What the Netflix?
In all honesty, what’s better than staying in bed, eating a pint of Cherry Garcia, and binging Cheers on Netflix? Literally, anything when you have a social life. Besides my lack of a social life, I find myself looking to the streaming giant, Netflix.
Today I will be looking closely at the business model of the company to evaluate and hypothesize what the company is trying to accomplish. Especially since there is plenty about the company’s actions that make people wonder how they are trying to gain capital.
If it was not common knowledge before, the main strategy for Netflix to make a profit is through the use of charging it’s users a monthly fee of $7.99, $10.99, or $13.99 depending on whether or not you want HD options and use more than one screen at once. Even more surprising is that the company makes approximately $30 million a month on their somehow still existing DVD rental service. Advertising is a no-brainer. I’ll get back to the subject.
Yet all of the proceeding descriptions only serve as a form of set-up to my attention to the recent string of cancellations the giant has made over the past few weeks. The Marvel giants Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and the Peabody-award winning American Vandal.
It’s not surprising to cancel multiple shows that don’t make seem lucrative in cable TV, as the ad time doesn’t make production costs any burdensome. However, Netflix, not relying on ad time, just has to make sure that their shows are given enough publicity to continue moving forward.
Then we look at the previously named shows does my pint in curiosity becomes clear. All shows drew in a large amount of publicity, viewership, and critical praise (except Iron Fist.) It was these three shows that had a big reason to be continued onto Netflix. Even more jarring, Netflix has recently announced their intent to borrow over $2 billion to produce new content over the next year.
Then again, this could all be explained away with the argument that production costs are rising and that platform is increasing its focus onto original programming. Here’s something to add to it though.
Recently, Disney announced that future content from Lucasfilm and Marvel would begin to be exclusively released onto their own streaming service. This, in turn, limits not only what Netflix can put on its platform, but also forces them to get creative to keep its subscribers where they are. To that, I bring the issue of lack of diversity.
In Marxist Theory of Media, lack in diversity means that pop culture has come to the point where it is stale and cliched. This connects with my previous reporting and suspicions of Netflix that brings me to my hypothesis; Netflix is trying to prevent lack of diversity.
Since now Netflix is getting new competition with Disney and DC, they are now realizing that they need to change and evolve to keep their subscribers. Iron Fist, Luke Cage and American Vandal, while good shows, Netflix decided to part with them to prevent an oversaturation in content. With superheroes as a growing trend especially, Netflix is taking risks by trying as hard as possible not to rehash their material in the long run.
With that in mind, I now can see why Netflix decided to move past these three shows to focus more on programs that require them to take risks. I mean, there’s gotta be something worth watching over the next year if they’re spending $2 billion for original programming.
