The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown

Yesterday, the trailer for the new Netflix exclusive series, “House of Cards” was released, featuring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as an ambitious politician and his wife, meddling in the affairs of a newly elected president and his administration.

Netflix has committed to two seasons of the show, based on a BBC miniseries. The first batch of episodes will premiere on February 1st, 2013. “House of Cards” is Netflix’s first major foray into original content, which may prove pivotal to the streaming service’s future. Netflix is one of the most popular online content providers, but Hollywood has been wary of doing business with it, for fear of undercutting their profits on other non-internet platforms. So, Netflix is investing in its own content. It outbid HBO and AMC for “House of Cards,” which boasts David Fincher as one of the creators, who will also be directing the pilot episode.

The ability of web-based content to rival television and movie content has been widely discussed, but nobody’s ever tried doing anything as ambitious as “House of Cards.” If this series takes off, it could be the beginning of web content becoming a serious cultural force, potentially upending all the existing content creation models. Skeptics point out that most of the web-based original content so far has only attracted very limited audiences, and are only financially viable if they’re made on shoestring budgets. However, none of the online services have the kind of distribution platform and massive existing subscriber base that Netflix has. They’re perhaps the only major streaming services with the resources and to try an experiment of this magnitude with a reasonable chance of success.

In my own circles, online distribution services like Netflix are already having an impact. Over the summer I was surprised to discover quite a few online conversations centering around smaller films like “Goon” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The participants weren’t the usual art house geeks, but casual viewers who had come across the titles on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and had enjoyed them enough to pass along recommendations. This was around the same that the press was full of doom and gloom about Netflix’s prospects because several of its content deals had expired, removing many of the most popular recent and mainstream titles from the available online catalog. I think many people underestimated the appeal of the independent and alternative titles that remained. When you take away the hype, the quality of the Hollywood and non-Hollywood titles is pretty comparable, and once viewers figured that out, Netflix’s content problems didn’t seem so bad after all.

One aspect of Netflix’s release plans for “House of Cards” I find especially fascinating is that multiple episodes will be released at once. This reflects the difference in the way that web content is consumed compared to televised content. The Netflix folks know that their subscribers like to marathon multiple episodes, and are offering the ability to do the same with their own original series immediately instead of parsing them out week by week. I’m not sure I understand the logic here if Netflix’s goal is attracting and keeping new subscribers, but maybe the promise of quicker gratification will be seen as a plus.

I should add the disclaimer here that I’m generally biased in Netflix’s favor. I want them to succeed and survive, even though I know that there are many problems with their current business model and there’s no guarantee that their original content plans are going to pay off for them. I have a friend working at Hulu right now who is absolutely certain that Netflix is on its way out, and she’s far more knowledgeable about the business side of these things than I am. However, I’m still optimistic that Netflix will figure out ways to keep its subscriber base happy even without the big studios, and their programming efforts could bring some real legitimacy and respectability to web-only content.

If they do fail, it’s still going to be a hell of a show in and of itself. I’ll be signing back up for my next round of Netflix in February, for a front row seat to all the fireworks. There have already been some rumblings from the television critics, trying to figure out how they’re going to review the new series in light of Netflix’s unorthodox release approach. “House of Cards” looks very promising from the talent involved, though, and I’m expecting good things from it. Also, there’s the upcoming return of “Arrested Development,” a resurrection I’m not sure would have happened without Netflix. If the whole scheme fails, at least we’ll have gotten some good content out of the experiment.

If these shows and the others are a success though, and do provide a significant financial boost to Netflix, things are going to get even more interesting.
---