[goldcd]

Unlike a lot of tech companies, I still like Netflix. From "DVD in the post" to "We need to make/own our own shows" was a massive pivot that paid off for them, and launched dozens of wannabes. I genuinely can't think of another company that managed anything so large.

Previous peers like spotify are still struggling to get out from under their publishers (still no HD music available) and they had to side-step to podcasts to own their own content.

Apple's got some good stuff they've paid for handsomely, but a lot of shit. Disney came in with a huge catalogue and had to buy Fox, and aside from a few star-wars spin-offs, hasn't managed to grab the zeitgeist and Marvel seems to be slowly dying.

Netflix is sitting on so much content and so many subscribers, they could cut back on new programming and introduce cheaper ad-supported tiers, and ride out the recession on their back-catalogue. Plus (and maybe uniquely amongst the streamers) they've got franchises like "Nailed it" that are cheap to make but will keep fans watching. And as my final "Netflix is going to win" point, they've successfully commissioned local programming and got the world to watch it. I can't think of any equivalents to say Money Heist, Squid Game or RRR from any of the other streamers. I mean just the other day I wandered into the living room and found my wife engrossed in "some turkish zombie series".. only on netflix.

[rektide]

> Unlike a lot of tech companies, I still like Netflix. From "DVD in the post" to "We need to make/own our own shows" was a massive pivot that paid off for them, and launched dozens of wannabes. I genuinely can't think of another company that managed anything so large.

It's also been a massive pivot that, over time, has radically reduced availability of what they can show.

And far more massively, has destroyed the broad ability consumers & services once had to get hardcopy mediums they could own or share. Netflix very clearly, somewhat accidentally, begat the end of DVDs of everything.

It is a crowning achievement of destructive innovation. It served very convenient ends, but was a forefront in ruining ownership. Netflix used to acquire media like anyone else: by buying disks. Now the market is far more politically foibled & less clear, about how content is acquired & kept.

I'm in no way saying it's not a huge achievement. But the long term repercussions seem almost all bad for almost everyone, to me. Constant re-negotiation of rights to stream media is much more complicated than simply having disks. We can look at latter decisions like Aereo, where a company bent over backwards to try to appease media-consuming constraints, by giving each consumer literally their own over the air antenna + timeshifting in the cloud, and trace the path back to Netflix, who started the shift away from ownable media, to a new content-holder regime.

We are very early in. Still, the various networks each having their own media-production arm is very much a byproduct of what Netflix hath wrought, of the dark times Netflix created when they replaced good old fashioned fungible media. Literally the only way to have leverage, to be able to be a streaming service, is to literally make your own media too. Old Netflix ran by a playbook of the world that was much simpler, a modified Blockbuster+distribution model that was far less complected, that didn't constantly run off the rails, that could endure itself.