They're still solving some interesting problems like how to watch the same content, in sync, with your friends. Interestingly my gf and I noticed that when we watched NFLX together using a video call to see eachother's faces/commentary our video would skew by noticeable amounts across the span of a movie. (eg even a 0.5% speed difference would give a 3 second skew in 10 minutes, which is enough for one to see someone's reaction to a surprising part of the video differ from your own.
So there are still technical fringes to solve that can value differentiate from late adopters like the channel specific providers like say the ABC app https://abc.com/apps
Amazon has taken a stab at this with a watch party on Twitch. I imagine you could have a private stream and do it that way maybe? Not ideal of course. It's intended for a different use case.
The best options I've seen involve using sites of questionable legality plus Discord.
Your observations of skew are kind of interesting and larger than I would've expected. But I guess this is the video players being built to show you the content not showing you the content at the same time as someone else. Specifically this means no effort is made to "catch up" in case of buffering. You or your GF must have a lot of buffering. This alone surprises me because Netflix's core delivery tech seems to be extremely good. But again, their delivery tech probably isn't built to solve this problem.
Anyway, while that's an unsolved problem it's not core to Netflix's business and that's the key criteria here.
Video should always be kept in sync with audio and not the other way around. You can freely drop or repeat video frames (within the boundaries of reason) without anyone being able to detect it in a blind test, but audio should not be messed with. This is why when syncing audio and video from different sources during production, the master clock is always the audio.
I can imagine part of Target/Walmart business to be like Amazon so they sell their tech to smaller or local players because they would have loads of knowledge in that specific area of ordering and fulfillment.
It is not counter argument as such - but idea that they could become Amazon competitors in some areas and be tech companies.
Google is a tech company because both the search and the ads networks are hard at the planet scale; we can see how hard it is to compete.
Same applies to e.g. Twitter or Uber. It applies much less to, say, Reddit, or eBay, or Craiglist; their tech is secondary to their existing network effects.
A company like GrubHub definitely has a strong tech branch, but the tech is secondary to its delivery network and restaurant contracts.
A company like CNN, equally, must have a strong engineering / IT branch, but it's so secondary it feels totally invisible, and everyone sees them as a "media company", not a "tech company".
But while it has also expanded its business model to include selling actual tech (Google Cloud, Chromebooks and Pixel phones, etc.) the lion's share of its revenue comes from advertising.
I have to dash through shit way too fast to try to get somewhere that they won’t auto-blast me with whatever high volume video shit they want to force down my ocular neural pathways.
My guess is that it appeals to the average “turn on the TV and watch whatever is on” consumer, and Netflix probably prioritizes retaining them.
FireTV device is an excellent value. Prime video? Well, it’s free with Prime at least…
If I pay for ad-free and then they serve me incessant ads anyway, I get really pissed off.
So, I don’t watch Hulu. If something is only available on Hulu, then I just don’t watch it. I’ll happily watch Disney+, though.
XR and interactive content are the obvious next generation of platform with many technical challenges to overcome. It's hardly solved.
Netflix could swap out all the underlying tech for someone else's and update their players to use that and nobody would really notice, except possibly for the very few interactive experiences they run. That's why they're not a tech company anymore, they've matured the technology, and so have their competitors, to the point it's a commodity.
Many here would dispute this claim. However, it may be that SEO spam has caught up and we're merely at the old equilibrium rather than worse than before the peak of Google usefulness.
It's like every DDG related HN thread always has these comments:
- I moved to DDG X years ago and it's [fine|better than Google]
- I can't find anything on Google anymore
- Here's a search where I didn't find what I want.
It's reached the point that I just immediately tune out whenever someone brings up anecdotes. There just seems to be so much confirmation bias.
I mean no disrespect here. This is generally true. Anecdotes just don't mean anything but for some people tech people love them when it comes to search.
For that matter, is there any more objective data about the quality of search results over time or are anecdotes all we currently have?
It would be an almost impossible task to filter these out because they are specifically generated to look exactly like the content you are looking for.
You're kidding right? You think this problem is solved? Try using HBO.
A tech company is any company that understands it can leverage technology effectively to run a more efficient organization. They treat tech as the way to solve problems rather than throwing people at the problem.
"Solved" also doesn't mean there aren't people maintaining it or working on it or getting woken up at night by pages to keep it going. It just means, they've got a handle on it and when the Netflix executive team meets to discuss the business, they aren't spending much time discussing the question of whether or not they can stream video to their customers.
It doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Others have pointed to UI issues, for example. It just means the state of the tech probably isn't the top of mind for the C-team and the board.
Being done, is not what a tech company ever thinks of. Look at all the innovation coming out of Netflix as OSS products and blog posts.
First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems.
HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came from the same people who did the streaming services for MLB (Major League Baseball)> In my experience it was very good.
HBO Max is the expanded and updated content ecosystem that came with the merger. I don't know what the tech stack here is. I suspect it's just incremental changes to HBO Now but that's just a guess.
Perhaps the commenter was referring to HBO Go's problems as evidence that serving VODs isn't "solved". To clarify, I mean "solved for Netflix".
Last I heard their whole ecosystem is now based on this.
But if there's scrolling issues and some others, its likely because they're literally trying to run one codebase across everything including OTT devices.
But they’re the only OTT streamer that carries the Lakers and Dodgers channels, so alas…
Or at least permanently hide all sports-related content on all devices I own.
I pay for the Hulu+/Disney+ combo that does not include ESPN, because I don’t want to pay for ESPN. Even if that triple combo was cheaper, I’d still pay for the combo that doesn’t include ESPN.
This in on a modern Roku TV, released 8 months ago. 0 problems like this from Netflix.
This feels like too broad of a generalization to be a useful definition. I could make the case any hospital or logistics or <insert business here> is a tech company by this. Tech seems too ubiquitous for this to be an effective definition.
I haven't given it much thought, but maybe "a company with a business moat hinging mostly on its unique technology or ability to use technology" would be a better definition. E.g., Walmart could still be a (less) successful business without an online presence but Amazon couldn't.
Not tech: tech improvements are internal and/or your IT staff is all about maintaining/integrating external products.
IT as cost center versus profit center may be a useful distinction.
Or perhaps "has a software engineering department".
They want to be a tech and data-driven studio.
Because if you’re not growing, then you’re dead. And no one wants to be dead.
This is the fallacy that all big companies seem to fall into, because they try to keep chasing the kind of growth numbers they had when they were small, but of course they can’t possibly sustain that level of growth.
Maybe we need to revise the famous phrase to: Lies, damned lies, statistics and machine learning.
Do algorithms that encourage viewership actually increase revenue, or retention? What happens when the algorithm is so good I under-sleep, miss work and get fired, eventually losing my ability to pay for Netflix? What if I see this in myself and cancel my subscription, instead of using Netflix sustainably? What happens if I genuinely watch all programming I find interesting and move on to reading books on the same topics?
In other words, if the Netflix catalog is perfectly sorted by relevance to my personal interests, how much of it will I engage with? How far can Netflix content creators and licensors follow me down the rabbit hole?
Thanks, I had not seen that before.
I worked for a telco that has the largest operating area of any telco in the world, and was also a monopoly with the highest internet prices in the world.
Steve saying that product people (& Tech people) were not seen to improve the company, and that only sales and marketing did is absolutely spot on. I didn't see that at the time, and now in hindsight it's obvious. It also makes perfect sense why the former VP of Marketing is now the CEO (of a telco!), and not the VP of IT or Network.
What about Jet.com (pre-Walmart acquisition) that pioneered cheaper shipping / savings by informing users to by substitute products from the data distribution center.
It's a bit like how SpaceX is set to become a major player in regional Internet delivery but you wouldn't call SpaceX an Internet or a networking company. It's just a synergy between Internet as a business and reducing launch costs while proving reliability of first-stage reuse.
I'm tempted to describe both companies as "engineering companies" more than "tech companies". I just looked at Tesla spends a relatively modest (for its size) ~$1.1B on R&D.
So what's the difference? I'd say "tech" is largely about software and "engineering" is largely about hardware. Specifically, both Tesla and SpaceX are capital-intensive businesses where that capital is being used to produce physical products.
To be clear, none of this is official in any way. This is just the framework for how I think about things.
No it's not. That's a fake narrative that was invented by Tesla bulls to try to label Tesla as anything but an automaker.
It doesn't make sense to categorize Tesla primarily as a battery company or energy company. Batteries and energy (including solar) are a fraction of their business in terms of dollar value and that will continue to be the case. That has been true for nearly two decades now. And it's not a close comparison, the battery is less than a quarter of the cost of the car. For the Model S and X it's far less than that.
Tesla is an automobile company. GM and Ford are also not transitioning into being primarily battery companies. They're automakers.
Want to test this out? Kindly ask Tesla to immediately end their automobile business and start only selling batteries, see what happens to the stock and their P&L statement.
If in 20 years Tesla's battery business is finally larger than their automobile business, then sure, recategorize them.
I wonder how Boston Dynamics should be characterized.
It absolutely is not. Almost all Tesla's battery IP rests on Panasonic IP. Panasonic has been a leader in this space for 40+ years.
That's why when Tesla "open-sourced" all their battery patents in 2014 it was seen as mostly a PR move. It didn't really affect the industry because Tesla's IP in this area just isn't that valuable.
By similar definitions, aren’t almost all companies also money companies, employee companies, legal compliance companies, strategy companies, marketing companies, mission statement companies, fundraising companies, etc?
That sort of definition works for giving job applicants a hint about whether the company might need them I guess.
So it is with tech. On some level all companies are tech companies in that you need a website, Intranet, database, etc. These are all commodities though. A "tech company" is one where your tech is so good that either you can offer differentiated consumer experiences that nobody else can offer (eg. YouTube, Apple, FB's various products, consumer parts of Google) or people pay you to handle the tech things for them (eg. AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud).
It’s a decent definition. It has some implications though
Almost no companies really differentiate via tech that nobody else can offer
Almost no game or app companies meet that bar. Most game companies have tech that another company can reproduce for example. Almost all apps use fairly commonplace tech.
There's a pattern there: Unity, Roblox, Unreal, Crytek, and Epic all build platforms and game engines used by other game developers, so again, you are what you do well enough to sell to people who don't want to deal with it.
You lost me there. Even before Google started putting their thumb on the scale for its Machiavellian goals, search had gone way down hill. It is now at the point that I've got a better chance of finding something by randomly browsing the internet than through a dozen targeted searches. Unless what I'm looking for is associated with a multi billion dollar media company's content farm.
Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie advertising) too.
I once again return to the Steve Jobs take on why Xerox failed [1]. An effective monopoly devalued the tech such that Xerox became a sales and finance company.
So, returning to Netflix. I agree Netflix isn't a tech company anymore because Netflix ultimately is about serving several thousand VODs and that problem is solved. Now Netflix's core business is about making content, licensing content and acquiring and retaining customers.
Obviously doing this (or anything) at scale is a lot harder than it sounds but at the end of the day Youtube is monumentally more technically challenging than Netflix due to the number of videos, the number of viewers, the advertising and live streaming.
"Tech company" is still a useful classifier IMHO.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM