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Netflix, the competition and the news

Headline:  Netflix to spend US$ 15 billion in content...an answer to the new competition (according to the headline), except for one big thing.  Dear readers guess how much Netflix spent on content in 2019 -- if you guessed $ 12 billion you would be right, and how much dod the revenue grow for the year -- 31%.  So obviously spending more on programming is the way to go!

There are two competitors to Netflix:  Amazon and Apple, the rest you can forget. Facebook will concentrate on teen romance/horror etc and Disney will recycle its film itself -- attractive to parents of young children everywhere (and no one else).  What is amazing is how much of Amazon's offering is charitably "B-reel" stuff.  Now, I'm not saying that Netflix doesn't have its fair dose of shlock but compared to Amazon, its a much smaller fraction.

Also, Netflix has a secret weapon -- its international content!  Which is largely not shown in the US, but which is often amazing -- saw an absolutely breathtaking police drama set in Sweden.  Really very very good and with excellent dubbing (or subtitle), an impressive number of French offering too!

At the end of the day, both Apple and Amazon are very American centric (it makes a lot of sense), but Netflix can get drama from elsewhere more easily since its been around for a while.  My instinct is that with these three there will be no winner, their pockets are either too deep or they have a global presence that will buy them years of superiority.

Anyway, interesting times ahead for content creators!



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