Netflix's Biggest Competition Isn't Sleep -- It's YouTube (venturebeat.com)

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings loves to identify sleep as the biggest competition of its service. "Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon, but think about it. If you didn't watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There's such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect -- and we compete with all of that," he once said. "You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep," he added. Turns out, Hastings does not need to look that far for competition.

From a report: Despite Netflix and Amazon investing billions of dollars in producing original content, they are struggling to make inroads in emerging markets. YouTube, on the other hand, is growing rapidly, becoming a daily habit for even new internet users. In India, for instance, YouTube reaches 245 million unique users each month, or 85 percent of all internet users in the country, the company told VentureBeat. About 60 percent of all YouTube traffic in India comes from outside of its six major cities. [Globally, YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly active users.]

As consumption on YouTube grows, creators are also finding loyal audiences. In India alone, YouTube now has more than 600 channels with more than 1 million subscribers, up from 20 channels in 2016. Record label T-Series, which is fighting with PewDiePie for the title of most-subscribed YouTube channel, took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. In the last two years, it has grown to 60 million subscribers. Globally, YouTube says the number of channels with more than 1 million subscribers has grown by 75 percent this year.

Globally, YouTube told VentureBeat that 75 percent of the platform's watch time occurs on a mobile device. The average watch time for a mobile user is 60 minutes per day. Or in other words, this is the time a user could have spent watching Netflix. According to eMarketer's estimates, an average user would spend about 86 minutes per day watching digital videos on streaming services this year.

Comments

Amazing...

[Junta]

You mean to tell me a free video website has more reach than one that requires a monthly payment? I would never have guessed that...

Binge is dead

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Here's how my family currently uses Netflix. Our usage has definitely dropped over time.

1) Wife will "watch" a series if it's interesting, maybe BBC, after the 10pm news. She's typically asleep by 10:40 and 3/4 episodes often play while she's snoozing.
2) I watch old Star Trek series, maybe the occasional anime or new sci fi series - typically in the background while I'm working on some side project by myself late at night.
3) Young daughter will watch girl cartoons, typically for about an hour at a time per day.
4) Teen boys ignore it. They know how to pirate and don't even bother checking to see if NetFlix has a version of what they want to watch before downloading.

What aren't we doing? Sitting down to watch anything other than the occasional movie together. No one binges series after series anymore; we pretty much got that out of our systems two years ago. And we still pirate GoT and other "premium" series, particularly if the only legit version online is season-limited or injected with commercials. But 3-4 hours of the same series...in the same sitting? Ain't nobody got that kind of time...

Re:Binge is dead

[urdak]

Watching for 3-4 hours straight isn't the only way to do "Binge". What I usually do is watch Netflix about 30 minutes each night (I don't have time for more...), finishing an entire season of a series in a couple of weeks. It's still a "binge" in the sense that I watch the series as one very long movie, and rarely watch other things in the middle. I actually feel that series-watching on Netflix have become the new "book": it takes a long time to finish, every night you continue from where you left off last night, you don't usually do it for 4 hours straight but perhaps more like 30 minutes, and it has a lot of depth and breadth (unlike a short movie).

Netflix still has a lot of series I want to watch, but I wish they had a lot more of the older TV series (there are *decades* worth of excellent series out there). Star Trek is an excellent example of older content they do have, and I watched.

Youtube's advantages

[CastrTroy]

I think the main advantage of Youtube is that they do a much better job of pushing stuff you want to see. You can subscribe to channels and then they show you a list of all tne new stuff in your channels each day. You can sign up for notifications so you never miss a new video. They can recommend new channels to you based on channels you are interested in.

Netflix seems to be terrible at promoting the content on their service. Every day I go on there and see the same shows and movies being pushed for months at a time. Sometimes I'll go exploring and find that there are great movies on there that they just never tell you about, even if I've watched many similar movies.

The only way to find these movies, especially when viewing in an app is to search by title, but almost nobody searches by title because so many movies just aren't there. When I want to find stuff they aren't pushing, I go to the web interface, where you can click on the name of actor/director/writer and see all the other content that they have for that person. This feature seems to be absent from the apps, and it's kind of a shame, because there is plenty of good content on Netflix, but much of it is impossible to find.

I love the University of YouTube!

[MpVpRb]

I prefer learning stuff over watching yet another cop drama or soap opera
I can attend graduate-level physics lectures by top professors, with great graphics and sound
I can learn glassblowing, welding, knifemaking, machining, woodworking, and more
Currently, I'm watching card magic tutorials
Even some promotional materials are educational. By watching an ad, I learned about longwall coal mining
And then, for fun, there's dead malls and Uncle Bumblefuck (AvE)

Re:Neither one

[nwaack]

So because YOU don't like it, Netflix and Youtube is for dummies? Not all of us are in school and/or like to read. Some of us have stressful jobs and kids, and very much enjoy those few precious moments when we get to turn off our brains for a bit and relax in front of the TV. But I guess raising children and being successful makes me a dummy, eh?

Re: Makes sense

[jellomizer]

I think it is more of an issue of age.
When we were young, these were new concepts to us, and the popular shows of the time that we watch got our attention and such ideas were interesting and radical. However as we grew older we see the same thing over and over again, and no longer gains the same attention, and just seems more blunt, while in actually it isn't as bad as you think it is, but as you got older you ability to spot the deeper meaning has improved, and your views on things get more firmly fixed. So if a show has a "non-standard relationship" a younger person will see this and realize not all families follow the same structure, while the older person will see it as the group you grew up to learn to hate and fear as a threat to your way of life.

The view is that culture peaked when you hit your 20's no matter what your age is, everything else past that is either repetitive or just lazy and shotty.
The Boomers are pining for the easy life of the 1950's and 1960's. Gen X thinks the 1970's and 1980's, Menials are now pining for the 1990's and 2000's

For me as a late Gen X Star Trek TNG was my first experience with it. And its stances allowed me to approach things differently beyond the strict code of my parents. TOS which I watched covered many of the same topics, but showed its age and I didn't enjoy it as much, Voyager and Enterprise just seemed repetitive and just preachy. But if you were to ask a boomer about Star Trek TOS was far superior to all the others...

For most people in the first world, your late teens and early 20's is your most optimistic part of your life, despite the stress and depression we have trying to attract a mate, the future is wide open to us, still under our parents to cover necessities, but the freedom to explore and do what we want. Where in a decade we are tied down with a Job and Family, while brings a new form of joy, means you just cannot getup and leave and explore a different country, take that job where you travel all the time, get the higher paid 1099 work, because you don't need to worry about those benefits.