Challenges Faced By Netflix In The Social Media Context

Business Context

Netflix is an American multinational company that that mainly does business by proving online streaming services of for movies and television shows. Reed Hastings founded it in 1997, users can access a wide range of online movies, and television shows form the library hosted by Netflix (Jenner 2016). Although the company has seen huge success in the recent past, there are different areas of improvements as well as many challenges faced by the company that has to be further researched. This can ensure that the company is well prepared for the ever-changing market in the future. Research has been done in the past regarding the different kinds of issues faced by the video streaming companies in the past and also extensive study has been done on companies such as Amazon prime which is one of the major competitors of Netflix.

1. Why is it interesting to research on the issues faced by Netflix?

It is interesting to research on Netflix since not much of research has been carried out in the past regarding the role of Netflix as a social media platform and there are different aspects that can be covered in the study.

1. What will be identified through the literature review of the issues faced by Netflix?

The literature review will help the reader to identify how Netflix has changed the lives of its viewers and how it has played an important role in socially by adversely affecting the mentality of the people. The literature will explain how the organization has been able to generate immense business by promoting itself in the social media by considering its advantages as well as disadvantages.

1. What will be the outcome of the project?

The project outcome will be a thorough understanding of the effect of social networking and how Netflix has used it to its optimum advantage and how the negative impacts can be reduced. Recommendations will be provided at the end of the project.

The preliminary research has showed that even though the company has seen enormous success in the recent past there are three major challenges that has to be further researched on, in order to understand how the company can shield its place in the global markets in the future. Some of the identified challenges faced by the company are that the US market are now saturated with Netflix subscribers. There are more than 47 million subscriber already in the markets (Elovici et al. 2014). It has also been found that expanding into the new markets globally will not be a very easy task for Netflix because of the existence of the preexisting stiff completion of the other video service providers. In addition, the price of the media deals and content costs are increasing with every passing days that makes it even difficult for Netflix to acquire other third party media companies. With the increasing price of copyrighted contents form the other media companies as well as television channels.

Primary data sources will be used which will make use of the data collected form an interview with an employee form Netfix regarding the exact nature of issues faced by the organization. There will be secondary data sources that will also be used such as authentic as well as credible journals and articles by renowned researchers of the past who have done preliminary or extensive research about this topic. This in turn help to understand which areas or working departments within Netflix should be addressed presently.

Project Questions

Surveys will be conducted and the data retrieved will be analyzed and converted into numerical values, which can be shown using graphs as well as pictorial description. Qualitative data analysis will be carried out using the data from the interview with the Netflix employee. All the data that will be collected from the different sources will be used in order to understand the issues faced by the organization and accordingly recommendations for future development. Surveys will be considered for the Netflix subscribers in order to understand their concerns and companies that they face regarding the experience of using Netflix services (Tuten and Solomon 2017). A sample size of 2000 will be used in the initial phase of the survey and depending upon the response the sample size can be later increased or decreased.

There are different kinds of ethical issues in understanding and addressing the issues faced within Netflix in the environment f social media. All these ethical issues will be address in the research. For instance, there are advertisements of the television shows and movies that are being broadcasted by Netflix. There are trailers that are available in the online social network sites and children often get addicted to such trailers and the updates in the social sites. Most of the children in the United States have been seen busy with their smart phones or computers watching and sharing these trailers on the social networking platform with their friends. This in turn has adverse social as well as psychological issues for the children and they tend to be more carried away in social networking and sharing Netflix updates with their friends. This causes distraction from a healthy life, loss of concentration in studies etc.

There are other ethical issues such as disparity I video quality for different users who use different kinds of internet connections irrespective of the fact that they pay the same subscription fees. For example a user who pays X amount of money but uses mobile internet to access the online Netflix services will get a video quality that is not as good for anther user who pays the same X amount of money but uses a faster Wi-Fi connection to watch the videos (Carr and Hayes 2015). This is Netflix’s unethical way of earning more revenue by utilizing the same bandwidth and resource, in which the consumers have to suffer (Lu et al. 2013). They do not get to enjoy the full HD experience of watching videos but they end up paying for the subscription. In this way they have a threat of losing the faith of its subscribers and eventually they may end up losing much of its subscribers in the future.

Figure: Gantt chart (Source: Created by author)

From this project, the complete understanding of the working of the Netfilx operations and the issues faced by the media industry can be understood in details. The reader will be able to understand the ethical considerations that should be untaken in the professional fields and the adverse effects caused by their decision-making processes (Dijck 2013). Most importantly, this project will help in developing critical thinking as well as analytical skills and get to know the steps and processes involved in a task that needs efficient project management skills (Onando and Mwangi 2014). The reader will also be able to develop leadership qualities and how to ensure optimum job satisfaction within the teammates working together in a particular project (Rimock 2013). The reader will also gain knowledge and ideas about how to frame a career in the media industry in companies like Netflix that provide online video streaming services and what are the pre requisites for such a career.

References: 

Carr, C.T. and Hayes, R.A., 2015. Social media: Defining, developing, and divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 23(1), pp.46-65.

Elovici, Y., Fire, M., Herzberg, A. and Shulman, H., 2014. Ethical considerations when employing fake identities in online social networks for research. Science and engineering ethics, 20(4), pp.1027-1043.

Jenner, M., 2016. Is this TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and binge-watching. New media & society, 18(2), pp.257-273.

Lu, Q., Zhu, L., Bass, L., Xu, X., Li, Z. and Wada, H., 2013, June. Cloud API issues: an empirical study and impact. In Proceedings of the 9th international ACM Sigsoft conference on Quality of software architectures (pp. 23-32). ACM.

Onando, M.I. and Mwangi, W., 2014. Temporal Absence in Recommendations: a survey of Temporal Patterns in Netflix Prize Data. International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI), 11(4), p.92.

Rimock, M., 2013. Regulatory issues concerning new media alternatives to television. Canadian Journal of Law and Technology, 11(2).

Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage.

Van Dijck, J., 2013. The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.

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