this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Why do they insist on crunching their existing customers instead of attracting new customers?
I haven't looked into them, but I'd bet they're just in a both mature and oversaturated market. There's not much they can do to gain new people, everyone knows what Netflix is across all first world markets and a corpo won't care about the others.
Sure. I haven't paid for Netflix in my life (mid 30s male, American), and at this rate I don't see myself doing so. My wife and I plan to do a free trial and watch Castlevanias new series one of these weekends.
Basically. They’re becoming the Comcast of streaming. And Comcast isn’t exactly high on customer satisfaction.
People throw enshittification, but that ain’t it. They’re not screwing their investors. They just don’t have room to grow and need to reorg to survive.
They chose how they wanted to grow. They didn't do it slowly these last few years with quality content and well thought out production time lines. They pumped their platform with more. And more. And more. They chose quantity over quality and that is their choice. It then becomes the choice of the customer of they feel the money is worth it. Simple as that.
They were kind of in a no-win situation for a while with content (either good content that couldn't retain subs or floods of good/bad content that, probably, did retain subs but lowered the bar).
Now that their library at least exists, one would hope they'd shift investment to both UX and diving headfirst into quality to try to compete at some level with Amazon's capex spend. Sure lots of people online didn't like LoTR but it's a flagship example of good use of capital, and the show was highly streamed - Wheel of Time Season 2 being another good, perhaps even better example, given the turnaround from S1.
I'm guessing Elon stealth-bought Netflix and is speedrunning company destruction again. It's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.
They dominated the market. Their model REQUIRES growth to continue for it to make sense (stock ponzi) so they need to find ways to promise profits to shareholders.
They can't easily attract new customers so instead they are obligated to squeeze existing customers.