I just finished watching the first season of House of Cards and I really enjoyed it. It's up there with original HBO programming as far as quality is concerned. If they can keep that up then traditional outlets should definitely stay worried. I know there was some talk about Netflix's future because of their dependence on content providers, but if they can keep this up then they certainly have a hand to play.
That becomes the question. The problem is that their current production slate indicates that they maybe have one -- maybe two -- standout shows to do a year. HBO typically has 4 (right now that would be Game of Thrones, Girls, Boardwalk Empire and True Blood with The Newsroom being an easy slot for #5).
Right now, Netflix's original programming track record is really spotty aside from House of Cards -- which is absolutely HBO quality and would likely have been an HBO show if Netflix hadn't outbid by such an absurd amount (granted it was the right strategy to make but I get why HBO didn't match)).
Aside from Arrested Development, however, nothing on their current slate looks like it will rise above Starz quality. And that's a problem if you expect people to consistently pay $8 a month.
I'm pretty sure people consistently pay $8/mon, despite the original content. You literally need only stay out of my way, be easy to use on multiple devices, and only entertain me 2-4hrs/mon to keep me coming back.
See, what happens with Netflix, HBO, Showtime -- even regular cable -- is that subscriber churn happens. It's often cyclical. One of the reasons HBO staggers its release schedule for its programming is to try to get people to pay year-round (it's also why they introduced HBO Go -- in essence they gave up their home video revenue, or greatly limited it -- in exchange for keeping people subscribed year-round because of all the content they could get anytime).
Netflix's own figures show that they can jump and fall by the millions per quarter.
If you want people to continue to subscribe every month -- and not cancel after they see the show they like -- you have to have a constant swath of new and original programming.
Even originally programming won't stop churn entirely.
The originally programming is meant to pull in new subs and keep current subs engaged at higher levels so that they are less likely to churn. If you want to cancel your subscription for whatever reason already, it may not matter if they have 100 original series, you'll still cancel.
It's all about increasing the lifetime value of each subscriber. One way is to keep them longer (e.g. reduce churn). The other is to upsell them to higher pricing tiers. We're not seeing that with the original content (yet), but what if Netflix managed to (for sake of discussion) get the rights to Firefly and made another season of it but only for people who signed up for a new "Premium Streaming" package. You'd see some complaints, but a slew of "Shut up and take my money" memes. I don't know if they'll ever do this, but it's the next logical step once they've established the original content as desirable.
You know what keeps me as a Netflix customer was how easy it was to cancel. A few years back, before online streaming, I just wasn't keeping up with the disks.. so I decided to cancel. No phone queue for an hour, no muss, no fuss, just cancelled online. I seem to remember getting maybe one email a month, not two or more a week... And when they added the online streaming, I came back.
I only use it a couple times a month, I find it hard to actually browse their catalog, but they do an okay job of suggestions. And I can usually find something interesting in a pinch. Most of all, I'm paying to keep them around, because of how good the experience was when I did cancel.
Contrast this to XM, when I had 3 radios, and only wanted to cancel one. Took three phone calls, with hold times of over 40 min each, to be mysteriously disconnected when they couldn't convince me to keep service on a radio in a car I no longer had. After that, I cancelled the whole thing.
I'm sure Netflix has churn; I'm sure they have clients that turn the service on for only a few months of the year; I'm NOT sure that is the majority, which is what I assumed you and I were referencing when quoting "people."
I'd literally pay 3-4x as much for the non-original content. Again, that is only 6-16hrs of content Netflix has to serve up, that is only remotely interesting. The convenience and paying for the business model I believe in does the rest.
If HBO offered its service unencumbered of cable subscriptions, I'd still find it less valuable than Netflix.
I don't even think the 8 bucks a month savings would ever be worth the hassle to subscribe/unsubscribe on any regular basis.
That's a brilliant pricing structure; one I never pay any attention to. They easily could get more out of me a month for the amount of value I get from it (and likely even more than that number if the quality of their unique content continues to shine).
This so very much. I find myself looking at software services, and apps, and saying $10? No way. But I'll buy a coffee or 2 a day without blinking. What's wrong with me/people? Why is stuff that's not physical so worthless?
Hemlock Grove is also excellent. But the point isn't to make money on these shows. Netflix knows that once people sign up, they're unlikely to drop their subscription. At the moment, Netflix is known as a place to get older movies and last season's TV shows. They want to change that perception with some must-watch shows that entice people to sign up. Netflix itself is more than worth $8 per month even without original content, but they need people to sign up before they can see that.
But what's stopping Netflix from replicating this success? To what extent is the success of HBO purely a function of the capital they invest? i.e. what non-financial assets does HBO provide that contribute to the success of its shows? What does HBO bring to the table that Netflix can't?
Scale -- HBO is significantly larger when it comes to production capacity. HBO can also have far more shows in production at one time. That scale is partially a product of capital, but also one of point number 2:
Experience -- This one can't be underestimated. HBO first started toying around with original content and series in the early 1990s but it wasn't until Larry Sanders that the show really started to resonate beyond the periphery. Even then, the established TV world didn't start to pay serious attention to HBO until the late 1990s, when you had a swath of hits become bonafide cultural phenomenons (Sex and the City and The Sopranos were hits of a massive global scale beyond anything that cable, let alone premium cable, had seen up to that point).
Netflix has had to start from ground zero. They are essentially right now where HBO was in 1997, when HBO started to shift from acquiring content to paying for original content (Larry Sanders) to making the content in-house (Oz).
Now, granted the current world moves faster -- and Netflix is already potentially approaching the 1997 spot in just two and a half years with this strategy -- BUT content is also now more expensive (The Sopranos and Sex and the City were not $100m shows for a total of 26 episodes like House of Cards is), competition is fiercer than ever and the overall economics of television are not as advantageous as they once were.
I would also say that a third advantage is cable. Yes, cable is an advantage. Why? Because cable often serves as free (or nearly free) advertisements for HBO shows and the bundling of HBO for 3 months free or half-off or whatever is a huge driver in subscribers. Now, Netflix can replicate this, but they'll need to do it at a price and obviously they'll need to assess if giving the cable companies 30% of their monthly revenue is worth the advantages of being bundled.
None of this is insurmountable, but just as starting a movie studio from scratch is hard -- pivoting from a pure distributor into an original content creator/distributor is hard too.
I usually think of the comedy specials as HBO's original content, going back to the 80's even. Given how successful LouisCK has been, it could be an opportunity to take this jewel from HBO in the near term. As shows like last comic standing have shown is that there are a lot of comedians out there that are very entertaining, the production costs can be relatively high quality, and low cost. Building out that area could be really good for Netflix, which already has a lot of older stand up content.
Is "a premium brand" a main obstacle preventing new entrants into the content production market? There is another large obstacle: acquiring subscribers to fund the production. Netflix already has a massive subscriber base. HBO needs to convince people to subscribe to their content and to watch their content. Netflix already convinced a massive subscriber base to subscribe to its content. Now all it needs to do is convince them to watch it.
EDIT: I think my post addresses filmgirlcw's point well. Yes, it took 15 years for HBO to cultivate their seal of approval. But that is partially because cultivating a seal of approval required HBO to build its subscription base, which takes time. Netflix already has its subscription base, so it only needs to convince that subscription base to watch its content. It can do that by 1) advertising prominently within Netflix (near zero cost), and 2) producing quality content, so that once people watch the first episode of a Netflix show, they want to watch the second. Therefore, the highest cost to Netflix is that of producing quality content. But as long as they can do that, they will succeed because they already have the audience. Of course, they do need to recognize that they only have a small window of opportunity to show that they can, in fact, produce quality content -- or else they will lose the willingness of their subscriber base to watch their originals.
But Netflix has to retain that audience. As we saw with the price hike, people by the millions will drop their subs and fast. TV is a hits based business -- HBO has to deal with that too, post Sopranos and SATC, it struggled for a few years to find the hits.
I'm also not sure if you understand that HBO has has subscribers in the tens of millions for decades. That's my point, they've cultivated this premium brand but have been a part of many customers lives for years. I'm 30 and I've never NOT had HBO.
My parents have had HBO literally since 1972. 41 years. I realize that's an extreme example but the network has a strong brand.
HBO and Netflix aren't in a zero sum game; both can succeed. It's just that as Netflix moves into HBO's pool, it's going to have to face the issues HBO already faxed, whereas HBO won't have as hard of a time shifting to over the top once the business model makes sense.
Excellent point - I was going to add brand to my above reply but didn't in the interest of time (and because I'd probably attribute brand to experience).
HBO has a quality seal of approval that has taken 15 years to cultivate. That can't be bought or earned overnight from one show. HBO consistently gets more Emmy nominations than every other network -- once Netflix is able to counter in that area, then it will happen.
Still, getting over the hump can happen. Look at AMC. Before Mad Men and The Walking Dead, they were best known for the terrible original series Remember WENN (don't ask, it sucked and I was in 7th grade when it premiered). Now it's easily one of the best networks on TV. Same for FX. Justified, Always Sunny, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, The Americans are all fantastic and this was a brand that was best-known for playing Fox reruns until about 7 years ago.
Here's the thing--I didn't even know, until your comment, what channel Archer was on because I watch it on Netflix. That's what HBO is looking out for.
I sub to Netflix to watch movies; I would like it if there was a wider variety on their streaming offerings but it's slowly and consistently improving. Original programming is gravy - although it's increasingly tasty gravy. HBO's been doing this for ages, whereas this is pretty new territory for Netflix. I think they're doing fine.
Netflix just needs movies, we haven't watched HBO since the 80s'. Their programming was never why we watched anyway. It's all about the movies. If I want original programming, and we do, we watch the education channels, in HD, free OTA.
As a counter point, I honestly see 'movies' somewhat dying out. Shows like Game of Thrones, House of Cards and several others now have the same production quality as movies and aren't hamstrung by the same limitations. e.g. how do you tell a deep story in 2 hours?
For what it's worth I consider the so called 'limitations' of movies their greatest strength. TV shows, given an almost unlimited time budget, have a nasty tendency to ramble unfocused all over the place, telling 20 stories badly as opposed to 1 story well. With a movie you have to pare down and focus on what is really important and have a clear vision of what you're trying to say. To my taste this almost always leads to a much better story.
Depends on what your definition of "deep" is. Have you watched Game of Thrones? The story is very complicated and I can't imagine a 2 hour movie being made out of it without dropping a lot of story on the floor.
You couldn't really make it work in 5 or 6 2-hour movies. There is much more material in ASOIAF than there is in Harry Potter or something similar, and they had to split that into almost 10 full length movies.
Have you tried their original programming recently? At the turn of the century HBO and Showtime started producing really amazing original shows that easily rival any movie and have become the top tier of TV shows. I would venture to say that most people that get HBO nowadays do it for the original programming and not the movies.
These premiere shows had a much different feel than normal "big 3" network TV shows. They tend to be much more serial, with story arcs that go for whole seasons or even longer. They also tend to have much shorter seasons (generally around 8 to 12 episodes). This serial style really lends itself well to in-depth story telling and the shorter seasons means more attention is spent on each episode (since they don't have to constantly churn out new episodes all year).
An interesting technique that many of the shows use is to base themselves off a book series but make the entire 10 to 12 episode season cover a single book. Dexter, Game of Thrones, and True Blood all seems to do this with reasonable success. It allows them to get much more detailed than a 2 hour movie based on a book could possibly be.
I think that's it's actually the other way round. Popularity of YouTube and shows like Game of Thrones proves that people are tired of long movies. Attention span has shortened and people want condensed action delivered immediately.
The popularity of Game of Thronesdisproves that attention spans have ``shortened and people want condensed action delivered immediately''. It's incredibly complicated, in-depth, and sometimes takes entire seasons for the pay-off to be delivered. Spending the first two episodes (20%!) of the third season laying the table for the remaining eight is pretty much the antithesis of ``condensed action delivered immediately''.
Yeah, House of Cards with Spacey is excellent. I started and liked it so much I finished watching all episodes in 2 days.
Its really good to see companies like HBO and Netflix giving the traditional TV media houses a run for their money. BTW, if you liked House of Cards, check out Game of Thrones.
I pay for Netflix from India and for that I've to pay for a broadband service which is INR 2.5K (~$50) which is very costly for India, especially for a single person usage + VPN cost.
Somehow I am not able to make HBOGo work on my Mac with all the tweaking and hence I pirate it(Sad :'( )
I wish they had an app that would just make it work magically - something like PnP!
I don't like the genre (fantasy), and I don't like soaps. "OMG, $x is fucking $y!" isn't my idea of entertainment unless $x and $y are people I know personally.
Well, I wouldn't call it either a fantasy or a soap. It's more about politics than almost anything else. The fantasy parts are much more restrained than I expected when I first started watching (seriously, pretty much nothing fantastical happens from after the first scene of the first episode until the last episode of the first season).
I read one of the books, but I hate the idea of getting sucked into the plot and then waiting years for the final installments. I manged to postpone reading all the Harry Potter books until last year so I think can hold out on GoT too. I don't have HBO so I'll just pick it up on DVD sometime...after I've gotten around to watching The Wire.
They just released another Netflix-original series, Hemlock Grove. After watching through it, I'm not that impressed. The reviews I've read also seem to be on the negative side.
Not to discount your opinion, but I do want to mention that I'm also less than impressed by 50% or more of what comes out on cable, to say nothing of broadcast television. It's just the nature of the creative process (and also, let's face it, varying tastes). Launching a few bad shows will not cripple Netflix, as long as they have a number of good ones and get a good return on that investment.
Me too. But my wife really likes it. It is right in her wheel house which makes me think this kind program is definitely geared to a specific audience in mind. I'm sure the production budget reflects that
Yeah, that's the key, I think. Netflix has a huge amount of viewing-habit data at their disposal, and it's tough to imagine that they didn't target their content acquisitions based on detailed information about their viewers. House of Cards was for the HBO/West Wing set, and Hemlock Grove clearly isn't, but they must know that there's a dedicated audience of schlocky TV-horror enthusiasts in their viewership.
House of Cards is absolutely there at the top TV shows, it was simply amazing. Hemlock Grove is… different. Sometimes it really is extremely cheesy, some of the acting and dialogue is weird. But so far it has managed to keep me watching. And it had the best transformation I've seen, movie or tv, so far.
Having watched both, well all three of Netflix's original series. I'd have to say House of Cards was the best, Hemlock was alright, a bit gruesome at times and Lilyhammer was... no comment.
It's great that Netflix finally beat HBO's subscriber figures but given that subscriber figures are cyclical (though HBO's have evened out now that HBO Go is out -- which incidentally was largely the impetus behind HBO GO, to curb subscriber churn during period's when new series aren't on), it'll take consistent effort and good programming for Netflix to remain in this position.
The problem is, that strategy takes money. And that $8 a month per household is probably half of what HBO is getting per household for its 29m subscribers (plus what they get from home video, licensing and international).
Netflix has pivoted from trying to be cable to trying to be HBO. That's all well and good but let's not try to spin this as how cord-cutting is "winning." It's not. If cord-cutting was winning, Netflix would have had more subscribers than HBO quarters ago. Instead, Netflix's next big strategy is to get bundled WITH cable providers (which incidentally is a smart approach and could be what really lets Netflix's subscriber base balloon).
HBO, Netflix and Showtime require original content to really push the needle. HBO has an advantage of having spent the last 20 years (since Larry Sanders, really) cultivating the best showrunners and writing talent that have in turn, brought in some of the best programming in the history of the medium.
Moreover, HBO has a financial advantage in that they make most of their original series in-house. Netflix does it two ways. They fund series outright like House of Cards and Arrested Development (but to be clear, 20th Century Fox still produced and owns the video and syndication rights to AD) or they acquire the first-run rights (Lillyhammer, Tom Fontana's Borgia). Even in the cases where they do fund the development, a secondary production company usually still does everything -- it's not in-house. HBO, by virtue of being a subsidiary (and the most profitable subsidiary) of Time Warner, has access to Warner Bros. Television, which cuts down on a lot ancillary costs before it comes time for distribution.
It'll be interesting to see if Netflix can afford to acquire or do full-contracts with certain production companies and creator shingles to get rights to future projects. Alan Ball has a longstanding deal with HBO and David Milch has a semi-exclusive with them too.
TL;DR This is great for Netflix, but all it really does is make them a real contender as a premium content network. It doesn't impact HBO's current economics or have any impact on the realities of running a content business. Which is basically that good shit is expensive.
I'm really cheering for Netflix. Outside of the US (I'm in the UK) people have complained about a lack of content but I'll pretty much give all my money to the people who bring back Arrested Development.
I'm in Uruguay, where we get 1/10th of the US content, and it still blows local cable out of the water :) .
Video on demand (with no ads!) is a killer feature for me.
Not to mention it's way cheaper than local cable - I'm paying for three subscriptions (mine, my parents' and my uncles') for less than one month of basic cable.
The day they can simulate cable's mindless zapping (some sort of preprogrammed channels), and get sports on board (I'm an NBA fan, and I'd like to watch Champions' League football too)
Agreed, I live in Scandinavia and the the content is really lacking. But at ~12$ it's so cheap (cable is maybe 50-100 $) I can keep Netflix and NBO Nordic..
Edit: That being said, I'd probably discontinue Netflix if it weren't for Arrested Development and, to a lesser extend, House of Cards
+1 on this. First time I hear about HBO Go (yeay for USA only web service - like Hulu). Netflix on the other hand is competing with Love Film over here.
One interesting piece of information from this article : During peak periods of internet use in the US, Netflix constitutes 33% of all downstream traffic. Impressive!
Well that would have ruined the whole point of the article. HBO accounts for 25% of all of Time Warner's profits. That's significantly more than what Netflix can offer. And it would also be useful if they did the revenue per user figure -- but again, that wouldn't be a tweet-worthy and sexy headline. (It would have also required the author to understand the content business but I digress).
the netflix numbers are actually pretty easy. At $8/months, it's ~$96/year ... which is close enough to $100 to make for easy math.
Quick and dirty numbers (on just the domestic streaming).
At 30M subs, run rate revenue is approximately $3B. They had about $2B in content commitments. Delivery costs (i.e. bandwidth) runs about 20% of revenue. So on their $3B, $600M goes to delivery, $2B goes to content, and they have $400M-ish in profits.
NFLX is difficult to value because it's growing so fast and the content cost is a moving target. If NFLX can keep content costs around $2B, then every incremental customer is 80% profit. Every 1M subs they add, is $100M in revenue and $80M in profit (capitalize that at 10x and you're adding $800M in valuation ... keep in mind they added 2M domestic subs in the last 3 months). Some people argue that content providers will demand higher fees as NFLX increases subscribers. I'm not convinced. They walked away from Starz and they cut a deal with Disney that doesn't look any more expensive than what they were paying previously. And they're also building a library of owned content.
It's definitely one of the most interesting stories to watch.
I think that HBO are quietly positioning themselves to prosper when the cable bubble finally bursts, though- HBOGO is great. Compare that to Showtime, for example, whose app offerings are widely panned.
I'm not so sure. HBOGO is exclusively an add-on to the cable service. Its present quality is irrelevant to the post-cable world as it is completely incapable of gaining traction outside of the "cable bubble." It is basically a tree falling in a forest where nobody can hear it. In the far-off future when HBO gets with the times, who knows what Showtime and everyone else's offerings will look like?
I don't think the idea is to gain traction, but to be ready to switch to a non-addon model when the bubble bursts. Espn and HBO have set themselves up with excellent apps and web services. Right now they are (frustratingly) only available to cable subscribers, but if at some point in the future we see a mass exodus from cable companies then all they need to do is add a way to pay them directly and they have a full, independent subscription service.
HBO is gaining a lot of traction outside of the US, especially in Scandinavia with HBO Nordic (HBO GO equivalent without a cable subscription). So they have the platform to do it, which means if the cable market starts plummeting they can pivot and start offering it as a seperate package rather than an add-on for cable.
I have hope that they will do this, but looking at the history it's far from certain.
My guess is this is exactly what they're planning to do, but that a revenue tipping point hasn't been reached in the US yet: cable subscriptions still provide too much money for them to be willing to flip the switch. Experimenting in Scandinavia lets them lay the groundwork without prematurely giving up the huge US cable revenue stream.
Thats why they are testing the waters with HBO Nordic in the scandinavian countries (I reside in Denmark). My experience so far has been that HBO Nordic is compared to Netflix hitting more quality programming than netflix, but Netflix is quickly catching up (especially with House of Cards), and since netflix is monthly based, and HBO Nordic is 6months prepaid, and netflix has good solutions for mobile.
The figures don't include pirating. If HBO had been smart enough to launch and promote HBO GO as a stand-alone service, pirating would be lower and streaming/revenue/official viewership would be higher.
That's because the cable bundling agreements they have make them obscene amounts of money. Those people are overpaying for the service, and that makes them more money than opening up HBO Go would.
It's not hard to understand, they're not idiots at HBO, they crunched the numbers and figured out how to get the most money.
In the future, there will be a tipping point when enough people have tired of "cable teevee" that the numbers will fall the other way, and when that happens, they'll leave the cable companies behind and push as hard as they can on HBO Go globally. They're already testing the waters and rolling out the infrastructure for it.
>Those people are overpaying for the service, and that makes them more money than opening up HBO Go would.
You and HBO are assuming that the number of people who would join HBO Go without a cable subscription isn't going to be greater than the number of people who would drop cable to just get HBO Go. It's just a guess.
It's not about number of people, it's about how much money they're getting from each.
A cable subscriber is worth a lot more than an HBO Go subscriber, since they get kickbacks from the cable companies, they are cheaper to acquire, since they get a lot of free advertising through the cable companies, and they are less likely to cancel, since it's harder to cancel an entire cable package.
So it's not a 1:1 relationship between cable customers and HBO Go customers. They need to acquire several Go customers to make up for each lost cable customer. But cable is shrinking, and streaming is growing, and at some point the scales will tip. However, they have to be damn sure that it has tipped, and that they can sustain their current revenues, so they will probably be a bit cautious and conservative, and let their cable-only deal stick around a bit longer. This might not be what you want, but such is life.
(Or you could move to any Nordic country and enjoy HBO Nordic, which is HBO Go, but without the cable subscription requirement.)
Netflix competing against HBO will be great, especially when HBO separates itself from its current model of being a cable add-on. Lilyhammer (Netflix) and Game of Thrones (HBO) are two of the best shows being produced right now, not to mention all of the other great original content both have provided. Mainstream TV is not at all compelling in comparison.
Netflix really needs to implement an offline mode for its mobile apps.
The vast majority of the times I'm watching something on my phone, I don't have a WiFi connection or the connection is too slow to stream an HD video (like on a plane, at the gym, in a car, etc.)
I'd love to be able to download something at my home and watch it in offline mode later. Both Rdio and Spotify do this for music. Why doesn't any video services do it? Are you listening Netflix?
When content is licensed, there are different licenses that are distributed based on who pays and what the service is:
* First-run -- you get to broadcast it first
* Syndication -- you get to broadcast second
* Digital -- you can also show the product on a digital platform (this was how Netflix was able to do their loophole with Starz back in the day, Starz sold the digital license and streaming license to Netflix because the content owners hadn't specified that such a license was unable to be resold or relicensed -- that' since changed and now it's an extra fee if you want to do that like EPIX does)
* Digital streaming -- can be streamed but not watched offline
* Rental -- traditionally DVD/Blu-ray
* Digital rental -- iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, etc. -- includes offline
Netflix would have to pay significantly more for its content to offer an offline mode. Even HBO, who owns most of its original content -- doesn't do offline because again, the costs would be exorbitant.
EDIT: To be clear I'm not being all-inclusive, as JFB points out below me, there are even nuttier licensing schemes too. And this is before we even talk about international, where you typically have different agreements with every. single. territory.
There are more and crazier ones: exclusive windows for airplanes, hotel PPV, &c.
When you're frustrated by some lacuna in a video service's offering, 99% of the time the feature is missing, the reason is "licensing". Content ownership is going to devolve into small offices of tens of attorneys and support staff, managing these licensing deals. Universal Studios et al will simply be licensees of Jaws properties for their theme parks.
Content ownership is already small offices of attorneys and support staff. Most major IPs are actually owned by small production companies. These production companies are in turn generally wholly or partially owned by the major movie studios.
It's done this way for financial bookkeeping, legal liability, and tax structuring reasons. This type of setup is more popularly known as "Hollywood Accounting" and is the reason why a movie can make hundreds of millions but still yield a "loss." (The studio acts as a distributor and is payed a distribution fee; the IP owning company receives royalties; the production company that actually writes the checks for expenses gets its cut "last" after the income has been redirected to various other entities.)
I've battled with Netflix many times. Its Canadian content is a joke, compared to what's available in the US I can't imagine why anyone would stay with Netflix Canada for more than a month.
Yes I've tried various VPNs and it's far better but I don't like the layout they changed it since I had used it the first time.
The biggest problem is the bizarre customer service which seems to be very amateurish. I was billed twice per month somehow they got approval to bill my credit card again, same address same person - me, without me giving approval. And it was a battle to get the representative to understand that was a problem.
The representative said she couldn't refund multiple months but I asked how they could take multiple months but not refund it! After some arguing (very unprofessional) she agreed to refund two months.
I asked her to cancel my account and she asked me why! Jesus Christ why do you think! You bill me twice, no approval, you drag your feet to refund my money you took and then are surprised when I want to cancel my account.
The concept is great better than MythTV, torrent or anything I could get working but their billing and customer service absolutely sucks!
Yes I'd say may be but I don't know for sure, odd though that they would advertise to me in my account menu screen certain shows or movies but when I tried to watch it I got a message "not available" which is just infuriating. Teasing me with unavailable titles is misleading it fluffs up the titles selection but of the limited amount there may be 25% fewer titles than advertised.
The billing is what is upsetting how can a large company have such terrible billing. And they don't care it took so much.
Part of my chat
Netflix Courtney
Okay, so what I can do for you is get that account cancelled. I am able to refund 7.99 back to you too. Would you like me to credit back that 7.99 or add it on this account so you get Netflix free next month?
You
Shouldn't that be $7.99 X 2 for two months?
Netflix Courtney
I totally know what you mean. But I am only able to do one month. I would love to give you 2 months but the system only allows one.
You
Why would the system create and bill me for a separate new account?
You
Credit me the $7.99 and cancel my account please
Netflix Courtney
We didn't create it. Someone must of created that account. Also, in November, a movie was streamed on it. That is why I can only do one month as someone was using the account.
Netflix Courtney
Not a problem, give me a moment.
You
Well you have a security issue then because I never created it
You
I'll get the other $7.99 back from Visa
You
It's all used from the same IP mine
Netflix Courtney
Well, do you want me to see if I can do anything further for you?
You
If you can credit me back the entire amount yes, but also cancel my account. Let me know either way
Netflix Courtney
Okay, give me a moment to see.
Netflix Courtney
Okay, so I am reaching out and in this rare occasion, I will credit back both 7.99. I will get this all taken care of for you.
Netflix Courtney
Do you still want me to cancel this account too?
You
thank you
You
yes I don't trust it if it creates a new account without me creating or authorizing it
Netflix Courtney
Well, someone might of got a hold of your information. I am not sure. Give me a moment to do this for you.
Netflix Courtney
Well I have gone above and beyond to take care of this for you David. I am sorry you are not satisfied.
HBO has a bullheaded insistence on distribution through cable operators, though. I can watch Netflix without a cable connection but HBO actively refuses to even think about an Internet-only subscriber model.
It's reminiscent of Sony's attempt to keep their content studios and product groups under the same tent. Any company whose business model is based on running unstoppable forces into immovable objects is always going to be at a competitive disadvantage in the long term. HBO just hasn't figured that out yet.
Exactly. And when the numbers do make sense, HBO will be there and likely be there faster than anyone else in the space. Why? Because they know how to continue to feed a business model that works for them (and is much more profitable than Netflix I might add), while also keeping an eye on the future.
If HBO were to go internet-only, it'd lose the major cable operators heavily promoting them for free. They only market premium channels so hard because it helps sell expensive cable TV service. HBO would lose subscribers immediately as operators no longer actively replace subscribers for them as others churn out.
To make up for the lost stream of customer acquisition, they'd have to:
a) Cut prices by more than 50% to become competitive with Netflix/Hulu. This will cost them billions a year.
b) Increase their catalog size significantly, which would cost billions a year.
To give you an idea of the costs of licensing, HBO's last major deal was with Universal studios and cost them over $2 billion for access to their future movie catalog.
It's hard to come up with a scenario where cutting their exclusive tie with cable makes sense financially right now. It's not "bullheaded" to say "no, we shouldn't throw away $10+bn/year to give Bob his internet subscription while we're in the midst of a death battle for the future of digital entertainment distribution".
Netflix can do it because (a) they have a big catalog and low prices to entice subscribers with, (b) they got much of their catalog on the cheap before studios fully understood its value; this perk is going away as licenses renew, (c) it has no choice. Whether Netflix can grow its original content business within the constraints of its low subscription price faster than its licensing costs get out of hand is still up in the air.
HBO would lose subscribers immediately as operators no longer actively replace subscribers for them as others churn out.
But that's going to happen -- and is happening -- anyway.
"no, we shouldn't throw away $10+bn/year to give Bob his internet subscription while we're in the midst of a death battle for the future of digital entertainment distribution".
"What? A phone that plays music?! Are you crazy? Do you realize how much money iPods brought to this company last year?"
I don't think anyone at HBO believes they won't go to an internet subscription service, but I do believe they still think it is too soon to switch. They have to pick the point correctly or have some bad quarterly earning reports.
And the net profit on a diamond necklace is higher than either. I'm not sure what point you're making.
Apple didn't build the iPhone because it was profitable. They built it because they knew that a race was about to begin, in which second place was really going to suck. HBO is faced with the same reality, whether they believe it or not.
And the point I'm making is that the choice wasn't really theirs. Either they were going to sell the most profitable smartphones, or somebody else was going to.
Let's take a look at subscriber growth on Netflix versus HBO over the next few years, and resume the discussion then. As RIM learned, the first few derivatives of that number are important.
Perhaps you've forgotten how perfectly awful smart phones were before the iPhone.
The original pitch was never "check out these amazing apps". There were no apps. People's minds were blown by the fact that you could get a non-hideous phone with a UI not assembled by two troupes of rival chimpanzees.
HBO makes a profit of hundreds of millions on revenues of <$3 billion a year [http://ir.timewarner.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=70972&p=irol-ne...], while Netflix's annualized profits are expected to be roughly $15-20 million on estimated revenues of $3.6 billion.
HBO could quite literally suspend operations for the next decade and it would still be vastly more profitable than Netflix, especially now that Netflix has begun incurring massive content production/acquisition costs (see e.g., http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nflx/financials and the massive drop in Netflix's net income after its sweetheart content deals with Starz and other media companies expired).
Netflix doesn't already have a huge amount of revenue from cable providers. Whether HBO could "afford" a streaming-only option is irrelevant; the question is, could they make as much?
The people I talked to at HBO certainly were smart enough to have crunched the numbers (this would've been in 2007 or so, but I have no reason to think its any different now.) if they're bullheaded, it's because they make shitloads of money from their current business model.
HBO actively refuses to even think about an Internet-only subscriber model.
They seem happy to offer such subscriber models outside the US, so they're obviously not refusing to think about it. I'm sure they think about it very much every day and have complete plans to roll out such a service in the US as well the second it makes financial sense.
This is not so much constructive, but more a comment on my Netflix viewing habits and opinions on three shows which they've created:
I really enjoyed House of Cards. Lilyhammer was pleasantly surprising and I'm looking forward to future seasons. I recently tried watching Hemlock Grove and that was awful. I'm sceptical of Arrested Development: I loved the original, but it's been a long time and I feel like it's time to move on.
Otherwise, I find Netflix to be attractive in cycles. Every now and then, I will discover a bunch of new things (be it movies or TV shows) and binge watch them, and then I feel like there nothing left on Netflix. I keep paying on "down periods" because I like there is a sense of security because I have a high quality / stable streaming service available to me. Then, after a few weeks, I eventually return to Netflix for more binge viewing.
"HBO’s figure dates to the end of 2012, but it’s unlikely to have grown much in the first three months of 2013, owing as much to the cable TV industry’s stagnation as its own trouble signing up new subscribers."
How the hell do they know this? Girls and Game of Thrones have been huge hits and an equally strong argument could be made that thanks to these two shows alone HBO is well over 30 million subscribers, hence having a larger viewership than Netflix. Pretty irresponsible imo to base an entire article and make a factual statement in the headline based on a hunch.
I keep seeing qz.com linked here: Is there a bloody reason that the page doesn't go completely to the right side, so I can use my bloody mousewheel without my mouse being over the content?
It's a responsive issue, not sure if it's intentional or not.
At browser widths of about 1400px and above, a buffer appears on the right hand side of the page. If your cursor is in that area the main content div won't scroll.
I'm thinking it may be an error since the main content div stops expanding at about 1400px but the black header/nav does. At widths lower than 1400px the header and content div expand/shrink together and the scrolling problem does not occur since the content div fills the full width of the page to right.
Just some feedback. Your whole website is straining. I actually noticed my head (not just my eyes) moving back and forth left and right to see what else is on the site.
I can see how the responsiveness would work well on mobile devices, but it's painful to discover content on the site via a laptop. The content itself is OK since you have a fixed width.
TL;DR - The website is very difficult to enjoy because of the design.
The number of subscribers seems to be a total apples to oranges comparison, given the extremely different channels Netflix and HBO get customers.
If I could pay Netflix prices for HBO Go, I would do it in a heartbeat. But there's no way I'm going to buy a TV and pay +$100/month for cable to become an HBO subscriber.
Because of their different business models, you'd think that the only metric they should be measured on is revenue vs. revenue. To compare subscribers seems like sensationalism and poor logic.
I just bought a Netflix plan and am using it in France (through a plugin). I don't know if it's illegal but it is really really good. I actually really hope this is going to keep working and that Netflix is not going to fix this.
If I had the people and the skill I would try to launch such a startup in France. I have no idea why there is no equivalent, it's a promised success.
I think it would be really hard to start something like Netflix as a startup in Europe. The content licensing structure is quite a mess (which is probably one of the reasons why Netflix isn't available yet (with some exceptions in Scandinavia)).
I feel like comparing these two is sort of like comparing Android vs iOS, am I wrong?
Netflix has more subscribers because it's cheaper. HBO on the other hand has less subscribers, but I'm guessing that they make more profit than Netflix. At the end of the day, it depends on which one you think is more important. More profits or more subscribers?
"HBO’s figure dates to the end of 2012, but it’s unlikely to have grown much in the first three months of 2013, owing as much to the cable TV industry’s stagnation as its own trouble signing up new subscribers."
I wonder how many people are like me and only pay for the months in which Game of Thrones is on (Q2 so far)?
How long would Netflix's contracts last if it was Apple (huge threat to media companies) who owned them?
Netflix has already lost some of it's content because they were deemed too big of threat to the content provider's main business (e.g.: Starz [1])... I only imagine this problem would magnify 100x if Netflix were owned by Apple.
Has Apple ever bought a high-profile company? They make acquisitions now and then, but they seem to be mostly (all?) companies that have solid tech but aren't on the public radar, or at least weren't pre-purchase: P.A. Semi, Siri, that kind of thing. Arguably NeXT falls into that category as well, although it's a bit of a special case since it was Jobs's company.
With such a huge user and fan base and strong relationships with content providers, why would they spend money on acquisition instead of building even better service themselves? Especially that Disney is so closely connected to Apple so no problem in having original content as well?
Netflix deserves it. With them for movies and free HT OTA TV we are 100% cable free. If only they ran in my Chrome browser on Ubuntu like Crackle does.
