Netflix to Raise Price from $11 to $13 a Month
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Is it improving though? It used to be better, had more quality content, easier to navigate, user ratings, reviews etc.
I feel it is one of those cases where to get the real meaning behind the corporate PR message you have to invert it. Then it would be something like: "We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in subpar entertainment and worsening the overall Netflix experience."
I had canceled it a few years back as I ended up spending more time looking for something to watch than actually watching anything. To be fair their original shows were not too bad. I enjoyed Stranger Things, House of Cards and a few others. But it just wasn't worth the price overall.
Our house has both Netflix and Prime Video and that about covers me, my partner and the little boy (Trollhunters is fantastic if you have a child in the house also created for Netflix).
Yes. Content would be removed. Especially top rated IMDB movies. Instead there would be more B-movies. In-house shows made it better, but there weren't enough of them.
Yes, once Netflix proved that streaming was commercially viable, they rapidly got competition bidding for exclusive streaming licenses and then content owners pulling content for their own exclusive streaming services.
So, yes, a lot of content was lost and more is being lost. OTOH, they've ramped up exclusive acquisitions and content development.
I do agree with the notion that the rating system has gotten worse though.
Ah ok I see. Well for the old things that are done well are more valuable as movies than just random new things. And if ratings are an objective sign of quality, I'd say they had been reducing the IMBD Top 100 movies and adding a lot of B-movies. Their original content redeems that a bit, because it is quite good, but it just wasn't good enough.
That’s exactly my experience too. And I usually give up and end up opening an illegal copy of Netflix with better content.
With Netflix I thought we would finally get a “Spotify” for movies, but they don’t even have 1% of the movies I’m looking for.
Netflix has a ton of content, but I feel like at least 70% (and I'm being generous here) is very much 'meh'. There are some people who are happy to watch 'meh', and that's awesome, but I find myself re-watching old (but good) TV series, because the good TV show I watched has ended and I haven't found anything good yet.
So, Friends it is, I guess...
For example: http://flicksurfer.com/ If I could just get pretty much exactly that interface in the Netflix app, plus toggles for "I've seen this, don't show it again unless I look for it specifically" and "I will literally never want to see this, never show it to me again", Netflix would have much higher value to me.
I cancelled after they dropped the Marvel shows. It's really one of the few things I liked/watched on there.
If they had the ability to create good content but were lacking the finances, they could take it from the mediocre content.
I've been wondering if the last Great Unbundling will be followed by another Great Rebundling. I'm no expert in any of this, but it seems unlikely that the new "channels" of Netflix et al. will prevent their programming and delivery methods from be bundled until it becomes disadvantageous to their growth (ie monthly subscriptions can't generate enough revenue).
It seems to me there is an explosion of content that will be able to be monetized far beyond just subscription lock-in. I wonder what the method of monetization will be after the gold-rush of building subscriber bases? Netflix's original proposition and value was one of convenience (and price), but I wonder how long that will last. Will households juggle 4+ subscriptions of $15/mo? I'm not sure that is why cord-cutters originally cancelled their cable subscriptions.
My off-the-top-of-my-head list of current and coming soon subscription services (that also produce content) is: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, YouTube, CBS, Disney/Fox, NBC, Apple. Technologically, it seems like there are some serious hurdles to "bundling" these together.
I wonder if the future "bundle" will actually be a service that manages subscriptions for you, with things like highlighting newly available shows since the last time you subscribed.
$13 gets you a nice entree in most any US city. Not white table cloth service of course, but you can find good and healthy food. Especially if we are talking just about the entree.
I usually don't spend less than $15-20 at fast food. But often it's multiple burgers without a bun, and a couple of side salads.
If you want to watch stuff that's not on Netflix, when you start adding in $7.99 for Hulu, $9.99 (?) for Disney, $14.99 for HBO, etc then you're getting into the same price range you used to pay for cable. Netflix used to be a much better deal when it had a much larger movie catalog, but as content owners have cut back how much they are willing to license to Netflix (and/or made it more affordable), it's not such an amazing deal any more.
I'd gladly pay a provider $30/month if they had all of the content that was available. I don't think music streaming would be nearly as popular if you had to subscribe to a half dozen different providers to hear all of the music you want.
It doesn't even have to be a monopoly, providers should set one rate for their content, and others can buy it and monetize it any way they want.
I felt like my family was lucky to get through 7 DVDs a month with one-at-a-time. We had a pretty good 3-4 day turnaround, but no matter how hard you tried to watch every movie the day you received it, we always managed to end up holding onto a disc for a few days. We eventually switched to 2-at-a-time so we could have one in-flight and one at home, that helped smooth out the gaps.
But even counting 2 or 3 at a time subscriptions, with unlimited streaming I am able to consume more content in a week and a half then I could in an entire month with DVDs, so in terms of content viewed per dollar I still think I'm getting a good deal. Streaming is especially a boon to anyone binging on a TV show. DVDs would have 3, maybe 4 episodes per DVD, so going through a show could monopolize your subscription for weeks at a time. Today I pop the show I want on and it just goes and goes.
Another big change is BluRay, which I've found has far and away higher quality than streaming of any type.
Absolutely. Blu-Ray usually have ~18-25GB of raw video for a standard 2 hour 1080p film.
It's usually actually more because of the container format but the actual video itself is usually about that size.
Standard Blu-ray (As opposed to UHD Blu-ray) doesn't have, to me, subjectively better (or even as good) quality than either 4K and/or HDR content available from YouTube, with the particular data connection I have at home, and with the screen I use. (I'm not currently paying for the 4K service from Netflix.)
I haven't actually compared UHD BluRay to 4K/HDR streaming. But a lot of this is going to vary by streaming provider, codec, data connection, and display hardware.
I keep a subscription for my kids, and will watch a documentary maybe once a month, but their in-house content seems to be the primary offering now and my impression has been that it's mostly terrible.
$13 isn't a deal breaker, but it's definitely creeping toward breaking point for me. I think I would probably drop it somewhere between $15 and $20.
The service has loads of fantastic content covering every gamut.
Same here. I mean, yeah, Netflix doesn't have everything I want to watch. But it does have a shit-ton of stuff I do want to watch. I only allocate a few hours a week to entertainment, so at this rate, I could watch Netflix at my max rate for the next 10 years and probably not even get through the list of stuff they have right now, that interests me (that's assuming nothing got dropped during that 10 years).
That said, yeah, their movie selection in particular is pretty weak. But at any given time, I can always find at least a few dozen that I can say "I'd probably enjoy watching this" if not "this is something I've very specifically been waiting to watch".
I don't know how much higher they could go on price before they'd lose me, but for now, I'm getting my money's worth.
Are they just really bad at suggesting content? How do you go about discovering the fantastic content?
Unfortunately many of their interfaces don't support More Like This.
Netflix has very poor discoverability, and it has gotten worse, but they have an enormous trove of extraordinary content.
I would probably drop HBO NOW before I dropped Netflix.
I wanted to show my GF Star Wars... but it wasn't on it. Same for James Bond, Die hard 4, Oblivion, MI1, etc. It's a shame, really. I would gladly pay 20$/month, but in this case, I want ALL available movies, not just some cherry-picked ones.
FWIW, for watching arbitrary "not on Netflix" movies, Youtube is actually a surprisingly good option. Their "pay to rent movie" service has a pretty deep catalog, and an awful lot of their choices seem to be in the $2.99 - $7.99 or so range. It's quite often I want to watch something that's not on Netflix and find it on YT for, say, $4.99. I don't mind paying that a couple of times a month, on top of what I pay Netflix.
I mean, I'm willing to do this for some thing (often because a new release on a streaming service breaks 3 episodes in because of capacity issues), but not everyone is willing to do so.
I'd be willing to pay $25/month if they got all the content that is no longer available back and included the disc at a time service back. Right now, you can't even watch most of the entire line of movies they do have (like all the MCU movies, or all the die hards, etc). Most of their original content I don't care for, a lot of the rest isn't great. And the dropped the handful of shows I really fired up the netflix app for.