[cam0]

True, but Netflix has gotten really good at this over the past 10 years. They create/fund some great content (and a lot of mediocre/bad content) - kind of similar to a VC fund now that I'm writing this out. They're an integral component of the entertainment industry now.

[hobs]

And they've been actively harming that idea by then canceling pretty much everything by the third season.

[posnet]

I keep hearing this from people, so I must be in the minority.

But I actually like the fact that they do limited run or self contained shows.

Not only does it mean that the show doesn't drag on for 10 seasons slowly reducing in quality until it's axed due to waning viewership.

But I've found their limited series runs to be more engaging since the writers and director are able to tell a self contained and complete story since they know the duration of the series and can pace out the story from start to end.

Also on a personal note, seeing a show has more than 5 seasons just feels like an exhausting time commitment to me at this point.

[ghaff]

I've always said that I have a 5 season rule--especially with network-length 20 episode seasons. Hit somewhere in that vicinity and I'm tired of the setting, style, and characters. There are a number of series who got to the 5, 6, 7 season point and even though they didn't necessarily "jump the shark" I just got less and less interested in them and eventually stopped watching.

I actually really like the fact that streaming helps allow for limited runs with episodes of the length that they want to be though one always hopes that a series ends at a natural point.

[CrazyStat]

I'm with you. If a show ends after two solid seasons I might wish there was more, but I'd rather that than watch it descend into an additional six seasons of mediocrity as so often happens.

[dhosek]

I was thinking as I was leaving the movie theater over the weekend and saw a poster for some movie billed as an Amazon Studios production that Google and Facebook are the only ones in the FAANG who aren't producing TV/movies. It will be very interesting to see how that progresses over the next decade. I want to believe that the data-driven approach that Netflix and Amazon have taken with their productions won't be the future of entertainment but who knows?

[HWR_14]

Google and Facebook are very much in the video space, they are just trying to crowdsource it.

And YouTube has a lot of ad supported movies and shows they are starting to roll out.

Meanwhile Meta is very much trying to develop interactive VR content.

[dhosek]

Thinking about this a bit more (and triggered by your comment), it occurs to me that the big difference between Google and Facebook vs Apple/Amazon/Netflix is that the former derive their income primarily from advertising. Netflix has established an expectation that online video is largely a premium thing that you pay for and don't have to watch ads during and while there are some exceptions to this in the major streaming services (Amazon's imdb.tv has free-with-ads programming, Hulu shows ads to most subscribers, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the lower-tier players do ads, but the big names in the space are all ad free with subscriptions and I don't know that Google/Facebook really have it in their DNA to do anything like that.

[efficax]

Incredible how quickly Facebook TV and YouTube TV have been forgotten