Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When a new season of that TV serial you like comes just once a week, isn’t it frustrating? You want to see the next episode, but it’s 7 days away, and by then, you lose the flow… That is why Netflix, the company that streams movies to your device, tried an interesting experiment: they released the entire season of its original programming serial all at once. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, pointed out that the same thing happened 200 years back, with, hold your breath, books! Back then, fiction was written for magazines, one chapter per issue. But once it became economically viable to print books, you got all the chapters at one shot! Hastings feels TV content is headed the same way: the “serialized release model” may be nearing its end. Another advantage Hastings sees with the new model is, again, what happened with books: variable sized chunks. After all, chapters in a book are of variable size, so why can’t episode lengths in the new system, “depending on the natural rhy...

“We know that if you ask people what movie they want to see next week, they’re likely to mention a classy art film. But, if you ask them what movie they want to see tonight, they’re more likely to mention a mindless blockbuster.” -          David Brooks Netflix isn't that big a name in India, but it's huge in the US. The company was founded by Reed Hastings in 1997 who “saw a way to combine Americans' love of movies with their love of not getting off the sofa even to go to the video store”! So how did they do it? Remember this was way back in 1997, with the Internet just starting to catch on. So the company mailed DVD's to customers; who after viewing it, would mail the DVD back. Today, of course, with increased network speeds, the company streams movies (the way YouTube does) to your PC/laptop/phone/tablet. Netflix is famous for its recommendation algorithms that suggest what you might want to view next. So much so that Xavier Amatria...