There was a time when Netflix was more or less the only game in town, but now it seems that every man and his dog has their own streaming platform for their content.
Netflix used to be able to pick up content pretty cheaply from production companies, but those days have passed, some companies do not want to licence their content to the ‘enemy’ now.
Netflix now has a massive void to fill in regard to content, or they are going to haemorrhage subscribers, so while they are still producing a lot of quality content, they also have to spend a lot of money on not so good content, to boost the amount of shows they can list.
One way they do this is to cancel popular, but expensive shows, that do not balance the books financially, and use that money to produce several cheaper shows. An example of this is K-dramas, now I am a fan of world cinema and TV, but I imagine that they could produce 5, single season series, for the price of say one season of Altered Carbon.
South Korean TV producers tend to wrap up the story in one, or two seasons with no cliffhangers, which means that Netflix can rightly say, they have five shows. The fact that they now have 5, single season shows instead a one series with 5 seasons does not matter in their eyes, it is all about content numbers.
The downside of this, is that Netflix seems to have changed their business model to one of quantity over quality, which I think will come back and bite them in the long-run.
Another reason for so many “useless” shows is that Netflix may want to licence a particular movie or TV series, but the producers will only licence it as part of a bundle.
Netflix (in the UK anyway) seems to be flooded with cheap content from India and the Far East, now both regions do, make quality content, but I really have no interest in Bollywood movies from the 1950s, which were very poor for the most part in my opinion. I remember watching them on TV in the 90s, and these old movies had terrible picture and sound quality, not to mention everybody used to break into a song and dance routine, at the drop of a hat.