The TikTok-ification of Netflix: Imitation as a Means of Survival
It’s of great irony that a slow death for Netflix looms on the eve of the ten year anniversary of Blockbuster’s demise.
But the writing’s on the wall. In January, April and July of last year, Netflix’s market cap shrunk like a raisin in the face of an increasingly competitive media landscape.
Let’s take a look at two existential challenges Netflix faces and afterwards, two opportunities Netflix can leverage to address and overcome those challenges.
I’ll then leave you with a viable proposal for Netflix to transform these opportunities into action.
The Short-Format Challenge
An External Threat
TikTok recently made history as Netflix’s first non-streaming service competitor, which coincides closely with the contemporary exodus to short-form video content, a format widely described as more convenient for consumption.
In fact, according to analytics firm App Annie, Americans now spend, on average, 24.5 hours (a whole day!) per month on TikTok compared to just 5.7 hours on Netflix.
Can you guess why? Because TikTok is a lower-risk pastime. The short-form format means no video I watch is a massive commitment or waste of my time, even if it sucks.
An Internal Weakness
Meanwhile, enter Netflix, which requires nuclear amounts of brain power to avoid an unsavoury hours-long entertainment experience.
This is Netflix’s first of two challenges: with the advent of short-form video, this commitment no longer warrants the risk it entails, and people are agreeing with me.
‘[TikTok] is like a short video version of YouTube. … I also like the idea of short videos due to my short attention span.’
Fellow Digisoc-er Sarah White backs me up on this, saying ‘people are wasting time picking something to watch’, although I vehemently disagree with her that Netflix’s algorithmic personalisation is a positive (more on that below!).
The Echo Chamber Challenge
Looking Inwards First
The second challenge fuelling the Netflix exodus is the universal realisation of users that Netflix simply doesn’t make people feel good anymore.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that even moderate consumption of Netflix is increasingly associated with depression and loneliness. As I myself lose the childhood safeguards that shielded my social and emotional development from detrimental influences, I’m increasingly struggling to maintain a healthy distinction between my expectations of the fantasy rabbit hole of Netflix and my expectations of reality and thus my relationships with society, leaving me lonely and isolated.
And Now Outwards, Down the Rabbit Hole
This warping isolationist effect is the second challenge propelling the Netflix exodus, but what exactly is causing it?
Let’s put the poet’s quill aside for one second. According to the scholars, Netflix increasingly blurs the lines between our own life experience and ‘shared cultural objects’ or even completely severs us from ‘shareable world values and functionalities’ through its ‘deep personalization’. Us users are left in an echo chamber where our faults and vices intensify themselves in an algorithm-induced positive feedback loop.
And I, like my fellow digital citizens, can feel it warping my perception of reality and of real people. The effect is utterly ‘misleading and disorienting’.
The Hybrid Format Opportunity
The Evolving Short-Form Audience
However, Netflix has at its disposal concrete opportunities to address these challenges, playing on its strengths in digital media and technology.
With respect to the first challenge, Netflix has a prominent opportunity to break into short-form media whilst it is still a fledgling industry.
Ironically, a niche but capitalisable audience for conventional television (hint: a strength of Netflix) retrofitted with the beloved short-format along the lines of Family Guy and South Park is growing, an astronomical opportunity Netflix can leverage.
In Memoriam of Quibi
But dear Netflix: tread lightly to avoid the same fate as Quibi, the billionaire-backed and star-studded pioneering attempt at a short-form streaming service which met its demise when it tried to cram the entire Hollywood formula into the short-form format. The end result was awkward and bizarre.
And so I therefore disagree that your ‘Fast Laughs’ counter proposition will overcome what Quibi could not.
Later I’m going to propose what you should instead do to leverage the short-form opportunity to address the challenges driving your subscriber exodus. Stay tuned …
The Shared Experience Opportunity
Shared ‘Cultural Objects’
But first let’s discuss Netflix’s second opportunity.
TikTok at its foundation can only present the community to the user, whereas Netflix (currently) can only present the user to itself. TikTok-ing is a ‘meaning making’ digital bandwagon that requires instead of suppresses a shared experience, which therefore grounds the user in reality … in a digital society, folks!
‘That immersed in our frictionless bubbles we will … neither know ourselves or each other, as we lose our orientation in the broader social landscape needed to anchor that knowledge’
But ironically, TikTok relies on Netflix’s (among others) proprietary intellectual property to poach soundbites as the ‘cultural objects’ that facilitate its shared experience.
Curse-Turned-Blessing
If you think critically about it, Netflix’s rights to its own bounty of content bless it with a ground-breaking opportunity to extrapolate TikTok’s iconic sound-meme format to its own current content catalogue to quite literally turn the echo chamber inside out and reverse its isolating, depressing and exodus-provoking effects.
So Netflix, to put a stop to the subscriber exodus, then you will have to leverage these two opportunities to address the duo of challenges that we’ve discussed.
You should consider the viable proposal below which recommends retrofitting crucial digital media and technologies to your service.
A Viable Proposal: Making Use of Digital Media and Technology
First, Netflix should incorporate short-formatted digital media into a secondary interface properly configured to provide the viewer with sufficient context and resolution within the narrow timeframe.
Second, Netflix should create a digital technology with a mechanism that leverages its content library as fodder for sound-memes through which users upload personal life moments overlaid with Netflix soundbites to share to an in-app mosaic … a shared experience made up of ‘cultural objects’ that overcomes the isolating and depressing effects of the echo chamber.
Netflix, please, for the sake of our digital society and our digital citizens succumbing to the echo chamber, heed my advice! 😬
