Netflix has been around for a long time. I’m not going to get too much into the history of Netflix because it’s not that relevant to what I want to discuss. They started out as mail order movie rental business, before shifting their entire model into a streaming service. That’s what Netflix is now: one of many streaming services, allowing people to watch movies or television shows when they want without having to dig through a massive collection of physical media releases. Let’s not get into the quality differences between streaming and physical media. What I want to discuss happened a little bit after Netflix moved to streaming.
The release of Lilyhammer in 2012 ushered in a new era of Netflix. They were now going to focus on original properties. They were going to create their own TV shows and movies to compete with television and theatrical films. They released shows such as House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, Orange is the New Black, and, later on, Stranger Things. This was meant to set Netflix apart from the other competing streaming services before those services started. Services like Disney+, Paramount+, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, and Tubi. However, the way Netflix went about this has only turned people against them.
Netflix found success in their early output. House of Cards gpot awards recognition. Movies like Beasts of No Nation were also getting critical acclaim. But when Amazon Prime Video came out with their own original programming, especially the movie Manchester by the Sea, Netflix begin to panic. They rapidly increased the number of movies and TV shows they put out, spending an insane amount of money on them, with no plan to properly recoup their funding. That’s where the problem was.
You see, if you’re putting all your money into making these new TV shows and new movies, you don’t have enough money to properly market all of them. Shows were being released to Netflix without anybody knowing they even existed, because no money was put into selling the shows. Many of them just showed up one day, people wondered what they were, and never watched them because they had no real idea. They never saw a trailer, they never saw a poster, they had never even heard the name spoken aloud. They had only seen one image and the title on their Netflix browsing menu.
This would be fine if it was one title, two titles, maybe three, but when it’s at least half the original catalogue of Netflix, there’s a problem. When Netflix started releasing numerous shows without any marketing, it was hard to continue the shows. Nobody watched them, which meant that no more money was going to go into them, because no money came in from people who watched them. It was a snake eating its own tail scenario. Netflix never invested in the shows, which meant audiences would not invest in the shows, which meant the shows were not worth investing money into from Netflix. Do you see what I mean?
This led to Netflix cancelling a lot of their shows before the shows had time to flourish. This was where the audience turned on Netflix. Netflix was one of the streaming platforms that heavily relied on binge watching. It’s still does. Most of the shows that get released on the platform have their entire seasons dropped at once. That might be convenient for people who want to watch an entire show without waiting. They can simply hit the next episode button and it will play. Netflix was a brand built on convenience, so it only makes sense that they would release shows in the most convenient way.
Yet, this binge-watching release schedule has only hurt Netflix in the long run. The way they have started to cancel shows has been very swift, very quick, and I don’t even have another word, but you can probably guess what I wanted to say. Some shows don’t even make it a week before being cancelled because people aren’t watching them. But it can be tough to watch a show when you don’t know it has been released, and when the platform is giving up on it after only a week. That might not even be enough time to find the show when it hasn’t been marketed.
I am a person who prefers week-to-week release schedules for television shows. There are a couple reasons for that. First, it gives people time to watch a TV show. Especially in the world of streaming platforms. A streaming platform isn’t going to release an episode one week, cancel the show, then not release the rest of the episodes. Well, they might not have before David Zaslav ended up in charge of Warner. Releasing something, anything, onto a platform is better than releasing nothing. If you release an episode, and it doesn’t do well, but you have five more episodes to release, you may find that it does better five weeks later.
Second, about that five weeks later bit, there can be buzz around the show later on. If the show is released on a week-to-week schedule, it allows people to sit with what just happened. They can talk to their friends about what happened. They have a whole week between episodes to ruminate on what happened, to look forward to what is going to happen, and to connect with the show in a way that they wouldn’t when rushing through all the episodes. If people connect more, and if they talk about it more, the show will more likely find popularity.
The Netflix model of releasing an entire season of a show at one time, or in two chunks a month apart, makes the show part of the collective cultural buzz for about a week at a time. If they were to release six episodes, one week apart for a month and a half, the show would take over people’s conversations for about that month and a half length. There would be more people watching along with the show at once, compared to when the entire season is just there to be watched at any time. People want to be part of the conversation, and the easiest way to do that is to extend the conversation. If something is released all at once, and they don’t watch it within the first three days, they typically give up on watching it around that time because they won’t be part of the conversation. It doesn’t matter at all anymore. They can watch it whenever they want. They just won’t be able to talk to other people about it in the same way as if they watched at the same time, or if the conversation was extended.
I feel like I’m writing in circles a little bit here. The point is this: Netflix has hurt itself by releasing on a binge model, because it doesn’t allow the show to grow in the same way it would over a week-to-week schedule. Netflix has hurt themselves by not investing in their own product to the point that, when they drop a show, people don’t know about it, so they don’t watch it. They did too much too soon, without taking the time to do it right. All because they were panicked when other streaming services started tapping into their market.
Now it looks like Netflix might be turning a slight corner. They are still going to have the same issue they had with original programming for the past five, ten years. But the other streaming services seem to be slightly pulling back on their own programming. Thanks to Zaslav paving the way, some of the streaming services are pulling their own original programming to license out to other services. And this is where Netflix can try and take some ground back.
Netflix is ubiquitous with streaming. When people think about streaming services, they typically think about Netflix. They think “what am I going to find on Netflix today?” They talk about Netflix and chill. Everyone knows that Netflix boom sound at the beginning of every Netflix original. If the other services aren’t going to keep their own original programming, Netflix might not have to produce quite as much as they have been. In fact, they could poach some of the licensed properties from the other streaming services and put them on their platform. How crazy would that be?
Netflix clearly has a problem. People have lost their faith in the streaming service that kind of pioneered the way for others. But maybe now that the other services are pulling back, Netflix also could, and that will allow an increased quality to their product which will bring people back. One can only hope.
I know I’ve been rambling through this post. I also know that people probably don’t care what I think about Netflix, about streaming services, about how shows are released, or marketing. I simply had some thoughts and wrote them out. I wanted to see if anyone felt the same way. Or just throw my thoughts out to the ether. Sometimes I just want to write, okay?
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