AI: Netflix to TikTok
...’Tyranny of Choice' for 'Long' TV
In this Sunday’s AI ‘In my View’, I want to suggest that Netflix’s best opportunity to entertain the world might be to take a page from TikTok.
One of the biggest running complaints for Netflix users for years, has been how hard it is to find something to watch. A recent joke from a comic (on TikTok no less), went like this:
“I asked my wife why she wanted to scroll an hour on Netflix to find something ‘cool’ to watch, when we’d just end up watching a Seinfeld rerun in the end anyway”.
That hits home. I’ve found myself scrolling so often on Netflix for something to watch. It’s the ‘Tyranny of Choice’ indeed in a world of abundant content, forcing me so often to just flip to TikTok for a few minutes of serendipitous entertainment.
And not leveraging my premium Netflix subscription, thus missing out on the benefits of the billions they spend every year on new shows. Ahead of other streaming competitors including Amazon, Disney, Apple or HBO, (sorry, ‘Max’) now.
What brought this home to me, was this piece in the WSJ yesterday, titled “How Netflix’s Algortihms and Tech, feed its success”:
“The proprietary technology that Netflix uses to gather and analyze data remains key to the company’s success. That data is, in turn, used to inform decisions about what shows and movies to produce, whether to renew them, and whether to share them with any given viewer through the company’s famous recommendation algorithms.”
“That data includes “detailed accounts of every piece of content you’ve engaged with since you created your account,” including how long you watched, where you were when you watched, and what devices you used. Netflix also has unprecedented insight into what led you to watch something in the first place, in the form of detailed records of how you navigated the service’s menus, and what you clicked on.”
Read the entire piece though, and one is struck by how NONE of that data advantage seems like it’s ever used to help users find something to watch in the Abundant sea of expensive Netflix programming. I know it’s not quite true, but it certainly feels like that when searching for stuff to watch.
Contrast this with how TikTok views itself and how they use data and AI algorithms for users. As I highlighted in last Sunday’s inaugural ‘In my View’ piece:
“TikTok is just the tip of the AI/ML iceberg, applied to consumer apps at scale. As I’ve outlined in earlier posts, I view TikTok as the best example at scale to date, of the power of machine learning and AI algorithms (not to mention cleverly licensed universally loved music), applied to consumer-facing applications to date.”
Specifically, as this Hedgehog review piece explains it:
“During the last twenty years, social media has altered the way we interact with popular culture. An explosion of user-generated content—attributable to cheaply produced electronics and platforms like Facebook and Twitter—widened the focus of popular entertainment. But neither Facebook/Meta nor Twitter has kept pace with the sudden rise of the short-video app TikTok. With 1.5 billion active users, and 50 percent of its userbase under thirty, TikTok has quickly become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.”
Note they could also be talking about the other major source of abundant user generated video content, Google’s YouTube of course (Bold text below mine).
“But is TikTok really social media? Not according to Blake Chandlee, the company’s head of Global Business Solutions, who has called TikTok “an entertainment platform,” pointing to the “massive” difference between the company’s approach and that of Facebook/Meta.”
“By design, TikTok encourages different behaviors from those prompted by other social networks. Whereas 70 percent of Instagram users regularly post to the platform, barely a third of TikTokkers do. “They say they check Facebook, and they check Instagram and they check Twitter,” said Khartoon Weiss, another TikTok executive. “But they don’t check TikTok.”
“They tell us they watch TikTok.” Like television, TikTok is something you watch. Its primary purpose is entertainment.”
“The app’s “For You” page, which auto-plays content tailored to your preferences, is little more than algorithmically assisted channel surfing.”
“TikTok specifically brought the language of television—its logic, its drama, its endless distraction—into our everyday lives.”
Today we think about TikTok as primarily serving short form video. Indeed, Google’s YouTube’s competing product, specifically designed to compete with TikTok, is called YouTube Shorts. Meta’s similar product, called Reels, also focused on short form video. Over two billion watch YouTube Shorts alone every month already, and Reels are a big part of what billions do on Meta’s Instagram and Facebook services.
But there is now a trend away from short videos. All the video services are now allowing longer videos. And indeed, Elon Musk, with his new focus in remaking Twitter into X, the “Everything App”, just allowed uploading of two hour videos for paying subscribers, in the morphing service.
Short form TV is blending with Long form TV. And Netflix should be paying attention. Founder/Chairman Reed Hastings has always been keenly focused on competitive threats.
He famously said in 2017 that Netflix’s prime competitor was Sleeping. In 2021, he cited YouTube as a primary competitor and not Disney and other streaming TV services. Netflix even experimented with short videos not too long ago to better understand the attractions of short videos.
Netflix has cited TikTok as an emerging competitor a while ago, as have many tech mega caps (Meta, Google et al). In the coming world of LLM AI technologies, Netflix would do well to take a page from TikTok’s ‘For You’ AI feed.
And make it far, far easier to let the algorithms find customers something to watch. Relieve the ‘Tyranny of Choice’.
It applies increasingly to content far beyond TV as AI takes Data of all types, and makes everything exponentially more Abundant. But for now, it’d be nice to not settle for a Seinfeld rerun on Netflix. Again. (‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that’). Stay tuned.