Netflix and the Disaster of Losing Subscribers

Netflix is the quintessential subscription service. Inspired by traditional libraries, they put a monthly fee on it and got busy taking over the world of video content by producing many, many addictive television series and films. As a disruptive force to traditional premium content subscription services, at a price point even a student could afford, they grew to become arguably the biggest player in the world of video on demand streaming.

Fast forward to now, however, and the stock price is tumbling on the news that for the first time in the company’s history, the number of new subscribers is falling.

I want to skip past the kind of surface analysis that you will be able to find in newspapers, because you read that there. I suppose it can be summarised, like Macbeth, that Netflix became their own worst enemy and have turned into the boring cable TV model they initially formed to disrupt.

Such is the life cycle of an international conglomerate, it seems.

As a professional video person, I’m quite well aware of the funding opportunities that Netflix offers young creatives, and indeed to the desperate poet, writing a hit drama on Netflix could well be the key to launching a successful career writing drama for Netflix. The budgets are there, and indeed even the UK’s creative development pipeline organisations sign deals with Netflix in order to basically say to a young, aspiring writer ‘that’s where the money is, guv’.

But it’s a little demoralising when you look into the T’s and C’s of writing an application to a Netflix film fund and find out that it’s really quite strict. You must write to a specific genre, and you must adhere to the content guidelines. And this isn’t limited to the English creative scene – it’s global, as Netflix has desires on world domination it seems, and has special content pipelines for ‘Hispanic’ creators and the like. I’m sure categorising creative practitioners like this is easier to manage, but I can’t help but feel like the ‘Hispanic’ writer with a dream may find themselves slightly hurt when the only way they can be a professional creative is to write ‘Hispanic’ content.

Which is the true revelation of why Netflix is no longer an attractive proposition – the content is boring. There’s no spark of interesting creativity, and indeed the only reason that a show goes ‘viral’ on Netflix tends to be how extreme and graphic the content turns out (see the last hit, ‘Squid Game’, which seemed to be about institutional genocide).