Netflix isn’t in trouble, but Wall Street is.
Let me get this straight, you have “professional” investors and analysts who focus on money, not art, not the service that Netflix provides, who are constantly getting things wrong in their own space and telling us what’s in one other area will happen ? Nonsense. They are hardly worth listening to. They can’t predict what will happen in their own world, how can they predict what will happen with Netflix?
Netflix is the market leader with first mover advantage, it has the most customers with the most products and in one quarter it doesn’t blast away the doors and we not only hear that streaming needs to be questioned but that ads need to be inserted… it’s like asking Apple to bring every existing port to the Mac, when Steve Jobs famously removed old ports and pushed the customer towards a brighter future.
Like Reed Hastings.
Let’s go back here. Hastings said he was making Netflix a streaming company as opposed to a DVD post company, and the public freaked out. Turns out Hastings knew more than the public. When was the last time you played a DVD? Do you even have a DVD player in the house? Hastings blinked, backed away from his statement, reemphasized DVDs for a minute, and then went full throttle on streaming, revolutionizing television in the process.
Let’s see… cable subscriptions have gone down. Other older companies eventually stepped in. And bingeing has become a worldwide pastime. But somehow Netflix is in the trash can. Give me a break.
America is addicted to stories. It’s a human desire. TikTok, YouTube, they fill a different need, except trying to follow the same paradigm, have you heard of Snapchat Stories???
So Netflix is a cornerstone. It will never go to zero. It’s like saying the food is on the way down. Or air or water.
Well, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.
Yes, Netflix has broken the price barrier. To the point where customers started thinking about what they are paying for. It used to be cheap, but when it topped fifteen dollars…
That’s psychology, so anything you buy just before a round number ends in a dollar amount and ninety-nine cents. For this reason, music subscription prices should not be increased. You don’t think $9.99, but as soon as you go a penny over it, you do. And you could quit.
Investors have no idea what’s going on with the Hoi Polloi. Did you see the online ad type is reported to make $835 million? And David Solomon, head of Goldman Sachs, has rebalanced payments on investments so he earns more. It turns out he’s furious that he’s not making as much as the tech titans. So he gives himself a bigger stake, fuck the investors.
Life is hard below. What accounts for password sharing… Can I say I share a password for Hulu? I’m sick of being pecked to death by ducks. I pay for Netflix, Amazon, HBO…it’s an insult to pay for another one.
We solved this problem in music business, we supply all the music with cheap price. But in visual entertainment? They took the cable model, imported it into streaming and calculated just as much. is this progress? What we need is a streaming bundle that gives me all the services at a lower price. But no, these suckers don’t want to live in the future, they want to import the past!
Conclusion… Inflation is raging. And despite the big employment numbers, look at how much most Americans make… bupkes! If you have non-essential service (and I know that sounds like a contradiction to what I said above, but if you’re broke only food and lodging is necessary), don’t offend the customer by asking the price increase like Netflix did. As for HBO… most people get it with their cable package. It is only one item in the total price. As for Disney… It’s cheaper and not only has kid rates, but it also has “Star Wars.” This is like the New York Yankees of visual content, at least the Yankees of yore. You can raise the price of gas and groceries and get away with it, but entertainment has a ceiling. And often what looks like a win is actually a loss. Overpriced CDs with a good title paved the way for Napster. People felt so ripped off for not caring about file trading, they felt no guilt. And then the RIAA started suing customers. That’s right, instead of looking to the future, they tried to corroborate the past. How does that look today, in a streaming world where revenue is rising and rising? It’s now a global business. Latin flourishes. While in the past physical world music was highly Balkanized, streaming, an advance in distribution, opened the floodgates.
Just like in visual entertainment. “Squid Game”? “money heist”? These international hits are on Netflix, not on the competition. The competitors are far behind, they have a minimal amount of products, especially Apple, tell me why people will pay for this service again? Most people still get it for free, at least it’s cheap.
And then Jason Kilar comes along and puts movies on streaming and Hollywood freaks out. Hollywood is like Wall Street, they don’t even know cheese exists, let alone move it. Come on investors and analysts, when was the last time you went to the movies? This is for kids!
As for the advertising… Don’t sully the service. That’s like asking Tesla to build a $20,000 car. SiriusXM doesn’t have a free tier and works quite well, the subscription separates it from the vast wasteland of terrestrial radio. It’s a psychological advantage. As for Hulu… it’s a fading service that providers pull their content from, and using it as an example is like listening to the wankers without an audience complaining that they’re not making any money off Spotify.
And one thing we’ve been taught over and over again for the last twenty years is that you give the public what they want or you pay the price. The public doesn’t want to be fed content. What’s here today is gone in the news tomorrow, in every area of life. But not in entertainment? If you don’t deliver everything now, it will probably fade away and almost nobody sees it. Waiting week after week for a product is an old model introduced with the advent of television. These days, waiting week-to-week for a show is like delaying orgasm for months, and nobody likes that. Instant is everything these days, but isn’t it on streaming TV? Come on!
As for week-to-week… Yes, it might work for big hit shows that have been anointed great, but those are very few in number. Sure we have Ted Lasso, but have you forgotten The Morning Show? Which one still hasn’t recovered from the week-to-week release? Everyone who watched the entire first season raved, but most people didn’t get past the first or two episodes, which were subpar. Don’t take the outlier and make it the paradigm for everything. Netflix was built on bingeing, you don’t want to remove that aspect. As for me, I pay for HBO, but I don’t watch their hit shows, which are always adult-oriented, I can’t be bothered to watch episode after episode, let alone forget what happened before. And when the series is done, the hustle and bustle will be over and I won’t even bother, I’m behind the curve. On the other hand, if all episodes are released at once, a series is a time bomb, an iconic object that can be discovered at any time in the future. I’ve consumed The Americans and loved it, didn’t bother me when it was on TV. I ate Prisoners of War on Hulu (which is why I borrowed the password), it was named the best foreign series of the decade by the New York Times, but I didn’t bother to read the English remake. Homeland,” though I pay for Showtime (as part of the mystery cable bundle). Now if every season had been released at once, I would have done it.
I could go further and prove my point, but the truth is that the business people have no idea what the youngsters are doing, they are out of touch. All of these weekly “hits” are adult shows that youngsters don’t mind (except for “Star Wars”/”The Mandalorian”). It’s just like music and CDs and Napster, Hollywood and Wall Street lost touch with the consumer.
Netflix needs to stay the course. People are still getting used to looking for new products for service as opposed to cable. And it might figure out how to address password sharing. Come on all you old analysts, don’t you remember when everyone stole HBO and other services? You simply removed the filter from your cable or paid your installer to do it. Then cable went digital and that was over. If people want it bad enough, they will pay for it. But don’t make the price too high and… Come on, college students don’t watch cable and they’ll give up Netflix? Do not make a fool of yourself. And maybe you have lower price for students as long as you can prove people are students. Young people aren’t too concerned about privacy, they enter their digits for a deal.
And there is a cap on how many people will subscribe to streaming TV channels. Eventually everyone had a smartphone, it became a mature business. Still, there’s scope for Netflix. As for the company losing 35% of its value…God, imagine if these stock pickers and analysts were publicly traded and if they didn’t make as much as they did in the previous quarter, their net worth would fall by a corresponding amount, ie 35%
And why can’t anyone stumble or make a mistake with a public company? Why do profits have to keep increasing?
Do you know who did this best? Jack Welch, at GE. He essentially cooked the books to please Wall Street. And what happened after that? GE cratered, it couldn’t go on. I could describe chapters and verses, but that’s a story Wall Street knows. And GE Capital? Looked brilliant before the market crashed. Talk about foresight… THERE WERE NONE!
What’s on Netflix…
I refer to my list from over a year ago:
“Best series on Netflix – alright”
This will keep you going for months, if not a year. And they are all blue chips!
And how many hours can you actually watch TV? So we’ve all been home during lockdown and…
The country may be in trouble, but not Netflix… Netflix is forever!