85% of new spending at netflix is for original content. That's building a huge moat that will be hard for others to cross. I'd personally cancel our Hulu or HBO subscriptions before we touched Netflix.

That’s the problem. Any original content that Netflix funds it only has one way to recoup it - subscription sells.

Any money that Disney makes from Disney+ is just additional profit. It’s already recouped most of its costs through theatrical releases, commercial network tv, video on demand, etc.

Netflix also has to borrow money externally. The other companies getting into streaming have free cash flow to prop up streaming.

Even Apple can operate its streaming service at a loss and its just a rounding error.

I wish they would have a cheaper plan for non-original content only.

Netflix takes in 1.4 Billion dollars every month. All the content they add stays and builds up value. If they want to branch out, they can start doing live events.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273883/netflixs-quarterl...

I'm shocked that they haven't started streaming women's football (soccer). It's growing like crazy and compared to the men's game it's extremely cheap.

That would be just momentary money throughput, there would be zero long tail accumulation. Redistributing sports is a "now" business without any story about why tomorrow will be golden to tell investors. If you lose money today streaming sports you will lose money tomorrow, because there is no way to assume that right holders will ever agree to better conditions. Every growth you may have will just be absorbed by them. It might still be a path for a bootstrapping streamer, but for an investment heavyweight like Netflix it would just dilute growth potential.

To be fair. Their soon to be largest competitor, Disney+, parent company Disney does $3B+ profit per quarter. And $15B+ revenue per quarter. This is before their additional Fox profits and revenue they’ll get. So soon they’ll be even more of a mammoth compared to Netflix.

$1.4Billion a month in revenue is about what Disney makes in profit. Disney+ is going to be Netflix’s largest competitor. They have decades of evergreen content and now they have Fox’s library.

They could leverage the edge cache they have to get into streaming games. Or maybe build a YouTube competitor.

What would be a compelling differentiator from what YouTube offers?

Better customer service and content management? YouTube's system for handling copyright claims is a huge mess and they don't have much incentive to fix it without a serious competitor. They've burned a lot of creators and some people would jump ship if there was a fairer alternative.

Netflix could also leverage the same strategy Hulu or the Epic Store has... pay/incentivize creators and partners for exclusivity. I hate this strategy as a consumer, but it does seem to be effective.

Higher-brow comments?

Not incentivizing propoganda directed at children?

There aren't many YouTube competitors because the upfront investment is high. And building a userbase from zero is hard.

Netflix already has most of what's needed in terms of infrastructure and talent.

It wouldn't need to beat YouTube. It could also offer something like what Vimeo does.

Edit: I wonder if buying Roku would be a good move. Their competitors all have players.

It seems lately that there's been a lot of hate for YouTube, with it's demonetizations and copy right strikes.

I can see them basically poaching top YouTube talent and telling them, we'll pay for your show, just it has to be on our platform.

Netflix would need completely new discovery mechanisms if they wanted to give YouTube level content any form of visibility without throwing the perceived overall quality of their offerings under the bus.

And YouTube has this weird moat: people know and accept that almost everything YouTube offers is crazily bad clickbait, but this is what enables the exotic gems. People just know to focus on the good parts and not hold the rest against the platform. YouTube only got there through a combination of boiling frog effect and an extremely forgiving audience back when the novelty factor of streaming video dominated their perception. Any new competitor would be instantly burned for even just 10% of the crap ratio that nobody is even noticing on YouTube.