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Does Netflix know what it wants to be?

I contacted Netflix support a couple of days ago in order to give them my feedback regarding their choice of programming. I’d become disappointed with what they offered and I found myself wasting lots of time browsing their selections endlessly, only to give up and watch something else on some other streaming service. Furthermore, I thought their shows had become either too niche or too unappealing. In particular, I was disappointed with what I thought were “filler” movies and shows from Eastern countries. I have no interest in Bollywood or Turkish or Arab titles. I’ve tried watching them but I don’t like them, yet Netflix keeps showing them to me, plus a bunch of other shows from other countries.

Sure, they’re expanding into those countries and they’re buying up some of their content in order to appeal to those audiences, but why am I, a Westerner with Western entertainment values, being bombarded with Eastern shows that I don’t want to watch? I am Romanian by birth, and yet I don’t even watch Romanian shows. I can’t. I find the language harsh. I find the shows’ aesthetics harsh. I find the way they look at life unentertaining. When I watch “entertainment“, I want to be entertained. I find the Eastern languages even harsher to my ear, sorry. I fell in love with English a long time ago, I find it to be a beautiful language, and I want to watch movies and shows made in English, for Western sensibilities. I know that statement is bound to disappoint some people, but I also think you’ll agree that what I watch — what I do with my free time really — should be completely up to me.

It didn’t matter that I continually avoided Netflix’s recommendations and gave downvotes to shows I didn’t like in the hope that they’d stop showing them to me. Netflix kept continually pestering me with choices that were unappealing to me. So at some point, I had to admit the possibility that it wasn’t their recommendation algorithm, but their lack of quality content, that filled up my screen with thumbnails of weird, unappealing shows. I wanted to be able to opt out of everything but movies and shows made by English-speaking countries, for English-speaking countries. I told Netflix Support that and asked them to forward my feedback to the content programming team.

Here’s the interesting part: even before I got done typing all my comments into the chat box, the tech recommended that I cancel my subscription. I don’t know if that’s now become standard practice at Netflix, to tell customers that have been loyal to the service since they were mailing DVDs to essentially “f**k off”, but I thought I’d raise the issue here on my website. And just to be clear, cancelling my subscription was the obvious choice to me as well, but I was trying to offer constructive criticism, not to pull the plug.

The question I ask in my post’s headline implies that we look at Netflix’s history. They started with red vending machines that offered a limited but interesting selection of movies old and new. I used those machines and loved them. Then they offered DVDs by mail (that was another innovative thing) where they widened their selection considerably to include even some hard-to-find classics. I used that service and loved it. Then they switched to streaming, where they once again offered up a narrow but good selection of the market; certainly less of a selection than they offered with DVDs, but a good selection nonetheless, compelling enough to make me spend my money on it. I used that service from the get-go and loved it. I have to give them credit here, they predicted the future when they started offering their streaming service. But then they felt they had to expand in all sorts of ways, to grow their subscribership aggressively and to buy up all kinds of shows and movies so they could wow their new, fickle public. I remember their ads running constantly for years on end on many websites. If I remember correctly, they used the affiliate model for a while and offered payouts to those who would help them get customers. As recently as this year, their ads ran constantly on YouTube, to the point of making me swear and cuss.

Instead of being patient, instead of growing their customer base slowly but surely, winning them over with good content, instead of being a place where you could get some of the most interesting movies ever made, they wanted to be the place where you got to see most of the interesting movies and TV shows made today. Never mind the fact that no one in the history of TV channels has been able to do that, and not for a lack of trying.

Damn the classics, they also said, and they cut all of them out of their offering. At one point they had less than 20 classic titles listed on their site, none of them going back earlier than the 1970s.

But being modern, fresh, up-to-date can be an expensive endeavor. Licensing rights for the most popular movies and shows of today can run pretty steep. So even though it looked like they were on their way to doing that for a while, they had to change tack. They thought they might be the place for tons of TV shows, with less movies. But here’s the thing: people still want to see movies. So they continued including movies, but they bought lower quality ones — the ones that were cheaper to license plus a few A-list movies every now and then to headline their portfolio. They also started producing their own shows and movies. When I say producing, I mean producing, not making. There’s a difference between having a proper studio where you’ve got high standards in production values that apply to every aspect of a production, and sticking your logo at the beginning of a title. Also for clarity’s sake, let me say that great visuals do not equal a great title. You can film in 4K, light and color grade perfectly, but if the subject, script, casting, direction, acting and editing isn’t also top notch, that title’s going to suck. And now, as they’ve expanded their membership plans to most countries, they’re trying to be everything to everyone, and that means buying up shows and movies made in foreign countries to boost up their offering, and pushing those shows on everyone. Yuck!

At some point, the Netflix execs should sit down and think about what they want to be. I don’t think they’ve done enough of that kind of thinking. They’ve just been chanting “more, more, more of everything!” at the subscribers, at the studios and at the investors, and that can only go on for so long… Netflix has to realize it can’t keep throwing money at the problem that is their lack of vision. That’s unsustainable and irresponsible. They can’t be everything to everyone, because that role is filled by YouTube, and you can’t replace YouTube unless you get everyone to give you their content for free, and that comes with its own list of problems. Google can tell you all about that. They know very well the headaches they’ve had with YouTube.

At some point, Netflix has to decide what it wants to be. HBO knows it very well. TCM Streaming, God bless them, know their market so well (incidentally, I love movies made in the 30s and 40s). Hulu knows what it wants to be. Amazon Streaming knows damn well the role it fills with its service; you don’t see them splurging on everything out there — actually, you don’t see Amazon splurging on anything. And you’d better believe Disney knows what they’re going to do with their streaming service. Disney always knows what it wants to be.

Netflix… it’s trying this and that and the other thing, and then going to a bunch more stores and trying on those things as well… It’s buying up good shows, then cancelling them instead of giving them time to develop an audience. It’s buying up the streaming rights to great movies, but only for a little bit of time, so you end up adding a movie to your list but it disappears before you get the chance to watch it. It’s producing shows that are bizarre, or they’ve got trite scripts, or soap opera production values, or bad acting… there are all sorts of problems that put you off when you spend a few minutes watching them.

So what people end up doing on Netflix these days is exactly what they were doing on their TVs before Netflix existed: browsing the channels, wondering what to watch out of the sea of useless, boring programming available. And that means we’ve come full circle, and since there’s no real differentiator between Netflix and regular TV, there’s no point for its existence, certainly not at the rate that it’s burning through its cash.

What do you want to be, Netflix? Because loyal customers like me aren’t going to hang around forever. We might just do the thrifty thing and cancel our subscriptions for 8-10 months of the year, then watch to see what movies and shows you’re buying up, and switch it on for a month at a time, binge watch, then switch it off again. You may not care if only a few people do it, but you’re going to feel it in your bottom line after a while. Or we might just cancel our subscriptions altogether and use another service. It is after all what your support techs are advising people to do. Let’s see how that sort of thing works out for you.

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    In 1938, Ed Sullivan wrote in one of his newspaper columns that “youth is wasted on the very young“. He was paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, who once said: “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world — and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

    What does this have to do with management? Several years ago, I got quite angry when an older, more experienced friend, declared to me during the course of a conversation that “people under forty are unfit for management positions“. He was over 50, wealthy and quite accomplished. I was in my early 30s and had already become a director at age 25. I had done a great job in that position — not that I was saying it; people in executive management had said it of me, repeatedly, during my appointment. So I thought my anger was justified. I asked him to clarify and he said something to the effect of, “there are certain things you can only understand, directly related to the management of people and organizations, after you pass a certain age“. Well, that didn’t make sense to me, but I chose to let it go. There was no point arguing with him and possibly ruining the friendship. 

    I am now over 40 myself. And the funny thing is that as I approached and passed this age, I began to have certain realizations that collectively, allowed me to finally agree with my friend’s statement. He’d had the benefit of experience on his side when he said it. And the cumulative benefits of dealing with many more people, at all levels of employment and management, during his long career (which still continues by the way, because the fellow has an insatiable work appetite.)

    Now I also see the wisdom of Shaw’s statement (which is also attributed to Oscar Wilde in some instances). Beyond the surface applicability of mere skin beauty that tends to be there in abundance when one is younger, I see a deeper meaning that has to do with the experience of age, which would certainly be very handy to the young. 

    What I also see nowadays, paradoxically, is a lot of young people promoted to management positions. To further clarify, I see a lot of (mostly) inept young people promoted to management positions, making one big mistake after another, because they don’t have the life experience and the work ethic of an older person who has dedicated themselves to their career. Perhaps this is to be expected when the current mantra is that “you really should change your job every couple of years”, which is the sort of idiotic thing young HR managers say to sound smart, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that promotes superficiality in one’s work ethic and the sort of bullshit CVs you see these days. 

    I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes in my job as a director at 25. I can think of several right now, off the top of my head, some of which still embarrass me. But I did a good job, as good a job as I could do. I gave it my all, earnestly. It turns out that in this modern world of ours, where youth is prized more than experience, that my performance as a young person in management was an exception, because most young people I see in management are a disappointment to say the least. They’re no good, and they’re not even trying. They’re not giving it their all. They’re bullshitting their way through their jobs and their lackluster, inadequate performances are accepted as-is, because “you can’t get better people nowadays, there’s a skilled labor shortage”. 

    Really? There is one? In an ever-growing world, with 7.2 billion people (at the moment), there’s an HR shortage? What a shame… I wonder how much worse this shortage will be when we’ll be at 8 billion… And how come we didn’t have a shortage of people during the Great Depression, when there were only 2 billion people in the world? You know, back when (mostly) experienced people were promoted to management positions? 

    I think we are somehow confusing youthful enthusiasm with leadership potential; energy with stamina; bright faces with optimism; intelligence with wisdom; knowledge with experience; a tailored suit and good cosmetics with a good work ethic. There’s a lot of confusion going on. I suppose it’s to be expected when so many changes are taking place in the world. Perhaps in this day and age it’s easy to look at the worn, exhausted faces of older employees and believe they can’t carry the load of a department or division or company, but it’s not about the cosmetics; it’s about the experience, the ability to look at the big picture and the small details. These are things that come with age, with dedication to one’s career and yes, with wrinkles and white hair. 

    If you’re stumbling onto this post randomly and you don’t know my website, you’re probably waiting for the pitch. Well, there isn’t one. I’m not selling my services. I’m busy enough with my own work. Thanks for reading this and carry on. 

    Thoughts

    Management: wasted on the youth

    Gallery
    Florin Rosoga Podcast
    Events

    An interview about entrepreneurship and more

    I was recently interviewed by Florin Roșoga, an entrepreneur from Cluj-Napoca (one of the cities near and dear to my heart) on the topic of, well, me… The discussion centered around entrepreneurship, work ethic and money. I tried to be as frank and direct as possible. The interview is in Romanian, it’s in podcast format and was published here. I’ve embedded the YT and MP3 players below. I hope it’s helpful to you (provided you understand Romanian 😀)!

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    A Guide To A Good Life

    Stewardship or possession?

    Video

    What’s the healthier, saner way to view that which have or enjoy?

    Should you regard it as a possession or should you see yourself as a steward of it? What’s the better long-term approach to these matters? Join me for a (non-religious) discussion of the subject in this video. I’ll talk about various topics related directly to this subject, such as the relationship between husband and wife, one’s home, business and other “possessions”, such as cars, furniture, clothes, etc.

    I hope this helps you!

    Thoughts

    Unscrupulous customer care at Apple

    This is one of those posts I don’t enjoy writing but this must be said.

    I have a mid-2011 27″ iMac (with AppleCare). It has now broken down three times for the very same problem (its video card goes bad). Other things on it also broke down, like the SuperDrive.

    Bottom line: Apple has refused to replace it, although I’ve asked them twice. I think they’re just trying to kick the ball down the road until AppleCare expires. This isn’t the first time, they did it to me with another iMac.

    Section 3.1 in the AppleCare agreement says the following:

    “Apple will either (a) repair the defect at no charge, using new or refurbished parts that are equivalent to new in performance and reliability, or (b) exchange the Covered Equipment with a replacement product that is new or equivalent to new in performance and reliability, and is at least functionally equivalent to the original product.”

    Notice they’re giving no clear rules about when they’ll replace it, although when you speak with Apple technicians, they’ll say three times is when it happens. It’s been three times for me and still no replacement. Not specifying when a defective computer must get replaced in the AppleCare Terms of Service gives Apple lots of backpedaling room, so they can delay that expense as much as possible, perhaps until AppleCare expires.

    Here’s what makes this unscrupulous and unacceptable from my point of view:

    • They did this to me before with my iMac G5 (Rev. B). Those of you who owned that computer know it had a lot of issues; most often, its motherboard went bad and needed to be replaced. The board on that iMac broke down three times during its AppleCare coverage. It was in the shop for other issues as well: the Super Drive, the Bluetooth module, the WiFi module, fan speed issues (fans would go on high and stay there permanently). The motherboard broke down for the third time a month or two before AppleCare expired. They fixed it but refused to replace it. Then it broke down a few months after AppleCare expired and by then, it wasn’t their problem anymore.
    • It’s unconscionable for an Apple computer to break down in such a major way, repeatedly, after a little more than a year of use, which is when the problems with my current iMac started. Imagine where I’d be if I hadn’t bought AppleCare for this thing. It’d be sitting in my attic alongside my iMac G5. Essentially, I would have paid about $2,000 (after taking out tax and cost of AppleCare) for a computer that would have lasted a little more than a year. How shoddy was Apple’s quality control when this computer was made?
    • When the video card in my iMac broke down a second time, I was promised by a technician from Apple’s Advanced Support department, that when it happened for a third time, I’d get a replacement. Now they tell me his promise wasn’t documented in the case history so it doesn’t count. Perhaps the technician lied to me at the time to delay the replacement.
    • I’ve been an Apple customer since 1994, when I bought a PowerBook 150, my first Apple notebook. I’ve bought plenty of Apple stuff since then. Is this the way they’re treating long-time customers?
    • Apple has been putting me through all this unpleasantry right around my birthday. They have my birthday on file. No comment here.
    • Apple is one of the richest, if not the richest, companies on earth. They ought to be treating their customers right, because it’s because of them that they are where they are. It’s the right thing to do and they have the wherewithal to do it.

    I wrote to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. No response from him, but a few days later, I was contacted by one of the people at Apple Executive Relations EMEIA in Cork, Ireland. I thought my situation would then be handled properly. No, just insincere apologies and a refusal to replace it. I wrote to Tim Cook again. No response, instead more of the same from Apple Executive Relations in Ireland. That confirmed it for me: you know what they say, a fish starts to stink from the head down. It looks to me like he’s instructed his people to do everything possible not to replace computers, even when they should be replaced. What other conclusion can I draw but this?

    I was asked to accept the repair one last time and was promised that my iMac would get replaced for sure the next time its video card broke down. I asked the woman with whom I spoke to put that promise in writing. She refused point blank. I assume this was yet another lie from Apple to delay the replacement. What else can I assume when a person won’t put their promise in writing?

    What complicates matters somewhat in my situation is that I bought the iMac in the States but have since transported it to Romania, which is where we spend some of our time. I can take it into an authorized Apple Repair shop and AppleCare covers its repairs there, so technically, replacements should also work. Not that this is a problem. I’ve told Apple they can ship the replacement to my US address. But I think what’s happening here is that they’re using geography and customs complications as an excuse not to replace my computer.

    What should have happened is this: Apple should have replaced my current iMac, no questions asked. And out of embarrassment because of the way they handled the repairs on my iMac G5, they should have offered to at least repair it, if not replace it with its modern-day iMac counterpart.

    The AppleCare agreement also says this:

    For consumers in jurisdictions who have the benefit of consumer protection laws or regulations, the benefits conferred by the above mentioned plans are in addition to all rights and remedies provided under such laws and regulations. Nothing in this plan shall prejudice consumer rights granted by applicable mandatory laws, including consumer’s right to the remedies under statutory warranty law and to seek damages in the event of total or partial non-performance or inadequate performance by Apple of any of its contractual obligations.

    Apple is currently in breach of EU/Romanian consumer protection laws on at least two counts, by my understanding:

    1. European/Romanian consumer protection laws mandate that repairs be made with new parts, not refurbished parts. Apple technicians, including the people from Apple Executive Relations, have admitted that they’ve been using refurbished parts to fix my iMac until now, and only this last time have they used a new replacement video card. The woman from Apple Executive Relations Ireland said that to me during one of our phone conversations… So they’ve been in breach on this point from the get-go.
    2. European/Romanian consumer protection laws further mandate that the customer must be offered the choice of a replacement or repair. The choice rests with them, not with Apple. I asked for a replacement, didn’t get it, they’re in breach of the law.

    Since I bought my iMac in Florida, I also put in a request for assistance with the Office of the Attorney General there and I’ll see what they say. If any of you reading this are knowledgeable on the matter, please chime in.

    I’d like to quote from a recent ad campaign from Apple. Keep in mind the things you’ve just read above as you see what they’re saying:

    This is it.
    This is what matters.
    The experience of a product.
    How it makes someone feel.
    …
    Will it make life better?
    …
    We spend a lot of time
    On a few great things.

    How am I supposed to feel after the way you’ve just treated me, Apple? Would you say that you’ve made my life better?

    Couple this self-congratulatory ad piece with Tim Cook’s stating during the WWDC Keynote that Apple is #1 in Customer Satisfaction and that it “means so much” to him. If this stuff means so much to Apple, they wouldn’t be doing this to me (and who knows to how many others).

    There will probably be some comments about switching to another platform. This isn’t about that. I love my Apple hardware and software. It’s just that quality control seems to be going down the drain and Apple execs seem to be in risk management mode. Apple computers have traditionally been about two things: design and quality. That’s what I’ve been paying for when I bought Apple products. Now it seems they’re about one thing: design.

    I want to make it clear that I think what’s now happened to me twice is not the norm of my experience with Apple; that’s why I still buy Apple products. For example:

    • The Powerbook 150 I bought in 1994 lasted about 6 years before the hard drive went bad; if I fix it, I might even be able to boot it up and use it today,
    • The 15″ MacBook Pro I bought in 2008 is still going strong; along the way, I replaced the hard drive and the two cooling fans, but I can still edit HD video on it,
    • The iMac I advised my parents to buy in 2008 is also still going strong. It had a couple of minor issues but they occurred while it was still covered by AppleCare,
    • The 13″ MacBook we bought in 2008 still works; although the video conks out every once in a while, a reboot sets it straight, and
    • My experience with Apple software has been positive from the get-go; I’ve always found it to be stable, a joy to use and easy to live with.

    I suppose whatever happened to my two iMacs was inevitable as their volume increased (making more of everything means there will be also be more manufacturing defects) but the way they’re choosing to handle the situation reminds me of PC companies, and I don’t think Apple shareholders and customers want to see it go down that road.

    Still, if that’s what’s in the cards for Apple and their stuff is going to become less and less reliable, then I guess they’ll have to convince their customers to buy their stuff for looks alone and for the real work, people might have to build Hackintoshes, where they’ll get to use the Apple software they love and get the reliability, serviceability and upgradeability that we should be getting directly from Apple. With a Hackintosh, we won’t need to pay extra for AppleCare, which now appears to be a band-aid that tides you over with refurbished parts for the three contractual years only to have your computer break down soon afterward. Planned obsolescence and a price premium? Is that the Apple way?

    My take-home message for Tim Cook and Apple: this isn’t the way you should be doing business.

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