Netflix will now interrupt series binges with video ads for its other series
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The content in Europe is woeful compared to the US.
And I totally blame Hollywood and the Media Industry, esp. Disney, for making hostile exlusive licensing deals.
In many cases, I cannot even watch a movie until it's dubbed in my language, even if I don't want to watch it dubbed but in OAT. It's frustrating. And then it's also likely on the streaming service I currently use, but on another one.
For example, we sometimes watch a show/movie with subtitles. But netflix frequently gets confused about whether subtitles should be on or off and with which language they should be in, even with simply stopping viewing and coming back later. We sometimes use English subtitles, but then they get turned on automatically in various languages for other shows/movies.
How much content are people expecting for $10?
For $10 a month at that time I gained access to basically every DVD ever released. There were a few art house type movies that were out of print that took forever to get copies of due to being in others' ques, but for the most part, I had access to all commercially released video for the past 100 years for $10. Adjusted for inflation, that's $12.45 today.
I noticed this, they removed the categories browser for me, it still shows up occasionally but it's hidden very deep in recommendations I can't find a way to directly go to it other than pressing down for a few minutes till it crops up.
Guess it makes sense for them, I used to boot it up and go straight in there and devour everything new in categories I cared about while still ignoring everything I passed over previously.
These moves to try and remove the choice from what I watch in the hopes of getting me to watch things I wouldn't watch out of choice seems so bizarre when the initial pitch of Netflix vs cable/terrestrial was being in control of what you watch.
Compare that to Spotify, which will have a song I want 95% of the time or more.
The value of Netflix is not that high for me right now. With ads it will be even lower.
Having 100 million subs (Netflix has 120 million atm) would then give you 1 billion per month -- which sounds decent enough to support a comprehensive movie archive, especially since most of it would be a long tail of movies that make tiny or no profit today and that would cost next to nothing to store for the occasional user.
And for the popular titles, you could even opt for a distributed (e.g. bittorrent like) serving, to further lower your costs.
No, they ran into the problem where once a distribution pioneer proves a market, the content owners they rely on no longer license cheaply in that market, in part because they want to capture the proven profit opportunity and in part because distribution competitors spring up a bid up the prices.
So far my house's plumbing system hasn't tried to get into the beverage business, but I expect it's only a matter of time.
Netflix has never been a "neutral pipe". Their business model is to curate/acquire/create content that people will pay a monthly fee to watch. How does that in any way resemble an ISP?
No, they weren't. Even Wwith DVDs, they had selection criteria. Though, sure, until streaming—and until streaming got competitive—breadth was a bigger selling point than it is now.
That's why their in-house content grows percentage wise each year. Each year the library of content they can license gets smaller.
Netflix offered a major rebuttal to at least one Reddit claim, pointing out that the ads for Netflix content are entirely skippable.
I'm guessing they aren't getting views they want, especially with a lot of their shows being duds.
The obvious response would be to increase the quality of their programming. The easy response is to jam their current programming down our throats.
I quit Netflix, and even a single ad about anything is enough to keep me from ever returning.
Trust me, this is just a start. They know people hate autoplay videos, yet they added them anyway. They know people hate ads, but they are going to be using them anyway.
What's next? Product advertising? I don't doubt this. Ad/ad free streaming packages?
When they first started, people came for The Office or Scrubs. Then they started creating their own, and every new show huge press. House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, etc. But as they add tons more content, they need more traditional ways to get people interested.
People have a "no ads!" stance and forget the way they got into most shows they like are ads. As they make more content themselves (as opposed to The Office or Arrested Development), they need more steady ways to get people interested.
If Netflix makes bad content, then I'll be mad they're forcing it on me. But if they make good content, in the long run I'll be happy they're experimenting with as-non-evasive-as-possible ways to get me interested.
To put it another way: it's better if they get more people hooked on more shows and that leads to more subscriptions, rather than them having to resort to crappy third party ads to afford new content.
Here’s a thought... they could let users rate shows, maybe on some 1-5 based scale, then use that information to power recommendations targeted at those users instead of just randomly promoting their disgusting flavors of the day? Then instead of shows dying in obscurity people who would most enjoy them could see them! As a bonus a guy who likes documentaries and dramas wouldn’t have to scroll through children’s cartoons being recommended to him?
Nah, that would never work...
What they're doing is literally what you're saying: targeted recommendations of their shows. They're just doing it in the format of a video rather than, say, a still image.
In this case advertising other Netflix shows seems reasonable. It's common practice on most content platforms. I agree it's annoying and I'd rather not have it.
That said, I like it when services play the next episode immediately after the one I just watched. I can just let it continue to progress and stop it anytime I want. I certainly don't want that interrupted by advertisements, whether for in-house Netflix shows or some other crap, it is still just advertisements and part of the reason I pay Netflix at all is because it doesn't have ads, and am willing and able to cancel my account if they turn into Hulu.
There was a time when there were no ads on cable too, seens almost incomprehensible now:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
So many of their flops are so obviously going to be massive flops. If they would just focus on putting out new shows like Dark, Stranger Things, their murder docs with a seasonal release calendar, etc they would maintain customers. That and inking deals with non-Disney entities to get solid third party content. HBO has maintained customers and grown with just 3-4 shows keeping people hooked in any given time period.
If they think they can compete with cash rich behemoths like Amazon and Disney they are going to get destroyed. Amazon is going to blow no telling how much on this new Lord of the Rings series...but they don't care, they can afford it. Netflix should go the Apple model, go with quality. Let the others burn cash to get into the space.
then it'd fix the issue you're having with them at the moment. It's a really simple fix.
Now that you say that I wish they would have grabbed FOX away from Disney. That would have given them something better to compete with and not allowed Disney to be even larger than it already is.
We need to move forward, but most of the content I've seen on netflix is crap.
Maybe not zombies, but premature deaths because they catered to niches that were too small successfully.
And get the artists to make new works.
Imagine the PR they would attract if they were able to bring back Firefly. Especially given Nathan Fillion is a big-name actor now.
http://m.ign.com/articles/2015/03/02/netflixs-product-placem...
They’ve been double dipping for a while.
Gilmore girls new season was obnoxious because of this.
Netflix is also horrible about autoplaying trailers with sound. Maybe I went to netflix.com to check whether something was in the catalog while my spouse sleeps next to me. You do not have the right to pump sounds through my speakers until I hit play.
It opens with a huge header image with a brief sentence or two about the thing it's showing you. You're three words in reading and the intro text disappears into a minute-long preview that spoils the show. What the hell?
Or worse, you've loaded your dashboard and are about to click into starting the show you left off on, only for the hero image/preview to load and shove the page down three inches. Your click now opens a new, unrelated show. You frantically click 'back', only to end up on the page prior to netflix.com. When you re-load Netflix, the show you accidentally clicked is now in the 'continue watching' section — right where your desired show is. !@#^*!)#
I'm sorry to hear that it happened to you while you were in a vulnerable position.
I’m guessing that OP tried to start another free trial and inadvertently paid because they weren’t eligible. Last I checked, Netflix makes the trial-ineligible payment screen similar enough to the trial-activation-with-valid-card screen that this is possible. It’s a bit of a dark pattern. But it would be national news if they worked with banks to steal new credit card numbers.
[1]-https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-accoun...
Haven't binged anything on Netflix for a while (due to autoplay videos, in part...), so I can't say what it does with the original topic of the link.
Also talked to support, they said it can't be turned off.
Either way. I wonder what will replace it.
Every action this company takes seems to have one goal, above and beyond all others: to make sure their customers never catch even a fleeting glimpse of just how few titles they have in their streaming catalog.
A strange model, but it seems to work for them.
Thinking about autoplaying, unskippable ads/trailers/promos makes me giggle. I can't imagine paying users reacting well to this.
I'm already annoyed lately by the stuff Netflix tries to push me to watch, by automatically playing stuff... like the intros when i open the netflix app on my Tv or when I've finished watching the last episode of a show.
"Thou shall consume more."
I only need a little bit more of that crap to cancel my subscription...
It's like some people are making up things as situations arise to shield corporate interests and diffuse blame to the individual to evade accountability and cover up greed.
Measuring minutes played or cancellations over a few months is pretty easy. Measuring contribution to a gradual loss of trust, fewer or weaker recommendations to others, and perhaps cancellations months or years later is all but impossible.
It's really hard to construct a split test that's deep enough to fully measure negative reactions. Usually that's not an issue because the thing being tested either has a positive or neutral impact; other than by accident, it's not downright offensive. Fully measuring something that a meaningful percentage of users consider offensive would be really tough.
It's even possible for a decrease in trust that doesn't manifest in user behavior for years. Maybe they stay customers and continue playing media, but start treating Netflix's future decisions with skepticism. The closest to an indicator is probably NPS, but NPS has its own issues.
(The fact that Netflix isn't testing a user-facing "Show a preroll trailer from Netflix's best recommendation" setting says a lot about their willingness to ignore long-term, hard-to-measure impacts…)
And a good part of this appears to be in the effort to hide and mask the increasingly crap quality of their catalog.
Bye bye, stars. Bye bye, user comments. Hello rotating tile images -- now more rapidly rotating tile images. Guess what? It's the same tired, B or C (or D) list title they've been pushing at you for weeks and months.
Oh yeah, and the fan on my laptop kicking in everytime I pull the site up, because now every tile has to have some irritating animation upon hover. Ooh, shiny! But a lot less useful for finding something I might actually enjoy watching, than stars and user comments.
(Think movie trailers, versus talking to a friend. Yeah, that clip may be "compelling". But your friend will tell you it's the best 5 seconds of the whole waste of time.)
10 bucks or so a month isn't that much. But you know what? I've had enough of the increasingly gamed UI and lamed catalog.
I have Prime, as well, and while it isn't the greatest -- all of streaming is becoming so balkanized -- I'm spending the vast majority of my fixed price streaming time in it, these days.
Recently, they've adopted the "big tiles" like Netflix. But so far, they aren't gaming the UI to nearly the extent that Netflix is.
And, starting a couple of months ago, I've gotten to revisit "Babylon 5".
Meanwhile, on Netflix, "Iron Fist" 'season' 2? Season 1 was bad enough...
One was actively offensive and disgusting in which the competitors were floridly incompetent and the challenge was to make something gross. After that experience which was like watching the worst of Youtube except with a 'made by Netflix' label I do not search for cooking competition shows on Netflix anymore.
You're a billion dollar company and your web player has problems getting the focus right.
You still haven't found a decent way -other than notification and email spam- to remind users when the series they're watching start a new season. Like, keep them in the user's list, but apply an "inactive/watched" filter so they don't mess up the list of currently running and unwatched series?
Although I've worked in a small company that got big and subsequently lost their speed in making the product improvements/changes that led to their success in the first place.
I suppose the difference is when you're small you work for your customers and when you're big you work for your investors.
I haven't seen it so no idea if I like it or not. Seems like people don't like it but who knows? Personally, I think they need to focus on the UI and slow down on all the mediocre content. It's choice paralysis and I'm finding it hard to want to even take a chance on many of their originals as there is too much.
(actually, I think it started prior to that... maybe when they started to push people away from DVDs by almost doubling the cost)