There Are Now More Shows Streaming Than There Are on Broadcast or Cable | Hacker News Reader

There Are Now More Shows Streaming Than There Are on Broadcast or Cable

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73 pointsbookbinder76 comments

Someone recently commented elsewhere that they were tired of paying for streaming access to a bunch of shows nobody wants to watch, and they wanted access to the most popular movies/network shows/whatever.

I didn't comment then, but FWIW: some of the best shows available are now streaming originals from Netflix, Prime, etc. If you haven't checked out specifically any of the Netflix originals, you're missing out. It's a complete replacement for the non-sports watcher.

As posted in response elsewhere below, here's a list of Netflix's best work:

  - Stranger Things
  - Narcos
  - The OA
  - The Haunting of Hill House
  - Marvel series. All of them!
  - GLOW
  - Ozark
  - Altered Carbon
  - American Vandal
  - 13 Reasons Why

Also good:

  - Atypical
  - Love
  - Flaked
  - Maniac
  - Master of None
  - Chef's Table
  - Making a Murderer

This is by no means a complete list, you can find that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...

I tried to skim through it and provide my own short list of what I really liked, so this is just one person's opinion.

These are all good but what I really like are some of the quirky Netflix-only series like "A Very Secret Service", a French comedy that would have been very hard to discover or watch in the old days

Discovery of content; that's the key! While i haven't seen the series you referenced, I agree 100% with your comment. There are numerous movies and series that I stumbled upon that are really, really enjoyable, and i would NEVER have found in the old days.

We recently binge watched both seasons of Stranger Things. Stranger Things and Altered Carbon on Netflix and The Marvelous Mrs Maisal and The Expanse on Amazon have been my most enjoyed shows this year.

"travelers" is good sci-fi. In the vein of "Fringe" but a little nerdier.

The Expanse was good! Fair disclaimer: I canceled Netflix recently, due to unhealthy amount of binge-watching... hence the list above. I have not heard of some of these newer titles. It seems some of them didn't make it through NFLX's recommendation system to my homescreen, because I have never heard of Marvelous Mrs Maisal but that has been out for a while.

Marvelous Mrs. Maisal is on Amazon, not Netflix. Amazon also picked up season 4 of The Expanse after SciFi cancelled it. Good for them. Who needs cable???

Highly subjective and therefor probably not welcome here, but since this was the comment I saw first:

My Top Netflix Shows:

- Better Call Saul

- Bojack Horseman

- Mindhunter

- Fargo

- Maniac

- The End of the Fucking World

- Master of None

- American Vandal

My Top Netflix Movies:

- Beats of No Nation

- Roma

- Annihilation

- Okja

And where I think your list is wrong:

- 13 Reasons Why

Very problematic show[1]. I found Netflix' response to the criticism lacking and season 2 doubles down on the mistake. Even if one can ignore that, I think the writing and characters are still insultingly thin.

- Ozark

Not bad at all. But also not nearly as good as Breaking Bad. If we didn't live in this gilden television age, I might've found it worth my time

- Altered Carbon

Visually very entertaining. But it's definitely pulp.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Reasons_Why#Social_impact

It is funny how the thing that is breaking the cable stronghold is the same thing that will bring it back. By 2020 there will be at least 15 competing streaming services backed by large entertainment companies.

How many subscriptions will people end up paying for then? Someone will then have the idea to consolidate it into one or two packages. Rinse, repeat.

This time it’s without commercials, at least.

I recently watched plain old tv again (after not watching any for several years) and I can’t believe we used to put up with those! It was like I suddenly turned off my adblocker.

Its truly incredible. I also had to stop using ad-block due to some work-related regulations, and I should demand compensation from the state on that.

What is most noticeable to me is how wasteful advertising is. I've seen some of the same ad 1000 times, and im just not going to buy that damn car. I cant drive!

> I also had to stop using ad-block due to some work-related regulations, and I should demand compensation from the state on that.

I'd love to hear more about this if you don't mind.

I'd guess it's either "browser plugins are banned" or "one of the advertising companies might sue us."

I work in healthcare: any plugin with access to your rendered pages is a massive liability.

Interesting that having ads profile the browser - and in many cases the ads or metrics have access to the page - isn't. I wonder if you could persuade them to drop a few domains at the router.

Get the IT guy to switch to Zscalar, Adguard, or similar ad blocking DNS:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

At home, I believe the software defined mesh routers from Eero offer a subscription with Zscalar’s malware and ad blocking DNS, 1Password Family, and VPN.

I tried to watch a half hour episode of "Strange Inheritance" last night. There was probably only about 10 minutes of show - the rest was commercials, "after the break" previews, and post-break recaps.

> This time it’s without commercials, at least.

That's how cable was sold, too.

Some channels still respect that (TCM) but most others don't.

Well, depends - the lowest tier of Hulu has ads. Nothing's stopping anyone from being greedy and introducing ads anyways.

Cable originally had no commercials as well...

Now the commercials are inside the show and make the whole show unwatchable, at least for me.

And on demand. When I come home from work at night there's nothing on television but I can watch an episode on Netflix before going to bed.

Jim Barksdale:

“in business, there are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle.”

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

Barksdale was the veteran of IBM, FedEx and AT&T Wireless (he mostly worked at it when it was called McCaw Cellular) who was brought on a few months after Netscape’s founding to provide adult supervision as its CEO.

Yep, this works in software. Bundle disparate technologies into a solution.

That idea is easy to come up with but impossible to implement. Netflix, Amazon, and probably Apple have no incentive to be bundled.

I'm surprised that consumers on the whole are quick to suggest they'd rather pay for one streaming service only, by which they mean one consolidated service rather than one over a competitor. I'd rather see it as competitive as possible. It's OK NOT TO SEE EVERYTHING.

I imagine most people don't want to see everything, but want to see ten things which are split across five different streaming services (with five different bills, five different user interfaces, and five different sets of quirks) by nothing but licensing. Television is not necessarily fungible.

Indeed. Television is definitely not fungible, and TV shows are not substitute goods. What you want to watch is a combination of your interests and the cultural context in which you want to participate.

If the top 3 shows talked about by my co-workers are each exclusively on a different paid service, you can be sure I'm gonna dig out my trusty Torrent client.

Quite right. Wouldn't it be possible to cut out the middle-man, have a Steam-like storefront producers could unload to? Games are now billion dollar affairs and they don't need to rely on the likes of Viacom or the like.

This is basically what Netflix used to be before the existing distributors realized they wanted in on the new action. The same pattern is playing out in games as well, though slower. Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, and most recently Epic are all trying to cut in on Steam's dominance and using exclusives as leverage to do it.

Services will be launched, but it very much remains to be seen if consumers actually will pay for them. I don't plan going beyond my current 3-4.

Tangential. Streaming TV has given us many benefits. More choice, watch at any time, pause, save for later ('record'), etc.

But I am wondering how much that has increased energy consumption for watching TV and having the internet as its backbone?

LED screens use less power than old CRT TVs.

Well, yes. But I was more interested in the energy requirements for getting the signal to your home.

On Netflix most of their own series are low production value crap. I don't even bother checking them anymore even if the subject sounds interesting, unless I hear about them in the media first.

This can't be good for them in the long run if the Netflix name becomes associated with filler content.

As opposed to broadcast and cable?

For me, the average Netflix show is easily better than the average show from every network except HBO.

> As opposed to broadcast and cable?

Which is why nobody bothers checking out broadcast/cable shows anymore. They have become synonyms with crap.

Netflix is playing a dangerous game here by letting content quality slip. And I don't think it's about the money, they obviously have it and are willing to spend it, but there is only so much acting/producing talent out there.

What? Tens of millions of people watch broadcast and cable shows. The average household still watches almost eight hours per day of TV, and I don’t think that includes Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

So you are basically saying everything is crap?

I'd say 90%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

That's why no one watches TV!

Are you saying that almost everything isn't crap?

You said it yourself. They're not letting quality slip. There is just a paucity of quality period. But like a shark Netflix has to keep moving or die. They can't afford to wait for the best stuff. Also it turns out that Adam Sandler movies are really popular. So maybe their slip isn't as dangerous as you might think.

> Which is why nobody bothers checking out broadcast/cable shows anymore.

Nobody in your circle of friends, perhaps.

Which is why nobody bothers checking out broadcast/cable shows anymore. They have become synonyms with crap.

The infamous “I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV” thinking.

74% of households still subscribe to cable.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nelsongranados/2018/03/30/2017-...

From the same article: “OTT-only households tripled in the past four years (about 40% annually), and I can think of no reason why this trend would slow down”, where OTT means over-the-top streaming services like Netflix.

It’s clear that people enjoy that experience more than cable, which isn’t surprising given it's on-demand nature.

Cable is on its way down, and quickly, where people have the choice.

I don’t deny that. But to say that people don’t currently watch cable when three in four households do still have cable is false.

My older son went a year without cable or home internet. He used his phone for tethering and his PS4 to watch video on TV. Of course he used our family Netflix plan, Hulu, and played video off of my Plex server.

I doubt my younger son will ever have traditional cable. We haven’t even bothered with giving him our DirecTVNow login or getting a third stream for him to watch.

He is also coming up in a house with unlimited gigabit Ethernet, every room wired for gigabit Ethernet and Roku TVs, AppleTV boxes, and Roku sticks all over the house....

Big mouth, orange is the new black, black mirror, house of cards, narcos....? I think they are doing a pretty decent job

House of cards: filler by season 3 and the last season turning into an incoherent mess to deal with the accepted but voluntary PR response of axing the main character, out of all possible responses.

Orange is the new black: loses all forms of ‘conflict’ as a literary device by season 3

And these are the flagship titles!

Low bar

Edit: since downvotes pause my ability to post for hours so I cant even respond, the only point is that this is what a Netflix fan can expect to experience from any show they get into. The “good” shows have the above experience, no matter what the rationale or external pressure was, and then there is everything else which is even worse.

Firing a serial sexual harasser of his own coworkers is more of an HR thing than it is a PR thing. You simply cannot keep someone like that employed; it's way too much of a legal liability. Also, many people would refuse to work with someone like that entirely, out of principle.

Maybe they should have canceled the series entirely instead of continuing on without him, but keeping him employed on the show was never an option.

As someone who worked at one of the large networks, I disagree with you when you state that it was more of an HR than PR thing.

I can assure you the types of behavior that these male actors were accused of were no secrets, neither at my company nor in the industry. Nobody did anything about it, and it wasn’t until it blew up into a fire storm thanks to social media that these companies decided the best response from a business sense was to suddenly pretend we are on a moral high ground and sever these relationships. It was fear and about saving image.

Otherwise, the response would have been to deny and secretly pay off accusers while maintaining relationships with the Kevin Spaceys of the world.

If it an HR/legal issue, he could be brought in as a contractor.

That wouldn't change anything. If a company knowingly chooses to bring a sexual harasser into your workplace, and you get harassed, the technical employment status of the harasser won't matter when you file your lawsuit against the company.

For HoC I swear that was the third or fourth "president" show I watched that used the Mercers as a major plot device.

OITNB is one of their first originals, and I wouldn't call it their best work.

Here's a list of their best work, IMO:

  - Stranger Things
  - Narcos
  - The OA
  - The Haunting of Hill House
  - Marvel series. All of them!
  - GLOW
  - Ozark
  - Altered Carbon
  - American Vandal
  - 13 Reasons Why

Also good:

  - Atypical
  - Love
  - Flaked
  - Maniac
  - Master of None
  - Chef's Table
  - Making a Murderer

This is by no means a complete list, you can find that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...

I tried to skim through it and provide my own short lists of what I really liked, so this is just one person's opinion.

Orange is the New Black and House of Cards were the first two originals that I watched, and I remember liking House of Cards, although it is very slow, but I stopped watching OITNB after the second season.

Flagship titles? Is that really an important thing for Netflix?

The thing is (like Amazon & Hulu) is that they have no advertisers, hence publish no viewing figures for anything.

We really have no idea what's working for them and what isn't.

Not everything can be that good, unfortunate.

There have never been too many Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or StarTrek Voyager.

But Netflix has still lots of other shows to over. They just have all Star Trek series. They buyout really good shows (Like Black Mirror) and there catalog is only growing.

That for only 10,- Euros. Spotify costs me the same!

I bought DVDs and rented VHSrs before. I don't mind paying it to Netflix and other Streaming services instead.

I do believe that the quality and availability got higher and the prices are cheaper than ever.

And btw. for a german person, it is the first time ever that i can watch it all in the OV. Even when you had something similiar to a usa cable subscription, you could not switch the language. Now its a nobrainer.

Glories Times :-)

There was a ton of "made for TV" content in the 70's and 80's, for example, TV movies. It has all vanished. It's not even on imdb.com. I wonder why nobody is streaming it.

On the other hand, I've noticed that record companies are reaching further and further into their back catalogs, even going back into the 1950s, and re-releasing on CDs long unavailable stuff.

(I notice this because I often buy thrift store records, wondering what is on them. There are some really nice forgotten gems.)

I tried watching the first season of Star Trek TNG recently and couldn't get through two episodes. Things get dated I guess.

I don't think good music ever gets old.

I like the old TOS with its campiness, but even when TNG was new I found it unwatchable.

In general, though, TV shows don't age well. Even Mission Impossible from the 60's, well regarded at the time, looks silly today.

The later seasons are still very watchable, in my opinion.

This isn't a show that is well-served by sequential viewing.

Try the Best of Both Worlds two-parter.

We rewatching Voyager and it is still great.

When we rewatched Stargate SG1 just a few years ago, i was surprised how good it still is.

TNG isn't really watchable until Riker gets his beard (around season 2).

There is a bit of it on Youtube. Have you looked much there?

Even things like 'Der Fahnder' a German TV cop show. Some episodes of The Rockford Files are there. Some Barney Miller.

I've seen a few low quality VCR rips of some old shows on youtube. Anything from a VCR from those days will be pretty poor.

> They just have all Star Trek series.

That was the reason I subscribed all those years ago. They also had Star Trek movies (the pre-JJAbrams ones), but now they're gone.

This is a huge problem with Netflix for me. Things are there today for me to watch, but they're gone the next week, just when I wanted to show them to my wife.

I think Amazon Prime has them now, or was it Hulu. So frustrating.

I agree with you, outside of a few productions the vast majority of netflix content isn't good. Black Mirror, Stranger Things, the new movie the Ballad of Buster Scruggs... I can't think of anything else I like from them.

Amazon has the same problem, both Amazon and Netflix seem to pump out tv shows without putting that much work into them going for quantity over quality. First Amazon show I actually enjoyed was the Jack Ryan tv show. Sneaky Pete was good for the first few episodes but it just seems to fizzle out.

In contrast, almost everything on HBO is good. I rewatched Band of Brothers for I think the 3rd time the other week and I enjoyed it just as much as I had the first time I had seen it.

Watch The OA. Refer to my comment history for other titles you might like.

  - Narcos
  - The OA
  - The Haunting of Hill House
  - Marvel series. All of them!
  - GLOW
  - Ozark
  - Altered Carbon
  - American Vandal
  - 13 Reasons Why

I've seen all of Altered Carbon, some of Ozark, some of Narcos, and 2 seasons of Marvel (Daredevil season 1 and 2).

None of them were particularly amazing.

Yeah, it's certainly not Game of Thrones quality stuff. But that's not what I'm looking for usually. I feel like certain outlets (HBO/Showtime, network television, streaming original content) have specific characteristics to their shows, in more than one way... really hard to put this into words. HBO shows, for example, are usually really well-written, great acting and strong cast, and strong visual design that sets their shows apart from other networks. The critics love them and they become hits, for good reason. Network shows, on the other hand, might not be innovating anywhere on the cinematography side and have a typical, cookiecutter look & feel, but still receive high ratings because they cater to a very mainstream audience. Sort of like your average, cookiecutter rock band that has millions of listeners, but the most picky listeners aren't going to like that band because they sound so "cliche".

TV seems to have a similar thing going to for it, a "class system" of sorts. I'm really bad at putting this into words; I don't work in the industry or read TV blogs or anything like that. Netflix has so many shows I'm sure they are all over the map here, though, so not really sure why I'm saying this.

I guess my point is, some people aren't looking for 5-star GOT/Westworld level quality in their TV watching. If you only have 1 hour per week to watch TV, sure, make it something good. If you watch more TV than that, though, the bar becomes substantially lower.

>I guess my point is, some people aren't looking for 5-star GOT/Westworld level quality in their TV watching. If you only have 1 hour per week to watch TV, sure, make it something good. If you watch more TV than that, though, the bar becomes substantially lower.

There is a lot of entertainment out there today, and I'm not going to say it is bad to like these shows but there is absolutely enough quality entertainment out there to last you a lifetime. It's not all in TV though.

It's no more the age of info overload but sensory and stimulation overload.

All cultures have a handful of the same stories they replayed to themselves for thousands of years. Now we somehow believe all this bullshit "variety" is required to entertain ourselves. It isn't true and it will break down.

You should tell that to the ancient Greeks, with their yearly competitions for new plays, and dozens of playwrights. Sophocles alone wrote a hundred and twenty plays, and he had a much smaller potential audience than someone writing for Netflix.

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