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Comment by brianstorms | Hacker News Reader

The code may be faster but the user experience continues to get slower, i.e., it takes more time than ever to find something worth watching. The recent UI changes simply disguise the fact that there are less titles available. Especially movies. Lots of filler, straight-to-video content that never got theatrical exhibition because the content sucked. No way to filter it out. No way to tell Netflix I really do NOT want to see this, I will never watch it, I really am not interested. Netflix will continue showing these unwanted titles to you. This is not speeding up a user experience. This is not making Netflix faster. And the user experience is really the only thing that matters.

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The lack of titles is the fault of the studios. Not much netflix can do about it. Which is why they are increasing production of their own content. From a UI/business perspective many people have argued that it's always better to show a user something than nothing. "We don't have the movie you are looking for but here are some you might like" is better than "We don't have the movie you are looking for."

For anyone curious as to why "the studios" are not giving their titles to Netflix is because they are developing their own, independent Netflix's (i.e. Comcast is has internet TV at tvgo.xfinity.com).

I genuinely wonder who has a better brand image among the general population, between Comcast and Netflix.

Most definitely Netflix. But Comcast and other cable companies have long-standing ties to studios, and are betting that if they can secure the content rights, they can win regardless.

which is why it's so important that netflix can have their own original series. House of cards, and dare devil comes to mind, but they need to do more. Once they break the strangle-hold of studios, and have their own content, they can slowly leverage their large subscriber numbers and fight the studios on even terms. I wish HBO and netflix join forces, because i see them as being more similar than different. But of course, that'd never happen...

Comcast makes the mistake of using their online streaming as leverage to tie people to their cable subscription model. I wouldn't mind looking into subscribing to their streaming, but I'm not interested in cable TV so they're out of luck. IMO this gives Netflix the advantage for now at least.

Comcast can charge a crapload of money for cable.

If they offer internet services at netflix prices and are highly successful (lots of signups) - if this allows a small fraction of their cable customers to cut ties, Comcast loses money.

How is just the studios fault. Do any studios refuse to license? Or is Netflix not offering the fair value. 8 bucks a month doesn't buy as much content as it used to.

>8 bucks a month doesn't buy as much content as it used to.

In music it almost buys you every song, ever.

Not really (plenty of artists opt out) and the big artists that remain bitch about the price. Just like the movie studios complain.

Music is vastly cheaper to produce than cinema and television.

Perminute yes. The cost of producing all music ever has probably been higher than all movies ever just because of volume. TV is less clear would be interesting to see the numbers.

I'm not sure why total volume really matters that much. A more relevant metric would be production cost compared to sale price. A music album costs about $15 at the most, and I would imagine that the biggest pop records only cost a few million dollars at the most. A new movie costs around the same, but a few million dollars is very cheap for a movie with a wide release. Of course, I could just be way off on my estimates of producing a major pop music album.

I wish, there's tons of stuff that isn't on any given streaming music service. Spotify has tons of stuff I miss, and I'm sure the rest are similar.

Music is like 2 magnitudes less costly than TV and probably three less costly than movies. Spotify charging 10 should show you how much a full movie subscription would cost.

Eight bucks a month is supporting some good quality content they are developing themselves in addition to their third-party offerings. Much like HBO has done for many years now.

I would also say the market is a determining factor in the decision to make it eight a month.

Studios don't see Netflix as fair value no matter what they offer if they think they can go do it themselves. As if the market will support dozens of independent content channels at eight to fifteen dollars a month each. People are wanting to get away from cable, not find a way to recreate it.

I'm sure Netflix would be willing to bump up the price if they could get the content and the market would pay it. I have a feeling many studios would still say no as they explore their own options.

HBO supports a handful of shows and movies on double what Netflix charges. Netflix makes up a lot of that on increased marketshare, but still, I'm not sure they can afford to generate a lot of content.

>People are wanting to get away from cable, not find a way to recreate it.

But it's totally unreasonable to believe you'll get the same content as cable at a steep reduction in price. Sure you can take away cable profits and delivery expense, but you have to add in Netflix profit and delivery expense. It'll be cheaper, but not by a lot. Unless Netflix increases the subscriber base, but cable and networks already had a massive marketshare.

The value Netflix provides on 8 dollars is miraculous. But most of that pricing is hinged on netflix being a rerun service. Studios sell them stuff that is old and will never run on TV again. Netflix is sort of a parasite on cable and the movie industry.

If netflix actually kills cable and broadcast TV, then who is going to make all the shows for it?

As netflix becomes the normal way to consume media the expense of the content is going to shoot up. Because media is priced based on price discrimination. If netflix becomes the premium market, it'll have to pay premium prices.

If you are a cable subscriber there are ways to get HBO on a cheap monthly basis if you are willing to play the cable game. How many times have people called in threatening to cancel to get a deal? Cable treats full price as something for suckers and treats their customers as such. HBO Now is overpriced and I seriously doubt it'll make much headway unless they make some serious changes to justify it.

It is not totally unreasonable to expect Netflix, and similar services, to replace cable, because most of the content that cable provides these days is total rubbish. I've been a cable cutter for over five years now and every time I visit someone who has cable I scan the stations wondering why they pay so much for all that crap. Netflix has a lot of crap as well, but I don't pay $150 a month for it.

Although Netflix does offer a great deal of content that is considered old, but so does cable. A number of stations, that are not the traditional broadcast networks, features old content and a good number of stations that produce new content simple repeat it nonstop to fill in time.

I don't believe Netflix will necessarily kill cable by itself and broadcast is making a slow comeback. Although broadcast is still niche these days, much like vinyl. But as for content? I seriously doubt there will be a lack of new content in the new wild world of no cable TV. Especially since most of the content on cable today is not created by cable companies, just broadcasted by them. There's no reason any number of content creators couldn't make a deal with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, or any future content broadcast method to show their stuff. They do it with Hulu now, which is how I watch my new content instead of waiting for it to show up elsewhere. Netflix has several deals with content creators now.

We no longer live in the world where someone with lots of capital is required to get a project started. There are several examples of people on low budgets making good content. Premium content will always have a premium cost, but that isn't necessarily just because of the cost of production. There are numerous reasons why one show would cost more than another show, not just the cost of creating the content in of itself.

With regard to the parent's complaint about movies, the biggest factor is probably the come-for-the-movies-stay-for-the-TV-shows effect. Consider having 100 40-minute episodes of a TV show vs a collection of 50 ~90 minute movies. Few people binge watch unrelated movies for hours on end compared to TV series. And that "there's still more episodes left" hook is great for retention too.

But especially in TV series, there's a lot more competition than there used to be, and so prices are being driven way up. And Netflix is devoting more of their budget to original programming as well.

There's probably very little due to studio nefariousness. The studios largely want to get paid, and creators being able to choose which studios to work with is a pretty big factor in keeping them mostly honest. It's like how TV studios are willing to sell shows to other networks if they'll make a better offer than the network under the same parent umbrella -- the studio has its own bottom line and future prospects to worry about.

Our 8 bucks or whatever per month is hands down the best money we ever spent. I should write a blog article on cutting the cable with OTA and Roku/Netflix.

Fully agree with you. What is OTA though?

Over The Air (traditional broadcast TV)

Not entirely. Netflix can have it, but still tells you they don't because their entire streaming library is not simultaneously available.

Netflix rotates their streaming content in an attempt to make old content look new. A series or movie will disappear for a year or two only to re-appear as though it's something brand new to the Netflix lineup, rather than a case of Netflix shuffling great chunks of content in and out of play.

I don't mind them doing that, I can understand the improbability of supporting their entire streaming library at once, just from a management perspective.

The studios do give netflix grief. It'll be interesting to see how this works out. I can't foresee any future where each of the big studios can support any ~10 a month model to show only their content. Maybe a dollar or two. But definitely no more, and it would have to be commercial-free.

There will have to be an aggregate distrubtor, whether it's NetFlix or another company, or maybe just devices to access studio's streaming channels (Roku, etc.). I don't see each studio being able to maintain the revenue to make the required streaming infrastructure cost effective.

The selection used to bother me until I realized it was due to treating it as a replacement for a video rental store. Makes sense since the original DVD-by-mail service aimed to compete in that space.

But now I treat it more like a really cheap version of cable TV. With cable, I can turn it on at any given time and channel surf until I find something I wouldn't mind watching. The specific movie or show I want to see probably won't be on but sometimes it is and the rest of the time, I'd just flip until I found something interesting.

The thing is, just a basic cable package for casual browsing and watching shows costs at least like $30-50/mo and often more. Netflix is what, $10/mo? As a replacement for "all the random channels" I find it to be quite good. I usually have a better time finding something I'd enjoy watching compared to basic cable and it costs a good deal less. For the occasional movie or newer show, there are online purchases, rentals, and more "premium" services like HBO Now. Just like cable TV, you pay extra for the new stuff.

The only thing about the new Netflix website that bums me out is that it broke the "God Mode" bookmarklet that I always used. It got rid of the endless horizontal scrolling and showed several rows of titles for each category, making for much easier and faster browsing.

If you log into your netflix account and then go here: https://www.netflix.com/TastePreferences you can boost the algo accuracy.

I see the lack of titles complaint all the time but personally I just don't find this to be true. There are tons of titles of all quality levels and genres coming and going all the time on netflix. I've made great discoveries there for new content, foreign films and tv shows, independent titles, etc. It just takes a little digging. And there are a great many sites on the internet that will tell you what is coming and leaving netflix in any given month along with making recommendations.

The main thing that affects the titles you are shown by default are your ratings. You don't even have to watch a movie to rate it. But the rating will still be used to determine what they list by default. If you watch and never rate, the algo will make worse choices. I pretty quickly eliminated straight to tv shlock by giving 1 star ratings to that type of content.

Basically UX doesn't have anything to do with the site's performance. Netflix have been solving great problems in development lately but they're due a good user experience uplift. No wonder people enjoy browsing their content more from other devices.

I agree with your points but at the same time their UI is now so easy to navigate that my not so tech savvy 70 year old dad can use Netflix without ever calling me and asking me any questions. So my guess is, Netflix is trying to be more like a preprogrammed TiVo with lots of content than trying to appeal to the super users that may want those features.

I find their new UI cramped and more difficult to navigate. It seems like they are trying to bury some features like user reviews, now relegated to a secondary tab called "Details" and squeezed into a scrolling view that only show two reviews on my big monitor.

I agree. UK Netflix is pretty barren, to the point where I've only watched a couple of things on it in the past two months. There's a severe drought of new/interesting stuff. I'm now considering ditching my sub.

I have a NowTV subscription which costs roughly the same and there's loads more things to choose from. I also have Amazon Prime (which I accidentally ended up with because I forgot to cancel the trial). It's problem is that I find the UI a complete disaster (and how I wish they'd release a Roku version in the UK)

> The recent UI changes simply disguise the fact that there are less titles available

This is exactly the entire point of the UI changes. They just don't want to admit it (obviously).

The more you watch, the less there is for you to watch.

There is an app for iOS (not sure about Android) called upflix that does a great job of filtering based on reviews from several sources.

For starters.. your comment is irrelevant to the conversation, eve with your attempt to make it so. Second, you aren't locked into any contracts and can cancel your subscription at any time. Pay for another streaming service with a better UI.

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