To add to this, given the resources spent on it their UX is pretty bad and I don't think their data scientists are giving them much if any edge over the competition at this point.

Features such as only using company generated ratings, aggressively cancelling shows, and the lack of ability to browse/sort/filter the catalog, in favor of Netflix pushing the recommendations they choose on users, is probably great for quarterly KPIs but bad for long term customer satisfaction.

Netflix is of course already a behemoth and not going anywhere but I expect their future to be much more of a generic media company than an elite tech company.

> aggressively cancelling shows

Ha, that is so true. Netflix is infamous for this. It’s to the extent that I cannot start watching a Netflix production unless I know it’s finished or if it’s a big hit from day one (so I know it won’t be cancelled, like The Witcher). It’s odd, because Netflix’s reputation for prematurely cancelling content without resolving their endings has extended to beyond just youth-dominated social media. For example, my parents of all people who cannot use a computer nor the internet, don’t like investing in new Netflix content because they’ve been burned too many times from incomplete series. That’s just like me. It’s sad because Netflix dared to create decent and interesting content, but now it would be hard to escape their infamy.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, too.

People don’t want to watch shows in case it gets cancelled early. Then Netflix cancels the show early because there wasn’t enough interest.

If they didn’t have the reputation people would watch the shows and if it’s good tell their friends. At this point it seems like everyone just stays away though.

They could always just keep making new seasons to add to their catalog and eventually people might watch it, but it seems risky to spend the money.

I've completely stopped watching unfinished Netflix shows because of this, which wiped out anything interesting on their platform I hadn't already seen. My partner still likes to use Netflix for times when she wants a random show on in the background, but once she switches to another app for that I'll be killing our subscription. There are many good shows on other platforms and Netflix is my least favorite to use.

Netflix, where series are produced in beta.

Following in the footsteps of that other company starting with the alphabet G where products are in perpetual beta?

I think their UX is intentionally user hostile to keep you from realizing there’s not much to watch. That and showing random trailers hoping you like one of them.

Oh God, the autoplay... That one "feature" did more than anything else to push me onto competing platforms.

Tell me about it. And there are some obnoxious ones. I’m browsing my library to pick something to watch late at night. Some horror trailer starts and scares the kids… great! Now I need to wait to pick a movie. Essentially movie watching time is spent just picking something.

>given the resources spent on it their UX is pretty bad

I think all of those companies fall into common problem of falling deep into A/B test local maximum. It's impossible to rework entire site at once, especially for an A/B test.

I actually find all their cover art to be extremely banal. There is a signature look to their content. It all feels very “made for tv” quality. I know that’s basically what it is.

Plus I hate their way of trying to soup up stale content by making various sexy versions of cover art. Like The Net with Sandra Bullock. A long forgotten, mediocre, and comically out-dated tech thriller. People were wandering right past it on Blockbuster Video shelves. That’s how old and stale it is. Yet Netflix goes and sources these sexy shots of Bullock in an attempt to get me to watch it. I find the whole thing very insulting.

They'll be a studio with a streaming platform. One that is perhaps better than average. Which implies the engineers will be the help on-par with the other studios with streaming platforms. If content is the differentiator why overspend on the platform?

The issue is their content is actually a very poor point in differentiation. I watch a larger amount of TV than I'd care to admit, and honestly Netflix is awful for content.

- Disney has Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and a long tail of childhood classic films. - HBO has Warner Brothers, DC, Cartoon Network (including a nostalgia back catalog), the best TV shows made in the 00s, and a long tail of adult films. - Netflix's largest successes in the last two years are Tiger King, Squid Game, The Witcher, and a long tail of shows cancelled after Season 1 and short-run miniseries.

At this point, Netflix is a last-resort source of entertainment for me, even after (ad-riddled) YouTube. I mostly only use it to watch their weird reality shows (Blown Away, Sugar Rush) and check out shows friends recommend. I suspect even Paramount+ has a larger selection of TV shows I'd like to watch compared to Netflix.

What do you have issue with in Netflix's UX?

Is it on the discoverability side or the watching side?

Watching is a seamless experience IMO - It really does just work, all the buttons and responses are perfect.

"continue watching" is the third or fourth row of content. I would think that would be at the top.

It constantly recommends the same stuff over and over despite the fact that I never click on it because I don't want to watch it.

It doesn't notify me when there's new episodes or seasons to a show I've previously watched (a year is a long time to wait for new episodes).

I'm not a fan of the UX.

Oh interesting. My continue watching is the top row. Honestly - this is something I am disliking more and more about the A/B, personalized experience effect.

Somethings are much better for everyone to have a common experience without it being unique.

Your second and third point though are accurate for me too. Thanks for explaining.

The viewing controls when watching a show are fine for me, but everything else is awful.

The UI constantly shuffles around, having to hunt for my list or currently watching shows is particularly annoying.

Incessant autoplay that couldn't be disabled for years, and still can't be in all cases.

Awful controls for browsing content. The categories are meaningless and constantly changing.

There's no way to find new shows I'm likely to like within the app. They refuse to have any sort of objective ratings and the custom ones are unbelievably bad, even after years of watching. I have to go to outside sources any time I want to find a new show.

I could go on. Prime gets a lot of criticism for their UX but I actually much prefer it to Netflix's. At least with Prime the ratings have some signal and the layout is simple and consistent. It's not pretty but at least it doesn't go out of the way to annoy me, which is just fine with me. Amazon has probably spent far less on their UX but has a better result.

The moment they put up a user reviews feature similar to steam, the entire platform would be exposed as the barren wasteland that it actually is. Most of the content is pretty substandard and not worth the time investment.

> aggressively cancelling shows

Even so much so I can’t find shows I saw ads for in 2017 or 2018 even existing because they were so bad. It makes me feel the Mandela effect is happening.

The purpose of this poll eludes me due to including Netflix and excluding Microsoft.

FAANG was originally about hot stocks. Jim Cramer coined it. And then, in tech circles, it became mostly about compensation--which had some correlation but imperfectly.

Today, especially with Netflix being less unique technically (they did a lot of early out-of-the-box stuff like going all in on AWS and microservices), they're pretty much an outlier from the other companies although as far as I know they still pay very well. As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier.

Microsoft certainly has more in common with the others, but their stock (as well as the company generally) was out of favor when Cramer coined the term.

Yes, I am aware of the history, which is why I specified the "purpose" of the poll.

A poll about FAANG with netflix and excluding microsoft seems simply like a poll about a group of companies that a tv show host made a catchy acronym about, rather than a poll about which of the big tech companies today is likely to decline or not.

> in October 2021, Cramer suggested replacing FAANG with MAMAA; this included replacing Netflix with Microsoft among the five companies represented as Netflix's valuation had not kept up with the other companies included in his acronym; with Microsoft, these new five companies had market caps of at least $900 billion compared to Netflix's $310 billion at the time of Meta's rebranding.

They also seem much smaller than the other companies, smaller than Microsoft certainly.

They're (relatively speaking) tiny. About 12,000 employees. That's in the ballpark of 10% the size of Microsoft and Alphabet, 20% the size of Facebook. That's about the same number of employees as you'll find at a lot of tech companies you'd consider medium-sized at most.

> As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier

also, as they invest in developing proprietary production software they could get an advantage over other studios.

There has actually been increasing collaboration among studios on software. See the Academy Software Foundation for example. https://www.aswf.io/

And Netflix themselves has released a fair bit of code as open source.

An observation that I've made is that people disregard Microsoft as if they've crossed over from some alternate universe where Windows isn't the predominant operating system on both desktops and servers, and Azure isn't the second biggest public cloud platform.

I regularly see comments like: "The public clouds providers like Amazon, Google, and I suppose even Oracle".

It's kind of hilarious to see people just skip over the second biggest company in the world like it doesn't even exist in their minds.

tester756[0] Proposed MAGMA as the successor for FAANG. I'm still waiting for it to happen.

MAGMA: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon.

[0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29278804

Google is Alphabet. It's MAAAM, and sounds like Cartman.

For most intents and purposes, it's also true that Alphabet is Google. (Youtube is also part of Google.)

Why do people insist on reinventing it when FAAMG works just fine? Also makes no sense to keep Google (Alphabet) but swap out Facebook (Meta).

Exactly, FAANG is a thing of the past, now the MAMAA is the Big Five

(And TBH, it had been a surprise to be FANG, not FAMG to begin with)

The Muppet in me is still holding out for MANAMA.

Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon

Works for me.

We need two more, NVIDIA and AMD? Then it's MANAMANA (do do do do do).

Dell and Oracle, etc

There are a ton of large tech companies once you get beyond the obvious "hot" ones.

Microsoft should have always been part of the Big Five. FAANG never made much sense.

Exactly!

Although back in 2013 the criteria was: "totally dominant in their markets". AFAIK, Microsoft dominates only two markets (OS and office suites) and it's only if we limit ourselves to desktop; even then, it's not a total domination.

But which market has Apple ever been dominating?

That was criteria for FANG. Via Wikipedia:

> Cramer expanded FANG to FAANG in 2017, adding Apple to the other four companies due to its revenues placing it as a potential Fortune 50 company.

Not a FAANG

FAANG == Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google.

It's an acronym specifically for those companies, which is why Microsoft was excluded.

Yes. But the point is that a term coined by a TV stock personality years ago has pretty much zero relevance for looking at what the arc is going to be for what are seen as leading tech companies (through a Silicon Valley lens).

If you think that's outdated, wait til you hear there are still people investing in "Dow Jones" index funds or aiming for "Ivy League" schools!

You are judging them based on perceived quality. There is the potential mistake. Have you considered that maybe quality isn't the most important factor at all times? Or maybe that what you perceive as quality is not what most people are looking for?

Fair enough. They care about subscriber numbers. Although there's probably some correlation with quality so long as you equate the term with quality that appeals to a fairly mainstream audience (i.e. not Euro arthouse fare).

But I don't actually see Netflix programming as aiming to make, e.g. reality TV drek. Most of their programming does seem to be aiming for midbrow quality although it often doesn't hit it.

Most shows and movies developed by Netflix are profoundly uninspired: they take no risks and produce content that is mostly acceptable but quickly forgotten.

Looking down the list, I don't really disagree. House of Cards which got me to subscribe to streaming was 5 star in my book at first. I'd probably put some others in the 4 star range. (Never could really get into Stranger Things or, really, The Crown.)

Half their content is algorithm generated

This. For a firm with all these supposed high-performers trying to discover and cater to my viewing habits, they sure had a hard time figuring out that I never chose their "original content" that they were shoving in my face all the time.

I dropped them in 2020.

There was this storyline that data was going to replace lunches with authors, pitch meetings, and a lot of other creative activities. It's mostly been BS. And recommendation engines barely work at all 10+ years in.

>There was this storyline that data was going to replace lunches with authors, pitch meetings, and a lot of other creative activities. It's mostly been BS.

Let this be a lesson. Data and fancy algorithms can NEVER replace a smart human who cares. Data and algorithms can enhance and expedite humans - but if your humans are stupid, you will just make stupid decisions faster

Some of my favorite works in the past few years have been Netflix originals. You might want to consider giving them another chance! They’ve got some of the film industries most talented minds working on them.

Examples? I haven't mostly seen them although I do subscribe. I could name at least two shows on Apple TV+ (which is rarely discussed) that I consider better than anything on Netflix of late. (For All Mankind and The Morning Show)

Not a series, but Extraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_(2020_film)

Queen's Gambit

Altered Carbon is good

… and canceled after 2 seasons…

“Some hits and quite a few duds” is how every Hollywood studio operates, isn’t it?

But that is what Netflix was supposed to be able to avoid because they know so much about the viewing habits of their users. More likely it turns out that knowing that doesn't help them create new content and they just need exclusive titles to draw people like all of the other studios.

If the Netflix recommendation engine is the result of any data science then obviously they have no special knowledge from their mountain of data because the engine is worthless.

I think an underrated advantage that the online platforms have over the legacy studios is that the original content from Netflix, Prime, et al is available globally and the legacy content is not.

Netflix originals are available everywhere, the licensed content is far more restrictive. On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals. Hulu won’t even let you log in if you’re outside the US. For whatever reason, legacy media decided they don’t want the rest of the world to be fans of their content and give them money for it. Disney is an exception since they’re starting to expand Disney+ overseas.

> the original content from Netflix, Prime, et al is available globally and the legacy content is not

This is not always true, and it depends on the nature of the “Original”. There’s really two classes: Originals fully owned by Netflix, and ones produced in partnership with a traditional TV network. The latter are branded as Netflix Originals everywhere except their home country (where they are carried by the local network instead).

> On Prime the only things available outside the US are Amazon Originals.

This isn’t true; the UK also has a lot of licensed content, if you have Prime in the UK. My understanding is they do in other markets where they offer Prime as well, but you only get access to the full library when you’re in the region where you have Prime, unlike Netflix.

That may be part of their content licensing, but that could also be a commercial decision by Amazon. (eg I also don’t get other Prime benefits from Amazon.de with my .co.uk Prime subscription.)

> For whatever reason, legacy media decided they don’t want the rest of the world to be fans of their content and give them money for it.

No, legacy media has distribution issues which they address by licensing distribution geographically before release, and once those rights are divided it's very hard to reconsolidate them.

Online streaming has been a thing for 10+ years now. Whatever distribution issues used to exist with finding a local guy to drive around a truck full of DVDs are long gone. They could have fixed this issue by now if they cared to.

> Online streaming has been a thing for 10+ years now.

Movie theaters and broadcast/cable are still a thing, and still an important component of how legacy video makes money on content. And the geographic distribution issues there still exist. And for them to work, geographic exclusivity can't ignore streaming, either.

Yeah, the thing is consumers don't care. They'll watch the content that's available. And as time goes on, that's what they'll know, what their kids grew up watching, and what they'll look for. The stuff that wasn't available they're not going to care about.

You can't convince me that, say, Warner Bros doesn't have sufficient leverage to wrest their online streaming rights away from some Bulgarian movie theater chain or whatever. I mean, come on.

Yes, for the last few years, every time I logged into Netflix I was stunned at poorly they seemed to understand me. Heist movies, murder mysteries, drug cartels fighting, stuff I never watch, and this was the majority of the stuff they showed. Recently I spent 20 minutes looking for something to watch, but I couldn't find anything at all that looked interesting. I thought that was so shocking, I decided it was time to cancel Netflix. So I finally gave up my account. There is an abundance of good material I can watch elsewhere.

But the main question is, why can't Netflix write a recommendation engine that actually shows me something I want to watch?

Because they can't get the rights to stream anything you'd actually want to watch, and they think they can trick you into accepting their catalogue and continuing to pay them away.

No one can write decent recommendation engines because it's a really hard problem that no one has solved.

Even in music--where everyone actually has a pretty complete catalog--recommendation is pretty bad.