[skohan]

Yes "data driven" does not always lead to what's best for the consumer.

From what I understand, Netflix' decision model is heavily based on how many users watch the first X minutes of a season in the first few days that it's up. Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.

I'm sure this is a data-driven decision, and I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers. It makes intuitive sense: with most forms of media the largest number of people will give something a try when it's new, and aside from very rare exceptions the viewer base will settle in to a much lower number of "true fans".

So it makes sense in the short term from a business perspective, and they have way more data than I do from my armchair, but I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

I suspect Netflix would have to see increased churn due to pressure from competitors to see more serious attention paid to loyalty and retention.

[Tor3]

Netflix not only stops shows before you even got a chance to see it (I'm not among those who look for new content all the time - I try to follow what I'm currently watching), but Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore. It's been like that for every movie she's asked about. I'm wondering why having Netflix at all. It feels like a pointless waste of money, something my wife now keeps mentioning, and I'm very close to terminate the whole deal.

Netflix, you're wasting my money. I'm not getting what I expected to get from you. I will be spend my money on something else than you.

[jm4]

Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV. And this whole data-driven approach to everything is infuriating. Complain about how something works? Netflix says the data proves you wrong. How long did it take them to add an option to get rid of those automatic video previews that had users enraged? I would have canceled long ago if my wife didn't like watching all the Asian novelas they have on there.

I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.

Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.

[jonfw]

> Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV

It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content

[jm4]

So true. It's like they forget what made them popular in the first place.

What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.

So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.

[pixelbath]

Prior to on-demand content, I was a faithful "red envelope" subscriber because not only was it convenient (and I didn't really have to worry about returning a RedBox DVD), but Netflix kept _all_ my ratings for _all_ the movies I'd seen. They still have that data last I checked, but it's very much hidden in the account settings and they've long since deprecated user reviews. They now say "98% match." Match to what? We pretty much use a single user account across two households; what is that statistic referring to?

Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.

[lukeramsden]

Maybe it's an inevitability of scale?

[dreamcompiler]

It's an inevitability of incentivizing growth over all else. So scale per se is not the problem. The problem is incentivising the first derivative of scale.

[Pet_Ant]

> Maybe it's an inevitability of scale?

Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

I appreciate their attempt to do this. I'd love such a thing. Unfortunately, their algorithm is woefully immature, they lack content, and can't double down on shows that get a slow start. In the short term this helps them grow at the expense of alienating early adopters, die hard fans, and their more flippant subscribers.

My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.

[extraduder_ire]

Automatic netflix previews are the thing that infuriates me the most about it. (And the reason I'll probably never pay for it.)

Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video. Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)

I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.

[Miraste]

You can turn them off.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

[skohan]

Turning off autoplay on YouTube was the one of the best things I have done for my personal happiness in the last few years. It's amazing how having to take a moment to choose the next the next action after finishing a piece of content has contributed to my mindfulness, and raised the quality bar in terms of what I consume.

[monadic2]

I'm actually a big fan of Netflix exactly as you articulated you don't like it—if I have an empty head, I sit down and click through to find something to watch. Not currently subscribed, though, and I wish it came at a slightly lower price point as I don't watch the vast majority of netflix content.

[MaxBarraclough]

> Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore

This is a different matter. Netflix has a finite budget to license content. It's not clear that it would be better for the consumer if they had a policy of never removing films from the library, as this would have to be counterbalanced by fewer new films being added. I suspect this approach would be much worse for the consumer overall.

Also, unlike when a series is cancelled, those films are still available to stream on an à la carte basis from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.

[dalai]

I have been giving Netflix a try for a couple of months now and I am really thinking of dropping it because of this. I think I’d rather rent something from one of the on demand services and watch what I want, than being forced to watch whatever Netflix happens to have on offer this week. Especially because I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series.

[MaxBarraclough]

It sounds like your complaint isn't that Netflix has a 'churn' of available content, but that they don't offer much content of interest to you. If that's the case, then sure, it makes good sense to cancel and either go with another subscription streaming service, or buy/rent what you want to watch. There's not much Netflix can do about that, short of just spending far more money on licensing content, which would presumably mean raising prices.

I've found that disc rental (by post) can be a surprisingly good option, even if it's been mostly forgotten with the rise of streaming. The available library is better than any streaming subscription is able to offer.

> I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series

Shouldn't this mean you're less inconvenienced by content churn? If you're part way through a series and it gets removed, that's annoying, but this doesn't really apply to movies.

[dwighttk]

That’s just a streaming rights thing. I don’t think Netflix is taking away any movies just to take them away. It’s because agreements expire and on renegotiation the rights owners want a bigger slice. Netflix’s streaming used to be a free tack on to the disk shipping business because they got a bunch of cheap rights because no rights owners thought anyone wanted to stream.

[macspoofing]

>I'm wondering why having Netflix at all.

For Netflix shows. Netflix is now a network channel producing its own content, in the mold of HBO. If you don't find value in HBO, then you don't subscribe to HBO. Same with Netflix.

Licensing content from turned out to be a terrible business model because a) licensing fees would bleed you dry of all your profits, b) content owners would yank their content anyway to compete with you because it turns out, creating a streaming infrastructure isn't that hard and much cheaper than owning and producing content.

[ghaff]

While there's obviously licensed content on Netflix, HBO, and elsewhere, it's increasingly about rounding out their own studio content or other exclusives. I'm not going to subscribe to HBO for whatever non-HBO movies they may have.

If you're not interested with what's on the "channel" at all, you're probably mostly better off with just buying/renting a la carte.

[jbarrs]

In fairness, I can't imagine "classics" garnering anywhere near the watch times of a new show. Whilst you'll get some new viewers from the people who've heard it's a classic or those showing their kids a movie from "their time", but the majority of viewers will be those who've seen it before and want to watch it again, and given the age of some of these classics they likely already own it on DVD etc.

[gowld]

DVDs are easy to get. DVD players are not so much. It gets expensive to attach one to every screen. And on my phone/tablet?

[some_account99]

plex

[o_class_star]

Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.

I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.

I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.

[jon-wood]

I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.

A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.

[skohan]

The problem is that it's not possible to know in advance if a series will be one of the blessed few to last more than two seasons. Designing a 24-episode arc, and then having the show be a smash hit is also a problem for Netflix

[jon-wood]

I’ve never encountered a well written TV series where I was disappointed at it ending after two seasons, while I’ve encountered a great many which outstayed their welcome and soured me on the entire thing. I know some people love great long things that never seem to end, I just don’t count myself among them.

[hef19898]

Not sure how much my viewing influences Netflix "Top 10", but this week it showed Star Trek TNG of being part of it. With all the series being out, including opd ones, I just don't have time to get to watch stuff right after release. I also tend to binge watch series before starting a new one. So when finally start to watch a new series, it might well be to late to get more than one season. Great, basically the same shitty situation we had back the day. And I really thought streaming would result in more variety. Turned out it is just a more modern version of cable tv.

[matwood]

During COVID I've been watching all of TNG. Sadly, after months, I'm now on the last season.

[hef19898]

That makes two, then! Also binged DS9, started VOY and came to the conclusion that out of all of them, DS9 is my favorite. And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me.

[matwood]

> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG.

This so many times. It gives me hope that humanity will eventually rise above what's going right now. There are also a lot more good lessons in TNG than I remembered as a kid. Great show :)

[hef19898]

It was great. personally, I was and still am torn regarding the optimism. I love it, but on the other hand I always liekd gritty and dark SF as well. Luckily for me, there is both! Even within Star Trek! And Picard is my favorite SF ship captain anyway, by far!

[tzs]

> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me

If you like that, you should give The Orville a try. A lot of people dismissed it thinking it was going to be full of crude humor, essentially "Family Guy in Space", because it was from Seth MacFarlane.

But that is not the case at all. What MacFarlane was going for exactly was that naive optimism, although from TOS not TNG. Later science fiction, he has said, has been a lot less optimistic.

Yes, The Orville has some comedy--sometimes quite funny, but it almost all fits in with the serious elements. The crew, at least for a long time, is not full of highly competent natural heroes like TOS or TNG, because The Orville is not the flagship of the fleet that everyone wants to be on and only the very best qualify. It is the opposite of that. It's a minor ship where you put average or below people who you don't expect much from, captained by a man who had problems in his personal life that tanked his career, given The Orville because some friends called in favors to get one more try to turn him around before kicking him out of the service.

The first season was a bit hit or miss for the first few episodes, as they figured out the right balance of comedy and drama, but it did not take long to get good. The second season continued on from that. That's all there was been so far, with a third season coming.

I agree on DS9. My one complaint is that I think they should have went another direction with the ending. It could have ended in a way that served as a launching point for the biggest Star Trek arc yet.

Much of the series involved the conflict between the Federation and the Founders from the gamma quadrant, with the Federation being the good guys. The Founders were perhaps not necessarily evil, but they had a strong distrust of others and a belief that the non-shapeshifters would wipe them out if they got a chance.

The thing about the Founders is that with their shapeshifting abilities they were pretty much the best spies and infiltrators in the galaxy. We know they infiltrated to the highest levels of Klingon government.

I don't remember if it was ever confirmed that they made it to high levels in the Federation, too, but you have to assume they did. But then they should be able to figure out that Federation really are the good guys. The Federation really wants peace between every intelligent species. They really should join the Federation rather than fear it.

So why didn't they?

Perhaps it is because they aren't the only ones who have infiltrated and placed people high in the Federation government? From TOS and TNG we know that others have tried or succeeded at that before.

So maybe the reason the Founders absolutely distrust the Federation is because they know that the people who appear to be in charge and are pushing the peace and unity message are actually not the ones running things. The peace and unity people are just clueless puppets of the real masters.

End DS9 with Sisko discovering the truth, the Federation's masters discovering that Sisko is on to them, and Sisko going on the run.

That sets up at least two more series.

The first one could cover Sisko on the run, working in the shadows to build up secret opposition to the Federation's evil masters, slowly spreading the word to others he can trust, like Picard on the Enterprise, and convincing Federation enemies like the Cardassians that they are better off with a Federation that really is what is claims to be rather than a Federation secretly run by evil aliens and so should help save the Federation.

The second series, "Star Trek: Civil War", could cover when matters get to a head, and open hostilities break out withing The Federation.

You could still have Voyager in there...have the civil war start while Voyager is lost. They can come back into the middle of it.

There's probably even plenty for a third series after Civil War.

[hef19898]

Totally agree! And I am convinced that now that I will give the Orville a shot. I am kind os disapointed with season 7 of DS9, the focus on the spiritual aspect was a little bit too much on the nose for me.

I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?

It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.

[Majromax]

> I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers.

It assumes that novelty is what drives people to the platform and increases/maintains the subscriber base.

However, Netflix's evident model is not capable of falsifying this assumption. By cancelling series as soon as they plateau (not even _decline_, given reporting (https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...) of its production cost escalator), they do not generate a large library of "complete series" for later viewing.

This also puzzles me, since it contradicts Netflix's willingness to pay a pretty penny for established series like Friends. Its current show-commissioning practices seem to be incapable of generating a new generational hit like that.

[skohan]

I agree, and I think it's a problem which can occur in data-driven systems: the system can stabilize at a non-optimal local maximum.

Ideally they should A/B test at least occasionally with different decision models to see if their assumptions are correct, but those are very expensive experiments to run when you're talking about the production of a TV series.

[Majromax]

It's also difficult because Friends is also a long-tail phenomenon. There were dozens of 90s sitcoms that failed to become generational hits.

Also, a counter-argument to my proposition above is that broadcast TV through the mid-90s had a captive audience in a way that Netflix doesn't. To a limited extent, broadcast TV could force audiences to become familiar with a show, pushing an originally-marginal show over a threshold of popularity.

[arkitaip]

How long before production companies start paying people to watch (measurable too) the first episodes of a tv series? If you could boost your viewership so much you got to produce multiple seasons, losing out on the first season might not be a bad deal.

[bobsoap]

I see a business model there.

Netflix Decision Model Optimization (NDMO). The new SEO.

[tomjen3]

It is funny. Originally the value of Netflix was that you could watch 10 seasons of an old TV show in one go. Now you can watch 1/2 season (10-13 episodes) of a new show.

I have started to check if there is more than one season out before I watch a new show, and frequently there isn't.

[thinkingemote]

I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire. It didn't affect the studio or publisher that much, GOT simply vanished from culture.

Past obsessives moved to other newer things after a few days.

It's an incredibly curious thing and the opposite from the never ending marvel material that gets released.

[gowld]

Why would a producer intentionally throw away $millions to $billions just to test a hypothesis that people don't like bad things?

GoT died because the writer was replaced by a pair of hacks when the writer couldn't write fast enough to keep up.

[Cactus2018]

> I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire.

This is a great theory!

I think the creators of HBO's GOT ended the series because they were rushing to work on:

]] Benioff and Weiss inked a five-year, $250 million partnership with Netflix in August to make film and TV projects exclusively for the streaming service. The move was head-scratching at the time, considering the pair had already committed to producing Star Wars movies for Disney—an undertaking that was likely to take many years and leave little room for anything else.

https://qz.com/1737729/gots-benioff-and-weiss-picked-netflix...

[Izkata]

> the never ending marvel material that gets released.

I dunno, now that Endgame completed the movie storyline that had been building for a decade, and their spearhead TV show Agents of SHIELD is over, I've almost completely lost all interest in the MCU. I've seen similar sentiments pretty regularly elsewhere, and wouldn't be surprised if its prominence also fades despite continued releases.

[ben509]

> Yes "data driven" does not always lead to what's best for the consumer.

One solution might be consumers use more data.

[bryanrasmussen]

I guess there must also be some value to how many people put it on their their favorites list.