Netflix
Equipped with a Netflix account, a living room can turn into a theater. Showcasing some of the most original content on the web, just this week Netflix has put out 36 new original releases, and there are currently over 6,000 titles available to U.S. users.
Netflix uses a combination of movie-junkie expertise and data-driven decisions, analyzing anything from clicks to user-behavior, in order to retain and obtain new users efficiently. Its clever design choices — comforting and inviting deep-red and black tones; as well as enveloping a user’s home page with one main movie/show recommendation, drawing them in to immediately begin watching — all contrast with the diffuse and less-clear-cut designs of other services.
Amazon Prime Video’s main-page, for example, displays the user’s shopping cart at the same time they’re making the often 90-second decision to stay or move on to another streaming-service. Compared with Prime, Netflix offers a starkly more focused design and product.
At the heart of Netlix’s product is its subscription. For $13 a month (equivalent to Hulu’s ad-free $12 rate and Prime’s $13 flat rate) Netflix users are able to watch a very broad, yet rapidly-personalized (starting before a user’s first viewing session), selection of shows and movies in high-definition with no commercial breaks (unlike Hulu’s basic plan), and with no typical OTT restraints like data-caps or limited media-selection access.
Company Mission
Netflix’s mission for quality, quantity, and user-empowerment is at the core of the company’s brand. Netflix has earned a place as the most popular OTT service among US adults, even in the face of fierce competition; including Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, or the emerging Disney+. Netflix has a strong brand loyalty — only 9% of Netflix customer’s cancelled their account last year, compared with double-digit figures for other companies.
With the company’s expansion over the past decade to this year, people from over 130 countries gained access to media that before was cost-prohibitive, not well-known, or simply unavailable. While many regions gain a newfound international selection of entertainment, Netflix takes care to tailor each countries’ portfolio of titles to the language and culture of each region.
Cultural Presence
Netflix’s cultural visibility, in large part, has won it a reputation that is often impossible to compete with. Friends and twitter-users spend days discussing the cultural implications of specific scenes and directorial choices in original Netflix shows and movies like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Bird Box, Making a Murderer, The End of the F***ing World, and GLOW. Work-place friendships can develop over late-night watching habits — or one of my favorites, over lunch-break watching habits… (37% of Netflix users binge-watch at work)
Through Netflix’s pioneering initiatives, the cultural concept of “binging”, as it exists today, was created. Statistics released by the company show users spend a total of 140 million hours a day watching Netflix’s content. “Binging” itself has become culturally synonymous with the company’s very product. Common idioms like “Netflix and chill” highlight the cultural-monopoly of the company even within the realm of memes — a notoriously difficult-to-harness cultural medium.
Competition
Competition is fierce between Netflix and its two main rivals, Amazon Prime and Hulu. However, the value users receive from a Netflix subscription for the price they pay continues to set it apart.
For its part, Hulu’s mission, from its inception, was to provide TV-cable content from major broadcasters, online. The repercussions of its initial mission are clear to this day — users must pay a premium to avoid commercials, and much of the content found on the streaming service comes from major broadcasting companies like ABC and Warner Bros.
The exclusive contracts Hulu receives from established media giants — often at the expense of Netflix and Prime — is usually the driver for consumers to choose Hulu over Netflix. This often creates resentment among consumers, especially on college campuses where discounted and bundled student accounts replete with ads are the only way to watch pop-culture monoliths like “Rick and Morty”. In the face of exciting original content produced both by Amazon Prime and Netflix, though, apathy toward much of the content created by the “old” cable giants Hulu partners with will prove to be a huge disservice to Hulu’s continuing brand.
Amazon Prime Video on the other hand, includes ad-free original content within its monthly subscription fee. However, award-winning shows that are exclusively available on the website, such as PBS Masterpiece’s Poldark and Downton Abbey often carry with them a season-by-season price-tag. This starkly contrasts with Netflix’s promise of unlimited access to all content at every subscription-tier. While Amazon Prime Video is able to offer a larger selection with these additional price-tags, the very promise of a flat rate–built into the Netflix product–serves to make the user-experience fully-consolidated — unburdened by additional purchases.
Product Suggestions and Improvements
With all of Netflix’s advantages, there are some proactive improvements that will help retain the visibility of the company’s unique product in the future.
Consuming media is an inherently social activity. We learn so much about ourselves, living through the experiences of the characters we watch on screen.
The cultural and linguistic medium that a show generates around it — anything from inside-references, to insights about human nature in the face of adversities — creates a unique discourse around each show we watch. Relationships are created and friendships are often built upon these cultural connections, mediated by the shows and movies we watch.
The sense of solidarity that is inherent within “binger” communities will mesh perfectly with a social media component, if one is integrated into the Netflix experience. The need for a social network of recommenders is already felt in the current market of Netflix users, where dozens of products and websites aim to simplify the process of finding human recommendations for that next “hot binge”.
— Social Media Component
There is no better medium than Netflix to create a social and cultural network of fellow “bingers”. Just as Spotify lets users follow their friends as well as share playlists and song recommendations, Netflix is in a unique position to replicate this in the OTT industry.
We often trust our friends’ show recommendation better than an algorithm’s. Products like a “recently-watched-by-friends” feed as well as a platform through which user’s followers can individually make recommendations to each other, would make a hit with the inherently social Netflix community of bingers.
While Netflix already contains a “trending on Netflix” feature, a “popular with your friends” feed on the website would provide a whole new level of personalization and granular sense of community with users.
The brand of Netflix will remain almost untouched by this shift. As seen in its young and socially-active user-base on Twitter, Netflix is a social and cultural leader in the OTT space. It would only benefit from making its product more socially-centered.
In addition to friend recommendations and a “recently-watched by followers” feed, I suggest the use of polls, shareable between friends: whether it be for a “what to watch?” in that next movie-night-gathering; or for something as fun and trivial as “What’s your favorite scene from this New Girls episode I just watched?” Built-in recommendations, including features like “Your friend Kristen recently started watching this show,” will serve to enhance the social aspect of binging even more — no one wants to start watching a show alone!
Impact
On the surface, the success of the Netflix product can be owed to the sheer quality of service, smart design, wide range of content-recommendation-algorithms and built-in infrastructure, as well as critical business decisions along the way regarding original media content — including Netflix’s very interesting acquisition of House of Cards.
Beyond that, though, Netflix occupies a place in popular-culture like no other OTT media service.
The social and cultural place Netflix has in many of our lives can easily serve to expand the product’s reach as well as open new horizons for the company.
Beyond offering quality content, Netflix can provide a novel platform through which friends, families, and coworkers can connect with each other around quality media.
In this way, Netflix can help make the “binging” that we all sometimes overdo, a thoroughly more fun, more purposeful, and much more socially-rooted activity.
