Look: We know we make a lot of fun of Netflix for its bold and innovative drive to invent things that already exist—see, for instance, reports from earlier this week about the streamer attempting to beat YouTube by sifting its way through the video hosting network’s old leftovers. But we’re now starting to genuinely worry that folks over at the streamer’s HQ don’t realize how relentlessly they seem to be drawn to reinventing wheels that have been spinning for the better part of a century. Like, how are you supposed to make fun of the fact that the company is (per recent reports in The Wall Street Journal) considering an idea where it gooses its flagging engagement numbers by putting themed collections of its content onto live, scheduled channels, and then broadcasting them in a set pattern? That’s TV, guys! You made TV!
To be fair to Netflix—per The Wrap—disrupting their way back to exactly where we all started isn’t the only solution Netflix is currently mulling, in regards to the fundamental problem that’s been eating at its bottom line for years at this point. (I.e., that they hit literal global saturation a few years back, and now have pretty much nowhere to go but down/increasingly militant efforts to crack down on password sharing.) The company is also apparently toying with the idea of bundles, a favorite of its smaller rivals, which would allow users to package content from rival services like Peacock into their existing subscription and, wait, fuck, that’s basically just cable, isn’t it? This “innovation” thing sure is harder than it looks!
To be clear, both of these ideas are just being floated as hypotheticals at the moment, as Netflix’s need for perpetual growth slams, hard, into the way it’s trained us all to lose interest in its offerings about five seconds after their initial release. Still, we would have loved to be in the room when someone first suggested “What if we put shows on a channel and then let people tune in when they want?” In our imaginations, it’s so clear: Flickers of recognition of the absurdity of the situation flashing across faces like a palsy, less than a second of stark and horrified realization—and then brutally suppressed as the conscious corporate minds reasserted control.
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