[ad_1]
when netflix (NFLX) – Get Free Report Initially, the company made a name for itself by shifting from offering reruns and old movies to producing its own content. In many ways, the company followed the lead of Warner Bros. Discovery. (WBDMore) – Get Free Report HBO, the cable giant with a focus on quality.
HBO wasn’t a volume play. It has always maintained subscribers by having some of the blockbuster shows people felt they needed to be subscribers to see. City, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and more recently, Game of Thrones, HBO was a prestige theater offering programming you won’t find anywhere else. cable or broadcast.
In some ways it’s an expensive business model (Dragons aren’t cheap), but in other ways it’s really cheap. Having a few prestige programs to keep your subscriber base happy and growing costs less than trying to churn out a show.
This is a lesson Netflix seemed to understand early on. The company has run several shows such as ‘House of Cards’, ‘Orange is the New Black’, ‘Ozark’ and ‘Stranger Things’ to build its business and captivate its audience. , constructed the word. mouth.
Netflix has clearly moved away from the fame model in favor of producing shows that please the company’s algorithms rather than become cynical conversations. As such, the streaming giant has produced a seemingly endless string of shows that no one talks about, cares about, or tells their friends about.
The answer should be obvious for Netflix now, but produce fewer shows and align what you produce with the prestige TV model. The company continues to go down the wrong path.
netflix
Netflix continues to make programming cheaper
People pay for premium programming.Walt Disney (DIS) – Get Free Report demonstrated this on the Disney+ streaming service. The channel offers top-notch must-see shows that people talk about, and in less than three years, Disney+ has become Netflix’s second largest paying subscriber, with about two-thirds of its global paying subscribers. Enough to make it the #2 streaming service.
For decades (before its current ownership mess), HBO has shown that consumers are willing to pay premium prices for premium TV. Disney has bolstered the success of its model with his Disney+ while retaining ad-supported pricing for its second-tier Hulu service.
Pricing is important when you have a product of questionable value. Hulu offers limited editions of reruns, mostly low-budget shows, and no big events for people to watch. The same can be said for Comcast. (CMCSA) – Get Free Report Peacock and Paramount Global (Para) – Get Free Report Paramount +.
These streaming channels don’t have Disney’s Star Wars or Marvel shows to drive subscribers. Sadly, this also applies to HBO now. So the once-premium service launched an ad-supported version, and so did Netflix.
It can’t be cheap and premium. As a result, Disney theme parks do not offer ticket discounts (with limited exceptions for Florida residents). The ad-supported tier doesn’t make Netflix or any other service all that special. Because if there’s a show that people want to watch, it can be dealt with for $15 or $20 a month.
Now Netflix suggests that cheap may not be enough.
Netflix Now Free
Paramount made a ton of money with its free Pluto TV service. Pluto offers a collection of old reruns that people are supposed to be watching. It’s a money-making strategy, but offering reruns of “Manimal,” “Who’s the Boss,” and “Airwolf” next to an endless supply of shows no one has ever heard of is brand building, not brand building. It’s a monetary game.
Pluto, like the Roku channel, and Amazon’s AMZN Freevee are free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channels. Repurposing old content as a vehicle for advertising sales. It may be a smart strategy (it’s hard to see how sustainable it would be), but it’s a very different model than Netflix has been.
There’s nothing wrong with packaging basically free (and free) programming for people looking for it, but I don’t want to do that with core programming. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos answered a question during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the company will launch his FAST channel.
“Yeah. Look, we’re open to all these different models that’s out there right now, but we’ve got a lot going on this year, both with paid sharing and advertising launches and the continuation of this slate. Of the content that we are trying to reach our members. So we are definitely looking at that segment,” he said.
The issue is not that Netflix is ​​entering the FAST space, but that the questioner mentioned that Netflix is ​​leveraging a decade of creating its own intellectual property as a way to do so. Basically, it’s the company abandoning its paywall, ruining its core product, even if it’s an older show.
Even “Stranger Things” and Adam Sandler movies are new to those who haven’t seen them. This is a core part of Netflix’s business model. Making some of these shows available for free reduces the value in promoting future Netflix subscribers.
Netflix had a successful business model. It was sustainable as long as we were producing great shows that people cared about. Now the company has run out of creative ways, and management has shown that it’s not even thinking about returning to television that people will be talking about.
[ad_2]
Source link
