✔️ 2022-04-20 12:47:00 – Paris/France.
They must not be having fun in the offices of Netflix: the announcement in the reporting Q2022 200 results that they lost 000 subscribers for the first time in a decade led to a huge stock market crash of about 25% of its stock value. Netflix has already launched a few contingency plans. First, with a battery of cheaper subscriptions with advertising. Second, end the market for unlimited account sharing.
Family subscriptions with four simultaneous connections have long been a godsend due to the laxity with which Netflix has allowed millions of users to share an account outside of the primary subscriber's home. The number: more than 100 million households watch Netflix without paying what they should (30 million in the United States and Canada, according to Variety). We've explained here how Netflix detects this unauthorized use and how the new sub-accounts will work.
But that gives the impression that this problem, already commented on by Netflix itself, is just the tip of the iceberg: there is a clear problem with the image of the company itself, against which its own strategy has played be the one who makes the most pitches, all the time, continuously. His crushing release schedule, which saw him release 79 movies a month in 2020 (and hasn't slowed down since) ended up enforcing the widespread belief, backed up by the evidence, that not everything has the same quality.
Never mind that Netflix has openly stated that it will focus on improving the quality of its releases. Never mind that for some time now the platform has made an effort to be more transparent with its viewership numbers, leaving behind the confusing criterion that a few minutes is enough to count as a full view. Because there can be a certain general feeling that Netflix is a churrería of content, where quantity trumps quality.
more people in the room
The fact is that things have changed from when Netflix announced this volume of releases. To begin with, the most obvious: competition. While currently no one is overshadowing the huge number of subscribers on the platform, Disney+ and HBO Max aren't just hot on its trail in terms of subscriber numbers. It is that their catalogs are extremely competitive: Disney + has Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars, as well as its dean arsenal of productions and franchises. And in HBO Max, Warner is one of the few production companies that remains dedicated to blockbuster cinematic (there's 'Dune' and 'The Batman' to back it up) and has DC's entire catalog of heroes, plus HBO's television prestige.
And the others aren't exactly resting on their laurels. Just yesterday, Prime Video announced that it would simultaneously release the entire Bond franchise with the arrival of May, and the strength of the catalog bottom that the MGM acquisition gives it is not insignificant. . Against all this, Netflix is running out of millionaire franchises (perhaps the transfer to Disney+ of the series with Marvel characters that it cherished until recently and gave it so much prestige and success years ago). years is the perfect symbol of the end of an era).
Netflix still has some powerful and genuinely own properties, such as "Stranger Things", "The Crown", "Money Heist" or "The Bridgertons". Their attempts to open up feature-length franchises, such as 'Red Alert', have (they claim) popular support, but with the exception exceptional cases like 'Roma' or 'The Irishman', do not completely get rid of their airs of TV and Movies with steroids. These aren't his only hits, but with many others, like 'Arcane' or 'The Squid Game', the idea of surprise hits prevails, hits that take the platform itself by surprise.
The episode binge problem
The situation is completed by a controversial subject that is rarely talked about, but which is part of the very DNA of Netflix: binge-watching, the appearance of entire seasons on the same day of the premiere. It's a tactic that facilitates mass conversation at first, but soon leads the viewer's attention to go in another direction. Just compare the performance of Disney+'s Marvel series or HBO Max's top premieres to the exhausting flurry of tweets that Netflix shows generate...the first weekend.
Le binge-watching reinforces this idea of “dumping content, regardless of its quality”, and that almost all of its competitors are abandoning. It is easy to compare with, perhaps, the platform whose perception is diametrically opposed: Apple TV+. More or less like their series, their technical finish and the feeling that they reveal themselves when they are finished and not to cover a demanding schedule of constant releases give the platform a much different prestige. His last big premiere, "Severance," benefited from those weekly premieres: not only did it benefit the pacing and story development, but it was alluded to twice, in its surprising premiere and in the season's conclusion. , nine weeks apart.
Limitations to shared accounts: lace
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether shared account limitations will make things better or worse for Netflix. Because it's going to make many subscribers wonder if they really care about Netflix content. Now, many people who watch Netflix because they got it from a subscribed friend or relative will be forced to take the plunge of subscribing or choosing the platform that really interests them.
One or the other, suppose a leap into the void for Netflix too immersed in the vicious circle of your own schedule (now you cannot delete the binge-watching, or halve the output rate) to back up. Netflix must remain Netflix, but with the ban on shared accounts… will that be enough?
SOURCE: Reviews News
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