r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • Feb 03 '23

Netflix says strict new password sharing rules were posted in error Business

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/03/netflix-says-strict-new-password-sharing-rules-were-posted-in-error
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103

u/notsureifxml Feb 03 '23

they learned from Hasbro with the D&D open gaming license debacle I see

85

u/Smarpar Feb 03 '23

There’s a big trend lately of these type of companies forgetting that they’re optional.

Unlike housing, food, and gas, which we can be upset over but can’t really go without, we don’t need them, they need us.

The dnd thing was especially confusing as their main product is more or less inspiring people to use their own imagination (which can be found for free basically everywhere). It’s honestly been kind of amusing watching them confused pikachu when they realize how insignificant they are.

21

u/thoggins Feb 03 '23

D&D thing was just executives hired from other industries thinking they could monetize a tabletop game the same way they would a video game. Idiotic but unsurprising when company leadership are all just jumping from company to company without regard for what those companies actually do.

I'm sure Netflix understands their position as a luxury that can be discarded, they just don't know what to do to stave off their inevitable death as a growth stock so they're throwing shit at the wall to see if any of it sticks.

There's no good solution for Netflix and I'm sure they know that. They can never regain their position now that the properties are so divided between the many streaming services. Even if they weren't constantly shitting the bed with their original content, they could never produce enough good material to replace all the rights they lost when everyone and their dad decided to do their own streaming. The whole reason they could grow the way they did was because there was no competition and they didn't have to pay to produce the material, just license it. Now they are just modern blockbuster without most of the new releases.

Maybe they can stave off death the same way mom-n-pop video stores tried to. Start licensing porn.

3

u/NGGJamie Feb 04 '23

The pandemic brought them into a good position to have peak numbers, then provide a good excuse for how those numbers would dip once people no longer had the same sort of free time they had previously. Where I think they made the biggest error that they're going to bleed for is the series cancellations.

They wanted every new show to be the next Stranger Things, the next pop culture hit. Plus, since they release their shows in a binge model, they're spending a lot more money to produce something that has a failure risk than they could be if they released traditionally, and made use of pilot episodes to judge interest. By this point, people have learned that investing interest in any new Netflix Original is taking a gamble, and adding insult to injury, many of their Originals don't tell complete stories in their first run to keep people on the edge of their seat. However, even then, they probably had a window where they could have saved audience trust.

Now that trust is all but burned. The only way they can get it back is to make content that people actually want to watch, and bring that content to completion. To do that, they really have to focus on the quality over quantity, and if they make a flop, they need to finish it right to get their credibility back.

1

u/thoggins Feb 05 '23

Frankly I don't think they'd have been much better off even if they didn't estrange a bunch of their users by cancelling shows. The perception would be a bit better maybe, but the reality on the ground would not shift very much.

Even if they were batting over 500 on good original content they would have neither the time nor the capital to produce enough content to make up for not having major studio releases licensed.

I think if they were better with their OG content and weren't dead-set on shooting themselves in the dick with everything they try to increase revenue, they could probably subsist nicely with the licensed content they can get/afford and their own offerings. The issue with that is that they'd no longer be able to pretend to be a tech growth stock and they do not seem willing to accept that fate.