a whole, is not.

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kev009
Behind the scenes, this has been a big boon for CDNs, my work is powering
Amazon, and it is interestingly derived from work from Netflix on FreeBSD TCP.
Together we are making TCP work much better on these largely wireless
networks.

~~~
Waterluvian
I know just networking basics so when I hear that someone's improving TCP I'm
instantly captured. I need to know more. I had no idea you could improve TCP.
I thought it was a fixed entity, for better or worse.

~~~
kev009
Most of what I'm doing is systems engineering. Incorporating research and code
from others. Reporting and occasionally fixing bugs. The research in this case
is primarily coming from Google. Linux has the state of the art TCP stack at
the moment, but for various reasons
([http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2018_04_11-bowling_in_the_lime...](http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2018_04_11-bowling_in_the_limelight))
we run FreeBSD. So the other part is re-implementing things on that. I am
individual contributor on the main body of our code, I directly recruited and
hired my team, and sought out and set up contracts to get features like TCP
Fast Open done (with some particular twists that make sense for our workload).
In an industrial setting, it is both competent and desirable for most
companies to be in this kind of engineering mode (application of existing
technology).

I'll give this simple example as a call to action. Schedulers of any kind, say
the one that puts threads on to CPUs, are open-ended problems. If you co-
design a system with hardware and software, it is highly likely you can get a
20% speedup in a system by manually emplacing different workloads (i.e. NIC
interrupt handlers, application threads). In TCP, this same kind of thing
applies. If you run Linux, there are a lot of things in the Documentation/
directory of the kernel that are worth reading and tuning. Selecting a
congestion control, and tuning buffer sizes is very much "working on TCP" and
could benefit any company using TCP. It's also something anyone with a few
years of general development experience shouldn't feel intimidated to do! The
most critical skill isn't any particular technology but learning to measure
and confidently make and deploy changes. Likewise, there are very few things
on computers that can't be improved. This can range from tuning general
settings to a particular workload or change of underlying hardware, to
algorithmic advances.

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tushartyagi
The problem that I personally see, at least with Netflix India, is that
finding content is like finding needle in a haystack.

Some time back (last year or so), they were showing IMDB ratings for their
content, but not now (maybe a falloff with Amazon since it owns IMDB). Now
they try to find similar to what I've already watched, which IMHO does not
make sense most of the time. I am here to find something new, not exactly same
to what I've already seen. Moreover, I first look up the rating on IMDB of
whatever I want to watch, and these days it mostly hovers around (5 or 6) out
of 10 for almost all of their content.

PS: IMDB isn't silver bullet, but the user reviews are quiet spot on.

~~~
amjd
This is one of biggest gripes with Netflix as well. Their percentage rating
system just tells how close a title is to stuff you have already watched. The
problem with this kind of recommender system is that you stay in a bubble and
never see content that is a departure from what you normally watch. Sadly,
this is the case with most applications today.

Coming back to the topic, Netflix sorely needs an actual rating system, either
like IMDB or something built in-house.

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wtmt
India is a highly price sensitive market, like some other developing
countries. If something is "free", it will win in India. Not that paid
services cannot survive, but "free" will trump those by a huge margin. This
just cannot be changed. But with higher disposable incomes and reducing mobile
data charges (which still cost a lot on some providers), people are willing to
spend a little on quality.

Hotstar has a huge user base mainly because it offers a lot of content for
"free", and this is something Netflix and Amazon don't do. If someone were to
get the revenue numbers from paying subscribers, I'd bet on Hotstar being far
behind the others.

As someone who has used these three services, my ranking of Hotstar would put
it way below Netflix and Prime Video. The Hotstar app is quite primitive and
is probably two or three years behind Netflix. It doesn't even have lists,
ratings, profiles, etc., leave alone features like skipping title screens and
others. Hotstar is also restrictive for paying customers since it allows only
one screen at a time. Like Prime Video, Hotstar is designed for individuals,
not families. For a family of four, if they wanted Hotstar's paid content, it
would cost the same as Netflix's highest tier. This is subjective, but it'd
most likely be a poorer deal for many.

Those who want high quality content and don't mind paying would go for
Netflix. People also share subscriptions with their friends or family members
to defray costs. Those who don't want to pay a lot would go with Amazon Prime.

What Netflix and Amazon need to do to grow their subscriber base would be to
license a lot of local content (the latter is doing well on that), like movies
and TV serials in different languages. They should also look at providing
English and other foreign language content voice dubbed in Indian languages.
Hollywood movies have long been released in India in English and local
languages. The same goes for many English shows too.

Netflix and Amazon will hopefully figure things out, and I'm confident that
Netflix is here to stay as the leader in quality on multiple fronts. The rest
of the players may replace cable but remain ad supported (like 20 minutes of
ads in an hour of content) and kill each other with their "free" and partially
free offerings. They're more of a threat to each other than to these two
behemoths.

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dingo_bat
Netflix's android app is simply horrible. I prefer to watch pewdiepie on
youtube than netflix's latest show because of that. I subscribed to their mid-
level plan for about a year. One day while watching the daredevil, I realized
the quality was so pathetic that it felt like playing a VCR on my 1440p
screen. Canceled the subscription and I just watch Youtube now.

~~~
amjd
What did you not like about it? I've been using it for the last few months and
found it to be fairly good. I believe it got some significant updates
(especially to the video player) recently.

~~~
dingo_bat
Off the top of my head:

1\. slow to load the main screen

2\. slow to resume a video

3\. quality is very low, both streaming and downloaded

4\. many videos cannot be downloaded

5\. sometimes the playback won't start and I have to force stop the app.

6\. the app cannot be minimized to a window

7\. seeking is slow and buggy

8\. many shows have only old series, for example, expanse

These comparisons are with youtube. All in all, it feels like a single sprint
effort to me. Guess they are spending all their money on content.

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Pica_soO
The only way this can be settled, is a dance-off between Bezos and Hastings.

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6ak74rfy
This seems to be your 6th attempt to post the same article here (albeit with
slightly modified titles). Are you doing this because you are genuinely
interested in discussing with the community or because you are desperate for
some internet points?

If it's the former, let's hear your thoughts.

~~~
mmaanniisshh
Hey,

Fair point. I wrote the story. My thoughts are in the story. I don't generally
submit my own stories, but I genuinely want more people to see it. (There is
no traffic incentive or anything.)

~~~
amelius
Using HN to find the most catchy headline? :)

