this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Profitability is a funny thing, especially with internet services and such. Some companies launch and raise money hand over fist without even having a revenue plan in place - I had a family member who proudly boasted about how he was going to short google at their ipo because they were obviously going to crash hard and were all hype. Other companies have a model for revenue but choose to concentrate on growth instead. Amazon skirted profitability for years as it sank its money into infrastructure and kept its prices low.
Companies can have staggering valuations because of the prospect of growth, and profits (depending on where they are coming from and what you’re doing with them) may not contribute to that perception because that’s money nominally not going into headcount, r&d, etc. This is especially true of streaming services that are rising on the backs of other profit centers, such as Disney. Hollywood accounting is an entirely separate beast anyway.
Ultimately, the importance of profitability is decided by the stakeholders - the large investors, board, and c-suite. If people are happy with the growth model and performance, they’re not going to care as much about the balance sheet. Stock prices stay up. If money starts to get tight, stock prices will fall and the company will go into cost cutting.
All of which is to say that if Netflix starts to lose customers, it should probably get pinched. They’re going after new markets and developing new IP, but the space has become really crowded over the last several years. They’re not going full Musk, but they are making decisions that will affect growth and retention in a per-customer revenue grab. To me, that means they’re having accounting issues and they’re hoping their continuing IP investments and international growth (where they might still be losing money) will be paid for by the customers they do manage to hold onto.
As a customer who subscribes to at least ten streaming services, I’m probably going to just start rotating monthly. That will save money, give me enough time (and focus) to catch up on the series I actually want to finish, and at least theoretically let me show a reaction to the price hikes.
I mean, the essential problem is the streaming video services don't have close enough to "everything" that the streaming audio services have. So you essentially fragment your market. You basically become a specific niche (in a way) because you can't appeal to "everyone" because you can't afford to make a popular version of "any show". This tied with people already wanted to shrink their cable bill so most people DO NOT WANT 10 streaming services. Even if they have the money to burn, they will feel (like you do) that they can't possibly make use of 10 streaming services worth of content. So you start to be choosy about what shows you want to watch, and probably start to lose FOMO because it's so fragmented there's just not that many "everyone is watching the show and I want to talk about it with them" that used to make appointment TV. I.e. there's less peer pressure to talk about any given Netflix (or Hulu, or P+ or D+ etc) show, so you might well think "hey, that's something I might like, but it's like not important enough for me to pay to see it or plan to see it." And today, if you aren't scheduling it - I'd say there's a good chance it'll be like that 500th book you got at the local book sale for $0.50 that "you definitely plan to read" that's been sitting at #500 for the past 10 years.
What's even worse is unlike in the 80s when cable took off is that there's so much content and competition that people probably aren't even watching as much "TV" as they used to. I already mentioned books, but there's comics, graphic novels, forums like this, YouTube, Anime (a big portion of a whole other cultures collective TV series added in now mainstream), video games, 3 hour long podcasts, and just fricken getting off a device and going outside. Some of this always existed, but a lot is new, and competing. I'd argue that as a share of what you could do in your spare time, as a whole TV is down.
I don't know if it would ever work, but I do wonder if we don't start to see something like "personal syndication" return. I know the app stores used to sell an episode of a specific show for $4 or something, but that's way too much. But I wonder if we start to see much lower per ep pricing where you literally pay for the show you want more directly. But again, we rapidly hit the microtransaction problem again. Maybe you just can't pay for an episode at at time, you have to pay per season to make it work. Maybe $4 a season / no ads would work? IDK. I guess as soon as you want more than 4 shows on a given streamer it makes sense to buy it bulk.
I don’t think micropayments have entirely worked yet. There’s still intellectual resistance to paying for an article that you expect to be free, and I don’t know if you could change that by making them available for $.05. It hasn’t been normalized yet.
I also have not yet caught up on 80% of the shows I was enjoying last year, including multiple Treks, shows where people cook stuff or make clothes, or stupid sitcoms that I got eight episodes in before being distracted by jingling keys. Don’t even get me started on my Steam library - I bought a Deck just to try to work through my backlog of more unplayed than played games.
I liked it when Netflix had movies I wanted to watch and shows I had missed. I watched Lost, Heroes (S1), B5, and Battlestar for the first time on the service. There was a service, and it had a lot of content. Then the studios, which had ignored streaming, saw there was a market and jumped in while raising prices or withdrawing licensing.
People went to Netflix from Pirate Bay because, as Steve Jobs pointed out when he got music studios to remove DRM, people will pay for it if it’s easy and reliable. It has ceased being easy and reliable because of fragmentation and predatory pricing.
I hope Netflix’s strategy dies and they have to think of something better. I hope the same for twitter and reddit. But other than the occasional glance in the rear view mirror for an opportune “I told you so,” I really am not planning on paying attention beyond logging off.
And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.
I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.
I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.