Netflix’s biggest competition isn’t sleep, it’s YouTube (opens in new tab)

What remains to be seen is whether the demographic trends here are due to fundamental differences in what gen Z kids are interested in, or whether it's just a function of the fact that YouTube is free, and Teenagers don't have money, and your parents can't see what you've been watching like they can if you use their Netflix login.

It would be like looking at transportation data and concluding that since teenagers tend to take the bus or ride bikes to get places, the auto industry will be doomed in 20 years.

There’s two things I adore about Historia Civilis. One is the way he represents terrain and units on a battle field in battle related episodes. It might not look fancy but it gets the job done. Normally I struggle to imagine unfamiliar terrain so this helps a lot. The second is he passes the Gell-Mann test for me. There are certain sections in history I know really well because I’ve read multiple books on it and he gets those absolutely right. So when I watch an episode on an era I’m unfamiliar with, I’m confident he’s done his due diligence.

There is a ton of quality on YouTube, some of my favorites are Redlettermedia, Baz Battles (focused on historical battles) and Lemmino, his short form documentaries are extremely well edited.

Historia Civils is one of my favorite channels as well. Excellent content.

I think a bigger thing, is that any of the youtube channels could just start posting to an alternative. I too enjoyed Historian Civilis, as well as Baz Battles and Kings and Generals.

In the later two cases they probably post twice as much content on patreon or other distribution channels.

I think that highlights the risk of lower scale production videos. They can be posted in more places to be "profitable", which means the distribution channels are necessarily more dynamoc / easier to come by.

I don't really understand this. Netflix cares about how much you watch it ONLY if it means you will stop your subscription. In fact, as long as you keep your subscription their interest is that you watch as few as possible to minimize costs, right? So a few addictive shows that make you need to keep Netflix are betters than keeping you on Netflix all day every day.

If Netflix cannot be replaced by Youtube, it is not a real competitor.

Saying otherwise leads to weird useless definitions of competition. We would have to say everything is a competitor of everything else, and then how is that interesting to know?

True. I can account for India here. There are some channels which nake scripted web series releasing 1 episode per week. Some of them even have 1-2 seasons . Mostly 5 episodes. And they are really popular among youngsters. Basically,these shows touch upon common middle class family relatable stuff,or college youngsters themed series. Most of them have a different sponsor each time. Sometimes its a car company (for a road trip based series),or a yoghurt brand, once Xiaomi was also a sponsor. And they hire veteran actors who are quite popular on traditional TV soap operas. But, i do feel that Youtube hasn't done enough for them. Personally i love Youtube for its educational content.

Fair point. I think Captain Disillusion is a good example of this, his production value is extremely high with regards to visual effects for what is a fairly niche subject matter.

but Youtube also has very low quality suggestions, so in practice it ends up proposing the same topics over and over again. And god forbid you watch anything political.

Netflix does not release it's viewer data as far as I understand. You cannot compare that which you have no data for.

YouTube recently suggested Impulse to me (sci-fi/drama) out of the blue. Just the first 3 episodes for the rest you needed premium. It definitely looked like a show you would find on Netflix or TV in terms of production.

Agreed.

As far as I'm concerned, almost everything on HBO is worth watching.

But almost nothing on Netflix is worth watching anymore. The quality bar has lowered so much over the years.

HBO barely streams anything, at a global scale.

>if it's filled up with watching youtube videos it can't be filled up watching netflix...

Correct.

And that's pretty convenient for Netflix' bottom line if that person is paying the monthly fee, but using only, say, a quarter of the netflix bandwidth of a heavy user.

The modeling to figure all this out is a lot more complex than just "are they watching?"-"are they not watching?". We need access to Netflix' internal data to determine viewing patterns, license fees, bandwidth costs, etc, but I suspect that people using Netflix more than a certain amount in a month end up costing netflix money instead of making netflix money.

Again though, Netflix is not there to grab a user's attention, Netflix is there to grab a user's money. We shouldn't conflate these two base motivations.

If netflix gets you to pay the monthly fee, while at the same time you only use a quarter of the bandwidth of most other netflix users...

well, I'd imagine that's a win for netflix.

Again, we'd need more of Netflix' internal data, but I wouldn't be surprised if a full modeling would reveal that netflix wants to optimize viewing time to be something less than 100% of some break even viewing level. I have to believe that people using Netflix more than a certain amount in a month end up costing netflix instead of benefiing netflix.

But again, we really need access to their internal data to say that for sure.

Sleep goes you one better.

Often enough sleep provides fantastical entertainment content indistinguishable from reality. Every genre, from comedy to horror. Only thing is, you can't choose what content you want to experience. (At least, not to my knowledge you can't pick what content you want?)

if you do it right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

The thing is that it's a bit more complicated than that. The business models are different. Even if we don't do the full analysis we can see that someone spending 60 minutes on youtube instead of netflix means that netflix is not paying for that 60 minutes of bandwidth. Netflix doesn't have ads paying for everything, they have to pay for everything other ways. So that business becomes about more than just blindly getting eyeballs. You want the right eyeballs, based on the content you pay to offer. That implies some fairly complex modeling.

Now of course we'd need more information than Netflix would likely provide us to do a full analysis, but my sense from what we can know is that this guy is likely close to correct about what his enemy is.

You're forgetting rental stores. My local grocery store had a rental section for $2/movie, and the selection was way better than Redbox, and the titles didn't rotate out as quickly as Netflix. I would typically watch 4-5 movies a month (one a week), which would cost me ~$10/month.

Now, I spend ~$10 per service for access to streaming content, and the selection is still worse than my grocery store was. Yes, there are more titles, but fewer good titles, especially since I'm not really into long series. I pay twice as much for half the quality.

So now my choices are only watch relatively new releases at Redbox (selection sucks), pay a ton to "rent" online (who thought $5/movie was a good idea?), or sign up for "unlimited" service(s) with mediocre selection.

Maybe I'm being nostalgic, but it seems we've moved backwards since moving on from video rental places.

Just because something is better now than in the past does not mean that it cannot be improved. We cannot be placated with what we have but must constantly strive to move forward. That is how human progress is built.

> I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down

I'd say it's the opposite, at least for TV. We're in the golden age, as they say. There are so many damn good shows out there.

And if you compare modern remakes to the old school versions, usually the difference in quality is drastic. Been watching She-Ra, and the old one is basically garbage compared to the remake. Same thing for Ducktales: the new one doesn't just have better animation, it's way smarter too (and I loved Ducktales as a kid).

~20 years ago my parents bought us(me) a new computer. A Pentium 2. For almost the exact same price(not adjusted) as the fairly well specced gaming computer i bought last year.

Prices drop for a lot of stuff. Thinking youtube for $15/month is expensive doesn't seem wierd to me. But i think its worth it just to avoid ads.

> mad max furry road...

What a movie that would have been :)

>And people complain?

They're not competing against 20 years ago, the value proposition has changed. (Although 25 years ago there was "57 Channels And Nothin' On").

They're competing against a giant glut of content. Whats the marginal value in watching the latest hot Netflix show over everything else at my fingertips on the internet? Is there something inherently better about the 22-minute format? A movie's 3-act structure? Or a miniseries carefully crafted with plenty of plot climaxes but no plot resolution so you sit there and binge it? Do those shapes of entertainment earn a special place that commands a premium? Does the spectacle enabled by their production budgets?

I actually think they do have an edge, the social act of watching something together with people in the living room. But that's it.

At least contextually I will personally complain that the whole business model of making content to then profit off of (be it in $15 3D tickets, $100 blu ray box sets, or 5 cents of Netflix revenue) permanently as being incredibly amoral and culturally destructive.

We have the Internet. People give away data in their posession for free to the order of exabytes a year. As a species, we have the capability to host the total sum of all information produced by our kind in kind. We just chose to silo anything dating back to the 1920s in corporate coffers as a means to rent seek forever on properties the creators are either long dead or long gone from the studio that continues to profit off their work forever.

> Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows

Yes, but are they the movies and shows people actually want to watch? You know, classics and the like. Increasingly, the case is "no".

Did you try to use Netflix outside of U.S.? It's pathetic.

The world is already improving at blazing pace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

I am not "white" but rewriting everything due to PC culture is idiotic. We must learn from the good and the bad. Also attacking men, family, and fatherhood at every chance is getting old. Simpsons did it, already, and long ago. And even they are under attack for being racist.

Don't get me wrong. Make your content and do your thing. Just stop shoving it down everyone else's throat. For example, YouTube Impulse which is more about MeToo than sci-fi.

There are free browser extensions that block ads. The only value add is the premium content.

> I agree 100% with the rest of your comment but I genuinely don't understand this claim?

It is a dog whistle for "I'm a bigot". A good technique to filter trash is to stop reading when you see somebody use "SJW" in a non-ironic way. It basically means they aren't worth talking to.

> For example, YouTube Impulse which is more about MeToo than sci-fi.

YouTube music quality is shit. You're watching a compressed video with music in it.

As I grew a family my YouTube time went from mostly desktop to almost all phone/tablet. Can't Adblock that stuff. I'm betting lots of people watch YouTube on mobile devices.

Alec Steele - A hyperactive Brit makes swords in Montana

Invitica - essays on ancient civilizations

Wintergarten - a Swede in France making a musical marble machine to millisecond precision. Good project management tips are included.

Man At Arms ReForged - Baltimore swordsmiths make ridiculous videogame sized swords that are mostly unusable.

EDIT: A few others

Bon Appetite's "Brad Makes": A New Jerseyian mumbles his way through fermenting anything edible. Frequent field trips ensue.

Kiwami Japan: A very very strange Japanese man makes the same knife, over and over, from various materials such as jello, underwear, and pasta. ASMRy.

Primitive Technology: The journey of a mute, nearly naked QLD programmer in the forest and his attempts to make a nuclear reactor from local mud. Turn on English subtitles.

Contrapoints: A trans PhD dropout comments on current issues through the lens of grad-level philosophy and copious innuendo. Impeccable set design and pacing.

I use it for free audio books: for example, HP Lovecraft is great for medium car trips.

Joe Pieczynski, mrpete222, clickspring: machine shop skills. I finally bought a lathe due to these videos.

Shango066: revive old TVs and radios in Los Angeles

Mustie1: revive old engines in New Hampshire

ADVChina/Laowhy86/Serpentza: x-pats in China. If you really want to know about life in China, watch these.

Mine Explorers: shango066 underground

Scott Manley: rocket science

w2aew: RF electronics

Applied Science: for the garage science lab

Isaac Arthur: futurology

Kombi Life: living as a VW bus nomad

Curators Corner: some shorts from the British Museum

Machine Thinking: history of technology

CuriousMarc: old computers

Practical Engineering: civil engineering

bigcliveotcom: for his soothing voice

glasslinger: DIY vacuum tubes

Lots and lots of food channels: recently I enjoyed the "Modern History TV" ones on medieval food.

Also I watched the YouTube original "Origin" recently- not bad, but not quite at the Netflix level.

Great list. I love when people do this, as I inevitably find new channels to follow.

Thanks,

Good list! I met Rick Beato at Summer NAMM this year. Really nice guy.

12tone - Excellent music theory in fast, whimsically illustrated episodes

agadmator - Best chess channel I've found

I'd recommend adding Ishitani Furniture to your woodworking list. Very relaxing and the he makes gorgeous stuff.

Nerdwriter is just psuedo-intellectual trash that panders to already popular opinions

Contrapoints - applied philosophy, set design.

Profit.

YouTube has struggled to make money.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2970777/YouTube-rou...

Amazon is already heading in this direction with Prime Video. In fact they already have different streams you can pay to subscribe to like Starz and HBO and some pretty niche ones like Curiosity Stream that I think is only $1.99/month or something like that.

There doesn't seem to be the right niche. Maybe if they restricted it to fiction and documentaries but Vimeo already has that niche covered. Maybe Netflix could acquire Vimeo. btw imo Vimeo has a lot of excellent videos. They're more open to trying new things so sometimes they have something really good or deep that you would never find on YouTube or Netflix.

Here's a link to the video being referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW8HNAlUXxU

ThisOldTony is very entertaining with his machining and dad jokes, I can highly recommend his channel. This video is not a bad starting point.

Though describing ThisOldTony as nonfiction is a bit of a stretch ;)

As a platform, YouTube's incentives don't serve the user as well as they could.

A prime example was a video with millions of views on a very popular channel about 9/11 conspiracies. Did the YouTuber believe them? No. But cranking out a 10m+ video every day is more important than what he believes.

Then you look at high quality channels who put out a video once a week, or even month, and they are forced to rely on Patreon (which is a great platform!).

Not sure what the solution to this would be, but I feel similarly on the wading through garbage to get to the good stuff.

IMO Netflix has done well in this regard by transforming themselves into a content company rather than a content delivery service. Recently most of my favorite shows on Netflix have been 1st party titles, and I can't think of another content producer who's output is as varied and as high-quality as Netflix at the moment. Maybe Disney has the IP and the raw muscle to pull this off, but they will have to prove it.

I actually think competition is good for the space. As I said, I think Netflix is really good now, but if they became an uncontested monopoly in the streaming space, I would fear that quality would suffer.

Ironically, I never intended on paying for YouTube, but once I switched to Google Music, (paid,) all the commercials disappeared.

If I had to choose, though, I'd continue paying for Netflix and put up with the commercials.

Huh, I wonder what causes that. Because I'll watch some of the political comedians (like Trevor Noah and others) and then that takes over my feed for a few days.

I do like viewing new content, but it seems like the algorithm encourages showing stuff I'm not subscribed to (like the above comedies) as opposed to stuff I am subscribed to. I also frequently get suggested videos I've seen before. Like even the same day. And I do have history enabled.

Same. I end up watching some of the stuff from homepage everyday. Plus YouTube's recommendations after you have watched a video is very effective, at least in my experience.

Despite what I subscribe to. My home page is 95% stuff I’ve never clicked on...

Because it is called "Recommended" and it is the first thing you see when you go to the website. I'm not asking for stuff I've already seen, but when one of those YouTubers posts something new. Show me that. Front and center.

Exactly. The button is right there on the homepage.

>Do you have any examples of this?

Not exactly Youtube but pretty much all professionally produced porn made since ~2005 is like this. They call it "professional amateur" or some buzzword like that. You've got a camera crew complete with lighting, sound and makeup filming the actors screw at some producer's vacation house and it's all done professionally but they try and make the final product look like it's just the actors and cameraman.

any youtuber who averages 100k views per video with more than one video a week probably either has a video editor or dark circles under their eyes.

a lot of them have camera men/audio guys and a personal assistant to keep track of their schedule if they're the jetsetting type

amateur youtube only exists <30k views + maybe 1 video in a week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R3moEtEmIA This one I saw recently.

Well I do, that's part of why I stopped watching broadcasts altogether.

The autoplay-next-thing can be disabled in the settings though, although it'll still auto-play a trailer after 15s if you complete a movie or whole series, which I loathe since it's a real mood killer after movies (I very much enjoy chilling or discussing while credits roll).

That only applies to the ads from Google, not from content creators themselves.

And it is three times more expensive than Netflix where I live.

I don't see the value proposition there.

I think, It depends. As far as I know YouTube Premium is only for removing ads and music streaming. If there are movies and quality professional content on YouTube Premium, then Youtube will have a bigger advantage since both amateur and professional content creators will be on the same platform. But right now, Netflix is the place to watch most of the desired pro content when it comes to both films and tv series.