After years of exponential growth, Netflix announced on Tuesday that it had lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. The announcement frightened Wall Street and caused shares to fall more than 35%, wiping out more than $ 50 billion in market capitalization of a company whose shares had already fallen more than 40% year-on-year.
To explain the decline, Netflix pointed to everything from the war in Ukraine to people sharing passwords. But what if the reason is much simpler – that Netflix just doesn’t make many people want to see more?
It’s been a long time since Netflix was a complete package: the home of cherished sitcoms like The Office, lively dramas like House of Cards, the exclusive venue for movie events like Bird Box, and all for less than $ 10 a month. Now that the cost of streaming service is declining, the big question is: are you still watching? And if so, what exactly?
It is definitely harder for me to answer this question. That night, as I spent 10 minutes scrolling around for a show to help me fall asleep – Ozark (uh), The Ultimatum (Hard Pass), Pierce Morgan’s Serial Killer (wow!) – I felt like a 90s cable TV viewer. -they, aimless flying for something, anything to watch.
Since NBC returned The Office and HBO Max did the same with Friends, well, it can’t be said for sure that the Emperor has no content. It’s just that Netflix’s whole approach prefers quantity to quality.
Critical hits like The Crown, Black Mirror and Russian Doll started some time ago and the new seasons can’t capture the water-cooled excitement of earlier episodes. Netflix’s attempts to bring back the noise were uneven: the Space Force promised big stars (Steve Carell, John Malkovich) to send a funny program from the Trump era, but it eventually failed. Sex / Life is soft porn with a not very storyline, an eight-hour episode of Red Shoe Diaries. Bridgerton, for all his creative remixes, still works from an outdated archetype, periodical drama. Netflix movies are also hardly worth recommending. Oscar-nominated and star-studded Netflix’s central work, Don’t Look Up, just as heavy on its environmental friendliness and Adam McKay’s directorial tics, is hard to sell.
Even when the company has tried to play it safe with huge talent from other networks, Netflix doesn’t have to fuel fears of missing out. Dave Chapel, the $ 60 million Netflix man, caused the streamer more trouble than it was worth with a special comedy from 2021 that distracted the trance community. Meanwhile, all the supposedly expensive streaming record holders, such as Will Smith’s 2017 science fiction drama (which cost $ 90 million) or the exaggerated drama created by Ryan Murphy’s $ 300 million deal, prove that subscribers will watch it all. an attached star simply because it’s available on Netflix; it doesn’t matter if they are good.
Apart from a few titles, there is nothing to keep viewers tuned to Netflix except habit
Netflix is not just a media company. Right there with electricity and the telephone is on the list of inventions that have changed humanity, a cure for boredom and laziness. When going to the rental video store became too tedious, he delivered the DVDs directly to our mailboxes. When the mailbox became too much of a commotion, it delivered the same content right to our TVs and laptops. It doesn’t just make our favorite movies and TV replays available to us at any time while making original, large-caliber programs. He did all this consistently enough to abandon terrestrial television en masse.
But since Netflix changed home entertainment forever, competing media companies have been vying to develop their own streaming apps, many of which are arguably better value than Netflix. HBO Max not only has a finely crafted television (Euphoria, Last Week Tonight) and the entire Warner Bros. library at its disposal; there are Batman and other blockbuster films six weeks after they hit theaters. Disney + is persistently redirecting the Star Wars and Marvel universes, the kind of IP Netflix can only dream of. Paramount + includes the NFL, March Madness and the Champions League. Prime Video is available free of charge with registrations for extended expedited delivery. With each new Netflix subscription app, he is becoming a growing victim of his own success.
It took many bouts and launches, before Netflix finally won its first major award for original programming, the pilot episode of House of Cards, which took the 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Directing. Apple TV + has only been around for five minutes, and yet Ted Lasso and Koda cleaned up this season’s awards. Overall, Apple seems to be changing the whole ratio of Netflix, doing more with less.
This does not mean that the competition is completely ahead of Netflix. As someone who has never been ashamed to buy DVDs from subway platform vendors, I love that Netflix draws on Nollywood hits like How to Ruin Christmas and revives One on One, Half & Half and other valuable black sitcoms from my teenage age. Even some of the original programming deserves props. The Upshaws is a fun sitcom that could handle more critical attention.
Netflix also has a hot series in the reality TV department with Love Is Blind, Is It Cake? and other variations of the genre. Formula 1: Drive to Survive also belongs in the Netflix profit column; the sport owes much of its resurgent popularity to behind-the-scenes series. Still, Netflix still has nothing for Bravo, VH1, Lifetime and other cable supporters in the beverage and wig grabbing department.
Aside from a handful of titles, viewers aren’t much in the mood for Netflix, except for a habit – which is almost where many of them were wired before breaking the cable and downloading the app. Netflix was a cool, real destroyer. But the success made him fat and boring, with a huge appetite for ever lower calorie content. This has become something he once despised – just another expensive TV package. That doesn’t mean people won’t watch. But there is certainly more to think about.
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