They should have spent 120% of their money on customer acquisition, and offered streaming services to content providers at a "can't say no" cost, ie at a loss, so as to dump more money into customer acquisition. They should have signed antitrust-worthy deals with ISPs to prevent other streamers from colocating (a major cost/barrier to streaming is the CDN).
Imagine being the tivo of streaming.
Instead, they spent too much money hiring too many brilliant but overconfident types. Average people could have done it, at low wages with lots of equity. Saving more money for customer acquisition.
They did a good job with their DVD service, which has a more easily understandable barrier to entry. They thought they had a similar barrier to entry with streaming, perhaps in part due to thinking that what they were doing would be so hard for others to pull off.
Of course, this is all in hindsight, so take it for what it's worth. But, as noted, even back then they had platform examples to model themselves after. Perhaps they weren't going after such kind of dominance, but still they could have foreseen vast competition.
Apple, OTOH, gets it. They can't even give away 1 year free of their TV service. But they will keep plugging away at it. Come to think of it, they are probably netflix's worst enemy, not disney etc. Netflix do recognize this ... they wisely refuse to be a provider on ATV, where they will just get 'amazon'd'. When your competition is Apple, you are in a bad place.
jiveturkey|5 years ago
Imagine being the tivo of streaming.
Instead, they spent too much money hiring too many brilliant but overconfident types. Average people could have done it, at low wages with lots of equity. Saving more money for customer acquisition.
They did a good job with their DVD service, which has a more easily understandable barrier to entry. They thought they had a similar barrier to entry with streaming, perhaps in part due to thinking that what they were doing would be so hard for others to pull off.
Of course, this is all in hindsight, so take it for what it's worth. But, as noted, even back then they had platform examples to model themselves after. Perhaps they weren't going after such kind of dominance, but still they could have foreseen vast competition.
Apple, OTOH, gets it. They can't even give away 1 year free of their TV service. But they will keep plugging away at it. Come to think of it, they are probably netflix's worst enemy, not disney etc. Netflix do recognize this ... they wisely refuse to be a provider on ATV, where they will just get 'amazon'd'. When your competition is Apple, you are in a bad place.