ANALYSIS:
When Netflix officially entered the market for original video content in 2013, it pulled a neat trick on all its rivals that has left them choking on its dust.
The trick? It succeeded right from the start. It made great shows like “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” As a result, it made original content look easy. HBO had been doing this for a couple of decades made it seemed intimidating at the time. But if Netflix can do it practically overnight, so can anyone, right?
Nope. As result, what seemed like a risky pivot for Netflix four years ago, has now put enormous distance between it and all rivals while making the Silicon Valley company one of the biggest content studios on the planet.
That prowess was on display yesterday when Netflix reported larger-than-expected subscriber growth. This surprises analysts again and again. But it shouldn’t.
The threats to Netflix are minimal at this point. Even the much-discussed decision by Disney to pull its content in a couple of years mostly leaves me shrugging my shoulders. I have now interest in subscribing to another streaming service just so I can watch Marvel or Pixar or Star Wars movies. I’ll see some of those in a movie theater; some I’ll rent from iTunes.
Meanwhile, Netflix is a bottomless well of content. Yes, much of it is bad. But enough of it is good, and some of it is even great. I’m counting the days until Season 2 of “Stranger Things.” And there’s still the Netflix Marvel series like “The Defenders” and “Daredevil.” And countless others.
Netflix is now working on such a massive scale that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Boosting its original content budget next year to almost $ 8 billion is one way to think about it. But for me, it’s more about the staggering amount of stuff that pops up every time we open Netflix to watch on our TV. And yes, for our family, Netflix is now TV.
Our Samsung HDTV also has the Amazon video app on it. And because we have a Prime account, we can watch it. I’ve recently watched “The Tick” (pretty good) and “American Gods” (good, has some potential). But beyond that, really, there’s not much. And in terms of movie selection, there’s pretty much zippo of interest.
On top of that, the user interface is horrifically awful. Maybe that’s a small quibble. But it can take eons to scroll through a category of shows or movies on Amazon to see what’s there. In contrast, the Netflix app let’s you just glide through with nary a delay or hiccup.
It was no surprise to read the recent Wall Street Journal story detailing the chaos and failures of Amazon Studios. The gap in both volume and quality between Amazon and Netflix is probably the best indicator of how hard it is to develop original content and how much can go wrong.
Another interesting example is the new CBS streaming service. The marquee show to help get this off the ground is “Star Trek: Discovery.” Which, where I live in France, is available on …. Netflix. So while I can’t say much about CBS’s streaming service, I can say that “Discovery” is a hot mess. Despite some interesting characters and potential, the story is almost completely nonsensical. The very premise, in fact, holds so little logic that we spend most of our time not watching the show, but yelling at the TV that the plot doesn’t add up.
This is bad.
One would think CBS, a company that’s been making original programming for decades for broadcast, would have this down pat. But somehow, when it comes to streaming, they’ve managed to take a beloved fan favorite in Star Trek and completely bungle it. Again, no surprise to hear about turnover in the show runner for Discovery and writing staff and production delays. Still, it seems they must have thought that, hey, it’s just streaming and viewers will just binge right over the plot holes and gobble down each next episode.
Ugh. No.
Hopefully, Apple is watching all of this and thinking carefully about how it plans to spend its $ 1 billion on original content. Facebook as well. All of Silicon Valley seems to have decided that owning and producing original video content is essential to their future.
Their hopes are no doubt high. But matching Netflix at this point may be close to impossible. It’s much more likely that the billions these companies will spend on original content will slip quietly into an abyss. And Netflix will continue its march toward total world domination.
