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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

Netflix used to have decent content. Now, it's mostly Netflix originals and an occasional surprise and lots of not great content. Most of the services for their "subscriber level" are the same -- hulu and prime being others. Now instead of "Prime" you need "Prime + StarZ" or some other BS. Basically, the online services have devolved back to the 80s HBO/Cinemax/etc era where everything with real content is extra.

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I was just thinking that they recently got some good content added.

These were all added this month: Batman Begins, Clerks, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, No Reservations, Stripes, The Aviator, and The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire Comedians in Cars series is a lot of fun. Heat, The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Casino, and Seven.

Maybe you're bored of all that, but it's not like the films on Netflix are universally terrible.

I think there are a few issues at hand when it comes to streaming services.

1. choice paralysis. There are simply too many options provided to you. One of the reasons I like watching TV over streaming is that whatever on is on. I don't have to "choose" a specific show, just a channel that will play things I generally like.

2. We've seen most of the content we want to see. There is plenty of great stuff on Netflix, but I have watched everything I am familiar with. The Office is great, and I watch it all the time. But I have seen that entire series at least 30 times. I'll flip through Netflix for about 20 minutes just to end up putting on the Office.

3. Content wasn't good before, and it's not great now. If you go watch cable, even with HBO/Starz/Sho during the day it's just movies that have been in theaters. Later in the day they might play their shows like Shameless, GoT, etc. But a bulk of the day is just the same "new" movie on repeat for a month. Netflix has all the same movies for the most part. You watch the movie once, and you're done. Every channel has more bad shows than good ones. Netflix has plenty of great original content, and plenty of bad content. So, it's just the same thing, we just get bored of it because it's on demand and we can have that bad content whenever we want, and we burn out the good content because it's on repeat for a while.

So, I agree. I don't think content is any better or worse than what we got before streaming. Instead we just get a lot more of it, with a wide range of quality, and we can choose when and how often we watch it. So content simply doesn't last us as long as it used to.

>One of the reasons I like watching TV over streaming is that whatever on is on. I don't have to "choose" a specific show, just a channel that will play things I generally like.

I've thought for years that YouTube and Netflix could trivially produce channels of lightly-curated content drawing on their existing catalogs. The only solid reason I could come up with for why they haven't is in some kind of attempt to break away from the paradigm of broadcast TV. Maybe there's a separate argument that it would somehow pollute their metric-gathering efforts.

But the utility of channels like that is still there for the reason you mentioned - The (very real, very strong) barrier of choice paralysis is overcome. I hypothesize that having those channels would improve the subscriber retention rates for a variety of reasons.

Some YouTube channels (e.g. funhaus) are already solving this themselves by establishing live streams that just cycle their back-catalog of content.

I think that's fine at a certain price point (it's the a la cart system we clamored for) but at $9-$20 a service it ends up costing more than cable because there's no comprehensive aggregator platforms anymore.

The Netflix model became "get or create everything we can," which means a lot of cruft. Prime gets scraps. Hulu and Sling are just putting lipstick on a pig. It's a mess. What consumers want is to select and pay for what they want. That was the major complaint against cable and it's no different with streaming services today.

> What consumers want is to select and pay for what they want.

iTunes offers that to an extent. You can buy or rent individual movies. If you only rent movies occasionally then it's a cheaper option than a subscription service.

I too wish there were a central aggregator platform, but I think the price:value calculation still favors streaming if you don't care about live events. My mother's "expanded basic" cable package costs more than my subscription to 4 streaming services[1]. It may be different if you negotiate aggressively with your cable provider every time the introductory prices expire.

[1] Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, FilmStruck + Criterion (annual plan).

I would love and pay for a service that would let me subscribe to all the episodes of a show for one month at a low price, directly from the content producer.

I would much prefer to pay, say, $.99 or $1.99 for an unlimited month of The Expanse, and if I don’t watch it all in a month and I want more, then I pay for another month. Maybe keep some shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on retainer for whenever. That would kick the crap out of having to pay twice as much for the 2-3 aggregator subscriptions just to get all the shows I want to watch.

I'snt Hulu owned by Disney and Fox? Not in the US and don't use it but I'd imagine they could really make it pretty amazing with back catalogue etc if they wanted to.

It's owned in part by a lot of media companies, primarily as counter-half-measure against YouTube and later Netflix and Amazon.

It's not an end game. It's the proverbial finger in the dike, a way to buy time until figuring out the next great way to screw consumers.

Fyi... for that expression you'd want to use 'dike,' not its homophone.

Not sure if edited, but if nkozyra had said "dyke" then it's a perfectly valid (non-derogatory) noun for describing a levee or earthwork to prevent the ingress of water.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyke

It's not common usage in us and given its pejorative association I think the edit provides clarity :)

Huh, I'd never known the Australian use as a synonym for jakes/outhouse!

I always thought that was a "dunny" in Australian parlance. You learn a new thing every day on HN :)

Thanks. I'd really like to blame autocorrect here ... yeesh

Yep, The content companies want to have their own streaming services. But what they risk is that they will fragment the market and consumers wont want to pay for 5 different monthly recurring bills to get the content they want and will just go back to torrenting.

Agreed! The content in Australia is already pretty poor, and its been getting worse lately. Mostly dominated by Netflix's releases which wildly varies in quality.

I kind of miss having a good cable subscription where you could watch everything. The way things are moving, one has to subscribe to 3-4 services and even then might not cover all content.

With the number of Adam Sandler movies Netflix produced points to you and people that complain about lack of content on Netflix being in a minority. The market for high brow content is very small which you can tell by the kind of tvshows that keep getting renewed and cancelled each season.

I cancelled my subscription when they raised prices, though I was already on the fence with the whole Billy Nye thing and the Dear White People thing. Netflix had stopped offering a lot of content that I wanted, even as they promoted content I found morally objectionable and charged me more for it.

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