What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription

Being put in contact with goreign contents? Disgusting! /s

More seriously, beg9re Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has defaults? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.

> how they ruined the opportunity presented

netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service.

I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content).

Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?

There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio.

What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35%; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction.

I think I actually enjoyed Netflix more when they used to send DVDs in the mail. The library of movies felt much more complete, and getting stuff in the mail is fun. And it’s probably a healthier way to watch than binging 3 seasons of some mediocre show in a weekend just to see how it ends.

> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.

I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.

They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.

>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented,

Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue.

Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform."

Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform.

E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's.

Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own.

To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue because most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.

The only way to make money from business is by bundling or unbundling.

Netflix made money by bundling, now others are making money by unbundling.

We'll get another netflix era in the next decade or so

First you attract customers by offering (potentially unsustainably) good deals. Then you become the default option. Then you extract money from customers by enshittifying your service. Most famous digital services follow this path.

On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.

We're going back full circle. From renting/buying DVDs, Bluray to Online streaming to renting content again.

YouTube music is really good. I prefer it more than Spotify and if you already pay for YouTube it's free for you.

For underground artists, spotify is piracy with extra steps, often literally only paying in exposure.

It would take you all of five minutes to modify your remote so it can never be pressed again.