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Comment by uxcolumbo | Hacker News Reader

For me, Netflix needs higher quality content.

More creative risky shows like the OA, Altered Carbon, Love, Death & Robots, Black Mirror and more old HBO style content… quality vs factory cookie cutter produced stuff trying to satisfy the lowest common denominator, because then you will satisfy no one.

Maybe they have good shows I just don't know about. Their recommendation system seems to be crap. I browse for 20 minutes and then give up frustrated, because I can't find anything interesting.

Today I was looking to downgrade my plan. Basic only gives you SD quality, which I'm OK with but only allowing one device at a time is taking the p!ss.

It's getting too expensive for what it is.

So rather than downgrading I'm now thinking about cancelling. If their Basic plan would support 2 concurrent devices then I'd stay.

Well done Netflix.

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I'm assuming by 'Dark Mirror' you mean 'Black Mirror', and not 'Dark'? Well, Black Mirror was actually created by Charlie Brooker and his production company Endemol for Channel 4 in the UK and simply bought by Netflix once it was already a hit.

Part of the issue is that many of what Netflix calls "Originals" are the opposite of that and I think it can be confusing for viewers when you throw them into the same bucket as the actual Netflix productions such as The Crown, Stranger Things, Ozark, etc. These are the risky shows, because they had to go out on a limb to green-light them, whereas many of their other "Originals" are actually just acquired and existing successful franchises.

Good point. A lot of the best Netflix content is stuff they've bought from the UK that they rebrand as "Netflix Original" in the US.

Yeah, I see these rebrands in Netflix Israel too. Snowpiercer is a "Netflix Original" despite being a TNT show. Then there's "DC's Titans" (DC/HBO Max), "Crashing" & "Derry Girls" (Channel 4), "Champions" (NBC cancelled show), etc.

Ha, yes - thanks for the correction. Updated.

It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you opened up Netflix. Nowadays you can't find what you want to watch on there, so people go to the places that do; Amazon Prime allows you to watch pretty much any movie (although often at a rental fee, which is a different discussion altogether), and the Disney empire has bought up tons of movie publishers and is putting all of them onto their streaming platforms.

Netflix pivoted to producing their own content years ago, seeing the contracts they had for other parties' films not get extended because they were building their own platforms. It's been hit and miss, mostly miss, but I'm assuming there's something for everyone, enough to keep people subscribed. But it's all very formulaic; they make something for every genre (from Attenborough nature documentaries to Scandi crime drama, via stupid game shows to Indian musicals) and see what sticks.

The number of things I still watch on Netflix can be counted on one hand. We rarely sit down to have a browse too, so I wouldn't know their current not-netflix film offerings either.

That's a phenomenon I've noticed, too — people seem to be doing less doomscrolling on Netflix compared to when it was less ubiquitous.

Now they can just listen to the conversation at lunch at work, or the radio, and "know what to watch".

There has never been a time that Netflix streaming had more than a sliver of popular movies. Especially since the original deal with STARZ was over.

>It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you opened up Netflix.

I don't recall Netflix ever having a good movie catalog for streaming. It's TV catalog used to be amazing though, but that was because they were essentially the only person paying for rerun rights to shows that weren't popular enough for syndication.

They used to have a “so bad it’s good” catalog. I remember watching abjectly terrible movies from Netflix in college with my roommates that were hilarious. Now the catalog is just bad.

> Maybe they have good shows I just don't know about. Their recommendation system seems to be crap. I browse for 20 minutes and then give up frustrated, because I can't find anything interesting.

I have the exact same experience. I've been using Netflix for years and years so they should now know pretty darn well what I like. I wanted to start a new series but couldn't find anything that isn't basically junk rated. Next step I subscribed to Disney+.

Re: Altered Carbon. How come the first season was awesome and got me to read the books. The second season was so bad I stopped watching it after a few episodes.

And yes, I just checked and I had the Premium plan. Just downgraded to standard.

Indeed, well done netflix.

If they continue to exercise their “creativity” like they did in Altered Carbon 2 and Witcher 2, they might as well not bother.

> Netflix needs higher quality content.

They got cheap when it comes to both licensing others' stuff and producing their own. It look a while for it to catch up to them.

Maybe they looked at the utter crap that gets millions views on YouTube. The difference is that YouTube is free. Nobody pays for hours of some narcissistic asshole spewing political outrage porn, repetitive cheap animations, or someone lighting their balls on fire.

Occasionally there is really good content on YouTube. I've noticed that Amazon has been picking it up.

I’ve switched to HBO MAX at 6 euros / month. I am happy for now.

+1, some good stuff over there, all the HBO classics and new movies are available quite soon after release - watched the new Batman yesterday, about to rewatch The Wire. Also the new platform is really improved in terms of usability, it the old HBO GO service which HBO MAX replaced was really bad with buffering and "adaptive" quality which somehow was always 480p for me. Now it's crisp and nice.

The OA was excellent series and it's a shame that they cancelled it after the second season. Indeed, Netflix could really benefit from releasing smarter shows.

>Basic only gives you SD quality, which I'm OK with but only allowing one device at a time is taking the p!ss.

Really? There's only one of me but I've had 1080p+ TVs for something like 20 years now. SD is complete BS for any modern content.

Providing it's encoded well I can't see much difference between 576p and a source 1080p bluray, but I don't imagine Netflix SD is using anywhere near enough bitrate to be comparable to that.

I don't watch on big screen - mostly on a laptop or iPad, hence why I don't mind SD. I'm probably an edge case.

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