Netflix Now Only Has 31 Movies from IMDB's Top 250 List
streamingobserver.com
streamingobserver.com
Former Netflix employee here--though I left in late 2013. I remember sitting at a company meeting and Reed Hastings explaining that AAA film content was never going to be the bread-and-butter for Netflix for several reasons. Most importantly: Between traditional, "linear" television and Netflix, the experience that Netflix brings with a combination of a low subscription cost, no commercials, and the ability to watch as many episodes of a show as you want to watch whenever you want to watch them is VASTLY superior.
Netflix survives and thrives on binge-watching--and people just don't do that with movies (they have a LOT of data to back up that statement). Combined with the realities of the costs associated with feature film licensing and there's very little incentive for Netflix to put any emphasis on films.
The only way they could do it is to tack on a pay-per-view service for films (because their subscription fee alone will absolutely NOT cover the cost of licensing more feature film content) and they are highly averse to such a service. The general feeling is that it's better for the average user if they can open up Netflix and watch whatever is there without ever thinking about whether it's an "included" title or a "PPV" title. When I was there, we regularly revisited this assumption and research always found that it continued to be the prudent move.
I'm not particularly ashamed to say I turn to unlicensed torrents for this purpose, but I would prefer if it weren't necessary.
Netflix's DVD service still exists.[1] They have a fantastic selection, compared to their streaming service.
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/
Whenever I wanted some mega-obscure Japanese or Thai movie, Netflix never had it and Blockbuster always did.
Oh well.
It might take some custom hardware, but just a few larger central stores vs something like redbox for example.
No studios will collectively give a tech company the majority of the licenses to make this possible - so torrents it is.
For a real film buff being able to go rent F. W. Murnau's "Noseferatu", Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blowup" or Polanski's "Knife in the Water" was really important to me and something I took for granted. Almost every large city had a least one such film nerd rental place. And now that video stores are gone there's just a void for so much of this content.
One beacon of hope though which is supposed to launch soon is a streaming venture by TCM and The Criterion Collection:
I am really forward to this that and I hope its huge success.
In the economic sense consumption means a resource is used and cannot readily be re-used at its original quality. Copying a file does not deprive anybody of anything, I cannot even see a reasonable argument when the case involves a market where the good is not even offered for sale.
Though obviously they'd much rather have you pay for it and watch it.
When they made the transition to streaming, they had to acknowledge that they could no longer provide the one-stop shop with everything to watch. Instead, they had to pivot to a model largely based on "something for everyone to watch." My personal opinion is that they missed a good opportunity to socialize that pivot.
It's not necessary if you accept the cost that the makers of these films want to charge you.
Not every country has a licence to sell certain movies. Literally can't pay the money the makers of the films what they want to charge me because they don't want to charge me. This also applies to music and other products (though other products can't necessarily be pirated).
My options are:
a) Pirate the movie at no cost to the creator
b) Do not watch the movie at no cost to the creator
My girlfriend already jokes that if you search for a film on Netflix they realise and immediately remove it. Then you get the dreaded "Films related to X" search result.
It's really really bad if Netflix gets a reputation for having a small catalogue, even if most of it is rarely watched.
It's kind of like Linux vs Windows. Linux has 90% of the apps you need. But when you need Solidworks or Altium or GTA 5 or whatever you think "pff screw this I will use windows". With Netflix it has lots of stuff but when you search for Die Hard or 12 Angry Men or whatever... well let's just say I treat Netflix as a moral way of paying for Bittorrent.
I assure you; they are.
Despite the very vocal people around the HN community to talk a lot about hating the selection, the data says that most people are pretty happy with it--and only getting happier.
I tried to watch a film last night and searched for all of these very popular films.
* Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
* 28 Days Later
* Go
* Gladiator
* American Beauty
* Speed
Then I gave up. When you try 6 very well known films and none of them are on there it changes how you think of the service from "most stuff is on there" (like Spotify for example) to "I have to search Netflix to find something I like" (like a normal TV channel). It's very different.
I'd be hard pressed to find the link to support this, but my understanding is that DVD/BluRay sales are the mechanism by which the "last mile" of movie finance is accomplished.
My wife and I recently made the decision to stop Netflix. We'd kept a tally and Amazon Video was used more than 10:1 than Netflix. We do have Amazon Prime ( which I suspect Amazon cannot keep up forever ). But for movie movies, we still DVR them from cable.
The Netflix experience is like giving up on the new releases portion of Blockbuster and trolling through the back of the store for older titles, leaving disappointed. From here, it smells like artificial scarcity. But I'm not buying too many more titles on physical media - I don't want to store them and if I ever get a buyer figured out, I'll sell a lot of what we already have.
Most of what we'd buy are the TCM offerings of classic movies.
They're not catering to the folks like yourself.
It's not peanuts if you don't think you're getting much value (e.g. it doesn't have the stuff you wanna watch).
Obviously :) We didn't miss the $10/M for a couple of years before we summoned the energy to unsubscribe.
I love the Marco Polo series, but I've only once watched more than two episodes back to back. Likewise for Jennifer Jones. Guess I'm just not a binge watcher.
OTOH, I have no problem watching a 2:20 long movie or even two of them back to back. Movies simply draw me in more than episodic TV does.
I don't think of watching several movies in a row as binging them, I'd call that a "movie marathon" especially if they were a series (e.g. watching a trilogy like Lord of the Rings one after another).
What is useful to Netflix is watching a whole show over the course of several weeks, a few episodes at a time.
The primary way my wife and I consume shows is to watch a few episodes a day, every day, until we've watched from the first to the last available episode. We are currently watching through The Good Wife on Netflix which, at 134 episodes, will take us about 2 months.
For me that's a good deal, because it would cost about £35 for a DVD boxset (yes, I could shop around, but only if my time is worthless), while Netflix only costs me £18 for 2 months. For Netflix that's a good deal, because they've got 2 months of subscription from me for 1 show.
Once we've finished with The Good Wife, we'll find another show to watch.
We watch about the equivalent of a movie each night, but we aren't going to watch enough movies in a month to make it feel worth keeping the subscription. Movies require a larger investment, because the characters and world are new and different with each one. With a TV show the characters are recurring, so you don't have to invest as much, which makes them easier to watch a lot of in a row.
I suspect it's as much the latter as the former.
1) We live in a multitasking world where people are half watching netflix and half on their phone. TV plots typically develop in smaller chunks, requiring less attention.
2) Most people do not set out to binge watch multiple hours of netflix, but instead get caught up in the shows. Movies feel like a larger commitment, even though many times people watch for the same total length of time.
3) Binge watching often happens because the TV show model is to often end on a cliff hanger.
All the Star Trek series and films are on Netflix. Wouldn't it be great to have a playlist of every episode by original air date? (So you don't get confused when Deep Space 9 refers to an event in First Contact?) Wouldn't it be awesome to have a playlist of only the top 20 Voyager episodes, so you don't have to suffer through the awful ones?
It surprises me they haven't implemented this. If they did, any user could solve your problem of putting a movie series in order.
Of course I also wish they had a "back 30 seconds" button for when you miss a line of dialog, and that's never been done either. Sigh. It seems like all their revenue is going into making Marvel shows and zero into software development.
Customers would still have to sign up for multiple services but at least all the content would be available.
Only true for shows that are not in the top 250 shows.
Netflix: Offering cheap & unlimited access for everytone to shows that noone wants to watch.
They have all of: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The West Wing, Cosmos, Planet Earth, Sherlock, House, Friends, The Office, Parks and Recreation, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and more.
Plus tons of their in-house and supposedly top-quality shows: House of Cards, Daredevil, Narcos, Orange is the New Black, Making a Murderer, and more.
Netflix is a steal for $10 a month.
Netflix--and others, like Amazon Prime--are becoming less and less worthwhile, and piracy is becoming more and more convenient again.
So, we spent the $6 to rent the movie on Google Play. About 10 minutes into the movie, the quality plummeted and playback stopped with an error code. We called customer support and they talked us through possible solutions for ~35 minutes before we gave up and asked for a refund. It wasn't a problem with our Wifi, since Netflix/Youtube and other services worked just fine, it was a problem with Google Play streaming to the Chromecast.
After searching and trying for over an hour to watch a movie legally using paid services, we went to putlocker, plugged an hdmi cable into my computer and streamed it just fine. We really, really tried to do it the legal way and pay money for the content we wanted to watch, but it was far too complicated to even find a place to watch it, let alone actually successfully watch it. I was reminded a lot of this comic http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones throughout the whole thing. All of this fragmentation is going to become a huge problem again, when piracy is just so easy and convenient.
No but seriously, it is sad that with my setup I can search something and stream it instantly, or have it download and automatically be renamed and organized ready to watch on Plex. TV shows can be grabbed automatically and alert me when they are ready. I can use Plex and stream them anywhere in the world right from my own server, and now they even have beta for streaming from amazon cloud so you don't even need your own server.
I hate that my most convenient option is the illegal one. I'd gladly pay. I have no problem paying the $10 a month for Spotify. I never illegally download music anymore because of it. I used to do so before, but now it is so easy and accessible with Spotify that I see no need to.
The Canadian version of a service like Netflix has even less content than the American versions. We barely would find anything we wanted on it, and ultimately got rid of it pretty fast. Just wasn't worth the cost. We had to resort to no longer searching for things we wanted as they rarely had them, and instead just viewing what they DID have.
Edit: I should also add that I am a student on a fairly tight budget, and despite this I am willing to pay for a service monthly to get access to these things. That is why I pay for Spotify. However, I am definitely not going to spend money at multiple video streaming services, and then have to go on some wild hunt to find the content I'm interested in.
Movies you buy/rent in Google Play Movies are actually available in YouTube as well. There's a section in YouTube called "Purchases." I've used this to stream Google Play Movies purchases on my Fire TV. I would imagine the same would work for an Apple TV since it has the YouTube app.
I know it is a cumbersome workaround, and that a company as big as Google really should have a product that just works, but since you mentioned that YouTube works fine, it is a possible workaround that might save you 35 minutes next time.
If you want to rent the movie or show on Amazon Video but are avoiding using that option just because it doesn't work on chromecast then here is what you can do : 1. Install Amazon video app on phone. Here's link for Android : https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/splash/sd/t/appstore
2. Cast your Android screen (mirror) to chromecast via OS's cast option.
3. Go to Amazon Video app and play show. Do a full screen view.
I have really really tried to use Google Play for video because it seems to work on the broadest array of devices, but the service itself is a second rate experience. Too many clicks, laggy unresponsive UI, silly JS driven pages that require reloading in order to start working again...
I too really want to do things the way that supports content producers, but the middlemen are doing such a poor job that it's difficult to get my money to them.
Netflix and Prime are finally acceptable on Linux thanks to Pipelight but that solution's not for everyone.
If you want a single settop box, you might run PI with XBMC/Kodi but you can't get DRM'ed things on there. So you need a Roku or AppleTV for your DRM, a chromecast for things coming from a PC, and you still need a Kodi for your personal needs.
I often watch it on YouTube under "purchases"
I actually think Apple is still doing OK on the technology front, and the Apple TV UI seems to have the right ideas.
But actually negotiating the content licenses is something calling for the full power of the Reality Distortion Field. Like how Jobs was able to convince the music industry to provide all their content because it would be available "just on Macs", or to get AT&T to give full control of the iPhone to Apple, in exchange for an exclusive over Verizon.
What would be the negotiating play to trick (I mean, convince its in their best interest) video content owners to make all their intellectual property available from a single excellent UI?
Why didn't you just stream Amazon or Play Movies from the computer since you plugged it in anyways? How was stealing it more convenient?
Being the 'chaotic good' person that I am, my family stopped trying to view entertainment content the normal legal way many years ago. I've been using a torrent friendly VPS in eastern Europe for quite a few years now to avoid any complications.
That, plus a little web service that presents youtube videos without commercials, gives us pretty reliable access to most anything we ever want to watch. The downside is that it's not setup to be 'live'. It can take a few hours to torrent it and then securely transfer home. But honestly that's kind of a feature.
To be clear, if there was an always works and reasonably priced way to legally view content, we would jump right on it.
But such a thing has yet to exist.
Why not just use an adblocker like uBlock Origin?
If you don't want to see ads, I assume you use an adblocker anyway, so you might as well use one that doesn't suck.
I cannot recall a recent movie I have streamed simply because most of the time it can be a third to more than half the price of buying a blu-ray.
I think you're playing up an edge case and frankly that seems disingenuous to me. It seems like every pro-pirate person has some shaggy dog story that "validates" their pirating. I also take issue with how 'easy' it is to pirate. Sure, if its for a current hot item and everyone is seeding it, but once the fanboys go away the seeders are mostly gone and now you're waiting hours (or even days!) to pirate something. Worse, you may expect a lawsuit from the copyright holders as torrents expose your real IP address unless you're using an offshore VPN or VPS which also adds a another layer of inconvenience and monthly billing.
Currently, we have two FireTV boxes and two Chromecasts for our two TV's and they're borderline magical. We have so much content on tap that "just works" that the argument of "its better to pirate" is pretty unconvincing to people without a political agenda. I also want to be part of a system that pays investors and producers of said content for moral and practical reasons. We don't need a Sega Dreamcast-like situation where the pirates kill platforms, hurt competition, and create disincentives to innovate, distribute, and create.
When I pay for a service, travel frequently, and cannot use that service because of licensing restrictions due to ads, that is a problem. That tells me these streaming services put more stock into my viewing ads than accessing content I am already paying for. I am not pro-pirate. Nor is your car analogy relevant. You are comparing apples and oranges (the business models aren't remotely the same and the value propositions are completely different, to me, that is disingenuous.
Now, I don't like selective enforcement and think it has many problems, but it does seem to be how our legal system functions these days.
There're probably other services it doesn't support (which limits its usefulness), but I've been using it for years.
Shoplifting is easy and convenient too. Next time you forget your wallet at the corner store. Just sayin.
Allow me to reference a very famous Bill Gates quote on Chinese piracy of software:
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
There are more ways to monetize a media property than pay-per-view so to speak. Merchandising is a big one, not to mention word of mouth marketing.
To be clear, I am not promoting piracy, it does pose ethical problems. The metaphor to stealing simply fails to illuminate any of them.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast/boadge...
Hey @Google, @Amazon, @etc., you have UX designers (tons of them). If this problem isn't fixed soon, more will do the same.
It works on a phone or tablet if you cast the whole screen. Might work on a laptop the same way.
The whole no Amazon Services on Google Hardware and no Google Services on Amazon Hardware does neither of them any benefit and only solidifies Roku's position as the dominant platform because it's the only one that's open.
Funny how so many people screamed for al la care programming and now that it's happening everyone is realizing it's actually worse.
I know people hated it, but there is something to be said about traditional TV and how it's consumed. Having a centralized menu/guide of all the content you can view makes it much easier to consume (at least for me). Jumping in and out of services can be kind of annoying, and often times has lead me to forget about content on these services.
My hope is Vue and SlingTV pick up more momentum and we begin to decouple broadcast TV from it's hardware. I don't want to rely on the FCC to do this, as we've seen it fail with CableCard and Tru2Way, so maybe more providers jump on this. I doubt we'd see Comcast doing this, but even if they did and locked it to AppleTV or Roku it'd be a huge step forward.
The issue has never been the cost of the bundle, it's always been the cost of the sub-par hardware.
I wouldn't equate balkanization with a la carte. To stretch the restaurant metaphor, the current situation is akin to taking 5 cab rides between restaurants to cobble together a meal, there's a lot of overhead and waste. Traditional cable television is the restaurant with everything available, but you're required to purchase dessert and coffee to get access to soup and salad.
Lookin' at you Mr. Robot.
I'd be happy with a service that charge me 1$ per show but with real choice.
That is, I've already proven to Xfinity that I'm willing to pay my monthly cable bill for those 5 channels, so if they offer them a la carte, those 5 will cost about what my monthly cable bill costs.
It pretty much works this way for music, why not movies and TV shows?
Having to deal with several different content delivery services, each with their own sign-in, is much more complicated than that.
Lawyers are the primary reason why Netflix is becoming less convenient, and by pure coincidence, lawyers will benefit from an increase in piracy.
Money talks.
As long as they are unbundled and easy to subscribe and unsubscribe from, I don't really mind. The bundling is the real thing I hate about cable. Now sub-subscriptions like Amazon Prime has with Showtime and such really suck, and I wouldn't want those, but if registration is as simple as setting up or cancelling a recurring subscription, I'm fine with subscribing to 10 different services. I can also see the market for a free or one-time paid app that will maintain a queue of what you want to watch, and automatically subscribe to the correct channel for that month so you can watch the maximum content for the minimum money.
[Also, this is a personal opinion, but to me, Netflix's original content + their reduced catalog is definitely worth $10/month. Much better than the $100+ "special offer price" that Comcast offers if I want to watch non-stupid channels from their lineup.]
In the end we just watched the Twitch stream, which meant I didn't get to access the service I pay for just ten miles from home, and TBS didn't get our eyeballs on their advertisements. Seems like a bad policy on their part.
A service like Netflix that would augment real, current TV with a library of older shows/movies would have been worth a separate bill. (Had that library not shrunk.)
But one more channel of original shows? It's not worth subscribing to a new service and not enough for me to replace cable. And I'm not going to sign up for 4-5 of them. Even if their total cost is a little less than cable, the convenience lost is significant.
Despite groans to the contrary, I don't think consolidation is the reason services like Netflix/etc. are so popular and why cable service is starting to become considered gauche.
I posit that it's entirely about:
1) The on-demand content that services like Netflix/etc. provide 2) To a lesser extent, the discoverability of content
I don't want to watch Game of Thrones on Sunday evening. I want to watch it now. I want to re-watch Ocean's Eleven tonight, not Thursday during the day. Netflix (in theory) helps me with that. Cable service doesn't.
I want to watch an action movie, and one that I can actually watch right now. Netflix helps me with that. Cable service doesn't, unless I just put on whatever the "action movie" channel is showing.
Hell, cable service providers try to offer some of this already - it's just that their selection sucks. It's either incredibly old movies, or movies that no one wanted to see the first time around. Or it's just the latest episode of a popular television show, or the first season and we're on season 12 now.
Again, despite what people might say I don't think they really want a la carte programming: They want a Spotify subscription for television and film.
Yeah, for you (and me), as a customer. But what advantage is there for the content creator? You're not going to not watch Game of Thrones because it isn't on Netflix. You'll find a way. The content creators have (and in my opinion, rightfully so) the leverage.
which would be a shame because I stopped pirating once things started to become convenient and affordable.
But the studios all want you to subscribe to their store. And they don't want to let iTunes have everything, because they want you to go to them first. Or their friends with Ultraviolet.
Studios don't like giving up their iron grip, which is what Apple was doing a good job of doing. :/
I'm also on the list of people that don't want 10 different monthly subscriptions to streaming services, and piracy really does look way more convenient. Especially with things like Popcorn Time.
I don't think it's Netflix's choice that they're getting rid of their broader range of content, more to do with licensing agreements. I assume they had so many films in the past because they had old licensing deals, when the production companies were more willing to go "Yeah, sure, let's give that small company a cheap deal to stream our movies online. What does it matter, no one watches movies on their computer, they'll still buy our DVDs or subscribe to our cable packages"
Now they recognise Netflix as a major competitor, and people are actually ditching their cable packages, and watching Netflix rather than buying DVDs. They can't compete with their old business model, so their only option is to demand extortionate prices or simply refuse to do business with Netflix, Amazon, etc.
It's the frustrating reason why companies like Fox, Universal, etc are able to be so successful, because they own the studios, the distribution, and the cable channels. They don't have to worry about getting someone else to give them content, or to distribute theirs. It's frustrating that Netflix is going to same way and being forced to rely on producing their own content, with less opportunity to show others.
Netflix are increasingly becoming like just another cable channel, with it's own set of content, and that's before you even get into all the regional differences. It's still an improvement over the alternative of bundled cable TV packages in terms of pricing and convenience, but I wonder how long that will be the case.
I've been looking into film and TV production for years as an outsider and come across several mentions that Netflix pays extremely well and is incredibly picky about their productions. So they're in the game to play for keeps it seems. "Come for the Netflix originals, but stay for some binge TV or the occasional random flick like a big on-demand shifting library!" as a tag-line sort of works.
Why, for instance, should I pay as much for a season of X-Files reruns as for the production of an entirely new series of Stranger Things? Why would I pay as much for episodes of The Sopranos, that I have already seen, and have on DVD, instead of another new series of Lillyhammer? I wouldn't, and neither would Netflix. The original content is a reminder to the owners of distribution rights that Netflix is the one who owns the ball, and they're the ones that will be taking it with them if they decide to go home and play alone.
And Netflix originals are getting nominated for Emmy Awards, in competition with AMC and HBO shows. Producing exclusive original content was absolutely the correct play for Netflix at the time they decided to do it, and remains so for the present.
What choice do you have when you don't own the infrastructure or content?
Let's face it, the barrier to entry to creating streaming app is low. Granted, Netflix is awesome in this department (they have to be), but I don't see how the future isn't in creating and distributing the content you own yourself.
The engine driving all of this that no one ever discusses is our current copyright regime. This cycle is going to continue to repeat itself as long as copyright remains unchanged. If our copyright laws were more sane, the whole thing would look a lot different.
We pay $20/month or so for Netflix and Hulu, plus Amazon comes with prime which I pay for more for the shipping than the streaming. This isn't a lot - compare that to what cable costs. The situation today is better than ever - a bunch of cheap ala cart services that together still add up to way less than cable.
Anyone trying to watch a specific film will care. Netflix is basically useless in a scrnario where you're looking to watch specific content. I maintain a to-watch list with about 20-30 films at any given time - Netflix offers none of them. Not their fault, I know, but the situation is far from acceptable.
Netflix's problem with movies is intractable because you'd have to pay much more than they're willing to charge to make the studios happy. The studios make more money they way they're doing it (they have accountants too).
It just isn't financially possible. I'm sure Netflix could have a lot bigger permanent catalog, but you are going to be paying much more than what they charge now.
Netflix (and Amazon) would love to have all the content licenses they used to have. The content companies are the ones making it impossible to have one service where you can get all of the content you want.
I bet iTunes has 250 of IMDBs top 250 available for rent. Piracy isn't more convenient. It's just cheaper.
It turns out that $10/month isn't enough to pay for every movie and TV show ever made. Who knew?
They are taking advantage of a government granted monopoly they had in the 1900's and now control a disproportionate amount of the media in Canada.
> They are the one responsible for the great Proxy/VPN banning this year.
At first, I thought this meant Netflix banning all use of VPN for streaming. Searching news articles shows in fact a Rogers VP rep had called on the government to outright ban VPN universally[1], but this was back in spring 2015. You are saying this has actually been made law and is enforced?
How did this pass when major corporations require VPNs, and I presume also government officials use it for sensitive communications?
[1] http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/carriers/rogers/rogers-governme...
[1] http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/liberal-government-may-blo...
Netflix has upped the game to the point nobody is able to provide a service to watch non-canadian Netflix in Canada, which renders Netflix useless.
5. Back to the Future
6. Gladiator
7. Sunset Boulevard
8. Cinema Paradiso
9. Django Unchained
12. Reservoir Dogs
13. Braveheart
17. Amadeus
21. Trainspotting
24. There Will Be Blood
25. Spotlight
26. The Princess Bride
27. Zootopia
29. Jaws
31. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Thing is I'm not subscribing to Netflix for those movies. Because I've already seen those. And yeah, once every blue moon I can get in the mood for some specific title. But that's rare.
Why I keep subscribing to Netflix and why I tried HBO Go as well is because of the TV series. And I'm in Romania, you can imagine how limited the content is down here, but so far they've had a couple of decent TV series that I wanted to watch. If they keep delivering those, then I keep my subscription. You also have the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe at any point, it's not like with HBO GO or other services where you have to commit to an annual plan.
Now I'm tempted to make a pretty graph of "Movies and TV shows per dollar" for the countries they're established in. Should be pretty interesting. I expect major differences.
[1] http://cordcutting.com/how-many-titles-are-available-on-netflix-in-your-country/Shows established in the USA become part of the global culture, USA is very good at exporting its culture. Once established, in order for people in other countries to buy in to that culture then exported media can be sold at higher value.
This is one of the reasons for regional encoding. You don't want to let outsiders buy in to something that's established as cool
I really don't understand the logic in charging a higher price for 10% of the content in a poorer country, but perhaps that's why I don't work for Netflix.
Number of TV shows/movies on US netflix: 1147/4593
Number of TV shows/movies on HK netflix: 134/ 392
US Netflix standard price: $ 8.99
HK Netflix standard price: $10.00You lucky bastard. In Norway, the same applies but we probably have to pay double of what they do in the US (100 nok).
"Without a service like Karagarga movie-lovers are in thrall to the whims of an implacable market — one whose recent and unerring shift to digital streaming has left vast swaths of cinema history to molder unseen. The myth that Netflix and iTunes offer a frontier where “everything” is available to watch instantly is a bad joke to anyone with a serious interest in movies. That crowd is forced, by the market itself, to fend for itself. Many of us would indeed buy an Out 1 Blu-ray or cue up Out 1 on Netflix if such a thing were possible. But in the meantime Karagarga will be cherished for the rare and valued access it affords."
[1] http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and...
Or, just maybe, the license holder isn't willing to make a deal with Netflix because they want to start their own streaming service.
- Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer
My Netflix hours per month has dropped to well under 10 hours per month these days. There's just not much content on there that interests me. I see more use out of Amazon because, even though it's comparatively expensive at ~$5 per rental, when I feel like sitting down and watching a movie, it's nice to actually have a catalog to browse that's not 90% garbage.
I think there's fairly strong evidence that the answer would be "yes" to that question. More people have signed up for Netflix since the release of House of Cards in Feb 2013 than signed up before then. IIRC that it's right around that time that the Netflix movie catalog really started to shrink, and also the time when Netflix started to have attractive original content.
Has TMC bought them all up and refuse to license them to netflix or does netflix think no one wants to watch black and white movies?
It's very clearly not Netflix's fault. The content owners want Netflix to die. Had Netflix not gone the "make our own content" route, they would be dead now (or the walking dead with just DVD customers).
Seems that the music industry has a better separation between content creators and providers than the movie and series industry.
The movie industry can make money during different "windows". Theatrical releases, PPV from cable companies, iTunes, Amazon, etc., physical rentals, DVD and digital sells, subscription movie services (HBO, Showtime...) and regular cable TV.
Radio stations have to pay royalties to the songwriters and musicians but not the singers.
No matter how bad or unpopular a movie is, a studio will always make some money on a theatrically released movie, with each of the distribution mechanisms.
-There is a compulsory performance license that allows radio stations to play any music. They have to pay the song writers and the music writers (?) a fee based on a mandated structure but not the actual singers.
-There is a separate compulsory licence for Pandora like services where you can't choose your music and there are guidelines that Pandora has to abide by.
-There is no compulsory license for on-demand subscription services like Spotify where you can choose the music you want to listen to.
But you're right though, the difference is stark. I don't think I've ever had a random tune I'd like to hear come to mind and fail to find it on Spotify, conversely I can honestly say that I have not once found a movie I've gone looking for on either Netflix or Amazon Prime.
I listen to music constantly, at work, in my car. The music industry can't get away with just ignoring the demand for streaming because of the way music is consumed today.
Although one thing I did notice by picking a handful of random films is that some are rated 8+ but only have 50-100 votes, which reminded me of this excellent article by Evan Miller on how not to sort by average ratings[2].
Personal opinion now: I'm more of a movie person than a TV series person, but I do appreciate some of the Netflix Original series, but I'm finding it harder and harder to justify the monthly cost when I also have a NowTV movie subscription which seem to have more decent films and are regularly updated (even though research[3] shows they don't have many 8+ movies)
[1] https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movies?providers=nfx&rating_imd...
[2] http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
[3] https://www.justwatch.com/uk/provider/now-tv?content_type=mo...
Movies are quickly becoming the "short story" of the cinematic world, IMO (though those countless sequels and prequels are an exception). When done well they have a strict beginning, middle and end.
If an episode's story needs to run a bit longer, it runs longer. Commercial breaks don't affect pacing. Nobody has to worry about sponsors being upset about content, an episode being interrupted by breaking news or postponed due to a sporting event.
I'd like Netflix to have a larger movie catalog, but if they continue to crank out quality long-form stories I'm quite happy to remain a subscriber.
(Now we just need them to secure the rights for Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels)
I'd much rather watch an HBO show or a Netflix show than anything on traditional TV these days.
Supporting Netflix is of course also something they don't like, since the more monthly paying customer Netflix attracts, the more viable competitor it becomes. This leads me to wonder that could it be that studios did not originally even consider Netflix as their competitor?
The studios don't really want to cooperate. They want complete control over how you watch their product.
In the UK we no longer have rights to format shift (we did, but they were rescinded), so if you bought it on DVD and want to watch on your tablet - well you'll probably have to buy it again or infringe the letter of the copyright law.
What's that? Want to stream it to another device from your computer, ha-ha, no chance. If media companies made such things legal (they control the copyright laws) then there's no telling what might happen. People watching the media they paid for, how absurd!
They want to sell you a cinema viewing, sell you a DVD, sell you a tablet download, and even then sell you a streaming copy to watch on your TV (because who has a DVD player now).
Likewise, I doubt we'll be seeing Netflix's OC showing up on regular cable or broadcast networks anytime soon. Not that they couldn't get some licensing revenue from it, but it's just not their chosen model.
Give me the 6 outta 10s, that's my bread and butter. I'd rather be surprised and discover a personal favourite or have something on the TV that I won't be expected to dissect with the nerds at work.
The big studios are just asking for more piracy at this point.
We also subscribe to Hulu Plus to watch network TV with no commercials. Also a good deal. If we want to watch a new release, I rent it on Google Play Movies. I don't mind using a few different vendors, and competition is good.
What is not a good deal is cable TV. We hardly ever use it and it is relatively expensive.
Netflix has created some of my favourite shows in the past few years (e.g. House of Cards and Narcos) and I'd rather have that original content given my access to the other services - Sky is better probably better able (through it's Fox parent company) to deliver the blockbusters should I want to watch them.
The obvious cost is that we have to subscribe to multiple services, and that necessitates cost both in money and in time to find content legally as you have to go through each in turn. If Amazon and Netflix both move further towards unique content then we'll also have reduced competition in the blockbuster space, which might increase prices and encourage a move back to privacy.
(Finally, I have major respect for Netflix as a developer, and so I probably view everything with a certain bias).
Netflix UK doesn't push movies, I'd be surprised if it had more than 5 movies from the top 250, although the catalogue is so hard to browse it's hard to verify.
If netflix was previously advertised here based on it's movie offering I would be annoyed about it's pivot to focus on TV.
Yes, it's ridiculous that in 2016, I'm still regularly getting bits via snail mail. DVDs are sometimes scratched, and my player often forces me to watch previews. It's terrible.
Except for the selection. Try this: go to http://www.imdb.com/chart/top, then start searching for those on https://dvd.netflix.com/. I tried a few, and they were all there.
I don't have crazy weird esoteric tastes, but I like to be able to say "hey, I heard that Movie X was good" and be able to add it to my playlist. I can pretty much always do that with the DVD service. I can pretty much never do that with streaming services. It's like, "oh, they have a sequel and a spinoff, but not the original."
I'm about 98% sure that the difference in selection is because of Hollywood being jerks about licensing, so I don't blame Netflix or Amazon. But as long as there's such a vast difference in selection, I'm going to keep renting DVDs.
Of course the poor starving actors of all those old movies -- Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, etc. -- would perish under such a regime. They might even stop making new works! /s
As a non-stop Netflix subscriber since 2004, I've only streamed 1 or 2 movies in that entire time (although my kids have).
>I wouldn't be surprised if movies just don't get the viewers to justify their cost.
Presumably that is also true. Whatever deal the content providers are offering, Netflix doesn't see the ROI.
To your broader point about TV vs. movies though. A former senior technical Netflix guy once told me that "People come for the movies and stay for the TV shows." (And this was before they had nearly as much original content.)
The danger to the studios here seems to be if people just get out of the habit of watching movies as a format. But that's probably a pretty big leap from where we are today.
Ripping DVDs & renaming things to Plex-friendly form is still more work than I think it should be, I'd really like to see something equivalent to CD-ripping software that "just knows" what the disk is by fingerprinting or whatever.
In general, Plex doesn't provide anything that I couldn't do with existing (and mostly free) tools, but it provides a friendly enough interface that my wife can use it without help, and being able to sync content to my iPad before a trip and have it "just work" is really nice.
This is interesting to me because it's so bad that I can only conclude that they must have incentives for making suggestions to me other than me watching something I like. Do they pay licensing fees per vote? Do they pay different fees per view for different movies? I would love to know the details!
And I very recently signed up for Seeso for $4 a month because I was craving some Monty Python's Flying Circus. I don't plan on keeping it long term, maybe just a month, to get it out of my system.
And then I still end up digging through shitty cheap roku channels occasionally to find stuff. Mostly just schlock, but I saw, for example, niche titles like Millennium Actress, Ninja Scroll, and Ghost in the Shell 2 on free services.
The idea of one streaming service that has it all is dead, but it kind of reminds me of DVD bundles at Walmart. 10 Sci Fi movies for $10, and one of them will be Existenz and the rest will be straight to TV or DVD.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4252-filmstruck-laun...
Why would you want them to? A big portion of the money you pay Netflix every month would then go to have indefinite access to films you don't watch or don't watch again often enough to justify this ongoing cost.
Would you lease a Ferrari you drove one or two days a year? Especially if a one-day rental or buying is an option?
Why can't I pay a la carte to stream pretty much any movie ever made? Even if that's a fee on top of the monthly fee, I would do it sometimes.
1. Add government regulation that makes exclusive licensing of content to streaming services illegal. This feels heavy-handed to me. Streaming entertainment just isn't important enough to warrant the attention of government.
2. Companies self-regulate: this would be cool, but it's not gonna happen without some serious outside intervention.
3. Removal of copyrighting that allows companies to enforce their licenses. This is arguably bad for content producers, but in practice content producers aren't receiving the bulk of the profits--labels and studios are.
4. Go back to an ownership rather than a rent model of content distribution. DRM essentially breaks this, however, and again it's unlikely that content distributors will stop using this.
I favor 4, but at a personal level, 3 is the only one really available to me, de-facto.
(e.g.: not Zootopia and Sunset Boulevard for instance)
If they don't want to play fair game with Netflix, people will just keep / start again downloading the movies they want to watch, because it will be easier.
Spotify has to pay for the content they're streaming. As of now, they're losing money with that model. You might like it as a customer, but content owners and creators don't seem to, and they hold the cards.
Want to find a mostly-forgotten science fiction movie from the mid-90s (in my case, Strange Days)? Two hours of hunting for a way of downloading it led me to buying it through a VoD service instead.
Unfortunately many of the discs you get from Netflix are made specifically for the rental market and have been purposely degraded by having features such as 7.1 DTS-MA audio removed.
People want to see the blockbuster movies..
I will agree with you however that as a consumer I'd rather have a commoditized subscription service for tv/movies. I suspect however that investors will disagree with us.
As the presence of great films on the platform may suggest, it's a long shot to assume that they're more interested in creating their own -great- content than simply offering you great content. But given the unavailability of a single legal platform to rule them all, the bet on original ideas propelled with data and smart marketing was and is still the best one.
IMO, if Netflix had all the content in the world, they would probably stop creating their own.
This basically reduces online video to two categories: user-generated content platforms and commissioned, curated content platforms. In my view there is only room for one player in the former (YT), but in the latter category, it is basically business as usual for the traditional TV networks.
VidAngel costs $1 or $2 per movie after sell-back. They filter the movies, but you choose your own filtering, so it's not censorship.
(No, I don't work for VidAngel, nor do I have any ties with them; I'm just a happy customer who wants to see them continue to grow and thrive. I'm aware they are being sued, but I think VidAngel will win due to the Family Home Movie Act of 2005.)
Edit: Missed it in the article. It dropped 12%.
But my viewing time is already overfilled with all the Arrow, Flash, iZombie, and other shows I'm binge watching. And 80% of the time I'm more interested in seeing some "weird" Indian/Turkish/European movie than same Hollywood drivel.
Too bad they're all dead now.
I am not sure the new video movie world is better now than it was 10 years ago for consumers.
It's only their streaming selection that sucks.
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/
Well theres a big assumption right there.. Movies yet unknown are not bad.
$10 a month.
$10 a month.
I'm repeating this because this is something that seems to be escaping people here. You're paying $10 a month for access to a massive library of content. Having every popular movie available for instant streaming is worth WAY more than $10 a month. If you want to watch recent blockbusters and popular movies, you can rent them on Amazon or iTunes.
To the people using this to morally justify their pirating, give me a break. Renting/buying movies on Amazon or iTunes couldn't be easier. The only problem is that you would rather steal than pay.
On desktop, the last word of the title ("List") on this page is on it's own line. Infuriating! Haha.
edit: This comment definitely deserves downvotes. Definitely.
We may never see them get released into public domain.
Does it have any relevance?