Netflix is a globally known company that has, in many ways, catalyzed the current era of streaming services dominating the landscape of entertainment.
Despite the growing number of competitors, the company maintains its status as an industry leader, balancing high-quality original content with streaming rights for popular films and TV series. Yet, with new streaming platforms steadily emerging, the company needs to ensure its best organizational features are consistently performing (Burroughs, 2019). The three key organizational features of Netflix are willing to adapt, consumer science and design freedom (Amat et al., 2018; Jenner, 2018). This paper attempts to comment on the strongest and the weakest points of each, as well as speculate on which of the three might have contributed the most to the firm’s ongoing prosperity.
The company’s willingness to adapt is evident from its ever-changing catalog of available titles. The dynamic variety can be partially attributed to legal regulations and copyright agreements, as with multiple non-original movies and TV series Netflix can only obtain a temporary license (Trusheim, Casisdy and Bunch, 2018). However, it is clear from the consistent shifts in the general tone of available and promoted material that Netflix takes into account large holiday seasons and modern hyper-specific interests (Lobato, 2018; Wayne, 2021). This may lead to the company lacking a distinct brand but also increases its chances of appealing to a general audience.
Consumer science relates to the data collection and analysis processing the platform’s software engineers conduct on a service’s customers. It manifests in e-mails with personalized recommendations, which has the potential to increase customer loyalty toward the brand and provoke positive emotions. However, in certain cases, clients’ minds find such initiatives unnecessary or even discouraging in relation to their likelihood of continuing to use the service. Finally, design freedom allows Netflix content creators and employees, in general, to contribute to the implementation of new and unique content they might have never encountered before (Elnaba, 2018).
An example of such innovation would be Netflix’s interactive video-game-like show episode Bandersnatch. It combines the interactive mechanics of a visual novel with the traditional structure of a TV episode, allowing the viewer to essentially co-write the story with the screenwriters. Such experiences are plausible within the creative spaces of streaming services, but not the larger movie studios.
Reference List
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Burroughs, B. (2019) ‘House of Netflix: streaming media and digital lore.’ Popular Communication, 17(1), pp.1-17. In M., Jenner (ed.) 2018. Netflix and the Re-invention of Television. Springer.
Elnahla, N. (2020) Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and how Netflix manipulates us, the new gods. Consumption Markets & Culture, 23(5), 506-511.
Lobato, R. (2018) Rethinking international TV flows research in the age of Netflix. Television & New Media, 19(3), pp.241-256. Web.
Reed, A. and Kranch, M. (2017) March. Identifying https-protected Netflix videos in real-time. In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM on Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (pp. 361-368).
Trusheim, M.R., Cassidy, W.M. and Bach, P.B., (2018) Alternative state-level financing for hepatitis c treatment—the “Netflix model”. Jama, 320(19), pp.1977-1978.5
Wayne, M.L. (2021) ‘Netflix, Amazon, and branded television content in subscription video-on-demand portals.’ Media, Culture & Society, 40(5). pp. 725-741.