Consumers do not exist so that companies can be profitable, and are not required to accept anything of the sort.

What a vampiric, corporate lickspittle point of view.

Generally a enterprise that is not profitable is using more resources than the value it creates and as a result the economy is better off if it goes under.

This isn't just "things only deserve to exist if it makes someone money" this is "our system systemically discourages wasteful use of resources".

Actors and such need to be paid. Their labor is a scare resource so if they are doing something that's not worth more than their time, they should generally be doing something else. If we all behaved otherwise society would slowly die as wealth got consumed to zero instead of increased with time.

an*

I would even object to calling people “consumers”, only because the conversation involves a (potential) service. It’s like calling us “bipeds” when we talk about us on a shoe-making context.

Well, when the shoe fits...

*shoes.

It goes both ways, does it not? Companies and their respective goods or service can't survive without being profitable.

Amazon survived just fine without being profitable for something like two decades.

Investors are willing to put a premium on growth, even if it means the company is unprofitable (for certain definitions of unprofitable — you have to be convincing that you could be profitable, if only you stopped spending so much on growth). If you're unprofitable and losing users you're in trouble.

I feel like we would all have been better off if Amazon had not been allowed to do this.

I absolutely agree.

Also it has been profitable for years

As the copyright holders (not creators, mind you) realized the vast worth of their IP, licensing costs started to put the pressure on Netflix.

I'm sure that's true, but then we've found the actual problem! And it's not viewers sharing their accounts with their families.

If more users have accounts then licensing costs are less of a burden to Netflix.

Yes, but the real problem are rising licensing costs, not account sharing.

That has always been a burden. If customers want something then the person selling it sets the price.

That's just a description for Netflix predatory tactics. Their narrative is "against account sharing" (which was historically allowed by them) but the problem is actually "rising licensing costs", so their actual enemy is not users but content owners.

The narrative is important. It's important to reframe this as Netflix going against the less powerful side.

Also, I celebrate this has already cost them 1 million users in Spain alone. I hope this backfires on Netflix globally.

Lickspittle??? :)

We're talking about video here, nobody owes anyone anything. It's not anything remotely close to a basic necessity.

No, you don't owe me anything.

But if I stop buying your stuff maybe you will lower your prices and maybe stop investing in expensive stupid fantasy shows that everyone hates.

I mean, I don't owe it to you to buy your crap either. It's a two way street.

> It's a two way street

Yup, this is my point.

Users in Spain seem to have accepted that they didn't mind if they had one less streaming service to choose from. They are voting with their wallets.

Media companies need to accept that the huge margins of profit are not sustainable. Accept that users will not pay exorbitant amounts of money for content and price your IP fairly.

Netflix has been profitable for years…

Devil's advocate: Is their growth high enough? In our current system, you always have to be growing enough, not just profitable.

Maybe true, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a stupid system

It is certainly a stupid system.

That’s the big brain thinking that leads to the enshitification of products.

It’s also quite frankly impossible to grow forever. Market saturation is a thing, as is the number of atoms you can convert to paper clips.

I agree with you, yet here we are, investors expecting more and more meteoric returns QoQ, YoY.

That's just "shareholder value". Combine it with everyone who owns stock expecting it to go up all the time, and you get that mentality. Stocks were once a vote of confidence in a company and their long term vision, and now it's just hyper-analyzed gambling with as short a return time as possible.

Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market. Now we have the additional burden of lumping nearly everyone's retirement accounts into that same system. What could possibly go wrong, again?

I read an article probably 20 years ago, about the things that take down profitable companies, and one phrase that stuck with me was "the relentless pursuit of more".

Milton Friedman really did a number on people. Has any of his ideas stood the test of time? Everything I’ve seen has led to rampant inequality, and rot in both the corporate and government sectors. Even in the most recent economic crises, zero countries embraced his ideas, and those that tried austerity had a worse outcome.

>Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market

Just the basic fact that an economy that is good for workers, where they are more in demand and make more money, is bad for their retirement because the stock market goes down, is really all you need to know to understand why the stock market is a plague.

They were perfectly profitable till greed didn't breed more walled gardens

Then it's back to piracy and the entire industry becomes unprofitable. Nothing of value will be lost.

Netflix got greedy and decided to make all their own content in-house, but they did a poor job of picking shows, and not making too many at once. They burned tons of money on mediocre-to-bad shows, all in the name of not paying licensing to another company, the result being a higher cost for less desirable content.