Tag Archives: Netflix

I now know Netflix isn’t watching me…

Well….being of the paranoid sort at times, and having read that some hackers and companies can watch you through the cameras on your devices, I am concerned enough to have taped over the one on my computer…not sure why anyone would want to look at an old guy writing on his computer but, better safe than sorry, right? Today, though, I had it confirmed to me that Netflix is not watching me watch them…during Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix show, periodically Netflix has been asking me if I want to keep watching if I do more than two of the shows in a row….the shows are really short at around 15 minutes each so it is quite normal, to me, to watch more than one…have never had them ask me if I wanted to continue watching on any other show…or maybe it’s a new part of their software? Who knows? It’s still a little creepy….holy crap…it just hit me that I’m watching on my tv that doesn’t have a camera…I wonder if they DO watch if I use my computer…better leave the tape on….

Some thoughts on Netflix…

Well…with all of the turmoil that is going on with Netflix and the giant mistakes they have made over the past few months, I thought a few comment on their management might be in order. As you know, the stock has been in free fall since the ceo, Reed Hastings, made the stupid decision to raise prices almost 60% and split the company into two parts, losing almost 8 billion dollars in shareholder value in the process. What I don’t understand is the lack of economic understanding of the market they operate in and the utter hubris of their decision making. If you know anything about economics and how markets operate, you know that in the early days of Netflix they were operating as consumers of marginal output…that is they were the only purchasers of content that the providers had already paid for as an addition to the normal channels like HBO and Starz, giving the content suppliers marginal revenue that standard economic theory says should be taken at any cost. And, until competitors come into the market, Netflix got a bargain on this content that they then built their streaming services around. But, what they missed is the fact that as more channels are available for content providers, the price will rise as marginal demand for the product increases. That is exactly what happened in this case and this was compounded by the fact that the supply side of the equation changed as well, limiting the amount of price increases that the market will bear. So, in every possible part of the economic equation, Reed and his cronies got it wrong and they are now paying for it by the company’s valuation plunging by almost 75%….it just looks like a karmic payback for trying to screw the customers that made them successful….couldn’t have happened to a worse bunch…