Hey, is everyone alright? And with that, it feels like one can exhale again. Four years braced to see what horrors would unfold today are behind us, and hopefully, history and politics will become boring again, just for a few minutes.
So we can turn our attention back to the important things! No…not the pandemic still raging and killing our fellow citizens by the hundreds of thousands, but what really matters here: the streaming war! The window! Netflix earnings! The Bobxit!
So turning our attention back to the real show, here in no particular order are a few of the things troubling our sleep this week.
The Service Reports: 200 million subs! Doubling in size in three years after two decades on the field. We can and will continue to take shots, furrow our brow, and express concerns about where all this is leading, but there’s a reason that discussion of the next phase in entertainment continues to hover around The Service. This is a hurricane plowing through like Hollywood hasn’t seen since the wide-open days of cigar clubs and the Katzenberg memo.
In a turn from the days when the world looked ahead to the streaming world as it would be One Service to Rule Us All, Netflix now notes that new services coming online are drawing people out of cable and into the streaming ecosystem where they will keep adding on services. Which makes some sense from a business model perspective, giving Netflix room not to be The One in control of a monopoly system, but the biggest slice of a growing pie.
One problem with that: More people taking slices of that pie is going to mean more bidding wars for talent, more competition for the best shows. If Netflix has soured on the giant mid-nine-figure showrunner deals, then it’s just good, old trench warfare, show by show. While The Service has a commanding position in the streaming battle zone, its not prohibitively so much better that The Service is the only place to launch a show you want to get seen. Particularly if Apple, Amazon, or even The Max is going to outbid.
So it’s time to jettison the paradigm that there’s this hard ceiling of how many services people could have (traditionally set at three) and that once they hit that number, everyone else is locked out. For the moment, whatever the number is, it seems like when people get into the streaming world, Netflix is highly likely to be part of their suite of apps. But looking down the road, questions remain.
But better to have problems and issues tomorrow than nightmares today. There’s a recovery saying of people celebrating how vast their lives become once they kick the habit: “Today I have issues in areas where I never used to have areas.” That sums up Netflix’s situation—concerns aplenty, and any other company would trade their grandmothers for a shot at those concerns.
As the others out there fight for the chance to be the next Netflix, the lessons that made Netflix, Netflix still seems to be lost on almost everyone. The drive to take crazy risks, make waves, and dominate chatter cycles year after year still doesn’t have a lot of takers on the lots around town.
Netflix Movies: Netflix bragged about dominating the Google searches for TV shows this year.
Fair enough. They’ve got a lot of stuff right up there in the stratosphere with Big Brother Brasil, so kudos for that. But they went on to crow that they had two movies on the Top Ten Most Searched Movies list. Saying you have two of the most searched movies, this year, when there were no movies released, and you released about 50 movies including: The Trial of the Chicago 7, Mank, Spencer Confidential, Uncorked, Love Wedding Repeat, Dangerous Lies, All Day and a Night, The Wrong Missy, The Last Days of American Crime, Feel the Beat, Desperados, All Together Now, Holidate, and The Sleepover. To name just a few. How is it an accomplishment with an output like that to get only two films on the list of a shuttered industry?
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