I was at a friend’s house this weekend, having a conversation I suspect will be replayed countless times over the next few weeks. It’s a conversation that does not bode well for Netflix.
To cut a long story short, my friend asked if I’d started watching the new season of Narcos.
“What new season?” I asked.
“The one set in Mexico.”
No. Not only had I not watched it, I wasn’t even aware it existed.
Which was especially odd because I’d watched the first three seasons of Narcos and had been on Netflix several times over the weekend, so its vaunted algorithm should have served the show up to me.
I looked up Narcos when I got home, and oddly Netflix did not indicate that there was a fourth season.
So I went to Google and learned that there was indeed a fourth season; it just wasn’t called “Narcos” but rather “Narcos Mexico,” and for some reason, Netflix, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen not to link it in any way to the original Narcos.
This is a problem that you’ve likely heard me warn about before: Netflix has far too many shows and not enough time to promote them all.
If Narcos, Mexico were a weekly series, Netflix would have a four-month window to advertise the show and let viewers of the original Narcos know that a new season was back on, albeit in a different setting and with different characters. But given the small window that Netflix has with its current "release all episodes at once" protocol, it’s easy for it to miss its shot.
Yes, it can still serve up ads for the show three months from now, but it’s not easy to keep track of what viewers have and have not seen, and as more people engage in “purposeful viewing” (e.g., using Netflix to watch a certain show rather than browsing around to find something to watch), getting the word out via the Netflix homepage and its algorithm becomes infinitely more difficult — not to mention more expensive as Netflix will likely need to spend more than its current $2 billion on paid media.
And that’s just the first part of today’s Netflix Dilemma.
The second: Even though I really liked the first three seasons of Narcos and really want to watch Narcos, Mexico, there are a bunch of other shows I have on my “binge list” that I haven’t gotten to yet. So either I need to rearrange my binge list, or Narcos, Mexico will go unwatched for at least a month or two, maybe longer given the demands of the holiday season.
That's a problem for Netflix because next year, my options are going to expand exponentially. First, there’s Netflix itself, which is spending $8 billion on new programming. Then there are Amazon and Hulu, two services I also subscribe to, which are also spending considerably large eight-figure amounts on original programming, some of which might prove more compelling than Narcos, Mexico.
That would be enough to keep most viewers feeling like they were never going to catch up to all the shows they wanted to watch, but 2019 is also the year that Disney is going to launch Disney+, WarnerMedia is going to launch the as-yet-unnamed “Warnerflix” (aka “HBO on steroids”), and Apple is going to launch its multibillion-dollar “Appleflix” service.
The laws of physics would seem to make it impossible for anyone to keep up with this upcoming “content bubble”—there just aren't enough hours in the day.
Which leads us back to Netflix: Other than new seasons of a handful of hits, everything on Netflix is going to be what in business jargon is known as “net new”—shows no one has ever seen before.
That means they’re going to need some time to develop an audience, to gain some buzz, to get people to add them to their “mental binge list” because three different friends recommended them or because they read a review that looked really interesting.
That’s a somewhat daunting task for a marketing team when you’re rolling out a dozen series over the course of a nine-month season. It’s next to impossible when you’re rolling out more than 100 new series and you’re releasing all the episodes at once, giving a week or two at most in which to grab people's attention. There are also five major competitors, all with equally large original series budgets and strong name recognition.
That means that there will be a lot more misses than hits, and that a lot of shows on Netflix (and its competitors) will wind up having just one 10-episode season. Even if your goal is to obtain and retain subscribers rather than grab high ratings, a bunch of 10-episode single seasons is not the way to do it.
It also means that it’s very possible that one or more of these new “Flixes” is not going to have any hits in 2019—a dangerous proposition for a company making a multibillion-dollar investment—and that the battle for talent is about to get a lot more heated. (Because there’s not enough talent to create more than $15 billion worth of good original programming.)
But mostly it means that next year the best show of all might wind up being the drama that's going to play out as all these new services bump up against one another, seeing who lives, who dies and who’s coming back for Season 2.
It's what the publishing industry used to call a "real pageturner."
Stay tuned.
