Netflix Plans To Cut Spending by $300 Million in 2023 (wsj.com) 56
Netflix plans to reduce its spending by $300 million this year, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, as the streaming giant continues its push to improve profitability in a competitive market. From a report: The company is looking to cut costs, in part, because its plans to crack down on password sharing broadly in the U.S. and elsewhere were pushed back from the first quarter to the second quarter, the people said. That change is expected to generate new revenue. In an internal meeting earlier this month, company leaders urged staffers to be judicious with their spending, including in relation to hiring, but said there would be no hiring freeze or additional layoffs, the people said.
Probably cost them nothing (Score:3)
There's a writer's strike, so we can't produce as much stuff. But if we spin it right, we'll tell investors we're just being smart with our money.
Also, something about how they were still spending extra as Disney+ got off the ground just so they still looked competitive.
Re:Probably cost them nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a writer's strike, so we can't produce as much stuff. But if we spin it right, we'll tell investors we're just being smart with our money.
.
There's a writers strike in America. You can find writers worldwide, and Netflix does a Lot of foreign-sourced content.
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly, and this is why the "writers strike" will be good for Netfilx, because 99% of what the Hollywood writers produce is pure cliche drivel, with the bonus of diversity and inclusion. The more Netflix can spend on foreign product, the better for its subscribers.
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Yet Americans keep paying for it. Perhaps you're also wrong on the DEI front as well.
DEI is wrong? Absolutely.
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Foreign content is also cliched drivel most of the time. But... it's not the same cliched drivel! It's new and different and thus American audiences can eat it up for awhile.
For example, 1% of Anime is really really good, maybe 10% is above average. but the rest is cliched drivel. But it still grew in popularity in America, espcially in the 90s, because it was different.
Then Bollywood. Cut out the song and dance numbers and it's not all that good to be honest, stories are silly, etc. But then cut out s
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99% of what the Hollywood writers produce is pure cliche drivel
Always has been. The only difference is that now you're old.
with the bonus of diversity and inclusion
See above
The more Netflix can spend on foreign product, the better for its subscribers.
100% agree. Bring back Au service de la France a.s.a.p.!
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It's all cliched drivel. Foreign or domestic.
It's made because people like it. If it didn't make money, it wouldn't be made. So all that cliched drivel is what the audiences want and what they're paying for. I mean, next week will have a release
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Yes, it's very big outside of America. But the foreign produced content is also popular in America.
Password Sharing? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Password sharing isn't "theft", its breach of contract.
You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmt (Score:2)
Password Sharing. Not Even Once.
Re: You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmt (Score:1)
Re: You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmt (Score:2)
Because there are not enough ipv4 addresses to allocate them in a wasteful way.
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If only someone would think of a successor to IPv4. Oh wait, they did! [wikipedia.org] That being said, there are practical reasons why residential users get changeable IP addresses. My ISP issues me a block of IPv6 addresses that rarely if ever changes though.
Re:Password Sharing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Password sharing isn't "theft", its breach of contract.
No, it's theft. You're taking a service you didn't pay for. Legally that's called theft of service. The guy giving you his password is the one that's doing breach of contract.
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no, its called sharing and we learned it in pre-school.
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And we also learned in school that going with your friend to a buffet and sharing instead of buying two plates is stealing.
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I pay for 4 screen, I should get 4 screens playable by whoever, wherever.. And you can't hid behind the new talking point of "You know it was never meant to work like that": https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/... [reddit.com]
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They have probably changed their terms in the past 13 years.
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They changed their terms in the last 3 1/2 months (Feb 1). That is the contention of this whole scenario... that we've been allowed to share accounts up until very recently.
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Thanks for the reminder. I never watch the 4k content anyway, so I just cranked my service level down.
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Password sharing isn't "theft", its breach of contract.
No, it's theft. You're taking a service you didn't pay for. Legally that's called theft of service. The guy giving you his password is the one that's doing breach of contract.
Correct! 100% agree with you, but let me add: Aside from breach of contract, the person who gives you the password is also "accesory to theft" (or however that is said in english, here would be "complice de robo de servicios").
To explain it with an example:
If you go out on the street, with your own ladder, and hook yourself to the (coax) cable. You made theft of service, I did nothing.
If you go into my house whlile invited to dinner, and subtertitiously deploy a coax from your attic to mine, and hook yousel
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Bunch of idiots in here. What property did anyone remove and deprive the owner of?
Something called "Intellectual Property"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Now go and read
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I stand corrected.
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And only in jurisdictions where unilateral changes to a contract are valid.
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"Password sharing isn't "theft", its breach of contract."
Even from the non-payers side? They had no contract. They just used services and resources they didn't pay for or have any right to take advantage of. That sounds like theft to me.
ChatGPT will write all the scripts (Score:2)
Can't get worse than now.
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The AI's currently have been neutered, so the results will be the same.
hiring for UNION roles is different then office ro (Score:2)
hiring for UNION roles is different then office roles.
Are they cutting back on office roles or cutting back on content roles that are loaded with UNION jobs?
How are they different? (Score:2)
I guess it is true that Union members make more money than non-Union, so maybe you pay a little more. But office workers are generally professionals. If they're not then you usually outsource them to a 3rd party so you can abuse them without taking the bad press (e.g. you can offer good benefits to the handful of employees you have to compete
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The difference is that office workers don't realize that they're being exploited just as much as the blue collar folks, so they don't realize just how badly they also need to unionize.
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Spoken like a true union supporter. But that's a pretty broad statement there. Certainly doesn't apply to me. Whether you want to admit it or not, there are lots of non-union companies that are not exploiting their workforce.
The union stance is typically that non-union workers are somehow missing out. In my experience that's generally self-serving horseshit. A leftover mentality from the days when employees had fewer protections under common law.
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So what you're saying is that you don't know you're being exploited, and that you don't have any idea what common law actually is.
Worker protections today are WORSE than they were 50 years ago, and the decline in union membership has been a huge part of the cause of that. Worker exploitation is rampant, wage theft by employers is one of the biggest types of theft today, real wages have been declining for decades, and compared to productivity everybody but the C-suite is severely underpaid.
YOU need a union,
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No I do not. I've had a very, very good career for 30 years without unions, but I'm very close with people who have spent their whole lives in unions. I worked in the energy industry for a long time, which is a mixture. I know the score thoroughly and I made out better than I would have with one.
I think it might be a wash. (Score:2)
There are so many different streaming services that people are sharing to cut costs. I think that is at least a third of the case. What they need is a bulk package seller so that the more packages you subscribe to the less you pay for each one. You can't watch them all at the same time after all. If there is an independent aggregator then they can't track what your watching and split the proceeds equitably. Otherwise your going to get people like me that alternative services for two or three months at a ti
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That's a good idea. Maybe the companies that own the cables delivering the content could do that. They'd organize all the streaming companies (let's call them "media producers") into "packages," then you could subscribe to one or more packages, with maybe also some a la carte options as well. Then you could just pay a monthly fee to the "cable company."
Related how? (Score:2)
"The company is looking to cut costs, in part, because its plans to crack down on password sharing"
Are they cutting costs because they think there will be a lot of customers canceling because of the crack down and therefore it will cause less revenue?
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Yes. Plus it is cool to pass on the inflation buck to the consumers. Plus their AWS spend is probably outrageous
Re: Related how? (Score:2)
What's AWS got to do with it? Netflix serve video content from their own CDN located mostly in ISP data centers. Their stuff in AWS probably isn't too huge.
Re: Related how? (Score:4, Informative)
What's AWS got to do with it? Netflix serve video content from their own CDN located mostly in ISP data centers. Their stuff in AWS probably isn't too huge.
Quite au contraire. The CDN/Cache servers can only hold so much content, so they will only hold what is popular for the ISP/Country (depending on size) where the CDN servers are connected. The rest of the catalogue is served from Amazon storage. The CDN is more about saving BW costs and diminish latency that to save AWS costs.
Then there is the issue of the extreme/agresive frame by frame encoding that netflix does ([1] from the horse's mouth, fascinating read). All that is done on AWS.
Then there is the backend of the whole infrastructure, that also runs on Amazon.[2]
So yes, AWS is a big expense for Netflix.
There is rumour that Netflix may move over to Azure (after all, why put money on the pockets of a competitor?). More so if Microsoft ends up buying Netflix (another rumour). Currently, the only partnership between Netflix and Microsoft is that Microsoft's Ad-tech powers Netflix's new Ad-supported tier.
[1] https://netflixtechblog.com/hi... [netflixtechblog.com]
[2] https://medium.com/@nidhiupret... [medium.com]
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They're actually ending their DVD business. A rival is hoping to buy it from them.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18... [npr.org]
Witcher? (Score:2)
Just wake me up when there is more witcher. Or when star trek comes back to Netflix, which I suspect will be never.
Stop greenlighting crap and be more discerning... (Score:4, Insightful)
... with what you greenlight and BADA BOOM! Netflix could save not millions, but billions in series that get cancelled after just one seasson, with no plot resolution, and therefore no hope that people will watch it after their initial run. Also, no hope to sindicate license them...
Making series left right and center, hopping that "something sticks to the wall", and then getting cancelled series with no plot resolution that can not get a secondary*, tertiary* or cuaternary* market is a recipe for disaster ROI-wise, Better Netflix discovers this sooner rather than latter.
* The Primary Market is when Netflix streams the series for the first time, which leads to their cancellation (or not), secondary market is when the series is still on Netflix for viewing of people who arrived late to the party or people who want to watch a second/third/fourth time, tertiary market is shinny disks and/or licensing outside of Netflix, quaternary market would be having the series on offer, just to buff up the number of titles available as a publicity gimmick (even that has "some" value).
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but billions in series that get cancelled after just one seasson, with no plot resolution, and therefore no hope that people will watch it after their initial run. Also, no hope to sindicate license them...
I've seen people claim this is because once a show is in the third season, they have to pay everyone a lot more, so the stupid MBA conclusion is to cancel everything after two seasons as opposed to, you know, realizing they have to pay more because shows that continue are actually more valuable.
You can cancel a series after the first seasson if you want. As long as the plot is resolved and the story is self contained, all is well. See, for example, Paranoia Agent (13 eposodes), or netflix's yasuke (10 episodes). The problem is when a series is ended (ussualy on a cliffganger, to boot), never to be resolved.
It'd be hard to convince people (either by publicity or word of mouth) to watch a series when they know beforehand that the series was cancelled with no plot resolution.
Thta's one of the reasons
Just Goes To Show (Score:2)
This proves that they can indeed make the quality even worse than ever.
$16-20 per month and noting but D grade movies and old TV shows. What's not to love? And Amazon is right there "competing" with them.
And... (Score:1)
...the garbage that is their algorithm-led content will continue the slide toward the very bottom.