TFA takes as its hypothesis that Netfix don't know what their doing, that is they are somehow missing out on growing or retaining their audience by cancelling shows after one or two seasons.
Obviously Netflix isn't going to act against their own interest, so they must believe the marginal cost of producing new seasons must be greater than the marginal revenue attributable to these new seasons.
What makes Netflix (and all streamers) different than the traditional networks is that their viewership data is orders of magnitude better. They know who watches, how quickly, where, when, which series are abandoned by viewers, which episodes are abandoned by viewers, how series X performed with people who binged series Y.
I imagine they aren't just saying that series X didn't have a big enough audience, they are figuring based on their machine learning models, series X could not build a large enough audience to justify the production costs.
That the art suffers for the bottom line, while tragic, is nothing new.
For all their data, they still can’t measure things like eroding sentiment, word of mouth that doesn’t happen, etc. I used to recommend Netflix, now I feel mostly meh about it. That is the long term road to cancellation at the personal level and irrelevance/bankruptcy if it happens at large scale.
That is a good point - that is, because of the fallacy of composition, what is financially prudent for each individual show, as a strategy for all new production, slowly erodes the platform. I'm not sure that's proven but it certainly should be accounted for.
They cancel a series after the second season to avoid paying exorbitant salaries to the cast and director. I cancelled my Netflix once I understood what they are up to. I finally get to know the characters in the second season, and it's over.
Obviously Netflix isn't going to act against their own interest, so they must believe the marginal cost of producing new seasons must be greater than the marginal revenue attributable to these new seasons.
What makes Netflix (and all streamers) different than the traditional networks is that their viewership data is orders of magnitude better. They know who watches, how quickly, where, when, which series are abandoned by viewers, which episodes are abandoned by viewers, how series X performed with people who binged series Y.
I imagine they aren't just saying that series X didn't have a big enough audience, they are figuring based on their machine learning models, series X could not build a large enough audience to justify the production costs.
That the art suffers for the bottom line, while tragic, is nothing new.