Netflix retrying its Social TV strategy

written by: Gianluigi Cuccureddu

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Published on Friday, 05 November 2010 15:48

Netflix is having another go at its Social TV strategy after just two months... since they shut down their community features. Apparently the reason for this new attempt stems from evangelism by Facebook's CEO Marck Zuckerberg who said:

"...of a world in which every industry must fundamentally become social or risk becoming irrelevant".

Mike Hart, Director of engineering for APIs at Netflix told FastCompany:

“It’s very nascent, as of a couple days ago. We’re entering a bunch of new markets, internationally. There will be less brand recognition, less word of mouth. So viral acquisition strategies have the potential to gain for us endless new markets.

“[Zuckerberg] firmly believes that all the surviving services, the leaders in their spaces in the next decade, will be social through-and-through. We think it’s worth a bet to invest in that kind of vision to realize bigger gains for the business as well as to protect us from potential disrupters entering our space and leveraging those types of technologies.”

Difference in strategy

The old social strategy by Netflix was a limited version, embedded in ideas of community that predates current state of the Web, which expressed itself in sharing tools for the users' recommendations and reviews. The new strategy though is based upon the diffusion of social networks-like Facebook- which fundamentally changes the way how companies market their products and the opportunities of co-creational marketing.