To be fair, it was pretty future when they first built it. They had already built a successful DVD-by-mail business that toppled the Blockbuster monopoly, and decided to double down and bet the farm on video streaming when bandwidth was still crazy expensive, even before cloud services had really taken off, then aggressively navigated a ton of legal hurdles to aggressively expanded internationally.
Clearly their business-as-a-sports-team mentality paid off in spades. But now that spinning up a competing streaming site is "dead simple" (as you put it), they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten.
I do wonder if their sports mentality starts to break down when it comes to more artistic undertakings. Greenlighting the right projects means bringing the right people together takes a lot of experience and intuition to get right. I think they still have a lot to learn from HBO in terms of focus - it seems like Netflix is still throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and to constantly show their customers new movie posters, but for the past few years scrolling through their offerings feels like walking through the unorganized aisles of a giant discount store, when they probably want it to feel like walking into an upscale boutique.
They optimized for a local maxima that's now rapidly eroding, and I think they could theoretically push themselves beyond it, but it seems more likely they'll just throw ads on the thing, or start squeezing and penalizing their users for using the product wrong like the Blockbuster of yore.
> they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten.
More specifically, they have to compete with all of their prior suppliers, who gave streaming rights away for a song, but after Netflix proved the business model, are now charging two arms and a leg for it.
Blockbuster was never a monopoly. Hollywood Video had a comparable number of locations, and there were many smaller competitors. The business model had no real moat.
Clearly their business-as-a-sports-team mentality paid off in spades. But now that spinning up a competing streaming site is "dead simple" (as you put it), they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten.
I do wonder if their sports mentality starts to break down when it comes to more artistic undertakings. Greenlighting the right projects means bringing the right people together takes a lot of experience and intuition to get right. I think they still have a lot to learn from HBO in terms of focus - it seems like Netflix is still throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and to constantly show their customers new movie posters, but for the past few years scrolling through their offerings feels like walking through the unorganized aisles of a giant discount store, when they probably want it to feel like walking into an upscale boutique.
They optimized for a local maxima that's now rapidly eroding, and I think they could theoretically push themselves beyond it, but it seems more likely they'll just throw ads on the thing, or start squeezing and penalizing their users for using the product wrong like the Blockbuster of yore.