We're back. Netflix is getting into the short-form content business. The company announced this week it's partnered with BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, and various Penske media brands to bring the digital videos to the platform. These videos will range from three-minute shorts to 20-minute episodes focusing on travel, cooking, fashion, as well as celebrity content profiles and viral content. All these people have been making these extra, what I call, shoulder content that you see. Oh, I used to do it when I ran Holler de Porter. We had to do the video version. The video version. And Conde Nast does actually a pretty good job. They all do a pretty good job at it. This announcement comes in the wake of a new report that Netflix is struggling to retain fans between the first and second seasons of top shows, with some shows shedding 50 percent of their audience. Engagement is slowing, too. The amount of time customers spent watching Netflix last year grew by less than 2 percent. Talk about why they're doing this. And just for people, I last yesterday went on Brian Williams' new show, which is they've also bought a bunch of podcasters. I think the one that's doing really well is The Breakfast Club. That the one they talking about We know next week when their engagement report comes out for the first half of the year Yeah but I don think they high I don I feel like I have heard internally the numbers are not high but it early days That what they saying They encouraged by the trends Yeah, but the Breakfast Club, from what I understand, is a real standout. That's what I heard from them. So talk about this whole thing and include what, it's not really podcasting. It was a TV show that I, it was an interview. It was like, you know, Charlie Rose with 100% less creepy. It was just, I don't know. You know what I mean? It was like, that's what the set looked like. Well, they're calling the video podcast. I mean, there's a distinction there. I think the guilds would love for them to call them talk shows because they have to pay more for them. Fine. It was a talk show. This is all just about Netflix having YouTube envy. Yes, exactly. They look at the engagement report every month from Nielsen. They're getting their butts kicked by YouTube. They know why, you know, so much of the viewing on YouTube is this lower quality, you know, user generated. It's just, it's a different product than Netflix. It's free, Netflix is not free. And they saying how can we boost our engagement numbers without going full on user generated and becoming YouTube but having enough on the platform where people start to consider it the everyday You just go there to watch video. Yeah, I think it's tough. It's sad to me. Netflix is such a great thing going. They're just so it's so in their head that they've got to match YouTube because they see if this trajectory continues, YouTube will eat everything. And then ultimately they'll wake up in five years and they will have to put shows on YouTube because it's so big and so dominant. Right. That is probably true. Because ads, I mean, everybody's been talking about the Netflix stock being down 40 percent from last year. And part of that is because they went after Warner Brothers and all the investors are like, whoa, wait a second. You guys thought you needed a big studio to compete here? I thought you were the darling of media. But what it really is, I think now, is investors are looking for the growth narrative from Netflix. How are they going to continue to grow? And internally they see the ads platform as being a growth engine It is it been rather well It is because it not huge I mean Netflix I mean Amazon turned on ads for all prime video viewers and it instantly became a gigantic ads business Netflix did not do that. It's an opt-in. You get to pay less money to get ads. It's actually more attractive across the globe from what I understand. Yeah, people like free or less money and they're willing to tolerate ads. But they need the inventory. They need people on it because they're coming from this position of so many of their subscribers are non-ads customers that even though they're growing the ads tier and they're adding a bunch, you know, the percentage of new customers that sign up, most of them do so for the ad tier. The ad tier. They want inventory. And the best way to do it is this lower quality, lower cost, you know, in a sports term, a baseball, you know, a middle reliever, someone that just eats up innings. Right, so you bring all these things in. And that's what these podcasts are. They're looking, you know, Netflix is also the evening streamer. People watch at night and YouTube is the daytime streamer. People watch at work or at home while they're doing laundry or whatever. And they want to compete for those daytime