Netflix – taking the simple route to success and changed entertainment forever.
Netflix — taking the simple route to success and changed entertainment forever. Netflix is an American technology and media services provider and production company, founded longer ago than you may imagine — way back in 1997.
The company’s primary business is its subscription-based streaming service which offers online streaming of a library of films and television series, including those produced in-house. As of April 2020, Netflix had over 193 million paid subscriptions in 190 countries worldwide.
With a 2019 revenue of $20.2 billion, you could be forgiven for wanting to know what makes Netflix so successful. Where to start? Netflix has totally changed the way we watch television.
It has coined the term “binge-watching” and just as television replaced the radio in the 1950s as the dominant home entertainment media, now internet entertainment is slowly but surely replacing cable TV as we once knew it. And who’s leading the change? You’ve guessed it — Netflix.
Some much-needed original content
Netflix spent $15 billion on original content in 2019, and still now continues to spend about 85% of all new spending on films, documentaries, series, and TV programs that are entirely created for Netflix itself.
That’s more than any of its competitors at Amazon, Hulu, or HBO Now and as a result, Netflix finds itself occupying the top spot in customer satisfaction surveys.
Everything began with House of Cards in 2013. When initially released, Netflix did something that changed the way we watch TV forever. When it was time to stream the first season, they released the entire season at once.
This was an unprecedented move that TV had never seen before. If you were a fan of a series, you had to wait a week until the next episode to see how events would unravel. Suspense? Yes. Frustrating? Yes. In a time of instantaneous information at the click of a button, the concept of waiting for the next episode was unthinkable and binge-watching was born.
For better or for worse, things had changed. The tremendous success of House of Cards led to new productions, such as Narcos, Stranger Things, and The Crown, all of which were highly popular.
Along with making their own TV content, crucially, Netflix invested in smart software. This software tracked subscribers’ watching habits and provided them with tailor-made recommendations for further watching, gauging programs they’d be interested in without viewers making the effort of trawling through titles for films best-suited to them. As a result, Netflix users don’t have to waste time searching through the catalogs.
They can simply watch the recommended content. What’s more, the data gathered by this AI-enhanced tool gave the idea to Netflix managers to produce new seasons of some old series. They realized that a large number of people were watching Arrested Development and Gilmore Girls again and again.
That’s why they produced two new seasons of these two classic shows. It seems that the revival of some old series based on users’ queries has only started.
A service free from advertisements
One of the most frustrating things about being a consumer in the 21st century is all irrelevant advertisements.
I write that in the passive voice intentionally. We’re tiny strands of data so algorithms know how to market things to us. As our favorite programs cut to an advert break, or the halftime whistle blows, there it is.
There are a number of industries and companies trying to sell things to us like Canning Town market. We need this car to be safer. We need this moisturizer to be more beautiful. We need this brand of pizza to be…happier? Anyway, switching on Netflix cuts out the noise.
It’s ever clearer that people get irritated with advertisements popping up, breaking up, and covering up our content and it’s the reason adblocking software is getting more popular than ever. This is what Netflix understands and as a result, they prevent users from all this annoying and often irrelevant marketing, making sure to give a better user experience to all its customers.
Variety is the spice of life
Do you remember the days of going to Blockbuster Video to rent a DVD? There was the horror aisle, the rom-com aisle, the classics sections and if you were really high-brow, the world cinema shelf.
Nowadays, Netflix subscribers can find a wide range of movies, TV series, shows, performances, and documentaries on a regular basis. There really is something for everyone and the person who’s finished watching Netflix hasn’t yet stepped forward.
Personalization
Let’s face it, we all feel good when things in life are all about us. Well, Netflix panders to our egos by doing just this. They know everything we do on their platform.
Which type of films float our boats, when we get bored midway through a film and exit, how many episodes of a TV show we watch daily, and so on. They have a huge amount of data on all the 193 million paying subscribers and that’s where machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence comes in.
Netflix uses machine learning to help their algorithms “learn” without human assistance. Machine learning gives the platform the ability to automate millions of decisions based on user activities.
Without recommendations, users would spend a lot of time going through thousands of movies and TV shows. That’s why the Netflix recommendation engine is vital to the platform’s success.
It automates the search process for users who would otherwise run out of patience and leave the platform. So, we began by saying “where to start with Netflix’s success?” and we’ll finish by saying “where to end?” Essentially, Netflix is successful because it has always maintained the fact that its subscribers’ needs come first.
The better their experience, the more they’ll come back waving their subscription cheques. Netflix has been courageous enough to steer the ship in a different direction and teach their teams to live by the business strategy of ‘adapt and evolve’. And you know what? Although it sounds like a simple plan, it’s effective. Just because people expect your business to do something, it doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do.
So there it is: adaptation and evolution. Evolution means survival and survival means growth. Business philosophies like this run parallel with the most successful companies destined to reach the top. Take online crypto-gaming platform SuperOne as an example.
SuperOne is the very first solution of its kind, taking fresh ideas and unique solutions in a totally different direction. It is the world’s first decentralized platform to unify crypto gaming, networking, and direct ownership via blockchain innovation.
Capitalizing on the massive global gaming market while also transforming the networking business for the better, SuperOne stands apart as a fresh new strategic and innovative approach.
Ask any expert forecaster tuned into the mobile, technology, and crypto industries and they’ll tell you that there’s a change in the wind. There’s an emerging transition of markets toward gaming apps and the integration of crypto rewards within these apps.
Combine this with a new, large-scale solution to easily enable global stakeholders, and it’s simple to understand how traditional structures will soon be obsolete.
Imagine being there when history is rewritten and the rip-roaring worlds of crypto and mobile gaming combine seamlessly for the first time. Well now is the chance! The future of crypto gaming is coming — and SuperOne has just arrived.