Netflix finally got some good news last week – sort of – after a long stretch of bad. In its latest earnings call, the streaming giant announced that it had lost nearly a million American subscribers in the second quarter of 2022. How is this good news? Because the company had previously projected that it would lose two million.
Netflix was once so far ahead of the competition that it may have been the entire streaming video business for some time. Now, however, many of the most-watched library titles, such as The Office and Friends, have moved to streamers owned by their respective corporate parents, and the most original titles usually end up they have been mentioned in the last few years by other people who are not. Netflix streamers, whether Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso and Severance, Disney+’s The Mandalorian, or HBO Max’s Hacks. Things have gotten so rough for the struggling streaker that it plans to introduce a cheaper, ad-supported plan next year to attract new subscribers (or, at least, more lose more).
so, what happened? How did Netflix take Blockbuster off the map to the point where it could become a business school cautionary tale in its own right? Some of it is simply competition; When every entertainment conglomerate realized they needed their own streaming service to survive, Netflix wasn’t everyone’s first choice of where to spend their home entertainment dollars. Still, part of it seems to be the result of an ethos among Netflix executives to focus not on great shows, but on ones that are good enough. The outfits were confident that the better quality of their user interface, the power of their recommendation algorithm, and a heavy emphasis on serialization and cliffhangers would make people want to keep watching more and more of Netflix, no matter what. . And when some Netflix shows feel as essential as they can be found elsewhere, that’s how you end up presenting a massive subscriber loss as relatively “good” news.
But it wasn’t intentional for Netflix. In the nine-plus years since House of Cards debuted and changed the streaming landscape, some great shows have escaped the shoes of the algorithm and made their way onto our screens. Some are well-executed versions of popular TV formats, while others look so new it’s hard to imagine they existed in the pre-streaming era. Here, we count down our 20 favourites.
