MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1518973
worldwide and inched toward ultimate profitability, studios/nets decided that the envelope pushers may be onto something and if they can do it, the creatives could do it … better. Using increasingly advanced Gen AI tools to determine what folks around the globe would like and would be willing to pay to see, they got into the side of the business Sarandos really liked … the creative side. The frustrating thing though for rating services, studios/nets - and yes, creatives - is that they wouldn’t share much of the viewer information, so they had a tough time figuring out what their formulas were for adding/dropping shows and how much, how many folks really paid to watch. Hastings and Sarandos admitted that about half of their audience was getting a free ride by borrowing user keys, but they wrote that off as a marketing expense until they decided enough was enough and freeloaders had to pay their own way before they’d share any more information. Studios/nets and Wall Street were sure (again) that this would crush Netflix, but the crafty techie/creatives came up with another wrinkle – tiered pricing – and something Hastings wasn’t fond of in the early days ...a cheap ad-supported offering. Yeah, they lost a few “viewers,” but by “swearing” they’d keep ads to a minimum (3-4 minutes vs. network 20 minutes of ads per hour) their AI data had proven most folks (those that mattered) would go with the flow. As soon as the studios/nets solve all of their other balance sheet problems, they’ll probably follow suit but … first things first. Besides, they were anxious to learn more about how and why Netflix was doing so well.