An unlikely suspect found himself at the center of several news stories regarding streaming media staple Netflix: comic Adam Sandler.

Whether you know him best as The Wedding Singer, Mr. Deeds, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, or The Waterboy, the prolific and divisive movie star highlights the challenge faced by Netflix and other content libraries in both curating and recommending content.

This conundrum came to light with the recent announcement that Netflix would be changing its rating system, ditching the familiar five star system for a simpler thumbs up or thumbs down.

Adam Sandler as Mr. Deeds

In explaining the change, Netflix executives noted that while viewers rated critically acclaimed films and high brow documentaries highly, the reality was that they’d watch “silly movies,” the sort which Sandler is known for, much more often. While users were stingy with their star ratings, they were generous with their viewing time.

Netflix soon put out an eye-popping statistic: users had spent over half a billion hours watching Adam Sandler.

However surprising, the real question for Netflix and other OTT video providers is what to make of this information. The paradox that highly-rated and highly-watched content are not one in the same.

Stocking the Shelves

Possible content allotments; critically acclaimed movies vs Adam Sandler films

Netflix is, in essence, a digital Blockbuster store. Despite massive yearly spending on content, their budget isn’t unlimited, and thus nor is Netflix’s library.

In fact, Netflix’s content catalogue is shrinking. And as it does, the company faces pressure to choose carefully what to stock their virtual shelves with.

If you’re Netflix, is it better to have a shelf full of hit shows and movies, praised by viewers and critics alike, or the type of content that viewers will watch again and again, though perhaps not publicly admit to doing so?

Growth vs Retention

Prestige titles are far more costly than mediocre movies and sitcoms from decades past, but the theory is that award-winning movies and shows play a role in enticing viewers to sign up for the service.

Adam Sandler as Happy Gilmore

But after seeing that Oscar-winner once, how often will you be queueing it up with an SVOD service? Most likely not often, if at all. And if that’s true for most of the content on the service, you’ll very quickly run out of content you want to watch. The service loses its value proposition, and churn is the result.

The other side of that coin presents its own problems. TV viewers have proven that even today, decades after their original runs, viewers will happily sit through hours of Fraiser, Friends, The Office, and other classic sitcoms, or 500 million hours of Adam Sandler. But popularity aside, a slate of aging and familiar titles isn’t the type of selling point that can move subscriptions.

The Limit of Libraries

Operators of SVOD libraries face some risky economics. While their business model may seem straightforward, actually pulling it off requires a delicate balance.

The formula for financial success is this: have enough content that viewers want to watch, but spending little enough to leave a margin.

Even Netflix has to make tough choices when it comes to content. And these choices are, in essence, a gamble. Netflix is betting on what it thinks will be popular, something neither human experts nor algorithms can predict months or years in advance, when these decisions are made.

When these bets go bad, it’s frustrating all around, for consumers and SVOD operators alike.

Adam Sandler as Billy Madison

Libraries are limited pools of content, in an age when consumers want and expect umlimited access to any and everything.

What consumers (and the media industry) need is an aggregated solution that can serve up the content they want to watch from multiple sources and services, with multiple options by which they can choose to be monetized.

Rather than the high stakes game of trying to guess what users want to watch or steer them towards the content you already have, aggregated solutions put consumers in control, with a seemless experience that gives them what they want.