2.7M Americans Still Get Netflix DVDs in the Mail
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
The implicit promise -- actually, occasionally made EXPLICITLY in marketing -- of high-speed broadband was that everything would be available, but the reverse has proven true. A person living in an urban area had a larger selection of movies available for rent in 1999 than they do today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business, but streaming is governed by different agreements -- which leads to ridiculous "availability windows."
We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix, but you still get the availability shifts. Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit, and it didn't (and couldn't) happen when movies were tied to a physical object.
If you want a deep library of rentals, DVD/BR by mail is still better. If you want better quality, DVD/BR by mail is the best option. And obviously if you live somewhere with shitty connectivity (basically the entire rural US), then by-mail might be your ONLY real option.
Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?
It’s like they see themselves as competitors.
I've ordered books from libraries thousands of miles away. It takes a few weeks for the books to arrive, possibly because they go 4th Class mail. But they get there eventually.
In my area, about 40 regional libraries are linked and will ship most stuff to the library of your choice. They also accept returns anywhere.
It’s fabulous except for new bestsellers.
Having both a family member and a couple friends who are/have been librarians, I seriously doubt it is a competitive instinct. I'm sure there are exceptions, but most librarians are genuinely dedicated to information freedom. (They certainly aren't getting MLS degrees for the money...)
I doubt they'll ever mail it direct to your home, though.
They are small, so super responsive. I had gotten halfway through a film and was interrupted, came back the next day and it was off catalog, so I gave some feedback about wishing for more transparency.
They sent out a schedule of movies leaving to all subscribes like the next day.
I used to go to the college library and get videos pretty often. I'd usually rip them to my laptop and return them in the same day, letting me get way more movies than I could watch.
Earlier this week I returned a new release that my wife ordered from the library. She waited several months for it to become available.
Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep. The other problem is that the library system holds back a number of copies for people who walk in, which I totally understand. Doesn't help my wife, though.
Also IIRC there's no limit on DVD preorders. Conversely the Overdrive kindle lending service maxes you out at 20 and usually has reasonable (well, sometimes 3-6 week) wait times.
True, but libraries are more my goto for things that aren't on streaming. For example I wanted to watch "Reanimator" and none of my steaming services had it but the local library had a DVD.
For new stuff I'm willing to pay a dollar or two on Amazon. (Especially since you can earn that easily by picking a slowing shipping speed on nonessential items... so order a dvd the library doesn't have, get a credit for a current release, and rent an old favorite to tide you over.)
It's not perfect, but in my experience you're often paying for convenience, and being willing to be slightly inconvenienced pays dividends.
$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.
I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.
If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.
I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.
Also, from my experience, many library DVDs tend to be scratched up (especially popular DVDs), while Netflix DVDs tend to be better (though some still don't play on my DVD player, for some reason).
Possibly because you don’t trust the government.
With that said, I'd think that Redbox basically does Netflix-by-mail more efficiently, no? It seems like the speed of the mail service guarantees that it will take at least a few days between you sending your finished movies back before new ones arrive, as opposed to driving to your nearest grocery store or gas station to pick something else.
Not much there at any given time though.
The selection was tiny compared to the independents they mostly priced out of existence, then became the most expensive place to rent once that was done. They had major films sooner for about as much as going to the cinema. That's it. Their only selling point. They got shot of old stuff far too soon so you could never actually find old stuff in Blockbuster unless it was 2001 or Wizard of Oz.
The corner shop near us that rented, and next door but 2 to Blockbuster, kept going years after Blockbuster closed. Having experienced Blockbuster in 3 or 4 places I've lived, I gave a little cheer when they went.
I can get a BluRay from Family Video and a pizza from Marcos delivered to my door in under an hour with a $10 or more purchase from Marcos. It ends up being a cheap date night with my fiancee.
I rented a lot of movies from Family Video in high school. There was a location about halfway between my house and my girlfriends. It closed at Midnight, and my curfew was midnight, so I stopped by right before closing almost every night one summer. They had a deal where you got an old release for free with every new release and it was like 3 dollars.
That was a fun summer.
My comment just worked better with Blockbuster since Blockbuster is/was the poster child of that era of video rental. :)
Netflix is a Trojan horse. The whole business model is moving to in-house stuff, and each of the big content owners will stand up their own platforms.
I am curious about how streaming will develop over the next few years as more services come online. I doubt the average person is going to want to maintain that many (expensive) subscription services. I already dislike the juggle between Netflix, Prime, and Hulu.
First, we got the convenience. Only when most everything went online and the alternatives had faded to irrelevance did the availability start to go away. Now we consumers have less than we did before.
Long lines were annoying, but the worst was having to drive to and from the store. The independent video stores in my area were much further away than the nearest Blockbuster, so Blockbuster was more convenient but their crappy video selection made going to the independents instead worth it for me, and Blockbuster was the store of last resort.
Once I started using Netflix's DVD service, I never set foot a brick and mortar video rental store again. Why would I drive somewhere when I had an excellent DVD selection at my fingertips that would mail the DVD to me?
My guy, the rest of your comment is great. You've gotta realize how wildly useless this line is, though.
Bad service exists and video store employees were known for being in this stereotype, as were theater employees. You just got lucky.
Context: I was one of those employees, and I worked in multiple regions of the USA and have conferred with friends who worked at Blockbuster UK as well.
I've also never experienced a long line at a video store, despite it being a regular Friday night thing for me to do for many years...
Gotta say, the thing I miss most is the ease of browsing through a curated back catalogue. Netflix and co are terribly awful by comparison. Several hundred square metres vs a 55" television screen...
for some it is purely impulse renting. do not confuse the immediacy of the experience with the ability to find something to stream, it is a whole different experience
Walking Tall? Giant? Gaslight? Beach Blanket Bingo anyone? Return of the Dragon? Ran?
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Walking-Tall/60034554
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Gaslight/70074384
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Beach-Blanket-Bingo-How-to-Stu...
I went ahead and added the different version of Gaslight to my queue though. Thanks, stranger.
Oh well, I guess I can check the local library.
I've read that Netflix is simply not interested in offering movies, preferring tv series. When I subscribed (in Europe) the selection was very limited.
We gave up on Netflix DVD when about half of our saved for later queue flipped over to queue of DVDs they no longer have.
It used to be that Netflix competed with Blockbuster by carrying movies Blockbuster did not rent. Netflix was originally the movie service for movie lovers and Blockbuster was the service for new releases. This was before Netflix also started carrying new releases. Now if I want to see a movie that was made more than 5 years ago, it is no longer available.
It would be tough to get studio buy-in, but it would be amazing to have a version or Redbox that burned DVDs in place.
From a logistics perspective it would be ideal if they could use disks that degraded after 5 plays, but they could also just accept disks back, read them, and destroy them.
I am extrapolating from seeing a number of battered rancher pickup trucks whose occupants are clustered around Redbox kiosks in small towns in the western US.
They also have a deal with the post office that in some areas the post office will notify Netflix when they pick up your disk so that Netflix can send a new out before they get your old one back.
Also, Netflix has various plans: you could rent one DVD at a time, two DVDs at a time, three DVDs at a time (and maybe more). If you have three DVDs out at a time, and watch one DVD per day and mail it DVDs back as you watch them, you won't have to wait long before your next DVD arrives in the mail, possibly while you're still watching the rest.
In my own experience, watching a DVD per day is pretty ambitious. Odds are you'll be watching way less than that, and there'll be multiple days between watching DVDs, in which case waiting for your next DVD to arrive in the mail won't realy make any difference.
;-)
No, actually, because the killer aspect of DVD-by-mail is the depth of selection. Redbox machines are even MORE limited.
First sale only applies if the video rental business purchases physical copies. It is/was not unusual for a large rental business to, rather than buy copies, to license the work for distribution during a particular time/area. That allowed them to burn/build DVDs to meet demand and replaced broken disks as needed. When the license was over, the DVDs were destroyed per the licensing contract.
So infuriating. We were surcharged and paid billions into fixing this. The universal service fund went into CEO compensation and not much else.
We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.
WTF does public television think its doing with this strategy? Makes me want to pull funding.
But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.
The whole industry makes no sense to me.
It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).
If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.
If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.
Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)
The content (and associated bandwidth demands) comes from those seeding the torrent.
Like it was already mentioned, this was about unfair business advantage, not about the actual copyright.
[1] https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000043556-...
https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/PBS_...
Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of rent-seeking? They explicitly don't want rent.
(Yes, I know the economic definition, I'm just punning)
(Yes, I say this from the point of view of someone who has "purchased" dozens of videogames on PSN and Steam, fully aware that any of them could have the plug pulled on them at any time...)
So movie distribution companies are certainly engaging in rent-seeking behavior–only you're not the customer. The streaming providers are.
(Reasonably good pun though)
It seems like we need something new here to cover things like streaming content, ebooks, digital delivery, drm, etc.
I'm sure I'm not the only one annoyed by how the world has moved from selling to renting, especially when services and the companies providing them seem more ephemeral than ever.
There is no reason why a license should be locked to a platform. IMO it’s a great area to regulate.
IMO making Amazon, Netflix, etc even more of a commodity is in the interests of the producers and consumers of content.
The last DVD I rented from Netflix was "Iron Monkey." This movie is very hard to get your hands on otherwise. (If you search for the torrent, there's a good chance you won't get any viable results!)
Netflix even had a production company called Red Envelope Entertainment that did some really great alt comedy movies (an early Zach Galifianakis special with the Netflix exec sitting front row with his Netflix hat on like a nerd, for example).
The limitations absolutely do bother me in principle, and on occasion I get frustrated about not being able to find something specific (then I have to decide if I care enough to go try to find it from another source). But in general I do not find myself suffering from a shortage of video content to watch at any given time.
Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.
There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.
This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.
They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).
For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.
Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.
I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.
My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.
Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.
I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.
Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.
Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.
But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.
It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.
Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.
Would you be willing to elaborate on what you find frustrating? We're doing work in a similar area.
Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).
Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.
Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.
Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.
You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.
So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.
To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.
They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.
Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-ratings-really-mean-1...
How? That's because they pretty much own all the content that is on cable. Titles are gradually disappearing from Netflix and appearing on Hulu.
Netflix was smart to start creating their own content early on, without it they would be dead right now.
Artwork Personalization at Netflix.. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork-personalization-...
Excerpt:
Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.
If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.
In Netflix, not only is it hard to find the last thing I was watching, but everything else is mixed together and worse: it moves around nearly every time I open the app. An endless amount of categories and lists seem to be invented all the time and are at the top of the interface where my "continue watching" category should be every single time. I get it, you're creative Netflix, and you want to promote stuff but that's not as helpful as consistency... and the proof is that you're losing me.
Let me finish what I'm in the middle of and promote your stuff afterwards, or at least have a consistent shortcut to get to the continue watching category much more easily.
I plan on joining again for a bit, watch a few shows they made in the years since I left, then probably dropping them again.
There are many, many parts of the USA where the 'high speed' internet service is somewhere between 1mbps to 3mbps maximum, or slower, assuming there's any broadband at all.
Internet speeds plummet when you're in most rural areas, often even semi-rural smaller towns that are 30-45 minutes outside of major cities have comically slow internet.
I think the fact that renters had more choices in 1999 is because Blockbuster was a near monopoly and nobody was really challenging their status quo outside of some regional shops. All of the price changes happened as Redbox entered the scene, not Netflix streaming (though Netflix mailers were a challenge as well). So even without these streaming services you'd be seeing the same BS with only being able to buy a film for several weeks before it would be available to rent.
First sale only works effectively once the studio starts selling copies at retail. After that, when anyone could go down to Target, or Walmart, or Best Buy and buy retail copies, then so could Redbox, and there was nothing the studios could do to stop them.
I believe that the way things like the Blockbuster exclusive deals worked is that the studios would make a deal with Blockbuster to sell copies to Blockbuster weeks before they released them for purchase at retail.
Before streaming became a thing, you could download movies and music through P2P networks. Streaming became a huge success, piracy became less of an issue, because many people didn't have problem with throwing $7 a month to use Netflix.
Now once again you get much better experience if you pirate. That's the only real competitor, can you imagine how bad it would be if there was no piracy?
The basic idea is this: Let's say i once downloaded long-tail file X. Me sharing it for years and years isn't the default.
But what if it was ? what if this was built into one of the popular torrent clients , and i would have to opt-out to change it ?
But in other places, this isn't a big issue.
But to share a file, usually you have to keep it in your file list - and that takes up visual space, attention, and bandwidth/storage, so you just delete it.
But what if the software limited bandwidth/storage for such files to 5% of your total, and managed that in a way that wouldn't clutter or take any attention ?
Maybe in a different tab - so you'd still have full control, if needed ?
For example, one offers a multiplier on seed credit for low seed-count torrents, and another does the same but also prominently features a small selection of them in the front page (programmatically) to motivate users to preserve them.
The underlying issue persists, but there are some methods to address it, and perhaps more could be devised.
Would that be legal? It's a lot closer to Pay Per View than to traditional streaming.
If such a service also provided a more general permanent digitization service for media you actually own (where you would send them your own discs, or forward them any random CD/DVD/BR you buy off the Internet, and they would rip the disc out of the packaging it comes in, digitize it, put it on a server for you, and then destroy the original), then—in combination with the multiple-countries thing—I could use this to consume content that doesn't have a streaming version, only a physical edition; and where that physical edition isn't sold for export, but only in its country of origin. (Think: limited-release pressings of albums from indie bands; movies from film festivals that never ended up seeing general release; etc.)
Essentially, it's like getting some physical media sent to Archive.org for expert digitization+preservation, but without distribution to the general public, just to the person who paid to do the preservation.
(Though, they could certainly sit on their own copy of the digitized work indefinitely, never giving it to anyone or acknowledging that they have it, waiting for the day it either enters the public domain, or they acquire distribution rights to it, whereupon they can put it into a public catalogue.)
You might want to look into this again. If you can get Netflix's highest quality 1080p streams they have much higher bitrates than what you can rent or buy on itunes.
But you are 100% right about availability. Streaming is almost a myth if you're like me and want to watch a bunch of unpopular titles.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2345839/population-dens...
https://geoisp.com/us/ has some data about availability by population, but not a great map.
The copyright industry just has a different agenda than we do. We think when technology improves we'll get more selection, faster at higher quality. The copyright industry thinks when technology improves about what new ways they can restrict the public so that lawyers can continue to make money from the hard work of long dead authors and artists.
With mobile games, developers are starting to realize that they can get far more money from the addicts who need to play 4 hours a day by throttling gameplay to 20 minutes a day, and forcing them to buy gems in order to bypass the throttle. This could get worse with things like Google Stadia if they decide to monetize their platform in a "pay as you play" sort of model, where you can pay, say, $4.50 for 5 hours of playtime.
And trying to convince someone like Google or Microsoft that their site or service is not very robust when things start getting lossy is a complete waste of time, even if you have a massive following on social media people who dare to complain about not having megabits of data are completely ignored.
I myself am lucky enough to have great broadband, but I've been getting annoyed with how series will move on/off the service (I see monthly "What's leaving Netflix this month" articles in some places), I'm annoyed with how Netflix has made their system "pushier" (such as constantly looping ads), how they gave me an ability to build a personal want-to-watch list and then hide that away making it hard to benefit from, and in particular, how I now have to balance multiple subscription services if I want to see the shows I want to see.
Side Note: As annoyed as I am with Netflix from time to time, they beat the pants off of Hulu when it comes to interface, and remain nicer than Amazon.
We primarily still have the paid for DVD service because there's a whole bunch of movies and TV shows that just aren't available via streaming services. For example we were just using it for the final series of True Blood, because all the previous series are on Amazon Prime, but not the last one.
There's a lot of classic movies missing from online services, as well, particularly MGM ones.
I would bet that the majority of those 2.7M subscribers joined before Netflix streaming began and never saw a reason to cancel.
This doesn't seem right.
A 50GB blu-ray that is 2 hours long can have a maximum bitrate of 55mbit. So if your claim is correct, you'd need a 100GB blu-ray (which exists) for a 2 hour movie, which doesn't match my experience, especially for 1080p.
I bought a lot of Blu-rays (obsessed with "owning" the good movies which I then rip - I extract the original streams without reencoding and then I put the files on my mediaserver) and the biggest 1080p-file I have is the one of "Interstellar" being 39GB (original video and original 3 audio tracks and some subtitles), followed by "the dark knight rises" of 35GBs and otherwise all the rest is between 10-30GBs depending on the movie.
Usually when I play a movie in the living room I see spikes of 2.5MB/s transferred data on the mediaservers, and this is original content ripped 1:1.
I've streamed 4K content from Youtube on my TV that has looked utterly stunning.
LG OLED Tvs are pretty nice, but they have color banding issues. Also have really good contrast.
Fire up an average Netflix show, and the banding is absolutely insane, causing one to immediately blame the TV (since it DOES have documented banding issues). But...it has nothing to do with the TV: it just makes the low quality of the stream very obvious. Watch some 4k HDR stuff on Youtube and it looks fine (there is some banding, but it's much, MUCH harder to see).
Oh shit didn't know Redbox did this. Wish Netflix did 4k Blu rays
The quality is really good on some titles, like the latest F1 docu-series. Others have terrible quality, like the original planet earth. Lots of stuttering and compression artifacts.
Like another commenter somewhere, I'd be happy with smooth, artifact free 1080p over 4k any day.
Uneven frame-timing, fo sure, but does it really use 3:2 pulldown?
IIRC the monitor, at least when using most of players on PC to playback, will just display/repeat each video frame uneven times, but no 3:2 pulldown, i.e. interlacing two frames together to generate 1 more frame every 4 frames, is involved.
I'm definitely not an expert on this topic though so please feel free to correct me!
I never understood the appeal of watching Netflix in a browser?
Why let DRM infect your browser? Why not use closed media services in dedicated, closed-source apps for such things and keep your browser clean?
To date I’ve honestly never seen anyone access Netflix through a browser. It’s all native apps.
What’s the appeal?
To really put this in perspective, the picture quality that Netflix provides is worse than pre-digital analog film projection. Dracula originally screened in cinemas in 1992 looked (far) better than what you stream on Netflix right now in 2019. Now I know the consumer has always traded convenience for picture quality, hence the popularity of early home media such as VHS, but that was bound by the limitation of the technology back then. Right now, there's zero technical reason for why quality can't be better, ignoring bandwidth. It's a digression and the fact it's so tolerated makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm not even a film buff, it's just that it's apparent like night and day, like a re-compressed jpg is.
Used VUDU when it first came out and recall being super impressed with its quality though. They have an HDX subscription that uses double+ the bitrate as their HD apparently..
It's slow, and there's all kinds of shit that has to be skipped, if it can be skipped. And then there's the high likelihood of scratches given enough time.
That the manufacturers of DVDs have not made it possible to play the main content immediately, as it is (usually) with streaming, is a signal to me that they are not taking the future of the medium seriously.
Yes, it's possible to work around with VLC player, etc. but that is not helpful for most commercial hardware and for most people.
Ironically, we see some streaming platforms, like Amazon Fire for example, adding shit at the beginning that's un-skippable.
That and commercials are dealbreakers for me. Makes it easy to choose my streaming platforms.
That's still an issue today for me. I've been told that using a true 5.1 surround system will fix that, but I've never been a fan of the extra speakers. Plus most of the people I know that actually have a surround receiver have all 5 speakers just sitting right next to the TV anyway.
Then there's the screwy menu navigation and forced commercials. My mom struggles to get through those, slowly hen pecking buttons or staring at the remote wondering if you hit the "Ok/Enter" button or the play button. My grandparents never have figured it out, I have to do it for them every time.
I'm not a movie buff at all. I only recently started buying movies now that I have kids but the DVD format natively is just too painful. I tried initially to rip DVDs to an mp4 but that just takes too long. What I do now just so I can be somewhat "legit" is buy some $3 "as is" used DVD off of ebay. Right when I get it in the mail, I throw it into a junk drawer and then grab a torrent of it. 10 minutes later I've got it on my hard drive and if I'm feeling fancy I'll ffmpeg it to wav format and normalize the audio then copy it back. From there I shoot it over to my media box in the living room for the kids to enjoy their new "freshly ripped" DVD. I don't even tell my wife the truth.
I used to buy DVDs to support creators, and just leave them on the shelf while I torrented the contents. It was so much more convenient than sticking plastic discs into slots and fudging through menus and copyright warnings.
Basically, if it is available on disk, Netlfix can mail it to you. And their mailing service is pretty efficient. It's rare to have to wait long to get something.
The only annoyance is that occasionally you get a 'rental only' disk that doesn't have the extras.
Unfortunately, they're really letting their back catalog rot. An awful lot of things I saved in my DVD queue at some point are no longer available. In many cases, they're still available to buy but Netflix doesn't have them.
Edit: because it looks like it will turn into a wasteland after disney leaves
However, in practice, large rental companies (like Netflix) likely DO have contracts that make it easier and cheaper for them to get large numbers of discs without buying them on the retail market. But at least the first sale doctrine provides a fallback if contracts fail. I think I read somewhere that in the past Netflix has had to refer to the retail market for certain titles.
Edit: I also wonder if the unit price difference will ever be big enough that Netflix has to charge a premium for those who want the excluded titles?
So they definitely have agreements with the studios/distributors to get discs for the rental market, and it looks like that agreement is covering more and more titles. For the Marvel titles - it's about 50:50 (in perfect balance..)
> The defendants, Zediva, self-described as a DVD "rental" service, served its customers with access to DVDs played from their data center where each DVD was streamed through its individual DVD player for up to four hours. Zediva customers did not have access to the digital file.
> The court held that the "public interest is served by issuance of a preliminary injunction" in order to uphold copyright protections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
Wow, was that ever a stitch up though; I have to vent(!):
>"The non-public nature of the place of the performance has no bearing on whether or not those who enjoy the performance constitute 'the public' under the transmit clause", stated the court. It did not matter whether Zediva's customers were using the service at different times and in different places. //
Paraphrasing that "the clause requires the transmission to be to the public, the fact that here they're not transmitting to the public [but to paying customers only, in private] is not material". Way to take an explicit requirement and hand-wave it away there judge.
What I'd love to know is how the motivations work in this sort of thing in USA, like do the politicians get paid by the media corps, and the politicians choose the judges, or is there a way the media corps pay off the judges direct [perhaps "consulting" jobs when they retire?].
>The court also refused to adopt the Second Circuit's volitional requirement //
What a surprise!
>Last, even though the plaintiffs required their licensees to provide a high quality movie-watching experience to the VOD customers, the defendants being non-licensed, were not obligated to meet such standards and provided sub-optimal customer experience that tarnished customers' perception of VOD as an attractive option for viewing the Copyrighted Works. //
Except that's, again, exactly backwards if the VOD providers were better then they'd get the business. The defendant is paying full price for the DVD; the DVD is the quality the complainant made it - likelihood of irreparable injury is close to zero.
I'll bet the court did a quick survey "would you like cheaper, easier access to dvd rentals at home?" and all the public said "no way, stop that shit ASAP!".
Not sure about Netflix, but studios have tried to squeeze Redbox before by telling their distributors not to sell to them until X days after release, though.
In hindsight, this would have been an excellent move. Each org could have focused better on their respective service. But now the media-by-mail half is just crashing in the space of the streaming service. They have no incentive to market it, and will pull the plug the moment it is unprofitable.
Are there any alternative discs-by-mail services out there that actually care about and want to be providing such a service?
It's not by mail, but most libraries have DVDs and Blurays. They often have countywide agreements so you can get a title shipped from across the city to your local library for free.
For those in the US, something I have found pleasantly surprising is that the local library (this is a "small" library with only two branches) feels this niche quite well. I have been able to get recent releases as well as it having a pretty healthy supply of general interest and some specialize interest movies. They have an online catalog so I can search and set a hold on a movie, book, or other physical media so I can go in, grab it, and go. Many of them allow you to rent an obscene amount of movies at once (the limit at mine is 20 movies check out at a time), and it's free! On top of that, they partner with a digital service that also allows you to "rent" a set amount of movies/shows/ebooks per month (for free!).
Something I have not tried is to see what happens if they don't have a movie/book/show that I want. I imagine they have a process to request them buying it if there's enough interest.
Likewise. There are many titles available through Netflix DVD that are not available through Netflix streaming. Just off the top of my head you have Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7), The Wire, True Detective, Fargo and The Expanse.
I can then watch the movie anytime I want via kodi in the living room. If I really want to watch some movie / series that is not owned by the library, I fill out an online form with a suggestion that the library buys the movie / series. It takes some time, of course, but they usually follow the suggestions.
[0] https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-rippi...
My local library does the same, but they will let you check out 5 more as soon as you check in the last set. So you can watch a lot of films every month, in addition to the 20 or so that you can stream via apps like Kanopy and Hoopla.
The nice thing is, if there are multiple card holders in your home you can at least double all these numbers. It's raining movies! :-)
I bet a lot of people use the DVD service to rip all the movies and have them on a hard drive. I've thought about it.
Netflix's DVD selection more closely matches what I want to watch than Netflix's streaming offerings. Plus, I can watch stuff when I'm offline, which is a bonus.
Why?
So many more titles are on DVD than streaming. Many many more.
Try watching anything by Rainer Fassbinder on streaming: does not exist, but are on DVD. But that number is dropping due to licensing issues, just like streaming. My DVD queue has movies saved in "unknown" that I've actually SEEN from Netflix back in 2002 when I first subscribed.
Examples of DVDs from Netflix ca. 2002-2005 that I watched which no longer exist:
Lumiere and Company
The Third Man
The House that Dripped Blood
Lies
Crimes of Passion
Sadly my "unknown availability" list is growing.
We had a practice a day or so after the Qwikster plan was announced and then abandoned. So of course I mention it to her, with a dumb-ass grin, sort of like, "Wow, interesting times at work, hey?" And she responds with something along the lines of, "Well, Reed thought it was a good idea, and we tried to do the best we could to make it work." It was said in a way that I immediately thought, "We?? Uh-oh." I looked her up that night and found out she was a VP and most likely deeply involved in the whole process. It took me weeks to get the foot taste out of my mouth, I had wedged it in there so badly.
Lesson: In Silicon Valley, you never know if your kid's soccer coach is actually the VP of a multi-million dollar corporation making headlines that day, so keep it to yourself.
For me, a large part of the appeal of Netflix/Amazon for video is that I don't have any physical media. I'm barely good at taking care of disks. My kids? It isn't really fair to get upset if they destroy them. Yes, everyone thinks they remember how well they took care of their parents crap. No. You didn't actually do so. (Statistically, I'm sure there are folks that did. But by and large you don't exist in the statistical sense.)
Now, this primarily just means that you need the major shows my kids want to watch. Nowadays, that is Octonauts and Pokemon. The How to Train a Dragon series is also getting a lot of play. Luckily, all available for streaming easily enough. Zero effort on my part, too. Just a relatively small bill. Especially compared to the cable I don't pay anymore.
I can't really say from experience since I live in Europe but I've seen people from the US complain about data caps on regular internet for a while and I guess netflix will eat up that quite fast especially if you watch 4k movies.
How large is the average cap on US ISPs?
This isn't a thing in the US. You've seen Canadians complain.
That’s only around 34GB per day..
I feel like I should state that I’m against all data caps. Where I live we don’t have data caps on home connections and it’s somewhat affordable to get unlimited LTE SIM’s (about €80/US$90).
I don’t see why there should be a limit. Connections are usually sold in different tiers which are advertised with a bandwidth speed. If something is advertised as having 100Mbps then I should be able to use that connection continuously 24/7 with that speed or a close approximation at least. So it depends on the advertised speed. For 100Mbps that would come out to roughly 60TB/month.
But in no way should it be 1TB in my opinion. It’s trivial to reach that especially because many connections aren’t used by a single person. 4k content is available and should be able to be consumed without having to worry about hitting caps. A family of four can easily hit 3-5TB whereas a single person might need less.
I have Comcast in NJ and there’s no cap as far as I can tell. I have been above 2 TB almost every month for a while.
I'm still renting mostly because of that, and I don't understand why Netflix is not offering more contents in both official languages here. I guess the government is not pressuring them enough even though they're giving them a ton of money to produce local stuff.
After 10 years of subscribing to Netflix I can only think of a handful of movies that weren't available on DVD. I don't have any hard numbers in front of me but it feels like there's maybe 20% of Netflix's catalog on instant watch vs what they have on DVD -- at least in popular genres like sci-fi, comedy, action and adventure.
He used it primarily for foreign films or artsy films that didn't have big theatrical releases.
It's very funny because i would say at least 60% of the times I am looking for a movie on Netflix I am referred to their DVD catalog and end up having to use another service.
Blu-Ray tends have have better quality then the streaming (obviously depends on a multitude of factors). And I don't have to deal with the horrendous UI or recommendation engine.
I do have both, but I'll watch the DVDs way more often than I'll stream anything.
It would be useful for their remaining customers that are OSS enthusiasts without bandwidth to spare.
Just in this case, it's DVD/BD rips from discs delivered by mail.
And it forces me to curate & plan, instead of taking whatever became available this week.
I'd like it if they offered more discs from The Criterion Collection.
I guess people are missing out on wasting their time binge watching garbage television shows. And yes, in theory you can binge watch an entire season on DVD(s).
Proven tech often has a really long tail.
A few years back, they used to have a button to check for DVDs and I did, and a lot of stuff that isn't up for streaming is not an issue for DVDs.
I love streaming TV shows, but for movies I just don't like it. I don't even know why.
You're pirating wrong then ;)
That's why I still subscribe to its DVD service, but not its streaming service.
Not surprising. Netflix, Comcast, Amazon Prime and other video streaming service charge you the same as the DVD rental, but force you to watch the entire video within 48 hours from 1st starting it.
Personally I find this very annoying (why do the do this? What does it cost them to let me watch it within a week or so and not 48 hours?).
Esp long movies like "Wolf of Wall Street" are not practical to watch in a single sitting.
I have a Samsung DVD player that I got for 40$ and depending on the movie, I find it's cheaper or same price to actually BUY the DVD from Amazon.com (with prime). Ex: Wolf of Wall Street was $4.99 to stream and view within 48 hours, or keep paying $4.99 until you finish it. The same DVD ( NEW ) was selling for $5.49 on Amazon, Free shipping so I ended up buying the DVD.
Ha ha, some moviebuffs will skewer you for saying that (about any movie). I feel your pain on the 48h limit though.
It's also standard to spend money on snacks during the intermission.
I love deep story telling and will gladly sit through a 3-4 hour movie
LOL. I have cats.
I haven't encountered this behavior in Netflix; under what circumstances are you experiencing it?
EDIT: A cursory search informed me that this seems to apply to viewing streaming movies which have been downloaded to a device and watched while offline. The expiration timer is reset when the viewing device has a WAN connection. I guess this is a mechanism to discourage hoarding a large number of movies, then cancelling your subscription? Not sure.
"Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps"