
Netflix may be less about content and more about data.Do we see Netflix wrongly? - pradpk
https://scroll.in/reel/921025/are-we-seeing-netflix-wrong-the-streaming-giant-may-be-less-about-the-content-and-more-about-data
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Mindwipe
I'd say that Netflix's model is much more traditional, and look at non-
American pay-TV operators, such as Sky in Europe.

Sky ran at an enormous defect for years, because building out a satellite
platform and buying sports rights is very expensive. And it started out fairly
cheaply.

But it has ratcheted up costs for customers over the course of thirty years
very successfully with that platform, and become a tremendously profitable
business off the back of it.

So I don't think data is actually the telling difference. Netflix's plan
surely is simply to become so large and to have exclusive content so they can
rapidly increase pricing, and leverage their scale globally to try and reduce
content costs somewhat, and hope it all meets in the middle. I'm personally
less convinced by this plan, because I think Sky built a technical moat with
their capital (which is only now dissipating), whereas Netflix generally
spends theirs on content, which depreciates in value very quickly for
customers and does not block competitors so effectively.

The history of television (and indeed AV in general) distribution is very
rarely about the best technology. It's generally about having understanding
shareholders who are willing to throw enormous amounts of capital at a target
for twenty years with little sign of return, until you win.

