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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."
Dear Netflix,
I have no interest investing time to watch a show that goes nowhere. Gets cancelled. Or has no definite ending. Even worse, that ends on a cliffhanger.
Follow a formula like Babylon 5 used. A story with a beginning, middle and end. Having a definite ending where everyone lives happily ever after is important. In the last few episodes you can see the pieces being moved off the chessboard as everyone gets promoted or retires or whatever. It doesn't have to be a five year story arc. But it does have to be something that you can definitely pull off without cancelling it.
I've watched shows that had a well conceived first season. Obviously thought out by a single mind. Or maybe a small number of people. Excitement builds from episode to episode. It has a good season 1 ending. Then it gets a second season and goes off the rails. In season 2 the show has no planned story. The writers wander aimlessly. Eventually the writers turn to thinking about what outlandish twist can we do to a major character -- completely ruining the character's back story in previous episodes.
I know it is tempting to think that if you can drag a show on for more seasons that it makes more profit. That is true in the short term. Eventually your audiences get tired of being strung along without ever having a conclusion. Resolution. They just quit watching. Find other forms of entertainment that have a satisfying ending -- like reading a good book. In the long run, it is more profitable to have a limited pre-planned number of seasons with a story that winds up and makes everyone happy. This kind of show might be watched and re-watched for generations. Just like a good book.
Stop worrying about trying to make a show that everyone wants to watch. There is no such show. This thinking is what killed television, and later cable tv. Make a show that a certain audience will love dearly. Make another show that another audience will love. People who like particular types of shows will continue to appear as new viewers -- forever. There will always be new sci-fi viewers, for example.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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
OTOH, I don't like the way regular TV releases a few weeks, waits a couple of months in the winter, releases a few more, takes a spring break, then releases a few more and quits for the summer.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I feel that a lot of Netflix series, well may be well written, seem to not have rewatchability factor to it. These are shows that I normally flag, as I watched it, I was glad I watched it, but after that I am not interested in seeing it again. For me I find this common with "Smart" Shows. While engaging, and may make you think, after you have thought about it, rewatching it again, just boring, because there isn't much new in a new view.
Some shows have the right amount of smart in it, that rewatching over and over means you can get different angles, but also not make watching it again a chore.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well then, has Amazon got a service for you.
https://www.amazon.com/rent-or-buy-amazon-video/b/ref=sd_allcat_aiv_shop?ie=UTF8&node=7589478011
The problem is with the production side, as the article says. Traditionally the stars and production company make a show and lowball the cost to get it on the air. They take lower salaries, cheaper locations, etc. Then if the ratings get big they renegotiate their contracts for better pay, more return per episode, better quality episodes.
With Netflix's attitude towards ratings, it makes it harder for production to do this. They still have to meet certain costs on production, but then if Netflix only says "It's a hit!" with no metrics, they can't judge what kind of leverage they have for renegotiation.
Then again, Netflix mostly skips the idea of pilot episodes and orders entire seasons, so less risk on the production side to start with.
I think the point was Netflix is shielded from making their audience ratings public. Clearly there's not going to be an incentive to maintain an unpopular show, but there's just as much incentive to make an exaggerated popularity claim to increase the number of viewers, aka false advertising.
There was an article on CNN or Reuters (can't find the article at the moment... it might have simply been a link from one of them) today about Sense8. Because of all the travel and different locals they were shooting, their production cost was about 9mil per episode.... about what GoT is. My guess is on that one is: money.
I've only watched a few of their series, and while Sense8 had a great premise, i can see some people having difficulty following it. The other mentioned i haven't seen, so no clue there.
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