It's clear they are just outclassed by Disney+. People thought the hard part was creating the streaming platform, the content was mostly licensed with a few exclusives. It's now clear that exclusive content is everything. Disney have new content every month (ie. Moon Knight -> Obi-Wan Kenobi) and high quality movies like Luca and Turning Red.
Netflix's strategy seems to be just get big name actors and mediocre creatives and hope it works. The Adam Project might have a lot of viewers but how many of those are just because it's there? How many people would say "The Adam Project is my favorite movie" and how does that compare to Luca?
Netflix has been essentially making the equivalent of direct to DVD movies as its whole strategy while Disney has been bringing their best. They are becoming The Asylum of the streaming world.
I feel like Netflix always kind of had an issue with poor taste. They have crappy reality shows and pseudo-documentaries about how the aliens build pyramids. A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence. In addition to this content being unhealthy because you either don't learn anything, or are actively being fed falsehoods, I think it just gives the platform a poor image.
It's kind of sad because Netflix had over 5 billion in net income last year, and 30B in total revenue. Suppose that Netflix can afford to spend 15-20B on content a year. You could do so much with that money. I mean, 20B is 20 thousand million dollars. Assuming you take just 5 billion and fund indie movies at 20M a pop, you could produce 250 indie movies a year. If they were smart about it, they would give scholarships to kids coming out of movie school. Create movie making contests. Give a lot of fresh young creative people a shot, and keep funding the creatives that produce the better reviewed content... Like, you know... A meritocracy of sorts...
Most people coming out of movie school never get to produce movies. There's just a lot of wasted talent out there. If you have tens of billions of dollars, there's no excuse for producing shit content year after year.
I suspect the data teams have a lot of sway at netflix right at the top exec levels. I know this anecdotally since I am close to someone who has approached Netflix and was told it wont work for them.
Their reasoning was as simple as it can get. Their data showed what shows people liked in terms of genres and runtimes.
That might seem reasonable for short term gains until you realise how silly it is for longevity.
Blind allegiance to data is a grave mistake. Numbers are meaningless without context. But if you misunderstand the context that is producing the numbers, you end up being much worse informed than without the data at all. I fear that people take data and whatever default interpretation as gospel and are loathe to go against it. Faux objectivity is an acute danger that we must all be on guard against.
I agree and I think it's kind of like that quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
If you look at what people like in your current library of content which you've classified into 10 different categories, you get an incomplete picture and you're kind of looking in the rear view mirror. Steve Jobs understood this too.
>A metric fuckton of content that caters to people with below average intelligence.
The big question is how big is the fraction of people who are below average intelligence. Depending on that ratio, it could make sense to produce content for that part of the population ...
Additionally, highly intelligent people earn more money and don't have to buy content wholesale. They can afford to buy movies directly which means that each view of intelligent content is worth much more. Now, how can Netflix integrate that into their platform? There won't be any bargains left. Even young talented creatives will demand what they are worth.
There have to be different streaming services for different quality levels. Netflix has decided to serve some fraction of the bell curve and leaves other fractions to others.
I'd say part of the problem here is that consciously or not, people tend to follow influencers, and flock to brands that are more aspirational (e.g. Apple). If you cater specifically to people who like mediocre content, you lose the interest of the people with better taste. Your brand then becomes a brand associated with people that have poor taste, and eventually, even people with poor taste see that the brand is not cool, and they leave too.
Indie movies are absolutely notorious for their habit of appealing to low intelligence people, it's practically their main market. They don't have much budget to tell an interesting story with, and are often being written by grant funded people without much experience and who are just desperate to make a movie (any movie) so they end up relying a lot on faux depth and complicated BS to make the movie seem like it has more to say than it really does. Critics lap that stuff up but most people who just want to be entertained with a risky but well made idea that doesn't puff itself up, the bigger studios are where you'll find them.
Mostly it is latency added by webcams, microphones(But our ears are used to delayed audio anyway) and the software. Your webcam probably has >100ms of latency then the app adds >50ms then multiply that by 2x (for two way conversation). Even a display like a TV can have loads of latency.
If you just open up a camera view there's huge latency without it even sending data anywhere.
The internet latency is probably only a small portion of over all latency and WiFi latency isn't much either. There's already lots of latency with audio (Perhaps having a microphone could make audio travel faster then through air?)
I wish people would take latency more seriously. Using a rolling shutter, encoding a single line at a time and sending it via UDP could probably save almost all the latency. Sub 30ms latency IMO would make it much better.
For distributed teams the Internet RTT between a pair of call participants is frequently higher than 300ms, and that's unloaded -- if the connection is marginal then average RTT could be much higher.
Wi-Fi is also a huge contributor to latency. In congested areas or with problematic APs or end stations it's not uncommon to see packets delayed more than 500ms by retransmits. The average might be lower, but with frequent excursions to much higher than average latency.
I've been reading lots of books (On computer graphics) and it's surprising how much better the average book content is then most online resources. I guess the difficulty to get it published really forces the quality to be high. It's so easy to get a copy of "The Cg Tutorial" for a couple of bucks online and get an overview of the graphics pipeline that is super higher quality(Though for 20 year old GPUs).
It's great that people are putting versions of their books online. I just hope that they keep making physical versions. I much prefer reading on paper rather than a screen or even kindle.
If you just use regular vertex and fragment shaders then all of that is automatically handled. A game like World of Warcraft might not use advanced GPU features that would slow down a TBDR.
I'm not that good at focusing, but one thing I've found that's super helpful is to turn my computer screen to monochrome. Obviously this doesn't work if you need colour.
I don't think that people only value the output. Take "Selfie Girl"[0] by Inigo Quilez people appreciate that it's a shader, even people that are not into programming (though they'd need to see the making of video[1]).
I think people should assess their surroundings to find what is good exercise for them to do. I run trails just because I live across the road from trails to run. If I had to travel to the trail I probably wouldn't go everyday.
