Netflix’s Media Production Suite

The tech is cool, but it seems like the main result of having such a pipeline is that Netflix has been able to produce an incredible amount of low-effort schlock that mostly lacks soul and artistic merit.

I remember reading once how all Netflix content is really meant for phones or smaller screens. Simple shots, not much background detail, lots of face closeups etc.

I remember when being made by Netflix was a unique and cool thing, it didn’t last long until it meant probably-slop.

I barely even remember the last one that I watched let alone enjoyed. I guess it was Arcane which is a total fluke.

That was probably the plan. Except they probably expect a higher fluke rate.

This is exactly how I'd imagine the dreck on netflix is made :).

A lot of them are also meant to "second screen worthy" where they run in the background while your attention is mainly focused on some other task like playing a video game.

Yes, strange to have so much and still feel like you'e lost something.

Some C-levels have gone for the "quantity has a quality all of its own" philosophy of media production.

My personal experience with netflix has been that a good filter for 'quality' is what specific TV series and documentaries various 'scene' groups in the warez/torrent community consider worth ripping and properly encoding.

There's a certain amount of manual effort that's required to properly encode a ripped netflix or amazon prime series. People who do this strictly for street cred in the piracy community generally don't waste their time on schlock.

Arcane is one of the most expensive Netflix series. Not that budget is a panacea.

Are you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week.

Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman?

Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants.

But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.

Lincoln Lawyer?

I mean if we go by volume of awards nominations it seems like they're fine in the artistic merit department

Having worked on both quality and junk film productions I assure you the editing workflow is not the determinant of artistic quality. No film or TV program has ever been improved by the editor(s) trying to build their own NAS or hack a version control system together.

It's not just editing though, right? This whole system makes it more viable to just film tons of b-roll quality footage without worrying about the end result. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and this system makes it much less necessary to worry about what you're filming and why.

You don't need this pipeline to produce 6 shows over a decade. Said another way, they almost certainly would not have bothered to build this system if the purpose was mainly to produce the shows you mention. The reason these systems exist is to enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of productions.

I mean you could say the same thing about video cameras making it too easy to shoot footage compared to film.

Using faster, easier or cheaper production workflows aren't significantly correlated with end product quality, other than perhaps in the obvious sense that investing a large amount of money/effort into a production might cause the investing party to take more care to ensure ROI. However, there are so many counter examples of very expensive, high-effort productions lacking artistic merit that the correlation is weak at best.

Yes, and it is arguably true, right? That doesn't mean digital shouldn't exist, but everything is a balance. The quality and effort put into the "average" movie has almost certainly gone down over the decades since the normalization of digital cameras.

If our ability (as a society or as individuals) to filter out the slop from the rest increases in lock-step, this is a non-issue. But it seems that this not what has happened, and instead we are inundated with mind-numbing content that absorbs our time and does little to impact us in any positive way.

If you think something is bad, all I can advise is that you stop watching it. Of course if it's easier/cheaper to make content, more content will be made, and there will be proportionately more crap around. My point is that quality is not specifically a function of the technology or workflow.

I have never been able to second screen, I just can't focus on my PC while listening to something. It's literally white noise to me. I do understand people do this though. When I do watch media seriously, I pay attention and keep off my devices.

Yeah my attention during second screening is split such that I'm now doing two things _terribly_ instead of one thing well. I've decided to only have music or something equally non intrusive in the background instead of second screening a show/video/podcast.

House of Cards, The Diplomat, Kaleidoscope, Lincoln Lawyer, The End of the Fucking World, etc etc

Thinking about this, and the reasonable argument below that Netflix have also produced a number of prestige films and series that are genuinely great, I wonder if the production pipeline has a side effect: flattening the quality signal.

That is, it used to be (80s/90s) a lot more obvious what the prestige/not prestige boundary was. Cheap TV content (soaps etc) was shot on video, expensive content shot on film. Now everything looks the same. Perhaps the one remaining effort signal was lighting, but Netflix seem to have chosen very flat bright lighting styles for everything now. Bad news for us chiaroscuro lovers. And even when directors do try to do that, they've often over-estimated the HDR so you get the opposite: an entire series which is too dark.

That's just your avg elitism. The idea that the world is better by making the creation of art expensive so that only a small group of elite people is nonsense.

Effort of course went down that's clearly a good thing. As for quality, before you needed to get enough return to pay for the expensive equipment and process, so likely you only do it for very few project. So on some abstract sense maybe 'quality' did go down, but that isn't bad as the total amount of high quality goes up far more.

See the massive amount of great TV that have happened since digital cameras.

> slop

What's slop for you is somebody else's favorite show.

Art doesn't have to 'impact us in a positive way' whatever that means. You are not a better person for having watched "Lawrence of Arabia". And in the past most people didn't watch "Lawrence of Arabia" but generic TV shows.

Personally I can easily filter the 'slop' (ie thinks I don't care about) so given how much better the ability is to select what to watch. On demand media libraries, recommendation systems, digital word of mouth and so on. In the past there were few TV channels and only a few movies in theaters at the same time.

So the total access to high quality content has gone up exponentially.

Those were just six examples. There are many more.

But OK yes, Netflix produces a lot of volume because that's also what its viewers want. Are you saying that's a bad thing?

Sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and they just need to relax with some mindless entertainment. And that's OK. Not everything has to be art.

I use music too but it can't have too many vocals. I will start to pay attention and get distracted. Similar to how I can't fall asleep with a TV on, I'm still going to listen to it.

So you're their target audience, enjoy.

Two problems with this argument / framing:

1. Consumers frequently don't know what they want, and will consume whatever is placed in front of them. Implying the consumption of Netflix shows (or other media) is a conscious choice they are making seems disingenuous to me. You see the same with doom-scrolling TikTok or Twitter (or even HN). Frequently it is less of a choice and more of a compulsion.

2. Even when they are making conscious choices, sometimes the things people choose to consume are objectively bad. e.g. sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and just need to shoot up heroin. While you can respect the agency of those people to make those choices, most societies do various things to discourage such behavior. A drug dealer whose entire defense is "selling crack isn't bad because my customers want it, actually" is not gonna get exonerated.

the importance of picking a fight you'll never win

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-vWRLGnTGg

A filmmaker discusses their experience with Amazon, who bought the rights to their movie and decided to release it on their streaming service instead of in theaters. The filmmaker explains why they feel this is unfair and why they are fighting for their movie to be seen on the big screen.

No, because people usually do know what they want in terms of TV and movies. They've been watching their whole life and know exactly what they like generally and what they don't and what they're in the mood for tonight. This is precisely why Netflix's personalization is so key, because people won't consume whatever is in front of them. People even rotate between streamers precisely to watch the specific shows they love. You're denying people's agency. Streaming isn't IG or TikTok.

And no, TV isn't heroin or crack. And who on earth are you, or me, to judge what other people want to watch on TV? That's paternalistic and insulting. Next do you want to censor which books I can read?

So on the one hand you admit that IG or TikTok are things where people literally consume whatever is in front of them, but when it's Netflix this no longer applies? Why?

And I never suggested preventing people from watching what they want to watch.