Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to step down from co-CEO (opens in new tab)

But it looks like they basically have distinct roles: media company CEO for Sarandos and tech/product company CEO for Hastings/Peters. A little bit Hollywood, a little bit Silicon Valley.

Then, the CEO's either have separate portfolios of what they oversee OR they have to be in agreement about how they're going to achieve the vision bestowed upon them.

It's also been a massive pivot that, over time, has radically reduced availability of what they can show.

And far more massively, has destroyed the broad ability consumers & services once had to get hardcopy mediums they could own or share. Netflix very clearly, somewhat accidentally, begat the end of DVDs of everything.

It is a crowning achievement of destructive innovation. It served very convenient ends, but was a forefront in ruining ownership. Netflix used to acquire media like anyone else: by buying disks. Now the market is far more politically foibled & less clear, about how content is acquired & kept.

I'm in no way saying it's not a huge achievement. But the long term repercussions seem almost all bad for almost everyone, to me. Constant re-negotiation of rights to stream media is much more complicated than simply having disks. We can look at latter decisions like Aereo, where a company bent over backwards to try to appease media-consuming constraints, by giving each consumer literally their own over the air antenna + timeshifting in the cloud, and trace the path back to Netflix, who started the shift away from ownable media, to a new content-holder regime.

We are very early in. Still, the various networks each having their own media-production arm is very much a byproduct of what Netflix hath wrought, of the dark times Netflix created when they replaced good old fashioned fungible media. Literally the only way to have leverage, to be able to be a streaming service, is to literally make your own media too. Old Netflix ran by a playbook of the world that was much simpler, a modified Blockbuster+distribution model that was far less complected, that didn't constantly run off the rails, that could endure itself.

* They forget, and then retain a monthly subscription charge. * They end up watching some small thing casually and it just remains forever.

The first point, especially, is a big part in why subscriptions work, I believe. Hell, it's definitely why Crunch Fitness is still in business (because they make it impossibly hard to cancel).

This is totally anecdotal, but I'm curious how many people actually set out to sign up, binge, and then immediately cancel.

Also - an aside. I'm pretty fed up w/ services that charge a monthly subscription, and make it totally unclear what happens when you cancel. Some completely shut you off immediately (which is just about the scummiest thing ever, since you... paid for the month already). Others let you finish out your month. This is super anti-consumer IMHO.