>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.
Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them?
From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
>> From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
Apple and Amazon Prime and Youtube seem to enable other services via their platforms, presumably for a cut. If the cut is large enough, seems like a good business move for Netflix also -- let the content owners focus on their business rather than some random broadcasting company trying to hire AWS infrastructure engineers and 3rd party platform testing experts.
I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible.
What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.
Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.
>> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.
The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store.
I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc.
I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.
I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.
Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.