discussion Netflix CEO says they "never canceled a successful show", wants huge shows every week

[mystery]

BLOOMBERG: Netflix’s New Co-CEOs Answer All Your Questions
 

Do you think it's realistic for one service to account for 25% of all video viewing in the US?
Sarandos: For sure. When you say one service, that's coming up out of a media landscape that was very specialized. The networks had identities and programming. We program into all those verticals, which gives us the ability to do quality at scale across every genre of entertainment and globally. It is very rare that a show like Squid Game from Korea would be as global as it was. Within 30 hours, the world was watching Squid Game with no human intervention to try to market Squid Game to the world.

Peters: We're just getting started to make Squid Game not an unusual thing, but basically something that happens literally every week.
 

How has the evolution of the business affected your relationship with the creative community? Online there are constantly people outraged about shows getting canceled.
Sarandos: We have never canceled a successful show. A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.
 

We'll try a different numbers question. How many of the hundred million plus people who share a password will pay for their own Netflix account?

Peters: Those people know how to watch Netflix. They've watched something on Netflix that they've loved. Our job is over the next couple of years to win all of them back. We won't do that out of the gate. Some of those folks are borrowing because they're more price sensitive, they're less engaged or whatever. But if we deliver a Wednesday every week, if we deliver a Glass Onion every week, we'll get the vast majority of those viewers back.
 

How hard of a wall do they run into?

Peters: We pride ourselves on being a great consumer experience and we don't want to that to change. This is a graduated approach, but the vast majority of people who are not paying for Netflix will have to pay for Netflix. It gets to a pretty firm kind of position. This is not gonna be a universally popular kind of event. There will be unhappy customers.

Edited July 28, 2023 by mystery

[Delirious]

Everything they said was correct unfortunately includinf the sharing accounts problem.

[JustLikeHoney]

Makes sense. Sooo tired of hissy fits over Netflix. They cancel a lot less than regular broadcast TV. 

[JustLikeHoney]

Makes sense. Sooo tired of hissy fits over Netflix. They cancel a lot less than regular broadcast TV. 

[Machete]

I do believe the shows they are cancelling weren't successful, but they also need to learn to let shows grow and find a footing. This might apply more to comedies than dramas but: a first season will almost always be rough, but it is not hard to move past it. Shows like The Office or Seinfeld took time to find their ground, imagine had their networks cancelled them after the first season. Like that Blockbuster show they cancelled, the first season was bad but it definitely gave potential for growth.

[JustHoran]

Well that's a lie.

 

They cancelled The Society AFTER it was renewed, because of Covid-19. It's ridiculous because the show was a hit, renewed and left on a cliff-hanger. Answer that, Netflix!

[vale9001]

7 minutes ago, JustLikeHoney said:

Makes sense. Sooo tired of hissy fits over Netflix. They cancel a lot less than regular broadcast TV. 

oh this. The numbers of show not coming for at a least series 2 is really really low if you see how much stuff they produce.

Plus a lot of people are complaining not for cancellations after one season but after also 2 or 3 seasons. As fans of course they want more than that but who said us these series just deserve to end?.  

[touch]

1899 would like to have a word

[May]

they need to look to the long term though

 

a lot of the shows they cancelled were in the process of creating big cult followings such as Sense8, The Society and The OA. sure they might not be the most successful right out the gate but in a few years when those shows have fully wrapped , people are going to still be talking about how great and fleshed out those shows were and THAT word of mouth is going to get people subscribing to your service because you have a comprehensive and polished back catalogue rather than being bloated by hundreds of shows which ran for 1 season then got cancelled .

[favorite crime]

4 minutes ago, touch said:

1899 would like to have a word

a high budget fantasy show that barely made a dent 

[whtvrdude]

19 minutes ago, Delirious said:

Everything they said was correct unfortunately includinf the sharing accounts problem.

It's not a problem, it's not like it's bankrupting ******* NETFLIX.

Quote

For full-year 2022, Netflix acquired an impressive $31.6 billion in revenue, a 6% increase from the previous year.

That "stop being poor" attitude ain't cute.

[JustHoran]

17 minutes ago, Machete said:

I do believe the shows they are cancelling weren't successful, but they also need to learn to let shows grow and find a footing. This might apply more to comedies than dramas but: a first season will almost always be rough, but it is not hard to move past it. Shows like The Office or Seinfeld took time to find their ground, imagine had their networks cancelled them after the first season. Like that Blockbuster show they cancelled, the first season was bad but it definitely gave potential for growth.

That Blockbuster show was terrible though  I mean there is no way many people even got through the first season. It could have been good, but that show 100% deserved cancellation imo.

[Uncatena]

maybe, but they don't even let shows get successful first. if its not an instant huge hit, its gone. 

[Gui Blackout]

Well, duh? That's pretty obvious. They have all the data for this on their fingertips, if a show doesn't make back the investment in viewership or awards nominations, of course they're not renewing it.

 

Some of these cancelled shows only have a niche audience of gays and girls on twitter who are loud but have no viewership from the general audience. 

[TheCal]

Wasn't The Society a hit tho? Why cancel it then?

Edited January 23, 2023 by TheCal

[fountain]

Netflix and Disney+ essentially have opposite approaches to their business, where Netflix is about putting out a huge quantity of content and hoping some of these shows reach FOMO must watch success while cancelling the rest, and most of their interest and subscribers come from this vast quantity. With Disney+ they put out much less content but instead focus on their established fan bases and green light shows that appeal specifically to them, meaning even if there is less overall viewership these shows still retain a must watch factor for the dedicated fans, which equals consistent subscribers for the service. Both approaches work well clearly since the services are seeing great success at a similar level, but one ultimately will surpass the other and if I had to guess I would imagine it’d probably be Disney+ because garnering a dedicated fan base is a lot more reliable and Netflix definitely fails in that regard. If they were to directly focus on building up their successful properties (including critical success as opposed to just views, as they also face complains about the overall quality of their content) then they would probably be unstoppable, but they don’t seem to be interested in this and I see it coming back to haunt them eventually. 

[Gui Blackout]

5 minutes ago, fountain said:

Netflix and Disney+ essentially have opposite approaches to their business, where Netflix is about putting out a huge quantity of content and hoping some of these shows reach FOMO must watch success while cancelling the rest, and most of their interest and subscribers come from this vast quantity. With Disney+ they put out much less content but instead focus on their established fan bases and green light shows that appeal specifically to them, meaning even if there is less overall viewership these shows still retain a must watch factor for the dedicated fans, which equals consistent subscribers for the service. Both approaches work well clearly since the services are seeing great success at a similar level, but one ultimately will surpass the other and if I had to guess I would imagine it’d probably be Disney+ because garnering a dedicated fan base is a lot more reliable and Netflix definitely fails in that regard. If they were to directly focus on building up their successful properties (including critical success as opposed to just views, as they also face complains about the overall quality of their content) then they would probably be unstoppable, but they don’t seem to be interested in this and I see it coming back to haunt them eventually. 

Disney's show are based on well established IPs like Marvel and Star Wars. Netflix doesn't have that so they have to throw thing out there to see if it sticks, like Strangers Things was. It's not easy to build a dedicated fanbase from the ground up.

[loveisdead9582]

This is a lie. They also need to let shows grow, or not green light shows that don’t have much of an audience in the first place. 

[Darius]

Wouldn't they want to keep at some some shows for the arts and not the charts, though? Cult classics are a thing. 

[Revolution]

Sadly all of their shows are trash, cliche and boring bc they pander to the masses.

[Bloodflowers.]

1 hour ago, JustHoran said:

Well that's a lie.

 

They cancelled The Society AFTER it was renewed, because of Covid-19. It's ridiculous because the show was a hit, renewed and left on a cliff-hanger. Answer that, Netflix!

 

I was about to say the same thing, but with GLOW. They renewed season 4 and filmed a couple of episodes then pandemic hit and they randomly scrapped the whole thing

 

[BrokenMachine]

If they know the shows are gonna get canceled they could at least stop leaving them with open endings/cliff-hangers 

[XAMJ]

They are correct, people can cry all they want but why would they cancel a successful show 

[KasioKas]

2 hours ago, JustLikeHoney said:

Makes sense. Sooo tired of hissy fits over Netflix. They cancel a lot less than regular broadcast TV. 

Feel the same way, even if I lost some faves too

[harwee]

Obviously that makes sense.

 

Though not all shows are the same, some takes time to build a base and then take off but some platforms (not just Netflix) don't believe in the shows.