Are you still watching? A crisis analysis of Netflix

Ever since its move towards streaming content online, Netflix is considered a posterchild of a self-disrupting company. However, in late 2021 the company’s stock price lost more than 70% of its value. This study aims to investigate the reasons for the crisis Netflix is facing and assessing whether the company has the ability to handle its current and future challenges through the use of the RBV, VRIO and dynamic capabilities concepts used in the context of strategic adaptive management as well as crisis management for academic teaching. The dissertation provides an overview of the aforementioned concepts as well as information on the market, the company and the crisis of Netflix through secondary data gathered from interviews, newspaper articles, publicly available data as well as the book “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea” by Netflix’s first CEO. The study includes a chapter providing teaching notes for the academic use of this case. Several potential assignments are laid out and answered, bridging the gap between the theoretical concepts introduced and the information provided on the case, laying out possible strategic moves that could save the company and prevent them from following the footsteps of Nokia and Kodak. The conclusion of the case is that Netflix possesses several VRIO resources and therefore competitive advantages as well as dynamic capabilities mainly due to their reactive and forward-looking management that has proven its capability of doing what is “best for business” multiple times throughout its history.Desde a sua mudança para o streaming, a Netflix é considerada um exemplo de uma empresa que se autodestrói. No entanto, no final de 2021, o preço das ações da empresa perdeu mais de 70% do seu valor. Este estudo visa investigar as razões da crise que a Netflix está a enfrentar e avaliar se a empresa tem a capacidade de lidar com os seus desafios atuais e futuros através da utilização dos conceitos RBV, VRIO e capacidades dinâmicas utilizados no contexto da gestão estratégica adaptativa e da gestão de crises para o ensino académico. A dissertação fornece uma visão geral dos conceitos acima mencionados, bem como informações sobre o mercado, a empresa e a crise da Netflix através de dados secundários recolhidos de entrevistas, artigos de jornais, dados disponíveis publicamente e o livro "That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea" do primeiro CEO da Netflix. O estudo inclui um capítulo com notas didáticas para a utilização académica. São apresentadas e respondidas várias tarefas potenciais, conectando os conceitos teóricos introduzidos e as informações do caso e apresentando possíveis movimentos estratégicos que poderiam salvar a empresa antes de seguir os passos da Nokia ou Kodak. A conclusão do caso é que a Netflix possui recursos VRIO e, por conseguinte, vantagens competitivas e capacidades dinâmicas, devido à sua gestão reativa e orientada para o futuro, que provou a sua capacidade de fazer o que é "melhor para o negócio" várias vezes

Saving Energy in Mobile Devices for On-Demand Multimedia Streaming -- A Cross-Layer Approach

This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient multimedia delivery system called EStreamer. First, we study the relationship between buffer size at the client, burst-shaped TCP-based multimedia traffic, and energy consumption of wireless network interfaces in smartphones. Based on the study, we design and implement EStreamer for constant bit rate and rate-adaptive streaming. EStreamer can improve battery lifetime by 3x, 1.5x and 2x while streaming over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G respectively.Comment: Accepted in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP), November 201

Mobile cloud game in high performance computing environment

Mobile cloud game is a solution to play high-end games in indigent thin clients with a diversity of end-user devices, and as real-time gaming, mobile cloud game hosting game engines in the cloud. Moreover, frequent change in network quality is another issue that should be limited to run the real fast cloud game. Thus, reliable software components between cloud and user devices as clients, including using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms such as machine learning, deep learning and so on will enhance the game performance, particularly in multiplayer and real-time conditions. In this paper, we list the mobile cloud game architecture in the high-performance computing (HPC) environment, where a load of the game will be distributed between servers as cloud and clients. The server node as clouds or clients will consist of more than one server with many processors (cores) or sometimes can be recognized as distributed computing. Using HPC for cloud games will boost the game performance where the execution times will be dispersed not only in some node in servers and clients but in many cores of each server or client. The involvement of the internet of things (IoT) and ubiquitous access from heterogeneous devices will give benefit to enjoyment in the game itself

Pricing of Content Services – An Empirical Investigation of Music as a Service

In the last years new concepts of digital music distribution have been developed. One of them is Music as a Service, which provides music streaming over the internet as a service - without transferring ownership for the content. This differentiates Music as a Service from Download to Own, which is used by music download platforms predominantly and is the most widely studied concept in academic research. The aim of this paper is to receive first research implications about customers’ attitudes towards MaaS. Based on an empirical survey of 132 Music as a Service users, this research explores the effects of product configurations on consumers’ utility and their willingness to pay (WTP) for premium offers. We can show that next to price, contract duration and music quality as the most important product attributes, there is a high WTP for overcoming insufficient mobile internet coverage

Proxy-based near real-time TV content transmission in mobility over 4G with MPEG-DASH transcoding on the cloud

[EN] This paper presents and evaluates a system that provides TV and radio services in mobility using 4G communications. The system has mainly two blocks, one on the cloud and another on the mobile vehicle. On the cloud, a DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) receiver obtains the TV/radio signal and prepares the contents to be sent through 4G. Specifically, contents are transcoded and packetized using the DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard. Vehicles in mobility use their 4G connectivity to receive the flows transmitted by the cloud. The key element of the system is an on-board proxy that manages the received flows and offers them to the final users in the vehicle. The proxy contains a buffer that helps reduce the number of interruptions caused by hand over effects and lack of coverage. The paper presents a comparison between a live transmission using 4G connecting the clients directly with the cloud server and a near real-time transmission based on an on-board proxy. Results prove that the use of the proxy reduces the number of interruptions considerably and, thus, improves the Quality of Experience of users at the expense of slightly increasing the delay.This work is supported by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnologico Industrial (CDTI) from the Government of Spain under the project "Plataforma avanzada de conectividad en movilidad" (CDTI IDI-20150126) and the project "Desarrollo de nueva plataforma de entretenimiento multimedia para entornos nauticos" (CDTI TIC-20170102).Arce Vila, P.; De Fez Lava, I.; Belda Ortega, R.; Guerri Cebollada, JC.; Ferrairó, S. (2019). Proxy-based near real-time TV content transmission in mobility over 4G with MPEG-DASH transcoding on the cloud. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 78(18):26399-26425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-07840-6S2639926425781

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Limits To Certainty in QoS Pricing and Bandwidth

Advanced services require more reliable bandwidth than currently provided by the Internet Protocol, even with the reliability enhancements provided by TCP. More reliable bandwidth will be provided through QoS (quality of service), as currently discussed widely. Yet QoS has some implications beyond providing ubiquitous access to advance Internet service, which are of interest from a policy perspective. In particular, what are the implications for price of Internet services? Further, how will these changes impact demand and universal service for the Internet. This paper explores the relationship between certainty of bandwidth and certainty of price for Internet services over a statistically shared network and finds that these are mutually exclusive goals.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200