Comments on: Why Netflix’s House of Cards Deal Is All About Audience Aggregation

By: pgattocpa

pgattocpa — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:10:26 +0000

I went to the TVDevo website and don’t get the warm fuzzies. No listing of what’s available (other than what languages channels are available in).

Plus they do the slimy pricing pitch. Normally one-time fee of $79.95, but for today only, March 21, it’s only $27. Then when you try to navigate off the page, a pop-up comes on with a one-time offer of a $10-off coupon.

If they are that hard-up for my $17 (or perhaps really my credit card information), I’m not interested.

Anybody have any *objective* (positive or negative) insights into TVDevo?

By: Vamshi Sriperumbudur

Vamshi Sriperumbudur — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:43:53 +0000

Originals might bring more audience but Netflix’s monetization models might need to expand beyond subscriptions to PPVs and such. DirecTV and Netflix have about the same #of subs (20M each) but former I am sure makes a lot more per subscriber per year than latter ($100/sub/yr?).

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:13:25 +0000

@ Kathy – In general, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on margins due to increased licensing costs. To me, its simple math – can they acquire customers at a rate faster the rate at which their content licensing fees will be going up. Prevailing wisdom on Wall Street is no, that’s why their stock’s been hammered as of late.

I do think using original content is a new audience acquisition strategy they haven’t used, and one that could, in the long run, help them acquire audience at a rate lower than large deals with studios and networks. I expect some more smaller original content deals to happen, but not a whole lot more mega-deals like House of Cards.