Quality or quantity
I’ve been a member of Netflix since the year they were founded, yesterday I cancelled. Netflix remains one of the companies I absolutely love. Their ability to eat away at their current business to invent their next business is inspiring.
But as a user I find I have little time to watch television. If I’m going to fill those hours, I want it to be something really excellent, and I found that HBO Go fit that much more than the largely second rate nature of Netflix’ streaming offering. I would much rather spend an hour on John Adams or The Wire than Killers or The Accidental Spy. Megan and I still go to the movies, so generally the movies we’ve really wanted to see we already saw - but that’s not the case with HBO.
Most people equate quantity with what it takes to scale, and having every movie type, or game genre, or music category, or thought, is certainly a laudable goal. But considering how much media we can actually consume, and how much more discerning we are becoming as our choices increase, there are increasingly companies of huge scale that are doing so by lazer focus on a few products.
- Pixar, Blizzard, Valve, Apple, HBO all focus on a small number of releases that are of the highest quality (Cars 2 and Mobile Me excepted). They rely heavily on trust with their audience, which creates anticipation for new products.
- Electronic Arts, Flickr, Netflix, Amazon, Universal Music all focus on mining massive numbers of SKUs, trying to have breadth while still making smart choices about the few major products to push (“pay attention now!”).
I’m conflating publishers and content creators here, but with good reason - I think the distinction is becoming less relevant. PopCap has relatively few releases, for instance, but they pursue a hybrid developer & publisher strategy. What they have is a brand their players trust. At Conduit Labs we had the largest catalog of music of any music games company, and I’m not sure it was a better choice than perhaps going deep with a few bands that believed in us to build more customized experiences.
It’s worth thinking about where your company lies on the spectrum of quality vs quantity, since I’m pretty sure in the middle is not a good place to be.
