Ted Sarandos being the CEO of Netflix.

Netflix has this policy that they are making content for the “second screen”. The idea being that you are scrolling TikTok or Twitter or BlueSky or something and you just have Netflix on at the background.

I hate this so much. The CEO of the biggest media company on the planet (well, based on market cap, which is hugely inflated), does not give a flying fuck about art. That’s painful. And yet, they are the better option (the other being Paramount-Skydance) to by Warner. What a fucked up world we live in.

Sarandos has been very open in the past about his disdain for the theatrical experience. And of course, if you think the 300 million dollar movies you are putting a huge part of your annual production budget on, are just for the second screen, you don’t appreciate what’s out there.

So, he is letting his people make shit and then when we watch it without paying attention to it, he assumes we appreciate that shit and that shit is the only thing we watch. So, why would we be paying to go the theater? Well, I do pay for that. And that’s the thing. If I believe a movie is worth seeing, I will go to the theater to see it and if I like it, I will by a physical copy of it. That means that Netflix doesn’t actually see what I like. They just assume their algorithm has all the data they could possibly need when the reality is that they are seeing only one specific aspect of my media consumption.

Netflix wants to be on everyone’s screen all of the time. The reality is that in my case, I watch more YouTube, MUBI (a highly-curated service for those who want to seek out interesting movies from outside of the mainsteram), Cineast (this is a Swedish company that provides libraries in Finland with a streaming service), and Nebula (which is mostly about video essays). So, for me Netflix is number 5. I have been thinking about getting Dropout.tv (formerly CollegeHumor but with great new shows) or CultPix (exactly what it sounds like – they also have a section of free movies you can try out before committing) so Netflix might easily drop to seventh position on my most watched streaming services. Basically, they have no idea what I like. They can see that I watch weird horror movies on there, when I can find them, but that’s pretty much it. I should cancel it, but I just haven’t gotten around to it (probably their biggest customer segment).

So, because everyone watches shit on Netflix, they assume everyone wants shit. Sure, we can handle shit when we don’t want to pay attention to anything after a long day of work, but that’s not what we really want. Occasionally they do try to make their Oscar-bait and so forth, but they also tend to bury that in their service. You often need to know to look for it or you’ll miss it.

Well, I don’t think theaters will die because Sarandos hates them. They will suffer and the big chains might die, but I think the small art houses will survive. When people get sick of the shit being shoveled to us by the studios that don’t give a shit and people want to go out and find something else, those places might even thrive. I see my local art house getting more people in. There’s a local association here that is showing movies on film and they are getting larger and larger audiences as well.

The big problem is that the big boys might be so big that they can find ways to force feed their content to us, no matter what we want. They are not letting go.

Finally, sure the theater chains are not doing well, but that’s because the studios have been finding it hard to find something to sell us. Superhero movies were a big thing and now they are still been fed to us with nothing new on the horizon. When something like Barbie does well, because the writers and the director and the star had a great vision for it, the conclusion is not that we want something unique, the conclusion is that Mattel needs to make all the toy movies they possibly can. Although, clearly they are stumbling, because we still haven’t seen any of those.

All in all this is about attention. Getting our attention makes money, so that has become an economy of it’s own. At the same time, getting attention is not about quality. On social media the posts that get the most attention are also the shittiest takes. This is not good. This is destroying culture as we know it, all for a few bucks.

Okay, one more note: The market gap of Netflix is about 400 billion dollars. They have about 300 million subscribers. While they are still growing, there’s a limit and they will hit it soon enough. Now, assuming that they can make about 10 dollars a month from each subscriber (which isn’t true, but close enough). Suppose they can get to 400 million in a decent amount of time, that still means that market gap is a thousand times higher than their subscriber count, meaning that the market expects to be able to get a thousand dollars in profit for each of these customers.

Okay, so that’s about eight years worth of subscription revenue per customer. That’s not a healthy timeline. Also, there’s expenses. They spend billions on their own productions annually and pay a shit ton to other companies for content as well, not to mention that with rising electricity costs from all the data centers, just the basic cost of running their business is rising. Then there’s also the broadband which is probably also going to become costlier due to all the AI agents clogging up the pipes. So, all in all, they are not making that much per customer.

There’s probably going to be a crash soon enough…