Confronted this week with the stark reality of having shed subscribers for the first time in a decade, Netflix’s co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos made the answer to the problem seem incredibly simple.

“We’ve gotta take it up a notch,” said Hastings, responding to the fact that a crop of rival streaming giants had begun to make serious inroads on the content front. “This is our moment to shine.”

Sarandos, Netflix’s content chief, added: “We’ve got to compete and we’ve got to continue to improve on the core service, which is making TV series and films, and now games, that people really love.

“We have to have an Adam Project or a Bridgerton every month, and make sure that’s the expectation of the service constantly,” he told a televised Q&A session for investors on Tuesday.

All the headlines were about two big strategic moves announced by the streamer: the planned introduction of a low-cost option supported by ads (long anathema to Hastings, Netflix’s founder, and now all but guaranteed); and efforts to monetise the 100 million or so freeloaders who piggyback off the 222 million paid subscriptions worldwide.

But the broader message was clear: content remains king.

What’s a little less easy to discern is what that content looks like.

If House of Cards set the tone when it became the first official “Netflix Original” in February 2013, what show best represents the brand today? Is it Bridgerton or is it Byron Baes? Is it the witty drama of Sex Education or the tacky dating-in-creature-make-up reality show Sexy Beasts? Is it the polished historical drama of The Crown, or the endless supply of true-crime documentary series?

Is there, in short, a discernible house style in 2022? And if not, is there a risk that in trying to be all things to all people, Netflix has lost sight of what once made it special?

When Netflix officially launched in Australia in 2015, its local library contained just 1666 titles. As of June 1 last year, it held 7531. That’s a lot of shows and movies, and a lot of variety. How can we even entertain the idea that there’s a “typical” Netflix show with so many to choose from?

“It is difficult to generalise about Netflix content because Netflix is really many different services in one,” says Ramon Lobato, associate professor in media and communication at RMIT University in Melbourne.

“Most observations about Netflix programming refer only to a small number of high-profile shows, like Squid Game or Bridgerton, but this is the tip of the iceberg, because there are so many other Netflix originals out there, from historical epics to horror films to cooking shows.

“We know very little about who watches these shows, where, and whether they like them or not,” adds Lobato, who has been tracking the composition of Netflix’s Australian library – and the amount of Australian content on it and rival streaming services – for years. “Netflix is never moving in just one direction; it is pursuing a portfolio strategy, investing in many different kinds of content simultaneously.”

The service’s offering, writes Mattias Frey in his 2021 book MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand, has always been in the form of a “buffet model” that “aims to overwhelm with quantity”. MUBI, by contrast, offers subscribers a small selection of “hand-picked” titles each month; its market is the dedicated or aspiring cineaste rather than the mass audience Netflix aims to serve.

If MUBI then is a boutique, Netflix is a supermarket. Its turnover is massive. According to the SVOD (subscription video on demand) dashboard maintained by the federal Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research, Netflix added 2181 new titles to its Australian library in 2021 and removed 1663. By way of comparison, Apple TV+ added 49.

Arguably, if you can’t find something to watch on Netflix, it’s because you aren’t looking hard enough. It’s equally true that what you find when you go looking depends very much on who you, or your fellow householders, are.

Share your living quarters with teenagers, for instance, and you’ll think Netflix is all about young adult-focused stuff like Pretty Little Liars, Riverdale and Gossip Girl. Share it with a sports nut and it’s all documentaries on Formula 1 (Drive to Survive), basketball (The Last Dance) or scandals, in cycling (Icarus), gymnastics (Athlete A), or wrestling (Team Foxcatcher). Live with a movie buff and you’re likely watching Oscar contenders The Power of the Dog or Da Five Bloods or The Irishman or Roma. Live with an Adam Sandler fan and … well, you have our sympathy (Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems aside).

The breakout shows are, in fact, relatively few but with the sheer volume of new titles dropping every month, they aren’t that far between. And importantly, they’re the ones that get people chattering.

No show in the history of Netflix has been as big as Squid Game. It racked up 1.65 billion viewing hours in its first 28 days on the platform, more than twice as many as the next biggest (Bridgerton season 2).

Across its nine hours, that equates to about 183 million people watching the Korean splatter thriller in full. But market analysts estimate Netflix has more than 600 million viewers worldwide (because many paid members live in multi-person households or share their subscriptions with people outside the household), and that means more than two-thirds of viewers did not watch Netflix’s biggest show ever in its entirety.

In other words, no matter how zeitgeisty any one show is – whether it’s a House of Cards, a Stranger Things, a Tiger King or an Anatomy of a Scandal – the vast majority of Netflix customers are watching something else.

“Netflix’s business is serving a broader audience than TV Twitterati,” says Professor Amanda Lotz, team leader at the Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre and author of the just-released book Netflix and Streaming Video. “The big challenge here is how difficult it is to ‘see’ the entirety of Netflix, even just its originals.”

Lotz estimates there are about 1500 original commissions in Netflix’s library now. In recent research, she and colleagues looked at the Netflix libraries in 17 different countries and found they consistently held about 40 per cent US content (including in the US), with the rest coming from a variety of different territories.

Across the 17 countries, the libraries remained about 60 per cent the same, and about half of that shared content – or 30 per cent of the total – consisted of Netflix original commissions.

What does that tell us? That Netflix’s model is uncommonly global.

It also tells us that, in a sense, Netflix’s offering is becoming more Netflixy over time – in no small part because of the loss of licensed library content as the studios morph into streamers – even if the precise qualities of Netflixiness remain hard to define.

With a content spend (on both original commissions and acquisitions) of more than $US17 billion in 2021, Netflix is covering the plethora from cake-making to awards bait and everything in between. That’s a huge amount, but it is dwarfed by the $US33 billion Disney will spend this year, across its suite of services – theatrical, broadcast (it owns the ABC network), cable (ESPN, National Geographic) and streaming. And with the deep pockets of Apple and Amazon as competitors, the pressure to spend big is unlikely to ease up any time soon.

“I think we’ve got to continue to invest in the content, both in the quality and the variety of the content,” Sarandos said last week. “We will continue to grow the content spend relative to prior years. What’s most important, though, is the impact of the slate.”

How do you measure impact? Awards are one way, and global film boss Scott Stuber has made no secret of his desire to nab a best picture Oscar (despite having been nominated seven times, Netflix was pipped by Apple TV+ in the race to become the first streamer to nab that prize when it won with CODA last month). But as some internal research leaked to Bloomberg late last year shows, Netflix has other ways too.

The company estimated Squid Game, which cost $US21.4 million to make, would generate $US891.1 million in “impact value”. At the time the figures were calculated, about 87 million people had watched the show in its entirety.

Perhaps it’s simply that the streamer made such a splash with House of Cards – top-line cast (a pre-disgrace Kevin Spacey at the top of his game, a magnificent Robin Wright, a prickly Kate Mara) and Oscar-winning director (David Fincher), bold visual style, outrageous storytelling – that the idea of it going head-to-head with HBO’s premium drama is indelibly etched in our minds. But it is inescapably reductive.

“Netflix has never been the source of what I’d call the ‘best’ work,” Lotz says. “But it is so reliably strongly above average and deep in titles that it is the last service I’d cancel.”

What really defines it is that there are many “different corners” of programming catering to different tastes and markets. Besides, she adds, “I’m not convinced the ‘spectacular series’ approach – what Amazon is doing with Lord of the Rings – is all that sound a strategy.”

In the end, the business model for all streamers isn’t about hit shows. It’s about attracting customers, and keeping them.

“The question we have to ask with Netflix, and any SVOD, is what makes people pay,” Lotz says. “Focusing only on a few titles misses a lot of what creates value.”

Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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