Netflix's Subscriber Loss Has Destroyed Employee Morale (bloomberg.com) 234
As Netflix shares plunge to their lowest point in five years, the company risks losing its most valuable resource: its star employees. From a report: Working at Netflix has been one of the most desirable jobs in Hollywood, if not all of corporate America. The company ranks as one of the most beloved brands, pays well and offers a chance to work with the people that changed the way we watch TV. But a record decline in Netflix's share price, precipitated by its poor financial results, has shaken employees' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory. It has also erased the value of many employees' options. People who were sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with nothing. More people are looking to leave Netflix right now than at any point in recent memory, current and former employees said this past week. Netflix employees also asked leadership to issue new stock grants to make them whole for the losses this past week, per The Information.
Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, make less content and improve the values of the shows you do have. It's that simple. Especially your movie division, it's very mediocre. In my opinion for every good series they make there are like 7 pretty "meh" ones.
Better content equals more subscribers, that's it. HBOMax is probably peeling away a lot of user because they simply have a better pedigree of films and series because they have a long history of high quality production.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't help that Disney took all of their properties (Disney and Marvel) content and put it on Disney+, Paramount/CBS moved all their content off to Paramount+, and all the DC Comics content went to HBOMax. This has left NetFlix with a rather mediocre selection that some might say is just absolute crap. The only thing that NetFlix has going for them is Stranger Things and even that can't go on forever.
What's killed NetFlix in a lot of ways is their constant process of making a new show only to have it cancelled three years later because some stupid algorithm said it wasn't doing well. So now after that's happened so many times, people are sick of it and saying why should I invest my time into a show that NetFlix will just kill off in three seasons.
That and the general idea that everything has to be "woke". Most of us don't want to be preached to all the damn time. Case in point, let's look at Star Trek: Picard. It's only Star Trek because it has Picard in it but other than that, it's very loosely Star Trek. It has none of what made Star Trek what it was when Gene was in charge namely that utopian future where humans had (somehow managed) to transcend modern politics and just get along. But that's CBS/Paramount but that's no less important here.
People generally want to be entertained and taken out of this shitty ass world for an hour or two and be taken along for a ride into another world. This is what the new generation of Hollywood types don't seem to get, we want to be entertained; not preached at and told how bad, evil, and racist we all are. Give me a good story and plot along with compelling characters and I'll be happy.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
> Case in point, let's look at Star Trek: Picard. It's only Star Trek because it has Picard in it but other than that, it's very loosely Star Trek. It has none of what made Star Trek what it was when Gene was in charge
"The Orville" is more Star Trek in spirit.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Orville" is more Star Trek in spirit.
This 100%, you can tell MacFarlane is a true TNG nerd from the lighting to the shot composition and the obvious fact he has a lot of 90's era trek people involved in the production.
The silly cartoon man has a much better grasp of what Trek is about than the dozens of Hollywood hack producers every Paramount Trek series has right now.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. "Seth" Trek understands the heart of great sci-fi: Exploring the social and moral implications of Technology.
It also helps that Seth is a HUGE Star Trek fan. He was even a guest on Enterprise.
Star 'Tard Picard is just dumb action schlock where the writers just make shit up completely forgetting ANYTHING that the Federation. If I wanted to be preached at I'd be in church.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This is a good part of that. I've taken a chance on several of their series. Often times it just feels rushed at the end to attempt to tie up loose ends or otherwise, just fucking doesn't end but you don't get the follow up.
Often times, "new" content for my wife and I will have at least 4 seasons already made. We figure, if the show went on for 4 seasons, it must be good enough to someone and worth at least checking out.
If the show couldn't break 3 seasons, maybe it just wasn't that good or in Netflix case,
Re: (Score:2)
The metrics don't lie. That's all that's looked at nowadays. If the metrics show something then it must be true. There's no way around it. Executives have no say in the matter to override metrics.*
* Yes, people, I am being sarcastic in case you were wondering. Metrics is the bane of companies everywhere but li
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
He is kind of right though, I watch Picard vicariously through the RedLetterMedia videos they've been doing every couple weeks about it [youtube.com] and the whole plotline of the crew going back to 2023 and one of the characters getting rounded up by ICE and some of the climate change dialogue is just... wow, it makes it hard to defend from complaints like that because it's just real bad.
I would say it's not bad because it's "woke" but it's bad because it's hack writing. Like you mention Trek by it's nature has always been socially conscious and pushed boundaries but there's a good way and a bad way to go about that. Picard is verrrry bad.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You think a show criticizing ICE and focusing on climate change is too progressive for Star Trek given its history? If anything Star Trek has faltered on its progressive messaging in recent times. The US was still lynching African Americans when Star Trek had the first scripted interracial kiss. The Supreme Court had only made laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional the previous year. It had a gender and racially diverse cast, and had episodes with dealt with a slew of contentious issues of i
Re: (Score:3)
No not at all, it's the fact that they are doing it in such a ham fisted, on the nose and practically literal way.
The classic Trek trope and formula is to take a current social issue (lets say immigration and enforcement here) and translate it to something with an alien society. Enterprise finds a system with 2 planets and one of the continents has more resources and is wealthier. The Enterprise rescues some refugees who say they are starving or poor or something and need to immigrate to the other plenet,
Re: Get better producers (Score:2)
I thought it was a great way to show how something was already "woke enough" yet people loved it.
Re: (Score:2)
Old trek mostly used aliens as analogues for x'ism, the federation was utopian diversity. Putting aliens in the bad guy spot makes the preaching a bit less on the nose.
Picard is just a fucking mess of mixed messages, humans being assholes to aliens who actually kind of deserve it. Gratuitous sex, violence and profanity ... it's a mess. If you want to find obnoxious woke in Picard to hate it you can, if you want to find dog whistle justification for racism in it you can. There's something to hate for everyon
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Woke" and "SJW" is not about being diverse, it's about being annoying, preachy and discriminatory.
It's the kind of people that hate star trek because there are white people in it that are not villains or comic relief characters and want for force you their opinions in you.
Re: (Score:2)
There were multiple ethnic kisses before Kirk kissed Uhura in Plato's Stepchildren.
* Uhura (African American) kisses Nurse Chapel (White) in the episode "What are little girls made of"
* Kirk kissed Lt. Marlena Moreau (Eurasian) in "Mirror Mirror"
* Lieutenant Marla McGivers (White) kissed Khan Noonien Singh (Hispanic) in "Space Seed"
Star Trek wasn't even first. [cnn.com]:
* In 1962 the British Film Institute (BFI) shows a black man and a white woman kissing in a televised play of "You in Your Small Corner".
* In 1964 Jo
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
That and the general idea that everything has to be "woke". Most of us don't want to be preached to all the damn time. Case in point, let's look at Star Trek: Picard.
Hilarous that you use Star Trek of all things. Ethnically diverse cast? Interracial kissing [wikipedia.org]? Stop preaching to me you SJWs!!!
This argument comes up all of the time, and it completely misses the point on both sides. What made Gene's social commentary in Star Trek something that has stood the test of time is clearly missed by this argument.
Yes, there was an ethnically diverse cast, and yes, Plato's Stepchildren exists (and I'll come back to that)...but was it ever an issue? Did anyone give Chekov a problem because he was Russian and in charge of weapons? Nobody else in America was putting a Russian in charge of the big red button, but the social commentary was hopeful - in the future, a Russian could serve side by side with an American, and there would be trust that both of them would do their job well. Same thing with Sulu - was there an episode where Sulu was upset by someone because a Japanese person was in charge of navigation? Kamikaze pilots were still in living memory, yet again, Gene showed progress in terms of hopefulness - in the future, someone like Sulu could be at the helm and keep the crew safe.
By time we got to Plato's Stepchildren, it was halfway through the final season. We watched Uhura do her job competently for years, and retaining the respect of her crewmates because of it. By time "the kiss" came around, it was as much between "two crewmates who trusted each other who were under duress from a third party" as it was "interracial". According to Wikipedia, it wasn't ill-received by most fans at the time; I would submit that the years of context surrounding it had something to do with this. Oh...and in-universe, once again, it was a non-issue. There wasn't a discussion after Kirk and Uhura got back to the Enterprise where they made some sort of reference to how scandalous kissing each other would have been a few hundred years ago, or how happy they were that they live in a time where they could celebrate their diversity.
Now, let's talk about Picard. It felt like Picard was a supporting role in a show named after him. Dahj and Soji were clearly the main characters. The Federation was 'bad' now, banning Androids was bad because Data was good so the androids were oppressed because apparently nobody ever thought to give "trial by jury" the community college try, the fringe of the Federation worlds discovered drugs and gambling and bounty hunting and video ads and they were bad, then Soji finds her home, a gorgeous utopian planet (which seems to be how Trek decides who's 'right' and who isn't now; Romulans saying "no humans" is bad because they're at a bar and it looks dirty, Androids living in total obscurity for the purpose of keeping organic life away is fine because everything is pretty), roll credits.
In Season 2, we up the ante. Poverty is bad. A madman hellbent on creating a synthetic copy of his daughter is bad. Q is bad, The Federation being fascist is bad (but murdering Maquis was totally fine). Picard has social commentary, but it's primarily about showing how terrible everyone is.
Star Trek The One With The Whales was social commentary about whaling and environmentalism, but it was woven into a mostly-comedic spectacle of 23rd century Starfleet officers trying to navigate a culture that was ordinary to the audience but foreign to the characters. We laughed at Scotty talking to a computer mouse, Kirk terribly negotiating for $100 so they had some money for the "exact change only" bus, the awkwardness of asking where the nuclear wessels could be found, and Kirk going on a date with no money. The Picard crew gives us none of that...everyone finds themselves on the wrong end of law enforcement, all of whom are terrible people, there's no levity or counterbalance; it c
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
The shift toward criticizing the social commentary present in Picard and Discovery has more to do with the nature of the social commentary becoming both a focal point and the sense that the provided commentary begins and ends with condemning the current state of affairs. There's no commentary given through a lens of hope, or a sense of wonder or a depiction of a world to which we should aspire.
Good grief where are my mod points when I need them? You, sir, are an example of what I still come here for.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really the point isn't it star trek was about every body was equal, have sex with aliens that's fine there is nothing wrong with that its the way the world should be. But its moved on to the point where in at least in Discovery (I haven't seen Picard) where there aren't any main characters that are straight white men, and its just about feelings the crew.
Its kind of like Stargate universe where the entire first seasons was them being depressed about being separated from their families, sure I get it its sad devote a few episodes to it, but when you devote your entire season to the crew complaining about what most of your viewers dream about doing its too far.
If I wanted to watch a show about relationships I would watch soap operas.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but there's a difference between having interracial kisses and all kisses having to be interracial.
Re: (Score:3)
1. Netflix used to have popular movies and TV shows that were either more prominent (unsearchable/algorithmically curated view is NOT advantageous) or simply are no longer available due to planning or competition from other services.
2. HBO Max is absolutely destroying Netflix (and other services) in quality content--both created as well as curated.
3. HBO Max started coming 'free' with my mobile phone plan whereas Netflix is raising its prices and offering me less quality content.
---
I realize it's not an eas
Re: (Score:2)
You almost never will find a "hidden gem" on Netflix, you get a hidden turd almost every time. These aren't even passable B pictures, they are like D pictures.
This is a good point, something Amazon Prime has done a decent job of recently is bulking up their catalog numbers with a lot of both recent and older actual "B" movies, but the kind you may not have heard of before but seems silly and fun. Hammer Horror and bad 80's action type stuff. Many times on Amazon I come across things where you have to say "I was alive then but never heard of this movie". It almost never happens on Netflix.
Re: (Score:3)
Sometimes I'll have the patience to "read" tv but it I really wanted to read I would pickup a book instead. When I want to watch or sometimes just "listen" to TV, it better well be in a language I understand. English is typically a good spot to land if you are trying to cater to the Americas. Even Spanish but it stops right there. We don't have enough people outside of Brazil to make portuguese worth it nor enough French speakers outside of one city/providence in Canada.
So while I have read and enjoyed a ha
Re: (Score:2)
"The one thing I think they have done kind of a decent job on is bringing over some excellent foreign language content..."
Actually, that's one thing that they've done that I don't think they've done enough of. Wife and I loved some of the stranger shows they've imported like Japanese Style Originator and Midnight Diner.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it can be hit or miss. Most foreign language markets are a lot smaller than the US and and the budgets of their shows are a lot smaller, too, and sometimes even decent plots or situations feel kind of cheap or just don't work.
Like the British seem to be able to get away with it sometimes because they can throw a rock and find some grand home to film something in. And they have what seems like a machine minting decent acting talent, like maybe putting a sizable minority of the population through a
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still trying to figure out how this new "Make fewer quality shows, replace most of the good shows with filler crap, raise rates, and threaten to charge people even more if they share their password with someone." business model ever was supposed to work.
Seemed like a recipe for failure to me, but what do I know... I'm not a streaming media executive with millions of (now worthless) stock options.
Re: (Score:2)
... threaten to charge people even more if they share their password with someone ...
Violating terms of service is something you do, it's not a constitutionally guaranteed right. Netflix should just start enforcing the damn plans:
Basic 1 watching.
Standard 2 watching.
Premium 4 watching.
If more than N are watching for the given plan on the same login pop a screen and make the user choose which device they want to continue watching on. Furthermore, if a company fails to grow over a quarter that is something to be expected, not a sign that it is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Furth
Re: (Score:2)
That's the way it works now. If you have one account with 2 logins at different locations, it works. If a third person tries to watch something at either location, they'll get the prompt that both sessions are already in use.
In the future, it sounds like they'll prompt you to "upgrade" your account if they see two logins at different locations.
Re:Get better producers (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this, just entertain people rather than trying to lecture us?
Give us stories and plotlines that show somebody actually has some literary skill; don't dumb it down for 4th graders.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not that simple actually. Their model from day one was not sustainable regardless of content. No ads, subscribers only. The total number of subscribers is finite. If every single person on the plant subscribed, what then? With their model, there will be a plateau of subscribers. Keep the content coming and you keep those subscribers, maybe getting a few new ones here and there, but never really growing once you hit that plateau. They are in the ebb-n-flow stage now. To generate more revenue they
Re: (Score:3)
Not necessarily I mean it's the same model HBO has used for decades. Pay $10-15 extra on your cable bill, you get this ad free network that has a catalogue of existing shows and movies as well as a number of its own films, series and documentaries.
It's a very simple business model, number of subscribers equals your revenue and therefor your budget. Goal is the use that money to produce enough quality content that they stay on board paying the fee.
What HBO did though was build a world class production divi
Re: (Score:2)
canceling moderately-successful shows before they can build 'legs' doesn't help either. Dark Crystal remains a sour point for me with Netflix: it is a cult classic thing, and cult classics take time to build the audience that can sustain them...but because Netflix blatantly announced 'no season 2', it was a stab through the heart kill: you can't even recommend it as a good solid show to watch, because 'no season 2'. It is dead, utterly, as if it never had existed. Nobody wants to start a program that ends
Re: (Score:2)
Man that hurts, I forgot about The Dark Crystal show because like you said, it was one and done. In my opinion it was really good to, it was a production with a lot of talent and creative love behind you could tell. It should have gotten at least 1 more season, I mean you paid for all those sets and costumes and production already I have to imagine a season 2 would not cost as much as the first season getting everything built and setup, just give it a chance to grab it's audience. When people see a "Sea
Re: (Score:2)
I've gotten to the point where I won't even start a Netflix season one show unless they at least have the "Season 2 Coming" banner up...
I can't imagine why... (Score:5, Funny)
Can you? [netflix.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Don't remember any tag lines for that ever mentioning social inequity.
Re: (Score:2)
If the content angers you so badly you could simply not watch it?
I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
They've had, what, one bad quarter? And suddenly it's doom and gloom everywhere?
Either Netflix's value was highly overrated, or they are far more fragile (in an economic structural sense) than we've been lead to believe.
Is there something I"m missing here?
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Nuance is dead, there is no grey area, everything is bad and it's all {{insert person/group}}'s fault.
When is "nuance" ever invoked except to point out that someone's missing it? That's all about asserting fault, too.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a natural consequence of the age of Intenet. There's so much content produced every day that only the best of the best and the worst of the worst, the extremes, get any attention.
It's now our economic system works (Score:2, Insightful)
We should move in and regulate it, but every time you s
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. They're absolutely not forced to partake in stocks and Wall Street activities.
Well, unless, of course, they have some sort of a retirement plan or IRA or 401K so that they won't starve on the streets when they get older.
Other than that, nope. No one's forcing 'nuthin... /s
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Their value was highly overrated as they've been pursing "growth" at the expense of "sustainability."
Their problem is fairly simple: they go for this "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" policy, but they don't care if something "sticks" with existing subscribers, they only care if it brings in new subscribers.
So they end up just constantly killing shows that are keeping people subscribed. Plus, because they demand that shows prepare for multiple seasons, but don't guarantee they'll actually pay for them, most dead Netflix shows end on unresolved cliffhangers.
Which means that the people who are subscribed - who Netflix seems to assume will just stick around forever - realize that there's nothing worth watching on Netflix, and even if there was, that Netflix would just pull the show anyway after it failed to bring in new subscribers. And then they leave.
So yeah, Netflix is dying, and has been for years. Wall Street is only just now catching on.
Re: (Score:2)
The MBA types consider a company to be failing if the growth chart isn't a 45 degree slope. They don't care about the longevity of the brand which is why they've done things like add commercials and clamp down on password sharing. They will continue to squeeze profits until Netflix goes belly up and they move onto the next victim.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The issue isn't that Netflix list 200K viewers out of how many millions, it's that Netflix LOST viewers period. Netflix had been a growth machine for decades, now it stopped.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I canceled my subscription back in February because
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the "woke" shit had something to do with it -- i have my doubts -- but netflix has been raising prices and losing staple content for the last 5 years.
I agree that it's not the major issue Netflix has, but it's not helping, either. The real problem with "cancel culture" is that once canceled, a thing can never be uncancelled, and companies are constantly relearning this lesson. There is no point to try and court the woke mob. They don't care about you or what you do, they only care about virtue signalling to the others in the woke mob.
Trying to get "uncancelled" by creating "woke" content won't get the woke mob to subscribe, but it sure will piss off your remaining subscribers, who'll notice that the content seems to have less to do with being a good story and more to do with pushing A Message.
Combine that with everything else they're doing wrong (a crappy suggestion algorithm, a crappy UI that makes avoiding the crappy suggestion algorithm nigh impossible, a ton of just plain boring content), and you've got a perfect storm to create a service that's losing money and subscribers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
After a long runup and Fed uncertainty, stockholders get jittery and decide to take their profits. Any bad news can be a trigger.
Re: (Score:2)
If the stock price was based on a couple more years of growth for the streaming market and instead it's consolidating with increased competition, that makes a huge difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)
You know Netflix usually creates a custom list of shows based on your viewing habits... Are you just trying to keep something in the closet?
Netflix Studio is just producing a crap load of content, and they are seeing what sticks and what doesn't. It is a risky business move, while the traditional studios, mostly just product stuff that is "Safe" which is just a rehash of the same crap that has been on for the last 50 years. Netflix produced series, is like trying to mine for diamonds, a lot of dirt and work with a random actual gem.
Oh look they have a female playing a traditional masculine role! PROPAGANDA THEY ARE BRAINWASHING US!! BAN IT, CANCEL IT!! (but we are not Cancel Culture!!)
The interesting thing about streaming media, and media in general. If you don't like a particular show, you don't have to watch it. You can just play a few minutes, and stop watching it realizing that you consider it crap, and pick and play something else.
Re: I'm confused (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Suddenly? I mean, the whole Civil Rights thing has been going on since the '60s...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
PROPAGANDA THEY ARE BRAINWASHING US!! BAN IT, CANCEL IT!! (but we are not Cancel Culture!!)
My not having Netflix isn't cancel culture. I don't want to watch that crap so my electing not to pay for it is my personal decision. I am suggesting many more people are doing the same. Even when some of those people write articles ab out that, or make memes, that is
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
So you don't have Netflix, but you are saying there is a bunch of WOK propaganda material on it.... So you are are just talking out of your ass about something you know nothing about.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
In halcyon days of yore, when Netflix only supplied DVDs, their recommendations of what I would like were 95% accurate.
Today, they are 95% wrong. What is worse, is that I have no way of saying "don't ever recommend this steaming piece of shit to me again, never, never, never."
So, the problem isn't so much that they got woke; it's that they keep pushing it on me no matter what.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked around this by enabling parental controls, and gradually blacklisting all the titles I don't want to see. I also wrote a script which notifies me about any new Netflix show releases so that I can ban them right away.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
What do you mean by "woke?" It seems to be some right wing boogeyman term for anything that has people who happen to be LGBTQ in normal roles. If you can't handle some diversity in your entertainment, how do you cope with LGBTQ coworkers?
Re: (Score:3)
Interesting...something changed in their content.
As short as a few years ago...no one was complaining about woke or sjw content being crammed down their throats.
Apparently not that long back, they put out entertainment that the majority of people wanted and understood.
I
Give 'em all tee-ball trophys (Score:2)
That'll boost their confidence!
Seriously, If not being "the best of the best of the best" is enough to trigger a crisis of confidence, MAYBE there is a deeper issue that should be looked into.
Never buy shares in your company (Score:3)
First rule of employement is never to get shares in the same company you work for, that's a recipe for disaster. If there are problems then not only do you loose your job, you also loose your shares at the exactly same time.
Re: (Score:3)
In my career I've worked for three startups all with equity plays, guess what they didn't pan out or they had to dilute the shares to the point that they were worthless.
The only way insiders make money on this is to have a big enough stake or have the board grant discounted options. In the world of CXX compensation these days, that's where the big money is. "You did a good job, here are 100,000 options at $1" when the stock is trading at multiples of that.
Simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
I saw about 2 minutes of the new Julia Childs series last night which my wife was watching... in that time they fabricated a black female production assistant inventing television syndication (never happened) and the real producer was transformed into a completely incompetent baboon. The next thing I know I glance up from the kitchen and Julia is in a gay club meeting a drag singer who is obsessed with her. It was 60's SF so maybe that part really happened but the previous fabrication has me skeptical and LGBT-Z+++ is the progressive avenue of the moment.
People underestimate how much of what we all 'know' comes not from study but is absorbed from information we found plausible when we were exposed to it in life. All this woke revisionist history is dangerously changing the consensus of that information to fabrication and since the major is most popular among the highly progressive demographic this is on top of rewriting the narrative in the actual history books and classes as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If foreign language means not English , then you need to realize that the rest of the world exists and most of it does not speak English as first language, ...Netflix should change to Spanish ... more of it's customer speak that than English ...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If foreign language means not English , then you need to realize that the rest of the world exists and most of it does not speak English as first language
I'm pretty sure that's just a rumor and has never been proven true.
Re: (Score:2)
If you intend to sell to the North American audiences, you are most likely going to be selling English content because it is by and far the #1 understood language. It may not be everyone's first language (the majority it is in fact) but it's definitely their second language.
Since Netflix very likely has the majority of it's subscribers in NA, they should probably try to cater best to that market.
It doesn't mean they can't also cater to other markets with other languages, but they should have good filters in
Re: (Score:2)
So when will telemundo start including English-language programming? I mean, there sure are a lot of non-Spanish speakers, why exclude them?
No one opposes Netflix offering foreign language content, the issue is recommending non-English content to English-only viewers. If Netflix allowed subscribers to indicate language preference that would go a long way to mitigating this complaint.
Re:Simple... (Score:4, Informative)
Huh ... that Julie Childs show you're complaining about is on ... HBO Max, not Netflix
Re: (Score:2)
Get some of the real Hollywood content back then drop 99% of the woke and foreign language content. Most importantly, give people the option to indicate they aren't interested in this content..
Their valuation is based on growth - this means they need much more foreign content to grow abroad, not less. Maybe they need to fix their algorithms a bit so that some people aren't exposed to content they might otherwise like if it's in a different language (the "murica" segment), but they shouldn't stop making it.
My suggestions would be to look at pricing[*], start dropping episodes once a week rather than all episodes at once, and cancel less shows. People hate it when you cancel something they like, a
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, if by "Hollywood content" you mean the drivel that's been coming out of the mainstream studios for the past decade? If so, count me out.
There are very few good stories, blame creativity and the writers along with the machine that repeats the same drivel over and over. How many damn MCU movies can there be? Shit, Star Wars was driven into the ground just as sure as terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center.
We need creativity, we need stories that keep us interested with plots and character de
Re:Simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to be able to exclude entire categories. Bollywood and LGBT-loaded content would go first. And it's not because I think it's bad content for everyone, but I personally have zero interest in it myself.
As to the political correctness and the diversity angle, I fully agree with you. People instinctively feel that something's wrong in the picture they're seeing, that the portrait of the world on the screen doesn't reflect what they see all around them, and that makes them anxious or disintrested, or both.
Re:Simple... (Score:5, Informative)
It's weird that you're triggered by the race of the character. Boston has a long history of a black middle class stretching back well into the 1800s and was a magnet for black intellectuals up until the 60s. It's not at all implausible for blacks to be working at WGBH, which also was a pioneer in black public interest programming in the 60s. So if you have a composite character there's no reason why they should not happen to be black, any more than than they shouldn't be Polish or Jewish.
I don't know of Russ Morash has issues with his depiction on the show, but in the era that sort of condescending attitude wouldn't have been looked on at as stupid or buffoonish. This was an era when the "help wanted" pages in the newspaper was separated into "Jobs for Men" and "Jobs for Women". Even a decade after this my then future wife applied for a summer internship at MIT's Draper Labs, and the candidates were separated into boys and girls and the girls sent off to take a typing test. Later the female IT staff at her graduate school were called "Data Dollies"; it was a dead end job because supervisory positions were "Jobs for Men".
You take any person and time travel him fifty years either way, and he'll sound like a buffoon.
Our idea of cultural decades is about five years off; the 50s really were from the mid 50s to the mid 60s; the counter-culture "60s" was from the mid 60s to the mid 70s and so on. "Julia" is a work of historical fiction, that takes place at almost the exact year the 50s were turning into the 60s. You can't tell the story of that era without showing the tensions that change wrought. The long history of the black middle class in Boston notwithstanding, new population brought in by the Great Migration had been funneled into segregated neighborhoods and kept there by red lining. The first season of The French Chef coincided with the first anti-segregation march in Boston. So making the composite character black is an interesting choice, not just an artistically valid one for a work of historical fiction.
No one saw this coming(roles eyes) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If people were not so stupid, they might try and form trade unions. I know belonging to my union gets me substantially better benefits and wages over other people in my same industry that are non-union.
Many people are instead convinced they are so special and value-able that a union would clearly just hold them back. You get a lot of that from techies that think they are gods but then bitch when they get replaced by an H1B, to illustrate an example though there are many more.
Sure, some of you may very well
Not morale; common sense (Score:3)
Once the stock price craters, every C-level fellow knows exactly the cure: big layoffs.
The smart folk are bailing to get first crack at jobs in competing sectors.
Options were always a risk - instability (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The solution is easy, don't use options outside of startups. They are just a bad deal for peon employees, but appeal to their gambling impulses to get them to go along. For upper management they are just perverse incentives, giving them vested stock is a much better incentive to run the company well rather than trying to game the option market.
Were they forced to accept stock options? (Score:2)
Did they just take a gamble and are now feeling gamblers remorse?
Re: (Score:2)
No, they thought they were going to turn the world woke, and now it seems they had taken one too many a toke.
Participation trophy (Score:2)
You should feel good when you have worked hard to achieve something. If you have worked hard and it doesn't work out, don't be demoralized. Look at it as an opportunity to learn. Cranking up quarter after quarter then having a misstep isn't a reason to throw in the towel.
Sadly we don't give out trophies for hard work that doesn't yield results. That's the tough part about life.
Reality Checks Often Hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
But a record decline in Netflix's share price, precipitated by its poor financial results, has shaken employees' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory.
Yes, this happened recently. After 10 years of almost straight growth, the stock price took a nosedive back to where it was in 2017, after almost five years of consistent increase in stock price. If employees don't believe that the company can recover from that dip, then these employees are finally waking up to issues that existed on April 19, too.
The problem Netflix is having is that it's not immune to growing pains. The $8/month they required in 2012 has doubled to $16/month, while an inflation adjustment would have made it closer to $10.25. Meanwhile, the $8/month I paid back then included Disney, CBS, and NBC content.
In contrast, each of those companies have started their own streaming service, so the value of the service has shifted tremendously, in large part depending on whether Netflix original content is as compelling as the third party content they used to have. Growth is easy when Netflix isn't competing with anyone but Youtube, but the landscape has changed. If these employees are suddenly waking up to the fact that their decade of original series are no match for Disney's century-spanning back catalog, then perhaps they needed this little reality check.
The real question is what Netflix will do next; price bumps and password sharing crackdowns haven't seemed to produce favorable outcomes.
It has also erased the value of many employees' options. People who were sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with nothing.
Did they lose their stock options? No, they still exist...it's just that today is a bad day to cash out. Netflix will either recover eventually, in which case they'll still have their money, or the world comes to the realization that Netflix was capable of pioneering a service, but incapable of sustaining it given all of the constraints that presently exist.
Re: (Score:2)
Too political (Score:2)
Let Disney and other studios slip threw fingers (Score:2)
Netflix problem was they let other studios create more profitable streaming services. The Value of Netflix just a few years ago, was that is was a one stop shop for everything that was out there, at least for movies, it was having a Video Store at your fingertips. Then with probably some bad licenses and pricing, studios did the math and realized they could have their own streaming service for less money, and make more profit.
So that caused a lot of their big draw content to go away. Thus having to try t
guess there just arent enough woke folk (Score:2, Insightful)
to support an entire library devoted to the woke agenda.
Missing must-have features (Score:4)
- introduce an ability to permanently hide titles people do not want to see from the UI. Currently once can only do it by self-imposed parental controls
- stop designing a deceptive UI elements such as the default hover action on the rating button is "like".
- restore the 1-5 star rating system
- more quality content; ditching the spray-and-pray, investment-portfolio-like series management
- improve your recommendation agorithm so that it actually takes user preference into account, and not what's popular or brings you most money
- and last but not least, less political correctness
Oh NO! my stock options! (Score:2)
The death spiral continues (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix had a big head start in streaming and managed to secure a lot of content. Now the likes of Paramount and Disney have ramped up and taken back their content to their respective platforms, leaving Netflix with second tier older movies and TV shows. Netflix has tried to bridge this gap with their own self produced content.
In the beginning this new Netflix content was quite good and produced a lot of shows with wide spread appeal. Ozark and House of Cards come to mind. But more recently they have put out increasingly controversial and woke content. Dear White People would be an example of this. There is a big difference between inclusion, where we embrace differences, and lecturing and shaming. I watch TV to be entertained not to be browbeaten or talked down to.
I think that Michael Jordan said it best. He was asked once about a political issue and where he stood on it. His response was perfect: "Republicans buy sneakers too". When companies like Netflix wade into politics they automatically alienate half of their audience. This virtue signaling might be make them feel better but it's not good for business.
new stock grants to make them whole (Score:2)
Seriously?
The stock market is like gambling in Vegas. If you never cashed out, then the money was never yours.
"Netflix employees also asked leadership to issue new stock grants to make them whole for the losses this past week"
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
They have employees with morale? (Score:2)
News to me.
Subscriber loss? (Score:3)
Netflix lost 700,000 subscribers because they pulled out of Russia. Many companies did the same and got no backlash.
This story is part of a campaign to bash Netflix, seemingly to get people to sell shares and tank the price. Watch out for a takeover bid any day now.
Re: I am not an investment advisor... but... (Score:3)
The âoevaluationâ was not based on the money they are/were making, instead it was largely dependent on the company growing for the foreseeable future. Not only did they lose customers last quarter, but they now see even more loses to come.
Re:I am not an investment advisor... but... (Score:5, Interesting)
PE ratios are sky-high, expect a rude awakening.
While some companies are trading at 1000s of times their earnings [marketbeat.com], Square (Dorsey as CEO) has a PE ratio of 341 [slashdot.org] even though the stock has lost 29% over the past month. Apple on the other hand has a PE ratio of 25 [marketbeat.com]
There are a lot of valuations that just don't make sense right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, here's the Square link [marketbeat.com]