> I didn't appreciate exactly how good Netflix's engineering is.

This is poignant as even the shittiest streaming service can dominate with the right IP. Content is king, engineering quality is not a differentiator.

Because of this, Netflix is ripe for disruption, which we've been witnessing creep up slowly over the last decade.

Netflix is easily the first of my several subscriptions to hit the chopping block, should it come to that.

If you follow the ratings (granted the ratings for streaming services are likely not as easy to calculate as network tv), Netflix pretty much dominates top 10 most watched shows every week. It's weaker on Movies but still does pretty well there as well.

If netflix keeps producing content at the rate it is, it won't be long until it has a fairly large back catalogue itself. At the end of the day it's Netflix's core business, whereas for most of the other streaming services it's a side gig.

Yep. Netflix correctly saw that if it was successful at streaming, content holders would be quick to try and cut it out as a middleman. They've had their sight on being a content producer since very early on, and have been extremely successful at it. There are many people out there who can only afford a few streaming services, and Netflix remains a top choice to hold, despite the fact they license comparatively little top tier US content any more.

Netflix can calculate their equivalent to Nielsen ratings preposterously easy and with far more accuracy and they can get far more data than Nielsen will ever be able to produce for anyone.

So?

The reasons the networks cared about the Nielsens so much was that they directly translated into how much they could charge for a 30 second ad block.

Netflix obviously does care about how many people are watching its shows. If no one is watching licensed content they won't renew licenses on it or similar content. If a new show isn't doing well and doesn't have passionate fans, they'll cancel it. (Possibly faster than a network would have.)

But they only care about how many people are watching something to the degree it increases the number of people subscribing which is a correlation that is harder to measure.

uh yes, but for the purposes of this discussion unless you can compare them vs the watch times of other services that's not very useful. So far as I know Netflix and nobody else releases those numbers so they have to be estimated.

WTF is this 'IP' that y'all keep bouncing around?

Intellectual property

No doubt, Netflix has optimized content delivery better than pretty much anyone. They spend all the right time in all the right places to get media the plays well and looks good on pretty much every device and any bitrate. They are leaders in video codecs and encoding.

Everyone else have been learning, slowly, the lessons Netflix learned years ago.

Is anyone else even doing a program like OpenConnect? https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

That's the sort of stuff that really sets netflix apart from the competition.

All that said, IMO, the average consumer doesn't really care about technical quality of the content, they care about the catalog.

Pretty subjective, but I find Disney+ quite superior to Netflix in both quality of the streaming and UX - two areas I'm surprised a "non-tech company" can win in. Seems to me like the tech part (anything but the content, really) is actually a commodity already.

Have you used HBO Max recently? Aside from the first month or so it’s been nearly flawless for me across a variety of platforms (Roku/Chromecast/iPhone).

And the first month pains were very clearly because it was rushed out to time it with the release of certain IPs during the pandemic.

HBO Max on Apple TV is a terrible experience. The app doesn't appear to use the standard playback and navigation functions in most other Apple TV apps so you get unintuitive scrubbing behavior and inconsistent searching. Also, the app signs me out on a regular basis at random intervals. When this happens, you can still browse shows and click play but at that point you're interrupted with a "buy HBO Max" screen which is totally confusing. You have to manually navigate to the account, sign out, then sign back in and re-find the one episode you wanted to play.

To be fair, Apple TV is a pretty terrible experience, especially regarding them trying to force users to give Tim Apple a cut of streaming subscriptions.

Huh… hasn’t been terrible in my experience, but I’ve never been forced to give Tim Apple a cut of my streaming subscriptions.

Use it regularly, and nearly always wish same content was on Netflix due to really awful compression artifacts I never see on Netflix.

They still don't have a way to turn off auto play for the next episode. That's a basic feature and they're missing it.