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Netflix's Big Bet on Original Shows Finally Seen Paying Off (reuters.com)
Netflix shares jumped as much as 20 percent on Tuesday, after the company added 50 percent more subscribers than expected in the third quarter. Reuters adds: At least 10 brokerages, including Goldman Sachs and RBC Capital Markets, raised their price targets on the stock, praising the company's focus on developing original content. The video streaming company also said it was getting ready to spend $6 billion on content next year, up $1 billion from 2016. "The benefits of Netflix-produced original content including attractive economics and greater control are clear and we believe returns on original spend are high," J.P. Morgan Securities analyst Doug Anmuth said in a research note. Strong subscriber additions after two quarters of disappointing growth helped Netflix post a 31.7 percent jump in third-quarter revenue. Anmuth said he believed Netflix was on track toward 60 million plus subscribers in the United States and about 100 million internationally by 2020.A study by IHS Markit this month noted that both Netflix and Amazon are challenging major networks by upping spending on original shows. The study noted that Amazon and Netflix both had doubled spending on new shows in the last two years. Amazon dropped $1.22 billion in 2013 and spent $2.67 billion in 2015. Netflix's spending on original content rose from $2.38 billion to $4.91 billion over the same period.
I subscribed to Netflix just to watch Luke Cage the moment it released instead of having to wait to pirate it. It was awesome. Stranger Things was awesome.
To be quite frank, while Netflix does have more misses than hits as far as original content, the hits they DO have are incredible. Directly comparable in entertainment value to a decent HBO show. (which is no surprise if they spent about as much money as HBO spends and they have about as talented a crew. Yes, Game of Thrones is still better than anything Netflix has, but GoT is arguably the biggest and flashiest television show in the world.)
Anyways, this is great news. Nothing to whine about. Netflix is a far better concept than ad supported TV. You can watch anything they have whenever you want. You pay a very paltry amount of money (9 bucks a month!) and get access to it all. No intrusive ads. The content is racier and more violent at times than anything advertisers would be comfortable with, or the moralizers who police broadcast TV would allow. They do lots of original ideas instead of rehashing the same cop/lawyer/doctor/reality shows that conventional network TV is rife with.
For nerds, Netflix is a representative of a golden age of content. This is what we all wanted on slashdot 15 years ago.
Not all of the "Netflix Original" shows are original. They'll call shows that they picked up for a season or two a "Netflix Original". And most of their real original shows are garbage. People don't know any better because most other shows these days are garbage too.
I am glad that Netflix is funding the creation of this stuff. They are giving the cable channels a run for their money, if not yet the main-line studios. On the other hand, they've had some shows that were definitely "acquired taste" sorts of things, too (Pompidou, I'm looking at you). I guess they're still at the "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" stage. But at least a good deal of it is watchable and a few things are quite good.
That is all.
Come for the Stranger Things, stay for everything else.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The problem with original content, from anyone, is that, for the most part, such original content will suck to high heaven. For each hit like, say, Cheers, there are hundreds of flops that, justly, remain in oblivion. I am all for new shows and movies - but I want access to classic hits. Complete access, not this garbage whereby things appear and disappear more or less randomly. Until this happens, piracy will carry on rampant.
But you are not everybody and most people do not want to watch old stuff over and over again. Most of the Netflix original content ranges from excellent to pretty OK and my only response to the idea of them making more of it is that it can't happen fast enough and the same goes for every other similar service out there. The thing that is currently holding up these streaming services is, as you point out, the tangled up cluster-fuck of a legal spiderweb that is visual media licensing. Some licensing agreement expires and a bunch of titles disappear from Netflix because Rupert Murdoch or some other dickhead media oligarch wants to shield his TV networks from competition. Another example is, say that I move from, oh... Germany to Austria and a bunch of stuff disappears from my favourites list because the local rights owners in Austria did not want to give Netflix access to stuff Netflix hat access to in Germany. This kind of thing is just going to force two developments in services like Netflix. Firstly visual streaming services will start making their own material because they have to in order to survive. Secondly they will augment their own stuff by buying material directly form indie content creators. Visual media services are not going away if content rights owners starve them anymore than music streaming went away when rights holders killed off Napster. What happened when they killed off Napster is iTunes, Spotify, and friends and they are to a large extent outside of the control of the music industry's old gatekeepers. Those guys found themselves replaced by new gate keepers and distributors. Similarly visual media streaming services will kill off traditional TV and the harder the old guard tries to prevent that, and the bigger the library of their own original content services like Netflix build up, the faster traditional TV will die and quite frankly... good riddance.
It's been paying off all along, right from the star with House of Cards. Not all of them along the way were winners (I despised Sense8) but Netflix has had winners often enough that staying with them was never a question, while other services I've subscribed to have come and gone...
At this point Netflix has all by themselves a pretty compelling library of content other services will not have, enough that any new subscriber would have reason enough to stay with Netflix for a year or more just to catch up. Add the fact that they often have really good shows and there's lots of reason to stay with them, even as the catalog of content from other companies churns...
Not mentioned is how crafty Netflix has been in picking up great TV shows other networks have been too stupid to see the value of (like Longmire) and continuing to make new seasons... we should all laud Netflix for being a safety net for good shows. I'm betting they would have taken up Firefly if it had been aired today with the same mistakes...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It does not matter how many flops they get. You only need one show that you own exclusive rights to that everybody wants to watch.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's entirely anecdotal, but I re-subscribed to Netflix for the original content (Bojack Horseman, to be specific).
I've said it elsewhere, but it's perfectly fine if the shows that Netflix puts out aren't for someone. Luckily other streaming companies are finally starting to do the follow suit, giving people options. What's impressed me with Netflix is the range of shows they currently offer. Besides their award-winners, they've got a broad variety of documentaries, anime, even old fashioned sitcoms. I'd never have known about the last one if it wasn't for my brother watching some. There's a lot of stuff they make that I have zero interest in, but they're smartly casting as wide a net as possible.
Netflix's long term game is to get BIG.
The #1 problem with Netflix is that they need to beg for Licencing. The Cable companies are already BIG, and so they throw their weight around. This is why you get that stupid VPN stuff with Netflix because you cannot use certain content in certain countries because the Cable owns all the rights. When content creators were initially selling content, it was simply seen as another new revenue stream. Then when it started getting big they all now want a cut of the pie, and today you see all sorts of players. However even now, some of them are finding, usually because they not only want pie, but cake and eat it too, that tying subscription to also only their own customers, that well you limit your customers, fail to get enough subscribers, and start to fail (sorry for the run-on sentence). On top of that you have Netflix which is the most dominant and has the most established base to break into. Add to that the fact that in the last several years they have invested heavily into their own content, which makes them less dependent on the content providers themselves... Anyway to finish the thought, is that if they continue to do this year over year and get BIG enough, the shoe will be on the other foot and they will have content creators begging THEM to be allowed to licence deals to stream their content over their service... However just as Netflix is established as a streaming service, so are the Cable companies and content creators, it will be some time before any of this flips in the other direction.
I've not been watching much of Netflix anymore, and I'm about to cancel. Everytime I open the app, I see all this exclusive content rated 2 stars. And I've watched some of it, and it is indeed 2-star content. There's so much of it, I want a star filter, but I think that would eliminate half their library.
Some of their stuff is good, but they lost Doctor Who to Amazon, and their top rated movie selection is dwindling. It's becoming a B-movie haven.
In fact writing this has convinced me to cancel.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
7 to 8 years ago or so I spent lots of $ on blu ray copies of some of my favorite shows. I remember spending what seems like a fairly obscene amount of $ on the BattleStar Galactica box set. That one purchase alone would pay for 2 YEARS of Netflix these days. Considering all the great netflix content... the licensed material is just cake. For the last year I can't say there has been one month I haven't had at least one great show to binge. We got a couple good Netflix movies... at least one of them was of fully legit award winning quality.
I know people like to pick on specific shows. They have had hits like Stranger things that have wide appeal, and others that have a much narrower viewership. I hope Netflix never ever ever goes the route that has killed quality with the major networks. Netflix needs to continue producing the odd niche content without a lot of care for the viewership numbers.The networks concerned themselves so much with demo numbers that they killed creativity completely and we ended up with years of reality tv and the same cop/lawyer/friends shows repeated 1000 times each. A show like Stranger Things wasn't expected to be a massive hit, no way during production any one at Netflix thought yes this one show is going to be a major part of our third quarter 20%+ stock surge. Netflix needs to keep going with the scatter gun... find young artists and fund them. I am glad the stranger things bump happened, it should keep us in good new shows for a few more years... it should have convinced them that spending money on talented no bodies is a better option then dropping millions on known hacks like Sandler. Not that their isn't a place for that type of content as well. For Netflix though... funding the unknowns and having 3-4 hit out of left field shows every year will push the Netflix brand and drive down the cost of getting "name" people to work on their stuff. At this point I'm sure people are wanting to work for netflix. HBO was the first "network" that movie stars viewed as safe to work with... I would say many are looking at Netflix the same way now. Winona Ryder won't be the last carer revived by a Netflix original.