Netflix says Fortnite is bigger competition than HBO or Hulu

[Var]

Both compete for your time and people have limited time, especially the older you get.

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Yep. By the time I get home from work I have about 2-3 hours of free time each night. I usually either play games or watch a movie/tv show. When a big game like RDR2 or BOTW comes out, I might as well cancel Netflix for the month with how much I get to watch it.

 

[Aranjah]

Seems like a core lesson for GaaS and live services in general: Potential customers only have so much free time in a day.

 

[Randam]

For me it doesn't make a difference.
I watch Netflix when I'm done playing and went to bed.

And they get my money even if I don't watch them at all.

 

[Eoin]

I don't think HBO is going to decimate Netflix tomorrow, if ever. But I think they're a heck of a lot more dangerous than any video game company. People aren't going to suddenly give up non-interactive media en mass, especially for a single game, cultural phenomenon or no.

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There are different ways of looking at this. No matter how high a chance HBO have of doing damage to Netflix, any damage they do will be limited because Netflix are global and HBO aren't even remotely close to having that kind of status.

No matter how low the chance of a video game company doing damage to Netflix, there are video game companies that operate on Netflix-like scales that could conceivably move into Netflix's market, globally.

15 years ago the home video market consisted of video rental chains competing with each other to be the best video rental chains that they could, and maybe the market moved a few percent one way or another each year, but overall those direct competitors split the market and it stayed split, and it stayed that way for years, and then they all got killed by a threat none of them properly honoured. Having been on one side of that disruption, Netflix will have no desire to be on the other side of it.

Anything can of course happen, and CEO's should be able to react to anything—but part of business is making predictions about what is most likely to happen, and preparing accordingly. I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where 5% of Netflix subscribers cancel their subscriptions because of Fortnite, and I flat-out don't believe that such a possibility is what keeps Reed Hastings up and night, whatever he says.

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It's probably good to ensure that you're aware that they're giving Fortnite as one of many examples of cross-media competition, not the only competition they face. Nobody in Netflix is talking about losing sleep because of Fortnite, they're just saying that they lose more time to a game with 125m players globally than they do to a region-bubbled streaming service with some unknown-but-smaller number of subscribers.

 

[brainchild]

Having been on one side of that disruption, Netflix will have no desire to be on the other side of it.

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This is key. It's something that both Nintendo and Netflix have had in common (both having a history of being disruptors), and partially explains why they have the perspectives that they do.

 

[Baleoce]

Makes sense. You're essentially in the market of competing for peoples time, and games that can be played in short bursts, or media that can also be watched in short bursts by similar age groups would be competing.