Web Excursions 2023-02-16
Netflix’s New Chapter
COVID screwed up the timing: everyone being stuck at home re-ignited Netflix subscriber growth, but the underlying challenges remained, and hit all at once over the last year.
most content companies simply don’t have the business model or stomach for building a sustainable streaming service,
and will eventually go back to licensing their content to the highest bidder,
and there Netflix has a massive advantage thanks to the user base it already has.
Netflix gets less leverage off of its international content than it once hoped for.
One of the bullish arguments for Netflix is that it could create content in one part of the world and then stream it elsewhere, and while that is true technically, it doesn’t really move the needle in terms of engagement.
Squid Game was very rare in that way.
And Wednesday looks like one of those too, very rare in that way.
There are countries like Japan, as an example, or even Mexico that have a real preference for local content, even when we have our big local hits.
Netflix gets less value from its older content than bulls once assumed — or than its amortization schedule suggests (which is why the company’s profit number is misleading).
If Netflix’s old content held its value in the way I once assumed then you could make a case that the company’s customer acquisition costs were actually decreasing over time as the value of its offering increased;
Netflix gets and keeps customers with new shows that people talk about,
while most of its old content is ignored (and perhaps ought be monetized on services like Roku and other free ad-supported TV networks).
A 90-Second Cure for Existential Dread, Every Sunday Night
For regular people — people with everyday problems, who don’t live in a fancy observatory surrounded by brass astrolabes — the winter solstice is a weekly event happening every Sunday. Sunday evenings are black holes from which no hope escapes; a time of rumination on the failures of the past seven days, and pre-emptive haunting by fiascos to come.
Yet the universe has been known to attenuate misery with fleeting comforts: the sensation of incredible warmth that overtakes a body dying of hypothermia, for instance. And to those souls mired in Sunday-night gloom, it offers a dazzling gift: Carrie Underwood doing the “Sunday Night Football” song on NBC
This song is not one song but many songs. Since the show’s debut in 2006, its intro has been updated every year, and, within a given season, the song mutates constantly: Each week incorporates a different rhyming line tailored to the current matchup. A schedule may announce a contest between the Colts and the Cowboys; only Carrie Underwood reveals if this promises to be a “righteous showdown” or a “nasty showdown,” or that the teams are “about to throw down” or are “breaking new ground,” and so on. According to representatives from NBC Sports, Underwood annually records 85 permutations of this line back to back in a single session.
The “Sunday Night Football” song extols not the thrill of football, nor the value of sport, but the highly specific ouroboric pleasure of turning on NBC to watch “Sunday Night Football” on NBC on Sunday night.
Under normal conditions, however, highlighting the fact that a football game is about to be televised for the American TV audience is an act equivalent to reciting the daily specials to a starving man.
Tripp Dixon, the NBC Sports “VP of Creative” tasked with supervising this visual triumph, likens the sequence to an “airlock” designed to safely transition viewers from the grim reality of everyday existence to the high-octane fantasia of “Sunday Night Football.” In exchange for submission to the spectacular, “Sunday Night Football” promises a respite from all concerns.
The sly genius of American football is that its accouterments — Super Bowl ads with feature-film budgets, stupefyingly cutting-edge bumper graphics — replicate, even or especially for those with no interest in football, the draw of football itself: a celebration of human aptitude and a diversion of attention away from anything more important. Through judicious application of Carrie Underwood and C.G.I. technology, the “Sunday Night Football” song offers a brief yet total respite from the horror of Sunday night.