Netflix: The world’s first global TV station

As Covid-19 works its way through our communities more and more people turn, for entertainment, to Netflix. For many who are inside all day due to self-isolation or quarantining the over-the-top (OTT) video streaming service offers a welcome opportunity to escape the moment into imaginary worlds where suspense distracts us from the mundane and its attendant sense of dread, that “fear and loathing” that, even in the absence of a global pandemic, can characterise everyday existence.

At 4.24am Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on 22 April I saw the following graphic, posted by Andrew Neff, a marketing person who lives in San Francisco. It shows, by volume of monthly visits to various websites, the most-popular sites in the world though some services, such as WeChat (China), are not included. A note at the bottom of the page where this graphic appears says:

Brands that extend across platforms or serve the majority of their users through an app will not necessarily rank well on this list. As a result, you’ll notice the absence of companies like WeChat and Snapchat.

Netflix gets about 1.81 billion monthly visits (its grey circle is located, in the above diagram, just to the right of the red one for YouTube, which has 24.31 billion monthly visits). The numbers are as at June 2019, so the uptick in visits to Netflix since March this year is not accounted for in the above diagram. 

The graphic shown above, which was posted on Twitter at 6.01am on 23 April AEST by Turkish marketing professional Engin Dikmen, seems to show growth in the company’s subscriber base occurred as a result of Covid-19. I take the figures to be growth for the period spanning the start of January to the end of March of each year. This success was embodied, for me, in a tweet I saw, at 4.37am AEST on 23 April 2020, that had been posted by a resident of Cincinnati and Dubai named Malcolm Wolf:

Love how a Netflix subscription is more expensive than a barrel of oil. I think Netflix should increase their subscription cost, since they have been able to prove they are a necessity. Possibly the only reason quarantine has been tolerable.

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This is the second post I have made on the subject of Netflix, the first appearing just after I subscribed in January. Since then, I’ve regularly posted TV show and movie reviews and by tuning into the Netflix hashtag on Twitter I can see what other people are talking about. Some ask for recommendations, which I often provide with links to posts on this blog. Some post complaints about the TV not showing Netflix properly. This can take the form of a constantly-spinning “loading” device (the small, red, broken circle that spins over the background of the Netflix logo), a black screen, or a message that says that the TV cannot find the program selected. If you get the latter message, you can try to go “back” and reselect the program, but this might not always work. If you cannot get Netflix to play and if you see any of these things, you can try unplugging the TV from the wall, pressing the "On" button on the remote control for 5 seconds, then plugging the TV back in.

Over the months it’s become clear to me that people who watch TV for entertainment are far more likely to ask for help – perhaps in the form of recommendations from others in the community – than, say, people who read books. I’ve absolutely no idea why this is true but for every request for book suggestions I see 50 for TV show and movie suggestions. It’s a culture of sharing and mutuality and people readily thank you for helping them find new material to watch. For those with limited data allowance, the issue of what to watch is material. For example, a person in Lagos, Nigeria, with the account @dhermmie, who asked on 22 April at 3.34am AEST, “Is Code 8 worth my data?”

Requests for suggestions appear regularly but comments about individual shows or movies mostly clump together. A popular show will result in hundreds or thousands of posts on Twitter over a period of about a week, only to be replaced in the hive mind by a preoccupation with another one. If you compare what people are talking about on Twitter with what Netflix displays in its “most watched” home page zone – which is specific to a geographical location, for example (in my case) Australia – the match is not one-to-one. But things people are talking about will often be included on the list of “most watched” for your region.

In comments with the hashtag attached, people on occasion include spoilers, so if you care about popular shows it might be best to tune out. From time to time I might see, amid endless ringing praises for the latest flavour-on-the-month, mention of a show I’ve seen and enjoyed, which sits there like a $2 dollar coin in a wishing well, surrounded by 10-cent pieces representing more common fare people have enjoyed and whose fame they have added to with a micro-post, something washed up like a shard of dull white glass on the tideline, smoothed on its edges, harmless.

Every day I pick up two or three recommendations from other people and, using my PC, I add them to a “to watch” list on the Netflix homepage. I can then, later on in the day or on an entirely different day, perhaps two weeks hence, watch one of them on my TV. One day I might watch an Indonesian action thriller, the next an Israeli crime drama. 

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Serendipity presides but it still puzzles me, despite having used Netflix for several months, how popular certain shows become. More often than not, I find myself in the minority when shows I’ve especially enjoyed – such as ‘Messiah’ and ‘October Faction’ – fail to get a second season scheduled. With many shows, an appetite grows for more seasons, or at least a further eight or ten episodes based on the same characters and with a closely-linked and carefully-crafted story. Some people say they “invest” themselves in a show, having developed emotional attachments to characters or places, and resent it when this support is removed from their lives. As though they are paying for it with their time, not just their money. In a very real sense, time is of the essence in the transaction. Without eyeballs, Netflix would not command a high share price. 

But I’m still not at all sure why anyone would need 24 hours of sound and moving pictures to tell a story – figuring in three-by-eight one-hour episodes – when with a conventional movie you can do it in two, but when a season ends often on Twitter you hear the cry, “Can’t wait for season three!” as though to live without the influence of that particular story constituted a hardship. In my view, in many shows there’s lots of flab – as in ‘Narcos: Mexico’ and ‘The Crown’ – where you see repetitive shots strung together and a pattern of similar video sequences, unravelling with a predictable a rhythm. It’s as though only by watching long-arc TV drama can people feel and appreciate the texture of time. 

You lose yourself in the flow of another’s ideas that have been moderated by convention, with its story obeying the rules and featuring the more common tropes of whichever genre it cleaves to. It all reveals what writer and academic Anthony Uhlmann calls the “analogue real” of the filmmakers’ collective imagination, education, and experience. Sounds, images, voices, faces, smiles, and eyes; the dangers and the hopes; the causes of the characters’ despair, the thrill of their loves, the end of their lives, their births, their meetings with fate; the delineations of their destinies laid out like patches on a quilt before us, which we use to wrap around our souls seated, alone or with friends or family, waiting in front of a screen. 

Waiting for the suspense to terminate, at which point in time you will be released from the grip of the passage and delivered into your routine again, like some sort of gorgeous, big-boned sea mammal washed up on a beach under the setting sun of your own desires. And regardless of any potential disappointment we might feel threatens the success of the relentless search for spiritual comfort, there’s in fact almost no limit to what you can find, though many on Twitter will from time to time say something like, “I’ve finished Netflix!” 

When I see this kind of comment – or if I see someone complaining about the company’s marketing tactics (when they ask people if they’re going to finish a series, or if they are “still watching”) – I sense myself aloof but say nothing knowing that, if only they’d tune into the hashtag and spend some time with others’ thoughts, they’d discover a world of entertainment. Time is what’s limited; there will never be enough of it to enable you to see the whole world. But now that everyone’s at home it’s hard to understand why the moaning endures when it takes so little effort to learn about a thousand new shows and movies. Taiwanese cinema? They’ve got it. Action thrillers? Yep, that too. Romantic comedies? Tons of ‘em. Scads of documentaries. Kids’ programs galore. 

A veritable cornucopia of content. And if you can’t manage to find anything interesting or useful on Netflix there are plenty of other OTT services you can subscribe to, though with Amazon Prime, which I also pay for, often the film suggested by someone is not available in Australia. And if they don’t have, for your region, what you’re looking for, they usually just suggest the most popular movies on the servers. Unless there’s a specific word match, but this mostly won’t lead to a satisfying result. So, for example, a search in Australia for ‘The Lighthouse’, a 2019 US historical drama, brings up suggestions to watch documentaries about lighthouses, and nothing related, in terms of its content, with the movie being searched for. All of this can result in disappointment, as can the fact that tweets relating to Prime are far less frequent than ones about Netflix. It’s just more difficult to find content to watch on Prime than it is to find something to view on Netflix, though Prime has more old movies on its servers, things from the 50s and 60s. If you want to watch Fellini or Hitchcock, go to Prime.

As explained in this story, Amazon provides the infrastructure service that Netflix relies on, so even given success for Netflix, Jeff Bezos will still be laughing.  All it takes to get all of it working for you is an email address, an internet connection, and a credit card. So you can dream. Awake.