Netflix raises monthly charges for U.S. subscribers
reuters.com
reuters.com
In the next 12-24 months it'll be obvious the way to consume media will change from a monthly netflix/apple/cbs/peacock/hbo/anyone else fee to a 30 day run. People will sign up and churn based on what they want to see. Services will pop up around this and handle your memberships for you. Those service will become the new cable companies.
Netflix is still a good value for the money charged.
It requires more overhead (i.e. manually cancelling and re-enabling services), but it saves probably $200-300+ per year vs. having 4 simultaneous subscriptions.
many people might have prime on an annual basis but amazon seems content with offering prime on a monthly basis as well. In fact the only way to get prime video (without prime) is monthly. https://www.amazon.com/amazonprime
Even Netflix has shifted their drops this way.
It could be a great startup idea - buy proxy access to all these content services for you, and in turn, you have to maintain only one account
This could be done as a power of attorney to avoid almost any TOS issue they could draft.
They lost the Supreme Court case because they were considered the same as cable broadcasting companies, but then were denied the same legal rights as cable broadcasting companies by a lower court?
I am not a lawyer but what the fuck happened there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
For this discussion - let's say there are total of 10m users for these services but they all would never be online at the same time. So, the aggregator can buy 5m Netflix accounts, 1m Apple, 1m hulu, 2m HBO, and so on.
I think it's a very fragile idea. Once Netflix, and the gang would figure out about the "Aggregator", they might start blocking it. There are ways to handle that but how long are you going to play this cat and mouse game?
The "proxy" could be a network node or a person/service/entity which contractually takes the place of one side of the contract.
Obviously the privacy and payment details is an issue. I like the NetFlix "guest account feature" reminds me of the "gym membership model" of the 90's bring a friend.
Currently Netfix gets some cash out of me because i have no interest in giving Amazon or Disney any more money than i have to.
- pay them a percentage of the price of the rental, which could not go below a certain amount,
- pay a yearly license (~3500€/year just for my country for a popular movie) per language audio track,
- handle on their own sending technicians to rip the masters to then host them on the platform.
I don’t exactly remember the minimum price per rental, but the economics didn’t make sense in terms of what we wanted to attempt, so we gave up. One would have to pay an enormous amount in upfront license costs without being able to generate a big volume of views by undercutting the competition in the case where technical excellence could allow us to cut prices.
I guess this explains why Netflix will have different audio options for the same movie dependent on region.
You can get more tracks to appear if you change Netflix UI language in settings, as described here in 2015 by Netflix CPO: https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...
This is also mentioned in various Netflix help pages, like here, which says 5-7 subtitle languages are shown by default, and you need to change UI language to see the rest: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245
Also, your seedbox is that NAS or it's remote and the NAS just syncs it?
I've found that seedbox providers tend to have very helpful irc nerds if you run in to trouble.
Venmo me @chinolex today and I'll give you a months free (I'm the Founder).
It doesn't really matter whether you send information over an ethernet cabel or a satellite dish.
TV streaming services have come full circle and are repeating the same cable tv mistakes that caused piracy to flourish in the first place.
[1] random source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-do-musicians-make-money-...
> According to a recent Citigroup report, the music industry generated a record $43 billion in 2017, but recording artists saw just 12% of that revenue, or $5.1 billion, and the "bulk" of their revenues came from touring.
I think we've been trained towards seeking out specific shows to watch in order now, so a you can't pick exactly what to watch model wouldn't really fly, but even if it did, it wouldn't cost any less, or be able to include nearly everything.
Spotify would probably be dead by now if Apple and Google didn't do such a poor job.
Actually Rhapsody was the first. But I guess conditions at the time weren't such that it really went mainstream.
Streaming just allowed cable networks to unbundle in the most lucrative way possible... and when users stop subscribing to various services because their prices have gone too high they'll scream "see, it doesn't work, we have to sell packages!"
Meanwhile the users are back to either pirating or suffering shitty overpriced services, of which Netflix is on a quick pace to make themselves one as their catalog narrows from TV producers moving to their own platforms and they continue to cancel their native shows and give ridiculous fortunes to D-list movie directors churning out flop after flop.
Is it, really? Not OP but I think there is a lot of room for alternative business models that doesn't have to depend on copyright. It's just that copyright already taken a hold on most people's mind so they default to it.
The thing is, someone has to pay for that content to exist... if that's not the pirate that pay for it... who does? Oh yeah, me by paying for that uncompetitive service.
counterfeit != stolen
At least counterfeited come with some kind of effort to produce the product in some similar manners. That come with it's own issues, the quality of the product is a big one.
> with BB I can return the item in a week if I don't like it, claim warranty, etc.
Yeah, never got theses issues over media files luckily. You could argue that a rebate high enough justify not being able to return an item. I'm sure plenty of van guy could allow you to return it too ;). I bought a 1060 on Kijiji and the guy told me that he would replace the item if it wasn't working. He got just as much incentive to do this than the van guy ;) hell maybe he even stole them, who knows.
> Meanwhile, I've gotten better service from private tracker staff than any streaming service.
Sure, when that's all you pay for, it's easy to offer great service. Believe me, there's a MUCH bigger part from Netflix price that go toward paying for content than from your private tracker. Not by choice... they need to pay for that content, someone has to pay for it.
Take it further instead, just give me the option to rent a single episode/movie.
Source: Wild speculation
Tools like youtube-dl get banned from github, and private torrent servers are taken down, and the data the site has is used to subpoena email providers and ISPs for individuals to sue.
I know we all come from the background of imagining information wants to be free, but it's only going to be another 20 years or so until having a general purpose computer in your house will be as suspicious as having a chemistry lab in your basement.
The next step I'm expecting is some blurring of the line between civil and criminal penalties for piracy, and for police to seize someone's house because it was used for piracy.
Though even residential proxies (https://luminati.io/) are being detected with greater and greater frequency.
The annual discounts and bundles are already here!
And streaming services realize that a lot of people use it that way, so they have nice individual profile functionality within a single account, so my shows and my recommendations don't get mixed up with those of other people using the account. Not every single streaming service had that feature at the beginning, but by now iirc they all got it.
You are correct, I think it is one of those technically grey areas. However in my scenario, given that the same group of 5 shares pretty much every single service subscription and physically spends a lot of time watching it together, I think, even in the intended spirit of household sharing, it sorta follows.
Regardless of that, imo there would be a lot of outrage if streaming services started cracking down on that, and, my guess, streaming services are intentionally not letting that happen.
The biggest issue is to unsubscribe each time on the different service. At one point we will have a middle man that does this for us, we will go full circle.
Most of my watching is mainly looking for stuff to kill the time and not specific movies or shows so this works for me.
Let me give the creative forces the money they deserve for the content they produce, but let me keep the file without being bound to a subscription service where I lose everything the moment I cancel.
Also, how is the money getting to the creator exactly?
When I downloaded a movie from Netflix I couldn't watch it on vacation because of region locking.
P.s. I’ve worked in this space.
(Spotify on the other hand is in a different league because there is almost no such thing as exclusive music. It's still way more convenient and time-efficient than torrenting. In my experience you can't even find music torrents anymore unless you go down the private tracker rabbit hole (which definitely doesn't scale)).
I've wondered if that is intentional, to discourage casual piracy.
Now with more services than ever I'm only have access to two services:
a) Netflix - (via gf account)
b) Amazon Prime (own account). The last year or two I'm back to doing a lot more torrenting !
We've never had it so good in terms of overall content, yet we have never had it as expensive to access say my "top15 Films/Shows" if they are widely spread across service providers.
PS/Sidenote: I do miss channel hopping (click-click oh what is this ?)
Not to mention trying to remember what is where etc... was so much easier when I had a list of shows, I'd check the torrent site(s) about once a week for new episodes, snag them all to a seedbox and download and watch local over the following week as time permitted. At least with less TV I'm getting more done.
Maybe in 20 years these streaming services will collapse and be replaced by something better, and then those services will once again split up.
It's been a while, we went full circle. Look at youtube, they display more ads than the TV channels I was watching 10 years ago. The content is spread over more and more services, so you end up paying for a few of them, exactly like we used to do for TV channels, it's ridiculous.
At least we can still easily cancel and subscribe from each one. It's still a gains I guess!
It reminds me of cable TV now: cheaply produced shlock, with less and less premium TV.
The last thing I watched that was truly wonderful on Netflix was Mindhunter -- which I heard was canceled by Netflix because it's too expensive.
Meanwhile there's a dozen or more new "reality TV" knock offs seemingly every week.
We've switched most of our viewing to HBO now -- it has a lot of fantastic content, like Raised by Wolves, Lovecraft Country, His Dark Materials, Chernobyl, etc. And they actually stand behind their product because they believe in it -- they aren't constantly pulling the rug out from under their viewers like Netflix does.
Nnnnnooooo!
https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...
I honestly consider this the same as Google. They're so focused on insane metrics they don't realize that by killing everything new - good and bad, people are just going to give up on the company entirely because their reputations sour over time.
I mean why am I going to try something new from Google just to find out they're cancelling it in 2 years? Likewise, why would I invest my time in a new Netflix series just to find out it's cancelled after 2 seasons?
The true problem is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.
Lately it feels like that's the issue with most tech companies, they will do anything to see the uptick in random metrics (engagement, etc) without realizing they are creating miserable experiences by destroying other areas that are less measurable.
Yes, I'll click more in your button if you place it full screen over the main content of your app. No, it's not making me more engage in what you're showing me, it's just forcing me to go through some hoops and now I hate you for it.
Other series, however... are dead slow. It was delightful to recently watch a 1998 film, `Ronin`: 2 hours, and more story happened, than in 2 seasons of most series.
There is no simple answer to this.
I hope companies like HBO keep trying to win with quality over junk.
Famously, MTV stopped showing music videos years ago. They did a bunch of analysis to see what the target demo for a music channel is, what that demographic wants to see in general, and started playing that.
But, obviously, if I turn on the MUSIC TV channel, I expect to see music.
I'm the "target demo" for Science Fiction. That doesn't mean I want to see SciFi when I turn on the evening news. It doesn't mean that I never want to see a period drama, or a nature documentary.
But based on a purely statistical analysis, I should only be shown Science Fiction forever and ever, on every channel, because that's my favourite content category.
Similarly, the number #1 most popular content for the general public is sports for men and celebrity gossip for women.
Does this mean that every streaming service, TV channel, and content producer should create nothing else other than Soccer, Football, Dancing with the Stars, and Big Brother Celebrity?
It seems producers think so. They really do, and NetFlix is going down that path as fast as their statistics will carry them...
It goes way beyond that into further "explorations of being". Clearly not for everyone, but it resonated enough to get its own subreddit :-).
I'm sad to hear that. Their reason makes no sense to me; that show is mostly dialogue.
Also watching a lot more Amazon+HBO these days.
I'm pretty intrigued by stories of how certain shows flopped in their first season (or two) but managed to persevere through some persistent TV exec who kept it funded until they got the story right.
Plenty of examples of mainstream TV shows that went this route. Seinfeld, The Office, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the list goes on.
TV execs really care about the product. By contrast, I don't think Netflix cares about the product. I think Netflix cares about the data about the product, which ultimately means dropping an original after 2 seasons.
It works I guess, but I've haven't had a Netflix subscription in a while, and on those occasions where I do renew it I just take a peek for a month before leaving again. More than enough time to watch 2 seasons of TV.
[1] https://www.vulture.com/2020/10/mindhunter-season-three-not-...
Am I going to cancel my Netflix subscription? Probably not, they still have all the Star Trek franchises where I am, and Friends.
Given that I'm almost never in a country where I can watch the broadcast television (digital nomad), streaming is the only option.
Would love a (legal) service that allowed me to watch AU/UK TV from anywhere in the world. Currently it's possible to do this sometimes with the channel apps and a VPN, but this is a gray area at best.
I get that there are content licensing issues, but the shows that I'm mostly interested in don't really have these problems. Things like the Great British Bake Off don't really make it outside the UK.
I also get that the advertising is focused on local audiences a lot of the time, but surely this is solvable with streaming.
What I get from streaming that I didn't get from cable is: no commercials and the ability to watch on demand without recording or other hassle. I would pay more than cable prices for those two features.
I don't except to pay one company and get all companies' products - in any context. You don't get Whoppers at McDonald's, Ford doesn't sell Toyotas. Intermediaries create their own islands of exclusivity (you can only get X on Door Dash and Y on Uber Eats).
What I'm worried about is streaming services not letting me pay to not have to watch commercials.
Last thought - if you think there's "nothing good" on platform Z you may be burning through content way too fast. I don't think we can or should put out endless hours of great new TV content aligned to each person's tastes.
So far, but still Hulu shows commercial in some plans, and netflix shove their "commercials" . Expect it to get worst.
> ability to watch on demand without recording or other hassle.
You still have hassle , you need to move from one application to the other, hardly convenient.
Commercials every 5 minutes. And they clearly didn’t have much ad inventory because it was the same damn commercial every time.
Canceled the subscription before it went to paid... about an hour after I signed up. Torrented the show instead. Fuck all of that.
1. Grading system changed from 1-5 to 1-2 (thumbs up/down). They thought that the users where full of crap when rating. I do believe some bosses just looked "bad" when buying in the next Adam Sandler movie. This started a cozy culture where no one in Netflix was wrong. Recommendation engine becomes comically bad, even with the best and the brightest.
2. They started to buy everything under the sun. South park made an episode about it even. All the comedians got their own stand up specials. It was now way easier to get a top score (thumbs up). Bosses where happy.
3. As they no longer focuses on quality which they no longer can measure (measuring time watched and churn is not that useful!), they start to strive for quantity. Which is expensive, very expensive.
I guess that in the next decade Netflix will become the next Comcast and cost 35 USD per month, and it all started in an innocent change to the grading system.
Those extremes are only extreme for people wanting a bell curve.
They had more quality in their data but they where incapable of using it because they like to take averages and so they blame the users.
As much as it offends my sensibilities, sometimes the best move is to simplify a feature so that improved usage makes up for the loss of the complications.
That way I know the timeline and plan to watch accordingly, and then when it comes up expired on login I decide to resubscribe or try another one. Can only watch a few things concurrently anyway!
Works really well. Usually by the time you go back to the first service, there are some pretty interesting new things that might slip by if you just kept that one.
I don't even need it to activate/deactivate my accounts. The real benefit to me would be tracking and notifying me when the shows I follow have a new season available. Then when I exhaust whichever platform I'm currently subscribed to, I'll know which one to subscribe to next.
Also, tracking the Series and Movies that I want to watch would be helpful, especially the ones that can potentially appear/disappear from different streaming services.
On the flip side, the VC model of gaining market share by charging less than is required to sustain the business is an unsustainable model that sets unrealistic expectations.
I'm not asking for them to lower their prices; I'm not even asking that they don't raise their prices. I'm simply saying that when they raise the price it makes me think about the value proposition and I am reminded that I'm paying for far more content than I can possibly consume. That's my fault and nobody else's.
I don't need a service that rotates my subscriptions as suggested above. Rather, if someone wants to create a service for cable cutters, I'd like a central place to curate what I like, what I've seen, what I'd like to see and know when that content becomes available. I agree that Apple does some of that, so does netflix, and HBO and some of the others... and I do use those features, but there is still an opportunity for someone to create a service that is centralized and provides more depth.
For example, I'd like to go a little deeper than a thumbs up/down when rating Netflix content. I'd like to have more than one playlist on Apple, Prime, etc. I'd like to know when a hard to find movie/show gets licensed and will be available on a streaming service, etc.
So, no... I don't want to pay very little money for lots of content. I just want to rebalance what I do pay for to match what I have time to watch. No, I don't want to spend very little time... I actually want to spend more time curating.
If that is how they do it, then the system I proposed is more complex, yes, but more economically efficient because it more precisely rewards content creators.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, cable double dips by having ads, while the purpose of this system is to fund it without needing ads. So not the same thing.
And I left it deliberately vague about how much the monthly fee is -- there are different models consistent with what I described. The point is, to simply apportion directly it over what people actually watch, rather than the clumsy system of paying for a specific provider and some unrelated amount of money going to the content.
[1] nor does a single library's physical DVD rental satisfy the entire internet market
Sorry, I misunderstood "apportionment by use" as meaning "division of payment by users, according to usage". That's what I get for not reading the original comment thoroughly, which suggested a flat per-user fee, distributed to content owners :-P. However, I think libraries still fit the bill.
> that producers be paid by how popular their content is
Libraries tend to buy more copies of popular content to reduce waiting time for patrons. So this does happen.
> nor does a single library's physical DVD rental satisfy the entire internet market
Libraries don't have to do only physical DVDs. They already loan e-books, there's no reason (other than the availability of licensing) they couldn't do the same for movies and TV shows. And a library can certainly satisfy the demand in its city.
They keep cancelling shows that I like as well.
(B) I don't think that's theoretically true either, in that Netflix and "Hollywood" both get content the same way: by buying it from production companies.
- The Queen's Gambit
- Narcos
- House of Cards
- Russian Doll
- Ozark
- Stranger Things
- Tiger King
- Dear White People
- The Witcher
- The Umbrella Academy
- The Crown
- Space Force
And that's just TV shows. There are a lot of films they've put out that are very good as well.
I wonder how many HNers would be happier if they replaced their excess TV consumption with something more fulfilling than working out how they can subscribe part-time to every service just so they can watch even more.
Aside, add "The Alienist" to that list. Great period piece in early New York with Dakota Fanning and Luke Evans. Has nothing to do with aliens btw.
Kidding. TV, especially good quality production, has been a great way for me to tune out of politics and the toxic environment of life in America. It's sad but for anyone just looking to get past the nightmare TV is a real boon.
I just read Wikipedia's current events[1] section once a week or so.
With the current government, I might lose loved ones to covid, deportation, violence, healthcare disaster, job loss, mental problems, drug abuse, gun shooting or just plain ol suicide.
Choose your poison cuz this otherwise this government will choose one for you.
The US has one of the lowest case fatality rates in the world for COVID-19[1]. As far as I'm aware, none of those other things you mention have increased dramatically under the current admin, except as they relate to COVID and lockdowns, which the entire world is unfortunately experiencing, not just the USA. It is certainly strange to pin coronavirus side-effects on the POTUS when you look at how the rest of the world is faring.
The US also remains one of the least likely countries on earth where you will lose a loved one to a healthcare disaster (even before the ACA) – quality of care in America is one of the highest in the world.
All the other metrics, infection rates, testing, contact tracing, reflect partially on the administration. And we are not fairing well, comparatively on any of those metrics.
When it comes to things that typically are the purview of the executive branch, I think I remember the US being the first country in the G20 to restrict travel from China, among other things, and then the POTUS was called xenophobic by various people for pointing the finger where it deserved to be pointed (China, who was the very first to downplay the virus and pretend everything was hunky dory while it really wasn't).
I'm not a fan of Trump, but if you are placing the blame for coronavirus on him you are more than a little misguided. In all honesty, watching Democrats use people who died of COVID as political props by trying to pin their deaths on Trump is one of the shittiest things I've seen this year, and it's been a crap year.
These states aren't islands though - they mostly share land borders, freeways connect them, and people freely travel between them every day. The virus doesn't know state borders. If the federal government can insert itself into random state affairs by citing the interstate commerce clause, I don't see how it can wash its hands of responsibility for this debacle.
Shutting down travel to China was only a partial shutdown and was about the same time that 40 other countries shut down travel.
Much of the early infections were thought to have come in through europe anyway.
Inconsistent messaging, disagreement with their own scientific leadership, disagreement with scientific reality, willingness to promote unproven theories and treatments, and most of all, inability to course correct when new information becomes available are all reasons the Trump admin has done a terrible job and is quite responsible.
I am not only looking at statistics to comfort myself. I am also looking at leadership and the direction of this ship, just like the way I would evaluate a potential employer.
Working a job at a sinking, chaotic ship with NO DESIRE to improve sucks. America's leadership, government and 50% of the population who'd cheer the crazy captain at the expense of the ship are exactly that.
No amount of past statistics can change the present reality.
How exactly is the ship sinking?
I genuinely don't understand if this question is legit. Are you seriously living under a rock?
Covid: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Unemployemnt: https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
Lifexpectancy: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
Education: https://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-ran...
Deficits (please pay attention to Republican terms vs Democratic terms) https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/defic...
US incarceration rate: https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08...
And I'll leave US racism, US supreme court politics, US voter suppression as an exercise (an exercise that I'm not sure you will pass since you appear to think America has been just fine lately)
For everything else, are we looking at the same stats?
Deficit: higher under Obama than it was under Bush / has been under Trump.
Incarceration rates: continuing to decrease during Trump's term.
Education: yeah, America's is pretty terrible. But that's been a trend for a long time, Trump has nothing to do with it.
The news is making you think things are worse than they actually are. Take a break from it.
The fact that current administration is doing NOT-A-THING to improve anything should be reason enough to vote him out.
But the fact that he has made education worse, deficits larger, demonstrated incompetent handling of crisis, escalated race relations back to civil wars era, actively encouraging voter suppression just makes me wonder what really makes those supporters so ignorant. Maybe blind faith is more powerful than one believes.
(And all I talked about was only done in 1 year, I could go back and each year was bad).
We have turned into some third world country where injustice, incompetence and corruption are routine and people just turn a blind eye.
And I have loved ones who have been affected from this administrations policies. It must be easy to say everything you said when it doesn't directly affect you. But we are all real people who are getting impacted with this hateful incompetence.
My graph reading needs brushing up? Do you know which years Obama was president? Are you reading the same graph (the one you linked) that I am? The deficit was larger in Obama's presidency in multiple years than it has been at any time in Trump's.
What policies have affected your loved ones? I'd love to talk about them.
How did Trump make education worse? Explicitly please.
How has Trump encourage voter suppression?
In Trump's presidency, there was the lowest black unemployment rate there has ever been. How exactly is it his fault that "race relations" are in the toilet? Did he shoot unarmed black men? Did he applaud it? Has his repeated denouncement of White Supremacy[1] not been good enough for you? The fact that you think race relations are EVEN CLOSE to what they were in the fucking Civil War era makes this the dumbest conversation I've had on the internet this month.
Seriously, stop reading the news, it's rotting your brain.
Let me help you with one specific item. Deficits https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
Just Google stuff up and stop being a willing fool. The GOP and Trump will eat this country and spit it on your children.
Literally look at the graph you posted. The deficit was higher in every year of Obama's first term than any year of Trump's first term. You realize you want the bars to be smaller, right?
I take it back; keep reading the news. At this point I'm not sure much can be done for you.
---
Boss: nine_zeros, I told you that your budget was $100k per quarter, but over the past 4 quarters you've managed to spend $500k per quarter! We don't have that kind of money!
Nine_zeros: I know, I know, but it's fine, don't worry! My trend line is going down so there is nothing to be concerned about.
Boss: That doesn't matter NZ! You've already gone $1.6M over budget! Your trend line going down doesn't change the fact that you've already spent that money, money which we don't have.
Nine_zeros: It's all the difference in the world. Just look at Stevens, boss. His trend line is going up while mine is going down, that's so much worse than me.
Boss: Except he was only spending $200k in his first quarter and has only just now gotten up to $400k! You were spending more than that every quarter. It doesn't matter if his trend is upward and yours is down if you've spent way more money. It will take him many more quarters to get to what you spent in your first! It's easy to have a downward trend when you spend an unbelievable amount of money in your first quarter, anyone can do that.
Nine_zeros: Wake up sheeple! Pull the wool out of your eyes! Stop being such a fool!
> nine_zeros is fired
Fin.
---
Look, I agree that this country is headed in the wrong direction. But it's clearly not Trump's fault, you've just been led to believe that by the news media. This country has been waning in some areas for decades now. At the same time, some things have been getting better. Crime is way down from where it was 30 years ago, for example. You wouldn't get that from watching the news, but you will from reading the stats. The news isn't gonna tell you that though. If everything gets better, what will they have to report on? They make all their money on outrage at the moment. They don't want things to get better, because then they'll be out of a job.
But yes, there are all sorts of things that need to be fixed. Trump, however, is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Orange man bad is a misdirection that an unfortunate number of Americans have swallowed – hook, line, and sinker. Things aren't gonna get better under Biden. He's been in Washington for 40 years. Hell, he helped cause some of the problems you mentioned (cough incarceration of blacks cough). He'll just lull far too many Americans back into a sense of complacency by offering a much higher level of decorum than Trump, while at the same time continuing to allow things to fall apart in the background.
If you want to fix this country, stop being such a partisan and calling everyone who disagrees with you a "willing fool".
I am not willing to justify his actions. His failure has been big and he is not capable of fixing anything. That alone is a great starting point to not vote for him (and I haven't even gone into how destructive his 4 years were).
I know I can't change blind faith but I would encourage you to open your eyes. Take that Red Pill and try to see what has become of our country.
Biden was VP to Obama. Deficit under Obama/Biden first term was much worse than Trump first term. Not sure why you think Biden wouldn't just immediately shoot the deficit way up (assuming he has that power, which mostly the POTUS does not). Again, doesn't matter if the trend is down if your first year is the all time high.
You still haven't shown empirically what damage Trump has caused. As far as I've seen, there is nothing in the data that is very damning at all once you exclude COVID, which again, I exclude because it's not just the US failing at COVID, it's the vast majority of all countries on earth. There are literally only a handful of countries that have handled COVID very well. Unrelated to the black swan event that is COVID, stats are either the same, better, or no worse than they've been at other times in the past couple decades. Hardly seems like the end times if you actually are looking at the data.
- Narcos: 89%/94%
- House of Cards: 77%/76%
- Russian Doll: 97%/87%
- Ozark: 81%/92%
- Stranger Things: 93%/91%
- Tiger King: 86%/84%
- Dear White People: 95%/50%
- The Witcher: 67%/92%
- The Umbrella Academy: 82%/87%
- The Crown: 89%/90%
- Space Force: 38%/75%
- The Alienist: 74%/84% (added by request)
The only one not well-received by critics was Space Force (which audiences liked), and the only one even close to "OK" according to audiences was DWP (which critics liked).
Except for those two, every other show on this list had a supermajority of both critics and audience view it favorably.
Anything else less than 80% in audience score(the "critics" there are beyond redemption) is a steaming pile of crap.
Also, when you say LOU2, do you mean The Last of Us II? I'd like to point out that Rotten Tomatoes is a TV/film ratings website and so does not have a rating for that video game. As such, if that is what you meant by LOU2, then you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
RT is also an aggregator of reviews, so any rating on RT of a film like Cuties is not "RT's rating", but rather a score calculated from professional TV/film critics. If you think most critics are bad at doing their job then fair enough, but this entire subthread was about a claim that Netflix has terrible programming compared to "Hollywood". Not sure who you think is better equipped to judge such things besides professional critics, except of course your estimable self.
I always wondered who actually rented those movies and how they made money. I guess the formula still works because people must be watching them on Netflix...
You have a perfectly valid Credit Card, you try to re-start your account (or maybe create a new account), and you get a "payment form not valid". Your bank says Netflix isn't even trying to authorize the payment, netflix support says they know there is no issue with your card, the issue is on their side, but they cannot fix it, the only proposed solution is to buy a netflix gift card...
https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1315402870661902336
This totally puzzles me.
They have a bug that I am sure technical people would jump in and solve in a matters of hours, they have tech support people who understand the issue, but the company has provided no way to connect the two!
see https://gizmodo.com/netflix-thinks-its-so-great-you-dont-nee...
Satellite/Cable had a huge lock-in factor due to equipment contracts and even monopoly/duopoly issues. A lot of consumers found themselves either hard or soft locked in as prices continued to rise/quality declined (and many still are).
The future is different not because content is guaranteed to be inexpensive, but because competition can exist and users get the choice (including choosing nothing for periods). In this case Netflix is raising prices which sucks, but the market is rich in high quality competitors, some of which are cheaper.
For the price of Netflix for a month I can rent two/three movies and choose whichever I want. Netflix doesn't provide much value on top of that. Paying in advance for a quite limited movie selection.
It would only be their series that provide value for the money, if you like them ...
It especially doesn't make a lot of sense to have "tiers" of subscription. Why would you allow your users to get a worse experience from you? That seems like a good way to associate "lower quality" with your brand.
Ye seems like people watch it longer than I guessed. Like old TV channels. It is funny becouse I get itches from watching rolling content nowadays and have totally forgot how watching TV after school was.
Everyone wanting to cut the cord isn’t better off then we were 5 years ago.
As I said in another comment, you can just keep one subscription active at a time. It is way cheaper than cable and you can still rotate pretty quickly.
If something really good comes, you can subscribe to both for a short period, but most of the time you can do pretty well with just keeping one active.
I wish a Netflix-for-sports existed already, though. I always had to keep the basic cable just to watch my team's football (soccer) games because you can't get those in any other way.
I also regularly rotate services. For example, Amazon Prime is how I'm getting my HBO. I'm ready to remove that channel for a few months until the shows I watch return. I've done that with Acorn (UK programming) and with Showtime.
Looking at the proliferation of silos (Peacock, AppleTV+, Disney, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, etc.), it's going to get harder to have a decent all-in-one place to go for content. But this is what a lot of cord cutters insisted that they wanted ("Why do I have to pay for ESPN if I don't watch it?"). Turns out it might not be cheaper after all? That is unless you're willing to put a little effort into rotating active services.
I dropped phone and cable a while back and it saves me quite a bit of money overall but I do lose some things because of it.
Then what does cable TV have a monopoly on?
If you're obsessed with a single show, isn't it time to own the whole thing digitally? Why would you even settle for needing an internet connection and service subscription to watch the one show you care about? It's like being annoyed that Scribd stopped hosting your favorite book.
Reminds me of the small brain panel of that galaxy brain meme.
Because I have half a dozen devices, all which get replaced every few years, that all need to be able to access that show. How do I get my show on all those devices without an internet connection and without taking a bunch of my time managing it?
But I'd question the need to get TV on all of your six devices just like I'd question the need to get Twitter and Candy Crush on all of them. Maybe get it on 1-2 (laptop, TV usb stick) and learn to be okay with not having 24/7 access to TV. You'd be happier.
As some ideas for ways to swap out TV with something more fulfilling, I recently decided to randomly consume some Youtube courses on the works of T. S. Eliot and Plato, of course reading them on my own alongside. It's not necessarily as stimulating as captivating TV or methamphetamine, but I feel like I'm growing, being challenged, and it's damn sure fulfilling. Also gives me something interesting to talk about. (I chose those authors because an older friend of mine knows about them and likes talking about them.)
I'm tempted to see if the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would smack them around a little for false advertising...
As a single person, I've watched as most of these services have increased their prices for single users but made it much more reasonable for a family.
Why am I paying the same price for Amazon Prime as a family of 5 with a 3K square house who orders from Amazon 2x/day and watches 5x the video?
Why am I paying $70/month for cable for maybe 7 hours/week when some family is watching 100 hours combined per week?
Why am I still paying a premium for AT&T post-paid mobile service when a family who is constantly adding and changing new lines for the kids gets a brand new IPhone or two each year during their upgrade deals, yet AT&T won't ever offer an existing user a discount on a new phone?
Same with Spotify, Apple Music, HBO, etc.
People will happily pay $30 per person for dinner in a restaurant multiple times a month, but are reluctant to pay $14/month for access to a huge library of endless entertainment. Why?
Along with functionally absent parental controls.
Price is irrelevant.
The messed up part is, that's still only a sampling of the services that are out there! But most of the remaining are regional newspapers and niche streaming video services.
Also, the shows I watch, such as Narcos, Stranger Things, etc. are released once every 2 years and I realized I had not used the service in a while.
Maybe since you mentioned "young people", you're looking for Gunsmoke reruns?
Netflix wont be around for many more years. The critical mistake was switching their servers to AWS, you never pay your competitor even if it reduces your costs.
In hindsight, of course it went that way. Have you seen the culture deck?
They've been on AWS forever haven't they? Long before prime video. I very much doubt that it reduces their cost, even at the pricing they must get. It lets them focus their effort.
Ok lastly you're wrong on their longevity. Yes some people will cancel but the vast majority will not, and they will see more revenue. I don't 'get' Netflix (the content sucks and they are like Google -- your favorite show is likely to get canned, simply because the very best shows are almost by definition "uniquely" appealing and TV, er streaming content is too expensive to generate many such shows) but every remote has a NFLX button. In the end there will be netflix and disney.
Imagine being the tivo of streaming.
Instead, they spent too much money hiring too many brilliant but overconfident types. Average people could have done it, at low wages with lots of equity. Saving more money for customer acquisition.
They did a good job with their DVD service, which has a more easily understandable barrier to entry. They thought they had a similar barrier to entry with streaming, perhaps in part due to thinking that what they were doing would be so hard for others to pull off.
Of course, this is all in hindsight, so take it for what it's worth. But, as noted, even back then they had platform examples to model themselves after. Perhaps they weren't going after such kind of dominance, but still they could have foreseen vast competition.
Apple, OTOH, gets it. They can't even give away 1 year free of their TV service. But they will keep plugging away at it. Come to think of it, they are probably netflix's worst enemy, not disney etc. Netflix do recognize this ... they wisely refuse to be a provider on ATV, where they will just get 'amazon'd'. When your competition is Apple, you are in a bad place.
Apple intends to "give away" Apple TV+ for free with their bundle Apple One. ( It is sort of included in the bundle as offering value )
Amazon Prime Video is ~85% of US household and increasing. And again it is included for free as part of Amazon Prime. And it is working hard on its intentional expansion.
Disney - I dont think any family with kids is ever going to cancel that. Not to mention their low price.
Netflix, with all their quality originals and their confidence to raise prices seems to suggest there are little to no lost of subscribers.
I wonder how this is going to end.
They aren't giving it away and it isn't free.
In fact Apple One is so expensive you need to be paying for most of the included services already for it to make financial sense (and several of those services aren't popular by themselves).