Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Casual Viewing

3 min read

Similar to the challenge at Freepik:

But as Hope learned, making a successful movie on a streaming platform didn’t necessarily make a streaming platform successful. At Amazon, Hope discovered he was in the customer acquisition business, not the film business. “And the way you win the customer acquisition business,” Hope said, “is by maintaining a regular cadence at a consistent quality in an environment that people trust.” Competition intensified, with Apple, Disney, Paramount, and NBCUniversal all entering the fray, and “it became tougher to keep a customer,” said Hope, “as people would dip in and dip out.”

I want to quit Netflix, Spotify, and all this algorithmic crap.

they turned to a safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the diverse tastes of their enormous subscriber bases. (This also guaranteed they’d keep global distribution rights instead of having to negotiate for them.) “They no longer wanted that outlier,” Hope said. “They wanted someone to have correct expectations: ‘Oh, look at those two couples kissing. One’s wearing pool flippers. That must be a romantic comedy. I get it, do you want to watch a romantic comedy tonight?’ And that’s what it reduced down to. As long as people got what they expected, they stayed in tune.”

In 2022, after Netflix’s subscriber numbers dipped and its stock tanked, journalists were quick to link the company’s excessive output with a drop in what they tepidly referred to as “quality control.” Responding to claims that Netflix had pursued “drunken sailor spending,” Sarandos provided a justification to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times: “We were trying to build a library to make up for not having ninety years of storytelling.”

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

“Play Something,” as in: play anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a user is on their phone or cleaning their room. What matters is that it’s on, and that it stays on until Netflix asks its perennial question, a prompt that appears when the platform thinks a user has fallen asleep: “Are you still watching?”

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