Why is Netflix considered a "tech" company? What is a tech company?

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They single handedly eliminated the DVD as one of the first streaming services

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At the time that was technologically advanced. It’s all relative to the time they entered/took over their market.

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It is partly legacy as one of the earliest streaming services, but they also were legitimately considered an innovator in technology & architecture at some point.

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I agree. It's mostly a legacy label. These days, they're more movie production than anything,

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Because it’s a streaming service it falls under the umbrella of tech.

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Lots of under-the-covers open source projects, from what I see at CNCF and Kubernetes zooms and conferences.

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I don't consider it one. It's a studio that's been smart enough to convince people to pay the multiplier of a tech company.

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The main issue is they don't have a patent that protects the space of streaming content. So even though they once were a major tech player, to monetize they needed to evolve to being a data driven studio. Maybe in the future they can start getting large enough to start absorbing more legacy studios and unlock their archives. Maybe they can even use ML to eventually have robots write the movies themselves.

They pioneered alot of modern media distribution. To do it via streaming was always the vision; the DVD thing was just a stopgap until the tech caught up. Many AWS services and SLAs were also driven by Netflix being their biggest customer in the early days too.

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But they own none of that IP.

From an engineering perspective I’d say so. They’re solving issues in a cloud, distributed systems environment and sharing these solutions as open source for others to use.

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I think “tech” is a broader umbrella than a lot of people realize. It’s supposed to encompass anything related to electronics, software, or services that depend on the internet (which is where Netflix would come into play).

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Not all banks are, but Capital One definitely is. The amount of resources spent on software development and maintenance makes you almost forget you work for a bank

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It uses viewer rewind data to figure out how to pace its productions in an addicting way and implement that in studio.

We all know it uses user activity to recommend new videos to the user, but think about how often shows and movies come and go from Netflix. Netflix decides what to air, and how long to pay someone to let them air it, and it calculates the answers to those questions based on user activity - probably weighing each user by magnitude and pickiness. It's playing big-data poker.

Not to mention that reliable streaming is a non-trivial technical feat. Yes AWS provides the heavy lifting, but using AWS wisely is a non-trivial technical feat.

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Business Wars has a great podcast that goes into why. Early on it was their strong utilization of data and consumer behavior, they’d grown much more since then.

https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/episode/5296-netflix-vs-blockbuster-sudden-death/

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It's more the rest of the other industries becoming more tech centric vs Netflix not being tech

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Lots of micro/backend stuffs to innovate now that the platform is built. It's similar to people solving issues on spam filtering but Gmail is already built

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I wonder how Netflix fares in the long run tho. Competitions have just copied it’s business model

It falls under Media and Entertainment

Google falls under advertisement, YouTube under media, Fb/twitter,etc under social media, Uber/Life under ride share?

What is tech then? Microsoft?

“Tech” nowsaday is anything that uses has software or internet/website (not even hardware coz some thinks Cisco is not tech) as their primary interface to interact with their customers to sell their offerings.

After they pivot from dvds to streaming but not anymore, I wouldn’t consider it entirely a tech company

Tech is a frustrating categorization. It’s like saying you work at a manufacturing company. Well, what exactly do you manufacture? Heavy equipment or hair product? Tech simply refers to the primary means of production and/or distribution. But the product industry is different. Uber is a transportation company. Netflix is an entertainment company. And so on and so forth.

AWS is one of the few true tech companies where the product is technology. Most others are actually in other industries.

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