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Netflix Shows Are All Worldwide Hits -- Until They're Not (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: On a conference call last October, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos described the hip-hop drama "The Get Down" as a success, like the booming streaming service's other popular shows. Eight months and 11 episodes later, "The Get Down" is history, a flop after one season on the world's largest paid video service. The sci-fi thriller "Sense8," another of the company's lavish productions, was scrapped after two seasons. The back-to-back cancellations caught Hollywood by surprise. Netflix has defied convention by offering no inkling of how many people watch its shows and claiming just about everything is a hit. That's vexed competitors worried about Netflix's growing customer base and influence in Hollywood. The streaming company will spend more than $6 billion on programming this year, a good chunk of that on about 1,000 hours of original shows. Cancellations are common for all TV networks -- even for Netflix, which has wrapped up most of its first crop of original shows. Without the need to attract advertisers, the company is shielded from the weekly audience ratings that determine the fate of most dramas and sitcoms. "One of the great things about Netflix is we don't have to release ratings," Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said in an interview this week on CNBC. "Each show gets to have its own audience because it is very personalized." That's great for Netflix and its 100 million customers, who pay up to $12 a month for the service. Without pressure to deliver weekly ratings, the company can give shows time to develop a following. "House of Cards," the thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, just started its fifth season. It's not so great for competitors -- or producers who must grope for ways to measure the success of a given program and wonder if they're getting paid enough by the streaming service. With no data, they must rely on the positive remarks Netflix executives make for all their shows.
For the networks, there's an incentive to keep plodding on with a show until it hits 100 episodes, which is the magic number required for syndication. That's why Star Trek: Enterprise was allowed to stagger through its crummy fourth season. Syndication allows recovery of the sunken costs in a mediocre show.
Netflix doesn't have to worry about that. Syndication has no meaning in an on-demand world. They can make a handful of episodes of, say, Marco Polo, and even if most people don't enjoy it, there will be enough people who do that Netflix can cancel the show early yet still get the benefit of the show in perpetuity. So for Netflix, pretty much anything they make is a "hit" as long as some people, now or in the extended future, are willing to watch it (and keep their Netflix subscriptions going).
For subscription services, the value of having a "gotta see it" hit:
very high
The value of a second one:
not so much
Likely they dumped the most expensive shows, hits or not.
"His name was James Damore."
I don't know about the Get Down, but my impression of Sense8 is that it was a good show with probably decent but not blockbuster ratings that was just too expensive to produce. Flying all of the actors around the world every season and maintaining so many sets just wasn't practical.
I also tend to think they were running a bit low on ideas about midway through season 2. Oh, another scene were thugs randomly show up but using the power of Korean ex-CEO punching we can knock them out and escape! That said, they did keep the plotline moving at a good clip, commendable for a show like this that can so easily get sucked into the vortex of dealing with dead end sideplots and social moralizing and forget what it was supposed to be doing.
I would be quite happy with a special/movie to tie up the loose ends (like the people in the van at the end of season 2) and call it done, but I'm not going to be angry at them like I was at Fox for Firefly if they just decide to cancel it entirely.
I read the internet for the articles.
That's easy. Sense8 was a good sci-fi concept. I watched the first season hoping it would get better and drop the concentration on sex. Started watching season 2 and turned it off after 15 minutes. I don't consider myself prudish but I wasn't going to sit through a season of broke back mountain. The notion they seemed to be pushing was we are all gay if we just give it a chance.
Never even occurred to me me to watch the other thing whatever it was simply because I don't care.
From the summary: Netflix is "shielded from the weekly audience ratings".
That is absurd. Netflix in fact is exactly the opposite of this statement; They have nothing BUT audience ratings to drive them. They don't have marketers clamoring for shows to be changed in a specific way. They don't have fights about a show not being able to exist because a timeslot it belongs in is full.
What they do have is pure, undiluted ratings. Is part of an episode boring? Netflix knows to the millisecond when you skipped or stopped watching. Show gets bad later in the season or after the pilot? Netflix knows you stopped watching, and on what episode... Netflix knows when you went back to watch something. Netflix knows when you binge-watched for fourteen hours straight. Netflix knows so much broadcast networks could only dream of knowing about the entire audience...
It makes perfect sense to me that Netflix would toss a show at the drop of a hat, if the audience is leaving in droves. I'm sure they give shows some leeway to find footing but even then Netflix probably knows exactly from data of every other successful show exactly what "finding footing" looks like from a viewing behavior perspective.
I'm pretty happy with the flood of new Netflix content. Yes a lot of it is and will be crap, but that's because 99% of everything is crap. So the more they produce the more non-crappy content will come to exist as well...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the problem is that TV shows are being released all together. You have 10 episodes a season (for example) that just come out all at once. It's like a 10 hour movie. You binge watch it, and have no clue what happened on Episode 2 or Episode 4 - you can't tell when events occurred, you might just remember that they did.
I never understood why Netflix and Amazon release TV shows like this.
What happened to waiting?
Make people wait. Release 1 episode a week, like normal TV shows do. This will make people talk about it, and talk about how they can't wait for the next episode next week. You get people talking, you build up the hype, and plus you buy yourself time.
This all at once system is silly.
"Producers who must grope for ways to measure the success of a given program and wonder if they're getting paid enough by the streaming service."
Gee, maybe you should get paid for the ACTUAL work that you do, and not how many people view it? Just a thought... This is why I can't stand the entertainment industry. Residuals should be outlawed. No one deserves to be paid for not doing actual work. They should be compensated well up-front, paid by the hour, just like the rest of us.