It’s interesting in a subscription environment that engagement is still seen as the primary draw. Clearly the bean counters have seen that if a user engages with the platform more than x hours per day/week/month they’re y percent more likely to keep the service. But this sort of implies that people only want the service when they are actively watching something - I wonder if there’s an a la cart opportunity there, if media was “rightly” priced in comparison to a binge watch on Netflix ($2 an episode is probably FAR too high).
It still comes down to content - if you have something all the time that is new an everyone wants to watch, then you get to keep the money flowing.
The various discussions here have me curious if the widespread practice of netflix account sharing (which I believe is forbidden but not really enforced to a degree that they clearly could if they wanted to) actually helps maintain subscriber count by sort of averaging out demand among a pool of people.
If I suddenly am not using netflix more than an hour or two per month because my attention is elsewhere, I would be pretty likely to cancel my subscription, but if someone else were using my account and I either knew they used netflix quite a bit, or their usage was currently unknown to me, I'd be way less likely to bother cancelling my account.
I think it’s a form of voluntary price segmentation. If you’re in a rich family, everyone has their own account. If you’re in a poor family, you could have 10 people on one account. The middle class does what you’re talking about, maybe shares it between two people but you have a higher retention rate. This way Netflix gets as much as it can from everyone.
All the ala carte options are too expensive. Itunes charges $6(!!!) for new rentals. It is trivial to find six higher quality movies in the $1 purchase bins at walmart and target or at redbox.
Right - do if Netflix with a $13/mo subscription gets you 20 movies you want to watch vs $60+ ala cart, why wouldn’t there be a micro transaction type thing where those 20 movies are paid for at their actual value?
How do you calculate actual value if you aren’t even getting a resalable asset? Whatever the price is is evidentally the actual value. In this case, a recurring price.
A la carte just doesn’t make sense with DRM; there’s no way to compete to determine a fair price.
I really don’t know to be honest. I’m just wondering if there’s opportunity between the people who won’t commit to a sub but still want to watch at a price similar to a tightly managed sub.
> It’s interesting in a subscription environment that engagement is still seen as the primary draw. Clearly the bean counters have seen that if a user engages with the platform more than x hours per day/week/month they’re y percent more likely to keep the service.
The first sentence is not evidence for the conclusion. It's very possible that engagement is seen as the primary draw for no other reason than that that is how television measures success, and Netflix is a television business.
It's also possible that someone decided to check whether the traditional metrics still made sense for Netflix, but it's certainly not something you should just assume.
Netflix was up until a few years ago a content provider but not a content producer - they became one so that they could survive the time that they could no longer provide enough content.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption that a publically traded company cares about retention rates for their primary product - of course it’s not the whole picture but it’d be rather radical for it not to be a factor.
Not true - the top comment in the thread who is ex-Netflix says the engagement and retention are the top 2 metrics and engagement is a leading indicator of retention.
That is evidence that the value of engagement as a metric has been investigated. It's not evidence that engagement and retention aren't separate concepts; it's an explicit statement that they are.
It still comes down to content - if you have something all the time that is new an everyone wants to watch, then you get to keep the money flowing.