Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows
Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows
当然，观众正在放弃 Netflix 的剧集
Cancellations and long breaks between seasons make it all too easy to jump ship to the free alternatives in your pocket. 剧集被砍以及季度间漫长的等待，让观众太容易转投手机里那些免费的替代品了。
Even though Netflix is the world’s most popular paid streaming service, the company has been struggling to keep viewers watching its series after their first seasons. Beef — the streamer’s anthology about people locked in feuds — lost 70 percent of its viewership when it returned earlier this year. There seems to be some confusion as to why people aren’t champing at the bit to dive back into once-popular projects like the live-action adaptations of Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece. Netflix is reportedly hard at work trying to figure out what, exactly, is prompting subscribers to jump ship in droves. But if you’ve spent any time paying attention to the broader media landscape, the answers — there are a few — are fairly obvious. 尽管 Netflix 是全球最受欢迎的付费流媒体服务，但该公司一直难以让观众在第一季之后继续追剧。以人们陷入争执为主题的选集剧《怒呛人生》（Beef）在今年早些时候回归时，收视率流失了 70%。人们似乎对为何观众不再迫切地想要重温《降世神通：最后的气宗》和《海贼王》等曾经热门的真人改编剧感到困惑。据报道，Netflix 正在努力找出究竟是什么原因导致订阅用户纷纷流失。但如果你花点时间关注更广泛的媒体环境，答案（其实有几个）是相当明显的。
Some of Netflix’s problems are rooted in its internal practices, like the way it tends to cancel shows right as they start becoming more expensive to produce. It also doesn’t help that, on the whole, the wait between seasons of series has been gradually getting longer, which makes it easier for people to lose interest. But Netflix also has to deal with the reality that competitors like TikTok and YouTube are capturing people’s attention in ways that it simply can’t. Netflix 的一些问题根源于其内部做法，比如它倾向于在剧集制作成本开始增加时就将其砍掉。此外，剧集季度间的等待时间总体上逐渐变长，这也让观众更容易失去兴趣。但 Netflix 还必须面对一个现实：TikTok 和 YouTube 等竞争对手正以它无法企及的方式占据着人们的注意力。
It only took a few years for adults in the US to begin spending just about the same amount of time scrolling through TikTok as they do watching things on Netflix. This is undoubtedly part of the reason why the streamer has been so aggressive about getting into games, live sports, and video podcasts. Netflix also has plans to experiment with short-form content that sounds like it’s meant to be consumed in the moments when people have time to kill. But the simple fact that TikTok and YouTube are free makes them significantly more accessible than Netflix, and it seems very unlikely that short videos will be enough to get people signing up for the paid service. 仅仅几年时间，美国成年人花在刷 TikTok 上的时间就几乎与观看 Netflix 的时间持平。毫无疑问，这就是该平台为何如此积极地进军游戏、体育直播和视频播客领域的部分原因。Netflix 还计划尝试短视频内容，听起来像是为了填补人们碎片化时间而设计的。但 TikTok 和 YouTube 免费这一简单事实，使其比 Netflix 更具可及性，仅靠短视频似乎很难让人们愿意为付费服务买单。
In addition to viewers spending more time on other platforms, Netflix also has to contend with the way the streaming wars have fundamentally altered people’s relationships with episodic television. When the platform first launched, appointment watching was still a thing and people made an effort to keep up with programs from week to week. But Netflix’s binge model trained audiences to cluster around shows for brief windows before moving on to the Next Big Thing that folks are yapping about on social media. The binge model made it difficult for Netflix’s shows to maintain long-term engagement or generate the word-of-mouth buzz that turns people on the fence into paying customers. And while the company has had some success releasing projects on a weekly basis, it’s a bit too late in the game for that strategy to solve its fall-off problem. 除了观众在其他平台上花费更多时间外，Netflix 还必须应对流媒体战争从根本上改变了人们与剧集电视之间关系的事实。当该平台刚推出时，“准时收看”依然流行，人们会努力每周跟进节目。但 Netflix 的“刷剧模式”（binge model）训练观众在短时间内集中观看，然后迅速转向社交媒体上热议的下一个“爆款”。这种模式使得 Netflix 的剧集难以维持长期参与度，也难以产生那种能将观望者转化为付费用户的口碑效应。虽然该公司在每周更新项目上取得了一些成功，但对于解决其用户流失问题来说，这一策略似乎为时已晚。
Something else that Netflix has to take into consideration is that, sometimes, people just stop watching shows when they aren’t particularly enjoyable. As much as we all loved Stranger Things in its early days, the show became an unwieldy mess by its final season. Stranger Things was a big enough phenomenon that its diminishing quality didn’t exactly hurt its overall viewership. But the same can’t be said for some of Netflix’s newer would-be flagship shows like Avatar, which came out of the gate limping and quickly drew ire from fans of the original animated series. Netflix 还需要考虑的另一件事是，有时人们停止观看仅仅是因为剧集本身不再那么有趣了。尽管我们早期都很喜欢《怪奇物语》，但到了最后一季，该剧变得一团糟。不过《怪奇物语》的影响力足够大，质量下滑并没有真正损害其整体收视率。但对于 Netflix 一些新的“准旗舰剧”来说情况并非如此，比如《降世神通》，它一开播就表现疲软，并迅速招致了原版动画粉丝的愤怒。
What Netflix needs to really turn this ship around is to focus on producing the kind of programming that gets people locked in, and then actually sticking with it once shows manage to build dedicated audiences. This will take time, patience, and money on the company’s part, which isn’t exactly the kind of strategy that gets stockholders salivating. But it’s really the only way that Netflix can hope to climb its way out of this hole and keep other platforms from eating its lunch. Netflix 若想真正扭转局面，需要专注于制作能留住观众的内容，并在剧集成功培养出忠实受众后坚持下去。这需要公司投入时间、耐心和金钱，这并不是那种能让股东垂涎三尺的策略。但这确实是 Netflix 走出困境、防止其他平台蚕食其市场的唯一希望。