The bottom is dropping out of Netflix
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The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.
The discussions this week aren't just a wobble, they're about whether Netflix can still generate that kind of extraordinary future growth. If there's even a strong hint that it might not then the speculative bubble bursts. If there's a serious expectation that it won't then the growth investors are out as well. One stock price crash, coming right up.
But let’s not forget that the original term was FANG and didn’t include Apple - the most valuable tech company or Microsoft that has been in the top 5 since 2000.
Netflix is around #50 in the most valuable companies - it at least it was.
Ah, so I’m not alone in this! Nowadays, I typically only consider shows that have at least a few seasons, I will never ever try one with just one season. The chances of them killing it off are just too high, and that would ruin it completely for me.
I like to binge watch, I can’t enjoy that when they keep killing off shows. It feels like a restaurant with only starters.
The two parent posters are far from alone in my experience. Lots of people are getting turned off by the variable quality and uncertain future of the home-made productions, which means lots of people are holding off starting to watch a show until it's somewhat established and had some positive reviews. If your management strategy is to measure early engagement with your own shows and viciously kill off anything that doesn't make the cut, and if your viewers know this, then you have defeated yourself no matter how good the show is or how popular it would naturally have become.
A few years ago there was almost a trend for shows that weren't getting the numbers to get wrapped up with some sort of mini-series or TV movie so at least there was a chance for the production team to finish telling their story and give some closure for the fans (who might be fiercely loyal in sentiment even if too few in number to sustain the show). It's a little ironic Netflix would probably have been in a better position than anyone to adopt this kind of strategy and establish a reputation for being trustworthy and loyal to fans. Now it has the opposite reputation and we're openly speculating about whether it will ever recover.
I sold my Netflix a few years ago when they started talking about how they are an attention sink vs an entertainment company.
A/B tests and manipulative apps have a hard time accounting for external competition.
The CEO’s reaction confirmed the cluelessness - pulling some bullshit non-plan about ads out of his ass is like ripping out the IV. If I was on the fence about Netflix, having the company accuse me of being a thief for allowing my family to use it and announcing ads will certainly get me off the fence.
I'm rapidly running out of things on Netflix I actually want to see but haven't gotten around to. Once I run out, I'm not sure why I would keep the service around.
I’d still watch a show with one season, just like I’d watch a film without a sequel. I don’t tend to watch Netflix shows because they just aren’t that good.
I absolutely agree where i’d rather watch an entire season than a movie, tho. i really enjoy the depth that can be exlores from doing an entire season. but like i said above, if a show requires further seasons to finish the story, it’s very frustrating when it’s canceled.
to me it feels like reading a third of a novel and having it yanked away.
There would be one big change there I believe, in a movie they make sure to kill off arcs terminally pretty often, in series they make sure not to do that in order to be able to spin on it perpetually if demand be.
Shows like a lot of their lower-tier Marvel ones can have significant pacing/padding issues but it's such easy watching and you can just burn through it in a weekend while doing something else anyway.
Not sure how much this holds true anymore, as now many big players have direct-to-customer streaming, but just sharing since it was a neat thought when I first read it
As an example, Stranger Things featured an average of 9 minutes of product placement for each episode of their third season. [0] The company claims they did not receive any payments from brands for this placement [1], but they likely received other extremely valuable considerations in the form of payment instead.
[0] https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/product-placement-in-stra...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90380266/more-product-placements...
The best product placements are the ones that go unnoticed.
Yeah, and I was right on the edge, not really watching it enough to justify the previous, cheaper, price. When they raised the price it served as a motivation to cancel it. In a 6 months I might join for a bit to watch some newer shows, then probably cancel again.
Raising prices works well perhaps if people are in love with the product or there is just no other alternative. But people have been auto paying and not really thinking much or using it, raising the prices is a decision point to re-evaluate the value of the service.
Given the subsequent lack of actual 4K content, general lack of content, and the fact that I’ll be finishing the shows I’m watching means that I’ll likely join the lost-subscriber group in a week or 2.
eg When Apple TV accumulates enough new binge worthy stuff, I'll sign up for a month. So probably once a year. Ditto all the other streamers.
It's now pretty rare that I'm compelled to see new OC apon release. Excepting The Orville, natch.
Netflix is a scalable company precisely because they produce content, when they are share other people's content any other platform can do that. But when they create their own content suddenly they operate based on a fixed cost rather than paying for other people's content.
to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.
There are also those who are not happy with woke content and "Anything Silicon Valley/Tech" and are walking away.
Disney has the same thing going.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/ted-cruz-mickey-plut...
>TED CRUZ WARNS DISNEY PROGRAMMING WILL SOON DEPICT MICKEY AND PLUTO F--KING
>The senator from Texas thinks the company’s opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law means it’s going to introduce X-rated content featuring animated characters “going at it.”
To me, it feels like the "diversity" of the characters included in a script is one of the factor that is taken into account when deciding to finance a show or not. It really shouldn't be: either a script is good enough and you should finance it, or it isn't and you should reject it. But adding artificial additional criteria just means that good scripts will be rejected and less good one will be accepted. And the logical consequence is that sometimes it feels like perfectly good stories are altered in a way that ensure more "diversity" is ensured, often times making the story worse.
And finally, casting is sometimes...weird to say the least. That does not help producing better shows.
I'm sure some people will hotly contest that these shows/movies are genuinely works of art, and representation just happens to be a bonus, but that's not how it feels when watching a load of this tedious paint-by-numbers pablum.
(This isn't to say that there are no instances where I feel the opposition to minority/female casting was driven more by bigotry than by people's finely-honed critical faculties. Of course there are. But I happen to think it cuts both ways in this case: many of those shows/movies are just godawful, and trade on the "you're a bigot if you don't like this!" card to drive sympathy/virtue demand, from people who want to feel like Rosa Parks for going to the cinema.)
There’s no accounting for taste. You should not be so fast to hate; it prevents you from understanding that which you wish to change. After all, we’re talking about entertainment, not war. Aren’t we?
The full effect of price increases will take time to fully play out, plus the effects of implementing commercials have yet to be seen. Also, it remains to be seen how other streaming services will respond. Will they raise prices and add commercials too?
If Netflix becomes the one streaming brand most associated with actions hostile to their viewers, this could be the beginning of a long decline.
This may have also triggered an exodus of subscribers too, even if Netflix doesn't do anything additionally stupid to turnoff consumers.
> They didn't get those 2.5 million new subscribers and actually lost 200k, so they're technically -2.7 million subscribers
To be extremely questionable, if not outright incorrect. They didn’t lose something they didn’t have. 2.5m people didn’t leave, 200k did. Sure, they didn’t reach a target of 2.5m new users, but that’s not the same as losing them.
I know, shareholder announcements/analysts predictions etc, I know I’m not going to change that logic, but I still think it’s bad logic.
> They had expected all inputs to yield at positive 2.5 mil
The crucial word here is expected. I can model all the things and expect that I’ll get a million dollars next week, but I haven’t lost a million when I inevitably don’t get it the next week.
If you make a prediction of +2.5m new subscriptions, during a pandemic and associated economic flux, and the prediction doesn’t pan out, the only thing that’s happened is that you made a bad prediction.
I mean, that’s demonstrably false. The world works by individuals taking action based on expected outcomes. That crosses species and pervades every waking moment of life. It is involved in things as simple as walking and as complex as mate selection, migration or habitation choices among thousands of others.
To treat this instance of variance between expected outcomes and reality as somehow different makes little sense.
The important thing to note is that stock prices aren't tanking because of 200k. If they had gained 200k subscribers, the stock would have tanked still. and the headlines would have been "netflix misses subscriber goal by 2.3m" instead and only investors would care
Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.
So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it!
Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to watch and a good amount of things we both want to watch.
Things only I want to watch I mostly find on Hulu and HBOMax. Or I have to watch them the old fashioned way because they are too obscure to be on a streaming platform.
When we want to watch something together, we are renting on demand movies or even driving to redbox and picking up some snacks at the same time.
Netflix is slowly turning into a weird mix of "high production quality Lifetime + HGTV" and imported dramas from places with strong media like Korea.
That's not particularly informative, though. It could be true right now. "Users" is not a group with a fixed population.
If they drive their content quality into the ground and hemorrhage users as a direct result, it would still be true that the quality of the content was uncorrelated with the amount that users consumed. Instead, quality of the content would correlate with number of users. But the users are always people who are willing to deal with whatever the current content is!
What's weird is that, as a flat-rate subscription service, they're already aware that increasing number of users is good, while increasing the amount of content that users consume is bad.
Lowering tye quality may not change viewership, hut it radically increases your likelihood to realise it's a pile of garbage one day and go climb a tree.
Short term that makes sense... long term i dont know if its true.
Scifi dropped out because they didn’t think enough people watched it, their inferior cable model has no way of collecting data on what actual humans do, and when they would do it especially by being limited in airings things at a set time
This effectively cancelled the show since it didn’t have funding
And then amazon/jeff bezos picked it up completely after a major fan campaign
Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there's considerable high-quality content coming out of other countries. I love that Netflix brings that to the U.S., otherwise I'd never know of it or be able to watch it.
Ozu Bergman Fellini Suzuki Clouzot Bresson Kurosawa Mizoguchi Costa-Gavras Herzog Renoir and on and on
I especially loved the films of Jean Pierre Melville, Masaki Kobayashi and Anrei Tarkovsky. And yet, when I am done with a long day of work and chores, I cannot stomach anything with subtitles. Exhaustion plays a part in it. It just feels like work after a long day. And I wouldn't want to have that experience of any of the movies I loved back then, seeing them as a chore to be tolerated.
At the end of a long day of work and chores I cannot stomach a 90-120 minute film, regardless of what language it's in. I much prefer 30-60 minute content. At that length subtitles are much more digestible.
I'm really puzzled by people with no stomach for subtitles or who would only watch stuff in their native language. Subtitles + original language of other cultures is so much better.
It's not tiring at all, either.
That said, subtitles can be very distracting. You end up focusing on the word and missing things in the scene/shot as well as the background.
Also the subtitles are not always faithful to the dialog. A good example of this is watching One Piece in English w/ Subs on Netflix. The spoken dialog will be one thing, the written will be another. I have some Japanese knowledge and can tell you that the subs(and the dubs) definitely do not reflect the feeling in some scenes.
It's just a matter of practice. And of watching on a big screen, I'd say.
Even then, just hearing the original language, even if you don't understand the words, conveys essential emotion. I like to hear the original voice actors, which are essential for the cartoon/anime (even more with live action movies, of course).
Through Netflix I've been exposed to a huge back catalog of great content just because they were the first ones to invest in having it dubbed (I assume). Even though the dubbing is often pretty crude it's surprisingly watchable still and definitely better watching first tier dubbed content than second or third tier native language content.
I hear in some countries like Spain, dubbing is the norm. And they are quite proud of it. I find that puzzling.
FWIW, I'm way more fluent in English than French.
what do you mean by this, that the French language is so much better that it renders the movie better by using it? Or is it that the writers translating the English to French are better and make the movies more interesting by their choices?
>There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
Or is it that the dubbing actors are better speakers than the original actors, for example most actors when they do voiceovers suck because they aren't trained for it I guess, and maybe a dubbed actor is trained for it or... I guess I am just confused by how a dubbing could improve a really good movie although I might suppose it would be possible to improve a really bad movie in this way.
So how does this work?
If it is a replicable aesthetic phenomenon you might expect people to aesthetically choose to make movies in this way, to make better movies.
What you're saying is effectively "our voice actors are better than the original actors", which I simply cannot stand behind.
A dub is like a cover, agreed. Almost always, a terrible cover. I can always tell when I incorrectly set the language on Netflix to something other than the original -- you can immediately tell it's a dub because of the drop in voice acting quality. English dubs are particularly terrible, it's like the voice actors are emotionless drones, and when they try emotion, they use it in all the wrong places.
Besides, it's disrespectful. An actor/actress is not just their face and mannerisms. It's their voices, too. The voices are an essential part of their acting (if you are deaf, you can't help missing them, but if you are not, unless it's a scene without speech, you're missing a key ingredient). Saying "ok, I'll replace his voice with this other voice, and his face with with this other face I like better.. you know what? I'll just edit him out of the movie and replace him with this other actor I like better!" is way too scifi and post-cyberpunk dystopia for me. It's just disrespectful.
I cannot honestly say I watched a movie if I watched it dubbed. I watched a cover instead.
Spanish dubs of animé are sometimes good. All English dubs I've heard are atrocious. I remember one of the first dubs that was lauded was the English dub of Princess Mononoke... and it's hilariously bad, even if it has big names doing the voices. The Japanese version is the best, but even the Spanish dub is better.
People without enough usable vision to read subtitles would disagree.
Dubbing is out of the question because I do not hate actors and cinema.
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I have not seen anything that wows me for quite some time at least for my preferences (SciFi).
So maybe it is for Netflix (the sky falling) things that start as a trickle might end as a flood.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926
$9.99, $15.49, and $19.99/mo
What did their prices used to be?
2013 joined at 7eur/month. Can't find the email from when it went from 7 to 9. May 2016 increased from 9 to 10. August 2019 from 10 to 12. March 2021 from 12 to 13. April 2022 from 13 to 15. (All prices euro and rounded up one penny).
I cancelled the day the last hike arrived - it's the least amount of time between raises, as was the previous raise before it. At the same time, their offer is getting more and more disappointing, and they're talking publicly about reducing their content spend and the possibility of adverts.
I feel like they're hooked on a growth bubble, and now that they're reaching market saturation the only way they can maintain that bubble is to squeeze it out of us - charge more, deliver less - which as a user is the complete opposite of value for money, so I'm out.
What these media companies seem to want is for us to pay $100/month in various streaming services rather than the $80/month we were paying for cable because, hey, we should pay for the privilege of unbundling right? I refuse. Netflix is no longer an automatic renewal. I'll sign up for it 1-2 months a year to binge watch on certain shows.
But you glossed over a really important point I haven't seen given much attention: the pandemic. The pandemic was a huge boost for subscriber numbers for obvious reasons and we're now pretty much at the end of the pandemic (as far as staying indoors goes, anyway). That has to have an impact.
Additionaly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has cut off hundreds of thousands of subscribers due to the sanctions. IIRC I heard this was 700,000. If so, isn't down 200K still a net increase?
The stock market routinely overbuys and oversells on good and bad news. It's the fear and greed cycle. And this honestly feels like an overreaction that'll be corrected as soon as Netflix spends some time controlling costs.
Now, it's becoming the primary business model and has to stand on its own.
It turns out economy of scale is real, and we've lost it. Other people were paying for our content before, but not watching it. How does real public educational content get funded in this new world? Most of us probably agree that there should be quality, unbiased content.
Cashflow consistency has a value as well, so subscribing and unsubscribing creates a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers.
I'm not saying things can't improve, just that many unrealistic, entitled attitudes exist. Content is better now than before as providers have to compete more to get subscribers, so the value is greater.
Those loyal subscribers don't get anything in return for that loyalty. the nash equilibrium is therefore to not be a loyal subscriber, but only subscribe for the shortest period of time and consume the maximum possible.
Hence, eventually the service would lose all loyal subscribers.
Fairness here would be putting the externalities of switchers on themselves, but that doesn't usually work well in the market. We'll probably just tolerate a certain amount of these 'switch freeloaders'.
That in turn was based on the experience with Amazon, which has raised the prices of Prime, products on its site, and the fees it charges its sellers all while still growing.
Netflix’s valuation was based on the thinking that Netflix was now a necessity for people. But this shows it isn’t.
In fact, the loss of subscribers is an even bigger deal because it suggests Netflix is eminently replaceable.
Offering of Netflix is extremely poor if you crop out all the duplicate shows popping on your feed.
Ive decided to drop Netflix simply because:
- new interesting shows are popping up so rarely, there is no point to pay the monthly sub
- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)
Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
The content itself is political. That's increasingly problematic.
[1]https://edition.cnn.com/style/amp/abercrombie-fitch-exclusio...
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
What you're really saying is that it's not your personal politics, and is therefore bad.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
Telling girls they can be stronger than men is a lie that can lead to terrible outcomes.
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/ "Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
https://www.romper.com/life/lgbtq-shows-kids-family
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
(I'm not joking, that's canon.)
Seriously?
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
Sure, maybe a century ago in the 1920s but it's been several decades since international revenues eclipsed domestic.
> That's what makes it political.
Other people having their voices heard is what makes it political? Or that you don't like what those voices have to say?
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently poisons or guarantees the latter.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spend major screen-time on another sub-plot where the evil alpha-male messes everything up and then the all-powerful woman to come in the save the situation.
Its a totally unnecessary plot shoehorned into the story with no relevance to the main story the show is trying to tell. The source material had brother sister team working together, but we can't miss an opportunity to rewrite it into incompetent alpha male/wonder woman narrative. That is a perfect example of force feeding 'woke-ism' into a story.
Again, this alone isn't a big deal. But this approach is pretty consistently applied.
> Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill.
I certainty agree that there is an over-focus on crisis of woke-ism and many-times unfairly so. For me this is not 'culture war' for civilization, rather annoying meme that makes TV show potentially worse then they could have been.
To give specific example in Wheel of Time. In the book the 'Two Rivers' is a part of Andor. Andor is basically the Britain of that universe. Given its history and isolation, 'Two Rivers' is very culturally and racially homogeneous.
In the show the 'Two Rivers' looks racially more like New York City. This certainty makes little sense from a story telling perspective. Cultures that are very isolated for 1000s of years simple are not that diverse. Now you can certainty change that from something based on white rural Britain to whatever other racial group want to insert.
You can of course explain this away in whatever way you want, its fantasy. Genetics might work different. Who cares. You don't even have to explain it at all.
One of my friends had a problem with this diversity suggesting it hurts the story and that priority should be an accurate representation of isolated cultures. He would have been fine with that being non-white of some kind.
I said, while I agree that it doesn't really serve the story, when creating a major 100+ million$ TV show with 5 lead actors all from the same village making them totally culturally and racial homogeneous isn't really all that practical. A am willing to throw overboard some story purity (or strict adherence to the source) as to give a diverse group of actors to chance to get a role in such a show.
PS: Pretty much all those actors doing a great job! That was the least of the shows problem. Fire the writers and keep the actors.
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
Calmly thinking through ones prejudices, even if only to defend them, is an easy way to erase them.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Everything you experienced in your life can and does corrupt you.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
---
- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
So you agree then that hetero relationships in children's media is also a political agenda?
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
> Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
Ok, name two.
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
This seems rather disingenuous.
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/24/how-many-sa... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married...
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”.. Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifyoulikeblank/comments/rdpmp9/tv_i...
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Guess it depends on what you mean by "recently" and maybe it depends on region as well, but Seinfeld is on Netflix!
I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.
1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests 2. Navigating straight to something I want
If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)
"They keep the search and browse capability so crappy in order to mask the true size of the content library"
dvd.com
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
It was beautiful:
- There were no video previews.
- All selection was text-based only.
- There was no algorithmic feed: only lists based on category / genre / etc.
If Netflix offered this, I might actually pay for it. For now, I'm just using a relative's login, and I won't be paying if they boot us off.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
> Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+
I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.
I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.
Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.
A few points though:
1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.
2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.
Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.
You need to hit “don’t recommend this” for a while on creepy videos and it’ll get the hint pretty quickly.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Facebook was also way more enjoyable to use when your home page was just a chronological list of all your friends wall posts.
I forgot where I got the original list of links
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Narcos
Battlestar Galactica
And some weaker contenders: Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Crash and Burn
Waiting on stranger things to end
I enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, Battlestar, and some of the game of thrones seasons.
If you liked Narcos you might also like ZeroZeroZero. It's a miniseries on Amazon with really high production value.
As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??).
The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
24 (which perhaps opened my eyes to TV overtaking film in new ways) Lost Buffy
And then further still:
The X Files This Life (UK only?)
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
I hear The Wire is/was a good show. We'll see....
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
Seems to me that's what they already have; which upon reflection, is indeed probably why they're currently having problems with subscriber retention.
If the experience browsing their catalog wasn't so awful, I'd be more inclined to try and use the service. Instead, after I've finished something good, I don't tend to come back to Netflix for awhile - it's easier to just watch stuff on Youtube because I know how to navigate it, the search works well, and the recommendations are actually decent.
I remember a couple weeks ago, Blade Runner 2049 was the first thing that popped up when I logged into Netflix. I was so happy to see it there, but when I went back the next night to watch it, it wasn't there (which is fine, the homepage isn't static). So I went to search for it, and "Blade Runner" returned nothing relevant (nor did "Blade Runner 2049"). I had to search "2049" to find it, and after the movie ended, Netflix recommended the first Blade Runner (which also didn't show up in any of my searches).
The search isn't always this bad (both Blade Runner movies show up in search the way I would expect them to now), but still...even when I know something great is on Netflix, it can be an utter pain to get to. It's like they're trying to get me to go with the mediocre recommendations instead of watching the good stuff that I know is on there.
It's so annoying that if I was the one paying for it, I'd cancel my subscription. And I remember things used to be a lot better, which just makes it all the more frustrating when looking for something good.
I'm getting the feeling that Apple TV+ is where it's at for this type of content. Severance was particularly good.
The new She-Ra on Netflix was the best thing I've watched in quite some time. It's not a kiddie show, it works for all ages, think like Pixar movies. Other great cartoons across a variety of streaming services: Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Star Trek Lower Decks, also the more mainstream Bob's Burgers. If you want something fresh to watch, try animation.
But once I watched a few, Netflix filled my entire recommendation catalog with almost all e.g. Turkish and Korean shows. Pretty annoying as it's like ordering an ice cream dessert, then the only thing the menu ever shows is all ice cream desserts. It makes me think part of people feeling it's all the same is that the recommendation optimization is overbearing in shoveling too much of more of the same recent history vs presenting a mix of recommendation and discovery.
something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season.
i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its successor Movies Anywhere, in which Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate are not participating.
[Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19046108]
I still prefer buying and ripping Blu-Rays though.
Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio, it doesn’t matter if you play them on the most modern sound systems, they’re still going to sound great.
Streaming allows me to find a nice balance between quality and bandwidth, unfortunately while DVD’s are neat for bonus features, the quality unfortunately makes it rather unpalatable on even semi-modern (1080p) TV’s.
Weirdly, almost all of even my much older audio CD’s - stored in the same bin away from heat and moisture - don’t have this issue.
I have to wonder what effect the specifics of the manufacturing process have on how likely a disc is to experience disc rot, as actually even within the SEGA community it’s widely accepted that Saturn discs have an unusually high rate of failure compared to other compact disc collectables.
However - importantly - my original point about quality also applies to backups of these mediums as well - so, assuming any copy of that audio CD has been properly archived and backed up, it will pretty much always be the best quality it can possibly be. Backing up a DVD these days - when there is a majority of the time a superior Blu-Ray or streaming release, is frankly pretty pointless, except for, unusually - the much more abundant amount of special features often found on DVD’s.
I never understood why special features pretty much went the way of the Dodo when Blu-Ray became the standard.
Many Blu-Rays are remasters of the originals as well - so, it’s kinda moot with remasters. My point is with the massive quality difference, and that DVD’s in general will only get less worthwhile as time goes on.
It's possible to make them look a lot better, but you're right that it's a huge amount of work to do so. There's basically nothing out there tagged "DVDRip" that's worth a damn IMO, because almost all encoders (both human and software) treat the DVD like encoding a CD where making the most exact copy of what's on the disc is the goal.
Encoding a DVD for modern screens on the other hand requires some art direction all its own. DVDs have a huge amount of legacy hidden in them, not only in the interlaced NTSC/PAL systems but in Sony's D-1 tape system as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)
A good modern DVD rip will be:
- Deinterlaced to 60FPS (technically 60000/1001 fields-per-second) using a temporal-smoothing filter like QTGMC. Handbrake will not do this. Almost all DVD rips are 30FPS and just look gross and feel gross from all the lost motion information.
- Cropped to avoid the black bars on the left and right of the D-1 resolution and to make circles into circles instead of slight ovals. This is really noticeable in cartoons with circle-guides for eyes like The Simpsons.
- Stretched to 960x540 (16:9) or 720x540 (4:3) at encode-time with a quality resize filter. This is probably the part nerds have the most internalized opposition to (I sure did) since the raw NTSC DVD res is 720x480 and expanding it feels kind of like encoding a FLAC out of an MP3. All DVDs are anamorphic (704x486 is a 3:2 res, stretched equally for both 16:9 and 4:3 DAR!), so the alternative is that the display performs the stretch in real-time using the container PAR/DAR flags. Most displays do a terrible job.
The vertical 540px is the EDTV resolution and still part of the ATSC spec to this day, technically as 544px with four dead pixel rows on the bottom for 8px block size. I've yet to meet a decoder fail with 4px blocks though so I prefer the panel-accurate res. It pixel-doubles in exact multiples to 1080, 2160, etc, so it looks way better on modern screens.
- Color-corrected from the oldschool D-1 colorspace to the newer HDTV or 4K colorspaces, or at least tagged as such if not converted. This doesn't undo the lossy nature of subsampled chroma but still looks a lot better, especially in the greens. This is another thing that cheap displays are terrible at doing in realtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601
- Rip the raster-based DVD subtitles to a modern format like SRT/ASS. I usually use SubtitleEdit and correct the few OCR errors by hand: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
- Encode AC3 audio to AAC, preferably with something nicer than FAAC. I include all languages because why not. I like FDK-AAC and will use VBR-4 or VBR-5 if I want low-pass or not based on the source waveform: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...
- MKV container, take the time to fill the container metadata fields, tag audio track languages so the player picks the correct one, attach a `cover.jpg` for Explorer/Finder thumbnail, name all the chapter stops, etc. This is actually grueling some times. My precious metadata.
Totally huge pain. Worth it though for things worth having :)
And did anyone ever use those UltraViolet codes? I never tried them. What did they even do?
I guess streaming won out because consumers prefer it - I know I do.
DRM. If it's DRM your still don't own anything
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
This feels like a really inefficient market.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.
There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.
Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.
My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.
I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end
I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !
There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.
Stranger Things, The Queens Gambit, Narcos, The Crown, basically all of the rest of them.
A complete list of movies that would be worse as series:
Anything by Michael Bay
It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.
Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name.
If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay.
Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1.
In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money.
In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk.
At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).
Compare the current digital rental prices to taking yourself to the theater. While the digital rental rate is high, it is less than one ticket for admission. If you buy concessions, it only goes up. If you take someone else, it gets higher. That one digital rental starts to look less steep from this vantage point. That being said, I still don't do the digital rental.
Note you're not just paying the marginal cost, you're also paying for the streaming infrastructure they invested in setting up.
Edit: very old numbers can be found here. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/03/6400-2/
The cost to build out the infrastructure to stream movies is tremendous.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
17 million listens. I would not call that obscure.
As a matter of fact a lot of truly obscure stuff barely gets to SoundCloud, let alone Spotify.
Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.
The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.
This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.
It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.
The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.
The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.
Same with movies. As I've gotten older, I can name about a dozen movies I'd like to watch again. I can afford to buy the next "highest quality release ever" when the time comes.
Before I do that though, I'm going to check into Youtube Music. It's possible what I don't find on Spotify is available there.
Movies, I don't find many are missing from services. Perhaps the movies I loved were less obscure than the music. I don't plan on ripping a single DVD or VHS tape.
I agree. Which is why I like to own my media.
The only way to stop me from pirating the media I like is if you actually let me buy the superior experience I can have as a pirate.
P.S. copyright and IP law in general need severe reform if we want to serve creatives and not executives
Now, though?
One of many, many examples: https://screenrant.com/its-always-sunny-blackface-episodes-m...
Even things like iTunes Music Store which once claimed that all your past purchases are available for download from iCloud forever quietly became untrue when I discovered parts of my music library went missing. Come to find out the record company decided to pull licensing from Apple which made that media forever unavailable. So don't forget your backups..... rule of thumb is that you can never trust any company with your media no matter how much bullshit they sell you.
Discs are good for ripping then straight to storage (or mailing back to Netflix?) but that's about it.
It would be cool to have a shared database of binaries+commands to recreate scene rips from the discs. Or just following along with someone who knows what they're doing and doesn't go for one-size-fits-all compression.
Sometimes I have to go though 4-5 different shows/movies on various streaming networks before I find something worth watching and even then, the shows usually get really bad by season 2-3. I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
Recommendations from friends. Reviews by trusted critics. The same ways we've always found other things we like really.
I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
I have a significant disc collection of movies and TV shows I enjoy. I have almost nothing I haven't rewatched at least once and enjoyed again and/or lent to friends or family at some point for them to enjoy as well. I don't really know how that happened but I can tell you that almost none of those discs were bought as new releases other than big names that I was already fairly sure I'd enjoy or sequels/spin-offs of things I'd previously enjoyed.
[EDIT: yeah, I can't read. Sorry for missing the example that immediately followed. ]
/ignore: Curious, can you provide any examples of this actually happening?
There are other Disney films and WB cartoons with large sequences removed.
It’s also very easy to watch if it’s that important to you to watch racist nonsense. Hell I think internet archive hosts it, they did a while back for sure.
- Peep Show (Jeremy & Nancy "taboo" breaking episode)
- 30 Rock (Jenna & Tracy "role reversal" episode)
- Community (Chang D&D)
- Always Sunny
In these instances, the character that is doing the "deplorable" act is the villian or idiot. It's not like these shows are promoting those views, they're actually doing the opposite.
It's so bizarre.
Yo ho yo ho, back to my old life I go.
You truly believe that’s the driving force behind the problem? That “wokes” are the primary reason some content is hard to get and/or keeps getting pulled from streaming services?
It’s licensing increasingly becoming the core product and everyone and their mother trying to launch their own streaming services. We’ve been slowly backsliding into this situation for the better part of a decade.
I remember looking at the Criterion Collection streaming channel not that long ago and what struck me was just how much of the Criterion Collection was not even available on their streaming channel.
Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable.
A cloud copy of something on Google, Apple, Amazon or Netflix is essentially forever.
People don't realize what they're effectively asking for is digital rights to something in perpetuity. And you can't really price that realistically.
Streaming services actually far better match what users actually want (in general). There's no issues of storing media or keeping digital copies safe. The limited time you can view something is what makes it economical.
Remember too that most things tend to only ever be watched once. The satisfaction for collection isn't relaly about repeat viewing at for the most part.
Instead I want to watch “The Expanse” and I dont know if it’s a Netflix special or HBO or Hulu or Amazon or what. I logged into three of them and it wasn’t there.
Oh look, it’s on the Pirate Bay. Also, it’s not throttled / forcibly downgraded to 720p or whatever.
I personally possess CDs from the 1980s and vinyl records from as early as the 1940s. Meanwhile I can’t access digital purchases made in the last few years. Perhaps not “forever”, but frankly close enough.
And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.
The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.
https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Things-Complete-Blu-ray-Orig...
It's sad that the general public cannot get its shit together and every man jack keep and use his own library.
I know because I'm one of the sad sacks that owns hundreds of original LPs, CDs, VHSs, DVDs, and also has a couple TB of HDD worth of borrowed series, and hasn't touched the damn pile of 'precious' in ages.
"Give me Convenience or Give me Death", as those 1980s punks so neatly summed it up.
I think though there will be some laws passed hopefully that will allow us to own digital content outright in the near future, hopefully in a decentralized way.
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
But it is a trend, they said to expect a 2 million subscriber loss in the following quarter.
> Two hundred thousand subscribers did not suddenly quit their subscriptions and start using their friends’ passwords.
That implies the author thought this was a natural subscription drop and not a result of losing 700k subscribers in Russia. I'm not sure I have any confidence in their predictions about the future, since they're so clueless about what's happening today.
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
The Netflix bump wasn't caused by covid directly, but by the lock downs.
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
I think bumping up past $15 has hurt them a lot too. $20 a month for a streaming service is outrageous.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-faang
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
GAAF is certainly better than the reverse, but it lacks the bite of FAANG.
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
Most people don't even know that it's an option. Horrible design for this particular feature's UX.
If you just want more search options, I agree but the search layout is also already a grid.
I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better. There are subtle issues with getting this layout right. Its not as obvious as you say when you need to deal with crap remote dpads and no keyboards.
It doesn't need to be a list of movie posters.
> If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
It's not though, you have to scroll horizontally for each section. That's not the same as a grid.
> I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better.
That's tough to do if everyone is implementing it poorly. However, I would say that something like this feels better in practice (even if it's still not ideal): https://i.imgur.com/AU6Az7e.jpeg
Sports are trickier of course.
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
Or if the price is too high, I will find something better to do with my time. Same as every other entertainment option in life.
People just want to pay for what they want. What is so hard about that?
I don't want cable with 500 channels of no interest. I also don't want to deal with subscribe/cancel 20 services as shows come and go.
Just make it simple ffs.
It's $40/season, but it's available.
Media companies have been using the value of "content you want to watch" to subsidize "content you don't know you want to watch" for about a century now, the back catalogs are what will keep you paying but that only retains value so long as new content can be added to it.
Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show? They create mindless entertainment for society and yet they are so highly compensated. Yeah, I don't feel like I owe them anything.
Because that is the agreement they made for selling their labor/services/content to the buyers of the labor/services/content.
> I don't feel like I owe them anything.
Correct, you do not owe them anything.
If you don't see the value in the entertainment those companies provide, you're probably not the target audience.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
Where I live now there is an insane number of carwashes — and more being built. Apparently they're a "subscription service" like 24-hour gyms, etc...
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- Edit: Plex et al are not the *only* ways to download content, not sure why some replies are thinking so. I too can type in a show into a piracy site, click the magnet icon, and start immediately watching it. I personally don't even use Plex, Radarr or Sonarr myself, it was just a suggestion. In contrast, I can't just type any show into Netflix and watch it, since it might not even be on Netflix! Then I'd need to get on justwatch.com just to figure out which streaming service is playing the show. This is harder than piracy in my view.
- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
What I’ve noticed: a Netflix 1080p is very much worse looking than the 1080p I get off Plex.
Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.
I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.
I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime). I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.
qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.
I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.
It’s not my crowd but it’s interesting…
Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Good luck with that.
Ignoring it sends a different message.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
Plus, this rental will not be available in all locales, for every video, etc
It won’t work?
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.
Better to buy a physical media.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
pay full price for the online offering (conducting the transaction in a browser) and then just download the content from BitTorrent.
I would happily defend that practice in front of a jury of my peers.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
Remember that whole Cuties debacle where Netflix sexed up a French coming-of-age about children ?
Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
I am not going to pay to rent stuff I used to be able to encounter for free by surfing channels...well, on top of my dish/cable bill
The $3 is for fast-forwarding Mr Video to next week.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.
If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.
You get the same amount of money either way.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
See music streaming, the origin of video streaming, origin of steam etc
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
We don't hire necromancers anymore, they’ve been replaced by training models on a corpus anchored by the creator’s existing work.
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
How about “owning” a movie but not being able to resell it or loan it to friends. What’s that?
Please don’t use physical item terms for digital items.
Stealing something from you implied you don’t have to have it after I take it.
It’s illegal and unethical, we agree on that. But it’s not stealing.
How else do you really think this whole thing works. You get to keep your money, but still get all the goods and services provided. That's just silly.
You can call it stealing metaphorically all you want, but it's not technically that (as candlemas claimed).
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.
You want me to buy the apple before taking a picture?
I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.
I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to.
It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life.
I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess.
I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses.
Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices.
They need to get their shit together.
Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched.
It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see."
And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.
I think you underestimate how many people pirated things before netflix existed.
Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers.
There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me?
Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy?
None of this sounds literally as easy.
And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.
If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.
ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.
Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt
Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker.
Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services.
GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
> "Piracy is a service problem." Valve's Gabe Newell said that years ago, touting the success of Steam, his online video game distribution service.
The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?)
The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.
Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.
Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.
And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.
you found one?? please share
Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)
Other than that I can’t really think of anything other than good clones like OpenTTD or crappy clones like minetest.
Maybe Dwarf Fortress in the future if tarn or his brother open source it.
Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.
Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.
>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?
older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.
Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.
many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam
There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated
The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM
there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway
But I gave in after several years, and now I'm a quite happy Steam user on Linux. It works as advertised, and the only issue I have is that I haven't found a way to filter games for «Linux support» and a genre at the same time. I've used EXT4 and BTRFS as file systems while using Steam, and never had any issues with that either.
I'm inclined to agree with Gabe. I've never spent as much money on games as after I got Steam. It makes it really easy to get a new game. Without Steam, I'd probably just go without. I have lots of things to spend my time on, and sometimes I'm even a little bit bummed that wasting time on games is an option on Linux these days...
Though I also buy from Humble Bundle and GOG. I prefer GOG whenever possible, if it's DRM free. Sometimes it's the most expensive option though.
I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly
the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale
i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting
the other problems are personal preferences that aren't universal
few things in life are. But we're on the internet, so we inevitably here a lot fo "personal preferences", often exagerrated to the point where it sounds like it's the worst thing in the world.
Steam provides a lot of value.
But, I will also admit that I'm a bit biased against steam due to using PC's for a lot of Visual Novels. And their VN submissions have always been a lottery of some sorts, to the confusion of readers and developers alike. Nothing worse than having an existing product on the store and then suddenly having a sequel to the product rejected, while the first product still sits on shelves.
Plug the PC up to display and presto.
I never have to leave my sofa. I don't have to dick around with plugging and unplugging my PC. No keyboards to manage. No OS or software to keep updated.
Your solution is easier than some other options but I'll stick with mine.
Then have a firmware update ad some advertising to the experience.
Sure beats my experience of pulling out my 12 oz keyboard plus touchpad bluetooth keyboard connected to a real PC.
GabeN is partially correct: It's a money & service problem. It's money for some, service for others, sometimes a bit of both. During college I had no money, so the issue for me was money. Once I got a job after college it was service: I didn't want to drive to music store & hope they had the CD in stock that I was looking for, not when I could definitely get it in 5 minutes online. Similar issue for videogames: I didn't want to spend $30-$60 for a game I couldn't return, when my computer might choke on it & not run or if half an hour in I realized it was crap. On top of which I might have to drive around to half a dozen stores to find a copy. That was a mixture of service & money.
These days it's faster for me to pay $1 for a song than pirate it, and I can instantly buy, download, and return a game in an hour if it either doesn't run or I hate it immediately.
Free is enticing, but so is convenience & instant gratification.
that's where the "service problem" sentiment falls apart. All companies want to be this monopoly for you with no red tape over multiple governments. But of course, companies get the best cuts (100%) from hosting it themselves and countries (and media licensed) will never agree on what's okay.
In this case, piracy is a way around a world that hasn't quite caught up with how the internet works yet. I wonder in a few decades if governments worldwide create enough enforcement on this for it to be just as inconvinent as trying to steal a CD.
However, people professing this quote everywhere should note that it's very hard to compete with "free infinite media" for those with the knowledge to pirate. So don't be surprised if instead of catering to that crowd that they instead focus on people who can't or don't want to pirate. It's a double edged sword. If I do pirate, I don't pretend I do it in some effort to make the product better. I do it accepting the risk that they may never choose to cater to me.
It's so frustrating to see that 90%of the shows I want to see are unavailable on Netflix. Video streaming is just so fragmented right now. And they try to compensate with a bunch of low quality Netflix original shows.
Why can't they just replicate what has been done in audio streaming? Spotify is what Netflix should have been. It's been years I no longer need to pirate music.
A service problem and a money problem are almost the same thing. Time is money, and I value my free-time very high. People will pay to not have to spend time to find the free.
I have a shared folder on my home network where I download stuff from 1-click hosters with jdownloader. I get the links all on one platform.
I got that money. I paid for Netflix once but now I can't remember the last show I watched made by them. Instead I'd have to pay for at least 3 other platforms to watch those few shows I watch throughout the year. Sometimes I'd even have to use a VPN to get it in the original language.
It only is a service problem for me.
(there is a bit revenge for their inability to provide a single platform in there too)
I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke.
Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English. A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.
Can piracy be the bridge to tech literacy? Sure.
“It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.”
Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock!
"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...
and the thread here as a whole is rebuking the argument that Netflix is losing money because people are pirating. Most people don't or can't go through this work, so that likely isn't the reason why Netflix is seeing drops.
Current market wise, I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix situation is people canceling their membership to spend that money on a different streaming service, and then swapping between friends to get the union of shows for a similar $/month. This would explain both pushes of membership going down, plus them wanting to crack down on sharing.
ehh, It's more like a speedbump than a storm. There's too much money in the game for it to end up being caught in a hurricane.
I just see the other side on how piracy can also harm more niche mediums and discourage businesses from even bothering to compete, which is why I can't even say piracy is a 'meh' at worst.
The manga indusry outside of Japan has this problem in that it's 5+ years behind the already decade outdated online solution for digital comics. Several JP storefronts for phyical and digital manga, but that is almost non-existent in English. Manga is fantranslated so fast that there's no incentive to bother having official localizers outside of the already huge works. Easier to cash in pennies on anime adaptations and merch sales afterwards.
There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable...
"You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!"
---
That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.
But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?
The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
You even call Netflix the easy option which is all I'm saying.
That's easy.
Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall.
But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.
The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet.
Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.
Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it.
At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror.
Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network).
Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier).
Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV.
The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.
This view is very US-centric.
In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.
And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?
In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.
In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.
So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".
I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.
- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.
- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.
- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.
- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
Go check out my imdb and see how many of my credits you've watched https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1968249/
For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.
You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
Stop stealing our shit.
If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways?
(FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)
You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying.
That's stealing.
If you really truly didn't want to watch it, you wouldn't steal it.
Which one of us gets to deposit the money?
If I copy your car key and use it to steal your car. I've copied the key but stolen your car.
The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service.
When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders.
That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially.
I don't believe it will ever happen tho :/
If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
Nobody is TAKING anything. Everything is at the place where it belongs.
Also if you'd be able to make identical copies of money, of course people would accept it.
Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
Another word for it is stealing.
Is my request reasonable? Do you feel inclined to pay me? Do I incur $1000 of damages if you choose not to?
If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
And this is again a physical situation, where one more person takes up limited space, reducing something.
Copying does not reduce anything.
It also does not contribute anything, true, so I am not saying it is always ethical to do so.
But when a poor person in bangladesh or bolivia living under very different economic realities, where 10$ means a LOT and who could never afford to pay for western realities anyway, streams some hollywood movie from a warez site - than I see zero damage. And guess what, they all do. So do poor teenagers and students in the west and they usually start paying, once they can afford it.
Judging them all as "thefts" from a position of being born into wealth, is maybe not very ethical either. So to repeat it again, stealing implies taking something away. Which is not the case here.
Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property.
For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it?
If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here.
This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.
Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?
"Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.
Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?
In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].
I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.
If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.
It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.
It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.
Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.
Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).
That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast
The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.
I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.
> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.
This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.
Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.
How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?
What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.
I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.
If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.
If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.
Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).
Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.
or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.
Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.
There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.
Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.
it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.
Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.
In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.
"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.
This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.
So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.
--------------- Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the underlying financial model at play in the current market. fwiw im too lazy to pirate, but i still feel there is an incredible difference between people who pirate for themselves vs people who make it easy for others to pirate. People who invite some friends over to watch something they pirated, vs someone who distributes pirated content on common low-tech household media formats like USB, CD, etc.
Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.
Did I steal from you? If so, what did I steal?
But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?
I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.
When you pay for things you like, more of it gets made.
Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.
Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"
stealing.
Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.
But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?
This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.
Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.
That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.
This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.
Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time.
EDIT: Fixed a grammar error.
>If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it.
That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option.
And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.
You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership?
So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.
When you steal cool stuff, cool stuff stops getting made.
Which is more powerful if consumers don't steal money out of their pocket.
Pay for cool things and you'll get more cool things.
Then the ephemeral luxuries, such as entertainment, begin to take a more relaxed position on our moral compass when one compares paying for entertainment services, vs, using funds for food.
In the future, I suspect we'll still have storytellers for the same reason we do today. To Inspire, educate, and entertain. I cannot envision society with zero entertainment.
I pirate-streamed the first season of discovery due to its lack of availability on other platforms. Felt like a 10 hour movie about a dystopian future with weak shallow characters rather than an episodic serial about the great people solving problems in a better society than we have today. Tried a few episodes of Picard and just didn't get into it. Neither were entertaining enough for my full attention, ended up watching on second monitor while playing a game.
I would feel like a schmuck if I paid CBS to subsidize this content: wasn't what I want more of in the world. There is no "voting with your dollar" in modern content delivery when you can't get a refund when a show ends up being a waste of time.
It seems to me like piracy of shows is tangential to whatever the root of the issue is. Folk are becoming disenchanted with streaming services. Whether they pirate or just stop watching instead, the services have clearly changed in ways that make them less valuable to consumers. Unless somebody figures that out, it's not going to improve. I doubt DRM is the answer, although a combination of higher prices and consolidated content might be. Folk would pay more for Netflix if it was still a "monopoly" with all the popular shows.
I think accusing folk of stealing money out of your pocket for downloading a video is quite hyperbolic and isn't winning you any arguments. You're trying to make it a moral issue, but it isn't really a moral issue, and nobody outside of the industry cares. You could claim that it's disrespectful to you as a participating member of society, and it probably is, but yelling at people to respect you more doesn't work, and has the opposite effect.
I think your point, though, is that it's a tragedy of the commons situation. The industry works as a whole because people are willing to pay a premium in exchange for entertainment. If people don't pay, then there's no incentive to produce. If folk value new entertainment, they need to support the industry that produces it.
The problem, as I see it, is entertainment is being seen as a "good" and not a "service." Physical dvds and vhs has conditioned us to think that it's a physical good, so there is no harm in replicating the digital product. In fact that emotional state derived from viewing the entertainment is the service that is being paid for.
Taking the value of receiving that entertainment without providing the cash value of that service is stealing.
There is no option for refunds. Pirating first gives the user more control over which films they economically incentivize iteration on.
While I agree with your sentiment, you can also make a better product. This is an easy fix with some of the smartest minds in the industry. People showed Netflix early on they were willing to PAY for ease of use.
The big studios know how many people are watching their stuff via theft. They are going to keep producting low end crap with studio friendly sponsorships, because piracy will have taught them that is a better business model.
Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
Where can I pay for a streaming service with no geo-blocking, no DRM quality limitations on Linux, offline viewing and all the shows/movies I want to watch? Seems the only way to vote with my wallet is to refuse to pay, which morally isn't really different to piracy.
I don't know where to find all those requirements. Perhaps they exist. If they are that big of a dealbreaker for you, don't consume the value provided by entertainment services.
When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a thief.
> When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a [pirate].
Correct, it is justifying being a pirate. The justification being exactly what you suggested: voting with my wallet. I want to watch a certain piece of entertainment, but it's producer has made it unreasonably unobtainable thus pirating it signals that it is both desired and that a sale was lost.
I think you're being angry about the wrong thing here. Consumers don't want to pirate; they are pushed to piracy by shit service. That's not a fault of the consumers, that's a fault of the seller. If you actually want to reduce piracy you should be advocating for better service rather than telling people they're stealing from you.
And someday I'll be makign my own productions.
And he is yelling at us, which also have no control, he should be yelling at the people he works for that do have control.
Also, we’re going to end up with shitty generated content regardless of my $10. If you’re making strong statements like OP is stealing from _you_, then go advocate for change. You’re in the industry.
I do advocate for change, within my own union. Today I am educating consumers on who exactly they are stealing from when they pirate shows.
Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.
Now I have a choice between:
1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like
2. pirating
3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch
I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.
However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.
You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.
Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.
The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.
Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.
We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.
Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.
As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.
What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.
One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.
I don't think this is what you mean to do. I think you really care about this! Lay down your sword and listen. Hear what people are saying in response. Let their responses inform and refine your advocacy. You can't stroll in broadcasting an ideological, self-interested position and expect people to react well.
While this may be a way explain why the masses pirate, it's a poor justification for an individual to do it. If you don't find the available payment mechanisms convenient enough, then walk away and support a product that does have mechanism convenient to you. (For the same reason that you wouldn't steal from a store that only takes Amex.)
If you want people to "stop stealing our shit", you should really address how crappy the distribution system is.
- Can't get it in __ country
- Can only watch it on __ closed-source devices
- Can't watch it offline
- A is only available on platform 1, B is only on platform 2, and I don't want either crappy platform
Anyway, as I said, I don't really watch movies much anymore, and haven't seen any of the ones on your IMDB page, I mostly play games or read books these days, but I'd probably watch more if the distribution system was better.
- Can't get it with subtitles/dub in _ language
As opposed to movies/shows already high on CGI with poor and rehashed storylines, and whitewashed to cater to CCP censorship?
I'm fine with this. Some of the best movies ever were made in the 70s, after the Hollywood studio system collapsed and a ton of money was sucked out of the industry.
Advertizements everywhere stealing my attention, public space, and landscape beauty. Stealth taxes on empty hard drives and other storage media. Hardware-destroying rootkits and other malware (lost a DVD drive to DRM, will you reimburse me?). Draconian control mechanisms and lobbying stealing my control of the devices I own. Mountains upon mountains of disposable plastic promotional crap stealing my planet and ecosystem.
I'm not stealing from you. I'm extracting some small reparation for the many toxic behaviors your industry engages in. When you start offering an honest product I'll start honest buying. And I do - I pay more combined to good people producing good content via Patreon than a monthly Netflix subscription.
If you live in a big city you probably walk by people in the street slowly dying from a drawn out form of suicide because you can't possible change all their lives on your way to the grocery store or coffee shop and people at large are choosing to do the same with your income stream. They opt to deal with problems more important and more personal than fixing the way in which culture is monetized so as to funnel slightly more money to rich folks who could do more for society as soylent green in hopes that a few extra bucks will stick to the hands of useful folks like yourself.
For myself I'm not angry nor do I have any intention of fixing the problem because nobody with any decision making power gives two shits what my opinion on anything is. I have monetarily in life about nothing and indeed will have nothing tomorrow and the next day. You feel like people are violating the social contract by not paying for multimedia. Part of your problem is that you even believe that we are part of the same society or share the same ethics.
We really aren't. I am not the benefactor of the current situation nor do I have any meaningful power to negotiate new ground rules or even enforce existing ones so rejection makes worlds more sense.
You say stop downloading and I hear enjoy poverty but with fewer books, music, movies, games. I wont actually be supporting the folks you mentioned to any greater degree but you will find such more ethically palatable. HALF of America is sharing 12% of the income. We don't have anything but you can stick a $200 PC and plug it into a $20 monitor and courtesy of a $10 internet essentials package download as many books music movies shows as you can possibly consume.
I don't feel like making my shitty life shittier in order for you to feel better. Artificial scarcity is a dumb way to run a society and its not my fault the people with all the money in this society have chosen it.
Jobs will be lost, just like happened with farriers and switchboard operators. Your income will disappear regardless: the demand for stunts is elastic and the supply is increasingly competitive. Blaming pirates is being unable to see the forest for the trees.
A lot of us would gladly pay the cast and crew directly to own a copy of your output that we could access on our own terms, but that isn’t a reality for most trade under capitalism. There’s a reason Googlers on HN aren’t trying to guilt trip everyone for personally stealing their income by using ad blockers. Maybe this is particularly to the entertainment industry, but most of us would shrug our shoulders at the equivalent of petty shoplifting from our employers.
Imagine a hypothetical universe where, in order to watch one of your movies, people had to a) pay you $1 and also b) let you punch them in the nose. Then, when people sensibly start pirating your content instead because they don't want to get punched, you loudly proclaim that they are stealing the $1 you are owed.
That's what's happening here. People want to watch your content, and are willing to pay for it. But they don't want to pay for it AND get punched in the nose. They pirate because your distributors, and by extension you yourself, have made it impossible to watch your content (and pay you!) in any other way.
I get that your natural rejoinder will be "if the content is not worth being punched in the nose, just don't watch it!" Which is fair. Debatable, but fair. Just don't come here pretending that all you have asked for is the reasonable sum of $1 when you are actually demanding that your customers subject themselves to the indignity of your fist.
When you lend it out, are you still able to enjoy the entertainment service provided by the dvd?
The answers to these questions are the answers to your questions.
Thinking of all the stealing they've done from the public domain it makes my blood boil. Charging top dollar for artists work that have been dead for decades is a disgrace. How about "stealing" from the public and renting it out in perpetuity... Winnie the Pooh, anyone?
Hell of a position.
Our base pay is daily rate governed through SAG-Aftra CBA with the Producer's guild and scaled off the budget of the production. Then there are OT factors and bumps that go along with how difficult the particular work is.
There was about a decade when Netflix went full in on online streaming and was offering a fantastic service for a reasonable price with a far superior experience to piracy. That is no longer the case, and the unbundling to now a dozen+ of subscriptions is driving pretty much all my techie friends back to movie/tv piracy. I personally don't really watch much TV and might watch one or two movies a year, so I'll just not watch anything. I've already cancelled my Netflix subscription about a year ago, and I prefer playing video games and reading books anyway.
Until your industry can offer a product experience that is superior to piracy, people are going to pirate. The games and music industries have largely solved this problem. When will yours?
Until then tho..a person who steals from a moral high ground is still a thief stealing from my income.
Steam and Spotify have made it incredibly simple to just get what you want without having to juggle or manage any kind of bullshit.
Boutta go "steal" from you just to do it.
Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?
Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.
As I've said in the thread, for me the alternative to movies/TV isn't piracy, it's playing games or reading books, which I do pay for because the experiences of finding what I want, buying it, and consuming it is a superior experience to piracy. If that ever changes across the entire media landscape and games/books go the way of movies/TV that may change.
To put it really bluntly, pointing out how piracy is easier than paying again is not literally stealing money out of your pocket. The whole "lost sales" and "stolen income" thing doesn't always hold water, because you can't measure all the counterfactuals involved. A lot of pirates are either just data hoarders or collectors, and you aren't really in price competition with piracy as long as you are even slightly more convenient than it. Yes, that actually used to be the case for movies and TV shows, back when you could get access to everything you could ever want to watch just by subscribing to Netflix or maybe Hulu. Piracy was actually going away, right up until everyone pulled their content from Netflix to try and grab a larger slice of a smaller pie.
However, I don't want to actually trash your point too hard, because you did touch upon something worth talking about. I have noticed in HN and in other engineer-oriented spaces a certain contempt for the creative working class. I call it "kill and eat everyone below the talent line".
There's this weird meme that came about around the same time that the RIAA was indiscriminately suing casual pirates. Back then, some artists - usually ones at the start of their careers or doing it as a hobby - were distributing content over the Internet for free. In fact, some of them were even able to make money off of it through crowdfunding or advertisements without directly demanding payment to read, listen, or watch their work. So people made this assumption that this business model would be both sustainable long-term and scalable to large productions. Ergo, copyright is just an artifice of history, we can just abolish it, and the "real artists" will prosper while publishers and middlemen are out of a job.[0]
The problem is that "real artists" covers both the Toby Foxes of the world just as well as the Temmie Changs. Abolishing copyright beggars the songwriter in the name of the singer. A-list actors would actually survive and thrive in a crowdfunding-only market, because they have the name recognition to do so. But all the other people who support them would see their income shrink. And producers and publishers would just turn into the absolute worst kind of scummy for-sale pirates you could think of.[1]
The thing about piracy is that we as tinkerers and hobbyists assume it works exactly the same for everyone else as it does for us. I.e. me and my 10,000 friends all trade files around for free. Yes, a lot of pirates are data hoarders and collectors, but there's an entire world of bootlegs and knockoffs outside of the world of BitTorrent. For-profit piracy is far more pernicious than just the person with a Plex server, and it comes in a lot of forms you wouldn't even expect. For example, when Facebook launched their video service, there was an entire cottage industry of people reuploading YouTube videos and monetizing them on Facebook. This is the sort of thing that individual filesharers would not even recognize as piracy, but is absolutely immoral and wrong, and does pull nickels and dimes out of artists' pockets.
[0] The counterargument I'm making against copyright abolitionism does not apply to other things like shortening the length of copyright terms or adding more exceptions to it. Those at least still allow the existence of a creative working class.
[1] Fun fact: lousy speedsubbing jobs aren't just for modern anime pirates. Before we had international copyright, it was common for publishers to just take books published in other countries, translate themselves, and sell them before the original author could.
The concept that Pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway is valid. Part of my problem with piracy is that so much bullshit gets consumed that without stealing, those things would be much less part of pop culture and we'd have a lot better stuff to entertain us.
However for definition sakes. Taking a service that you wouldn't have consumed by paying and using it for free is stealing.
Netflix was on a path to successfully serve the first kind, the only remaining problems being region locking and an incomplete catalog. Demand for piracy went down. Then the industry got greedy, made one of those remaining problems much, much worse, and now the demand for piracy is on the rise again.
The industry spends a lot of resources making life worse for the second kind, in a misguided attempt to both satisfy them and fully prevent the possibility of piracy. Instead they fail at both. The result is an increased demand for piracy.
> You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
So here's the problem: The only way I can spend money to encourage the production of content I want is to buy a terrible, abusive product I don't want. It only plays in 720p, it's only available through a shitty app, it may disappear from the platform it's on any time.
All of it is just a wrapper for content. Please sell me the content. Whatever file comes out at the end of the production process, sell it to me.
Instead I spend my money in other places. Streamers on Twitch want it. YouTubers want it. People on Patreon want it. Developers want it. Somehow they manage not to abuse the people willing to give them money.
Most of those who pirate, wouldn't pay and since the content is not going away because somebody pirates it, it can't be stealing.
And Jesus...please...it's not like you're starving out there. Start producing original stories. We don't even need all that fancy and expensive CGI crap. Just start writing properly and in a creative way. Pay THOSE people more IF they deliver (though I'm not sure anymore if you really understand what's missing here with all your sequels and remakes...). We're not the audience you should cry to, go to those managers who messed up that market so piracy is coming back again.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Although in this case, I have to imagine that first understanding the problem would enable the industry to fix itself and then make more money.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
example issues. Here's the quick start guide. https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/quick-start-guide 1. Get stopped immediately at the indexer. No sane defaults there at all. No guidance either.
Plex doesn't do 4k streaming to Apple TV, doesn't do 4k to chromecast.
The movies you pirate frequently have technical problems, usually the sound is off. You are lucky to have subtitles that work(synced correctly).
Very true.
In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.
My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.
And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Oh I use a Nvidia Shield as Client. It’s awesome!
I'd rather do without.
Netflix after canceling all of its best shows during a period when piracy has never been easier: "Let's start doing ads!"
I wonder if anybody at Netflix has seen the UX of popular streaming apps like (now defunct I believe) terrarium and its successors. They're easier to use, just as fast as Netflix, have much larger libraries, allow DRM-free downloads, ad-free, no algorithmic spam, etc. It is incredible that when faced with that as another consumer option they've gone for "severely degrade user experience" as the strategy.
At this point, some vulture private equity firm should just take them private and sell it for parts. Clearly they've spent far too much time being the biggest player and have completely disconnected from what their customers want.
Care to list? Most of the loss of shows I see are from studios pulling them off Netflix to make them exclusive to their own streaming service - a bunch of Disney stuff is now Hulu or D+ only for instance.
Personally I am still not over the cancellation of Sense8 and The Oa.
Right now there's kind of a shortage of Netflix-unique good shows. I'm not spending money that I worked for in exchange for... a nature documentary narrated by Obama.
Derry Girls is great but you can watch it months in advance on All4 with a dirt cheap VPN. There is a similar situation for Bodyguard.
They are expecting people to actually sign up (instead of sharing passwords lmao) and watch ads for the off chance that in a year or two maybe Squid Game season 2 is as good as season 1, or that they need to not miss out on Red Notice 2 and 3. It feels like they are literally betting that people need forgettable Gal Gadot movies in the same way that they need cigarettes.
Did they ever clarify exactly why it was cancelled? I remember reading that the cast and crew wanted one more season to finally wrap up the story, and the fans DEFINITELY wanted another season so... ?
Price increases bring increased scrutiny on the value of the service compared to just hiding as a monthly $15 charge or so amongst a sea of subscriptions that products are sold as.
This is anecdotal but this is my experience. I used to love Netflix and though maybe they didn't have the most shows they had shows I realllllly wanted to watch. Now? There is so little that I care about and the positive brand sentiment is gone. Great shows that I became attached to were canceled so regularly that I am truly not interested in investing time into their shows. Not all shows should go on forever but then you might as well commit to making everything a limited 2 season series and be honest about it.
I actually canceled Netflix and had not had it for a year before the pandemic (where I gave in) but I think many people in this economic environment are finding it easier to give up a TV subscription to a company that produces _mostly_, mediocrity.
It truly has been interesting to watch a giant brand so committed to their own internal analytics that they've lost so much of their brand reputation.
The straw that broke the camel's back for us was the disappearance of a deep catalog and only one or two new shows which were worth attention — if we really want to see them, we'll sign on for a month next year and binge-watch through them, then drop the service again. This is the model we're going to be going forward with any such service.
It's not entertainment, it's education.
The challenge now is to find and filter 'useful books' (most are not, and don't deliver on the promise on the cover).
I looked for it in all platforms, Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, Play Store, and it wasn't available in my country. I then connected to the US through a VPN and tried to buy it or rent it but my PayPal account didn't work because it isn't associated to the US. I finally found it in YouTube posted by a page that seemed official! But it had no captions... argh!
I wasted 2 hours trying to have anyone accept money to let me watch it, but got nothing. Then I tried torrenting and 3 min after I had the movie ready to watch and a captions file ready to add. In the end I couldn't finish watching the movie because it had already taken too long.
- Lots of competition, some more serious (Disney+) than others (Amazon)
- Nearing the top of the streaming adoption curve
- End of the stay-at-home covid bump
The covid impact is noise in the long (5+ years) term.
Reaching full adoption is a sign of maturity overtaking growth. You run the company differently, but it's not "the bottom dropping out."
Competition is rough. The competitors have deep pockets and back catalogs, but consumers have no appetite for 6 separate services. This is where I'd be worried.
I empathize with the recommendation and UI gripes, but I doubt they're driving Netflix's woes.
My question is, how did people not expect this given that a huge XX% of the first world already uses it, and there are tons of viable competing streaming services popping up like weeds? They had a first mover advantage, and that was pretty much it, but streaming is a solved technology now. Competition took much longer to mobilize than it should have, but it's finally here now.
At the end of the day the only differentiator for Netflix is as a production company. Up to you to decide what their moat is there
1. Netflix is boring
2. Their recommendation algorithms didn't solve 1.
The root cause of it all is their odd focus on expensive originals over third party content. Their catalogue is just not deep enough if you remove all the subpar content. Before using Netflix I engaged in massive piracy for over ten years, and I'm considering it again - this time in smaller amounts, because I don't have that much free time anymore.
1. I want to find my own shit with filters, not by scrolling through endless reams of D- grade cable TV quality shows.
2. I want major efforts from networks and studios, not homemade content. I know I may be in the minority here, but I strongly prefer HBOMax right now (which I get for 'free' with my phone plan) because the content is aligned here coupled with their own solid content, not D+ grade self-created content.
For me I associate the big red "N" with bad content. So when I open Netflix and see the red "N" plastered on every thumbnail the algo serves up, I immediately wanted to close the app. I eventually felt tired of batting away their originals to find good content so I unsubscribed.
I don't know how many other people actually feel the same way, but it seems pretty clear to me that their subscriber base doesn't like Netflix's original content as much as Netflix does.
That seems very premature to me. Subscription growth has slowed and they may still lose some more, but saying the bottom is dropping out is hyperbole at best & clickbait at worst. (though why not both?). They're facing more competition, and coming out of COVID lockdowns probably means people aren't home as much to binge watch shows. Not enough to doom them unless they start hitting a bunch of own goals.
For now subscription loss is a one-off event, so it's a bit early to call it a cycle. They project to lose subscribers this quarter as well, so it could be the start but I'd guess that a base price increase is at least a year in the future since they just bumped it up. If they do it sooner, that would be a key sign of the cycle you're talking about.
They have hinted at a price increase for accounts that are sharing passwords. On the other hand they've also hinted at a cheaper ad-supported plan. If they go ahead with an increase for shared accounts that could get messy. There's a lot of potential for angry customers here. Get it right and people will be frustrated at higher prices, maybe cancel, maybe share the cost, but probably not be outraged. Get it wrong and they've got a million or more customers essentially getting fined for sharing an account that they're not actually sharing.
It will be interesting to follow along, I just think it's too soon to project any particular path. They could pull it together (maybe?) or they could proceed to botch things up with customer-unfriendly punitive policies and lower quality content as they try to cut costs, and maybe two years from now we'll be looking at a Disney(+) buy out at a steep discount. (more likely, at least the part about screwing things up. A buyout... I don't know. Maybe just stagnation.)
Thank you. The only reason I break my Netflix embargo (and log into my profile on a friends account) is so I know what some viral meme is about.
Nobody[1] talks about or remembers shows from there two weeks later.
[1] this is hyperbole validated by 200,000 - 2,000,000 others seeing the light
I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise.
Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productions, but especially their foreign stuff sometimes proves that less is more. They tell interesting stories in "good enough" settings for them to be enjoyable.
Every Pixar movie is exactly the same, and they're all great. It's a good formula. My problem with movies is that they're built for two many audiences. Pick China xor America, and the will be more enjoyable to watch
IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
I wonder if they'd be better off making better quality content, but less of it.
They don't want to to get in and get out. They need subscribers and the revenue flow they bring. I think they should stop the binge model for new, original content. That is, release new seasons one episode at a time rather than drop them all at once.
Sense8, Travelers, Altered Carbon, basically there expensive science fiction.
Sure nailed it is fun but I won't miss it. The only one that I will truly miss is Big Mouth... but there are alternatives.
Apple TV+ is quickly becoming my science fiction go to and they seem to be going more than HBO route with a smaller catalog.
> 71% of TV households nationwide have some form of pay-TV service. The percentage of TV households that have a live pay-TV service (via cable, satellite, Telco, or Internet-delivered vMVPD) is down from 82% in 2016, 87% in 2011, and 86% in 2006.
http://www.satellitemarkets.com/71-percent-us-households-hav...
A second source that classifies vMVPD differently: https://www.emarketer.com/chart/239301/us-pay-tv-vs-non-pay-...
Combined with the decline of movie theaters, it's an existential crisis for everyone in the media world. Can they replace lost cable/theater revenues with streaming subscriptions?
I expect we'll end up with a 2 or 3 major media companies and a couple small premium services bolted onto unrelated products like Prime and Apple TV. Netflix has some short term headwinds with this new competition but is the only company that's a shoe-in for making it.
Netflix is old enough now that a lot of subscribers now have children that are in college or have graduated. My daughter is in college, and she definitely uses my netflix credentials. At what point does Netflix feel it is required for her to have her own subscription?
It really feels like this is already a "family plan", given the number of concurrent streams permitted. I don't think that there's much fruit to be gathered by shaking this tree.
Househould is not an easy thing to quantify.
But it does say that people can use their Netflix account while travelling, as long as they can verify that the device is “authorized”. So the bottom line seems to be that you’re a member of my household if I say you are, no matter where you are.
The series that are really well made are few and far between. E.g. - Narcos - Ozark - House of Cards - Stranger Things
For every good show, I see another few dozen that I can't bear to sit through. Stuffing the catalogue with filler is reminiscent of cable.
For example, I've been enjoying "Handsome Siblings," a Chinese wuxia show that's pretty shallow. It's not going to win any awards for writing or acting, but it's beautifully produced and good mindless fun.
To some people, it's filler junk (worse—subtitled junk). To me, it's perfect for passing the time on a long plane ride.
Decent Netflix TV: Maid, Unbelievable, Ozark, Narcos, Bloodline, Mindhunter, Black Mirror, Sweet Tooth.
They average like one decent TV show every 18 months. It's an absolute disaster.
Even shows like Ozark have this very "netflixy" feel to them.
The sense I got when Netflix started going original content was that it was the place for creatives to go and flex their muscles. They could do really weird stuff like Sense8 or The OA (both absolutely top tier stories in my opinion).
But now, I have come to expect that no shows will ever go anywhere (story wise) that is interesting. No boundries will be pushed, just bland kindof all the same background stuff. It's too bad, because some of the early stuff was really cool.
The result is that all these new netflix-produced shows like Ozarks all look super flat and similar. Most scenes are very poorly lit, which leads to a really poor experience when watching on a laptop or tablet. I don't think all viewers are consciously realizing it, but I think this is why many people are getting "bored" of netflix shows.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90653850/why-netflix-movies-look...
Squid game was huge and should have been a monster pole to hammock off of for months. The conversation about Squid Game should still be goin on...
Killing off shows because they're not bringing in new users is a terrible idea.
Their tech is great but the running a network aspect was pretty terrible.
Maybe they could have had a huge windfall by offering to be the “AWS” behind every “$CHANNEL+” streaming service. In other words, instead of having 14 kludgey apps that all suck in at least one way, we get 14 services but with a smooth implementation.
I don’t see how content is a long-term win for them.
Disclaimer: I work at Twitch, an Amazon subsidiary whose tech it's based off of.
The customers they lost are likely ones they would lose no matter what now that the pandemic is waning.
Separately, the disdain for bringing in advertisers, saying it's bad for customers: advertisers are their customers, too.
With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
Sorry, what does this mean?
Netflix did poach proven talent, but even then, it was people like Shonda Rimes and the guys who botched Game of Thrones.
Netflix has spent more on original content than Amazon did to buy MGM, though they apparently have spent less than Disney did on Fox.
What has gone wrong with our world that making a 6 billion dollar a year profit is considered a problem?
Its $6bn in profit still at a $96bn valuation. Down from $150bn. Quite high if only looking at profit. But I definitely like the revenues under the idea they can reduce overhead
I can see the business being fine, definitely watching for lower prices. netflix has always been a fun casino, super leveraged rocket.
As a consumer, the company will still provide real economic value
It is not considered a problem by anyone other than those who were invested in Netflix equity and expected it to be at a higher price.
Because it is a problem.
Firstly, it's a problem because stock prices are a measure of predicted future value. The profit today is mostly irrelevant. In order to make a profit on shares the business has to be in a position to do better in the future. If it doesn't then people won't believe it'll do better even farther in to the future, so they won't bid more for the shares than they're worth today. That means investors can't make a profit. If you bought Netflix shares in the past you'll lose money. That's a problem.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, Netflix (and every other tech unicorn) use their shares as a hiring incentive. If the shares are going the wrong way then good hires will refuse offers and go elsewhere. A big chunk of renumeration in tech is predicated on people getting stock instead of cash because that's worth more to the individual and cheaper for the business. If that fails then the business has to start dipping in to that $6bn profit to replace people who leave, or to acquire businesses, or just to maintain the status quo.
It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where a $6bn profit turns into a loss within a decade or less. The driving force behind people saying Netflix has a problem is that they're predicting that the future of the company isn't good.
I mean, they might be wrong and Netflix might be fine, and ultimately even if things go badly Netflix is never going to "fail" because it'll get bought long before that happens, but if you hold Netflix stock it's entirely reasonable to be worried despite the healthy profit they make.
As far as I know, Netflix shares, much like shares in many other tech companies, do not pay any dividend. Perhaps it's time they begin.
I do not want dividends if I think the business can invest the money with a higher probability of better ROI than I can. If shareholders want dividends, they can vote for them.
A better ROI to whom—itself, or to you? Do you own Netflix stock to make money for yourself, or for Netflix to make money for itself?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/07/ex_dividend....
With a dividend, you have to pay taxes now. Without the dividend, the stock price remains higher so you sit on higher unrealized gains. But assuming you can sell it anytime (it is liquid), the ROI is still there without the dividend.
That's not quite true. It means investors can't plan to make a profit by selling future shares based on the price growth beating inflation.
But...investors can still make a profit from dividends. There are plenty of large companies that are much less growth focused, and much more dividend focused.
Now that the US money hose decreased it's flow a little bit, the insanity of those valuations is hurting.
People are so used to having smoke blown up their asses that when someone tells them honestly about slightly negative news, they get confused.
The password sharing thing is also huge, as due to the insanity of the fragmentation that the ludicrous number of streaming services has caused, a lot of friends and families cope by subscribing to one service apiece and sharing them among each other.
As soon as these little tricks stop working and it becomes more expensive, people will just drop it. It's not like Netflix has actually worked on any value adds recently - tbh I feel their content offerings have gotten so poor recently it's next on the chopping block for me, too.
Wildly off-topic but perhaps you’re turning off a TV without the streaming device itself shutting down?
Hum... It's not that. It's just that it's impossible to access the long tail of Netflix content.
Better Call Saul is proudly labeled a "Netflix Original".
But you couldn't watch season five on Netflix until April, even though it originally aired two years ago.
Had to let AMC reair it first, right?
Think season six will air on schedule with AMC in August?
Meanwhile, HBO Max, and Hulu by extension, released The Batman nearly on time with theatres.
It's clear that Netflix simply lacks the content creation supply chain of its competitors.
And no amount of price hikes, ads, excuses, or desperate back-door deals will solve that.
Their greatest hope was to capitalize on successful originals, like Love Death and Robots.
But in three years they've managed to deliver only two season of that show.
Which, even with the pandemic, should have occurred much faster given it's an animated anthology.
I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning to find news of a Sony and/or Paramount buy out.
They've reduced content.
They consider emplacing password locks for their users.
These things say to me "we no longer want your business and will blame our decline on what YOU'RE doing rather than our policies that aren't keeping up with the real world."
Netflix content is mediocre. I loved Squid Game and The Queen's Gambit, but they felt padded and I fast forwarded through them. A lot of their other other content is shock and sex, which I presume gets people to binge.
But there's only so long you can keep dropping quality before people leave.
One would think there's room for a Netflix equivalent of Amazon Prime, where you pay a yearly fee instead of a monthly fee (as the author mentions), for which you get a discount off the monthly rate for essentially "buying in bulk", as well as early access to original content, and maybe even get access to content that non-Prime subscribers can't access at all.
Netflix's strategy contains several apparent contradictions that I'm unable to make sense of. For example, charging by the month seems to conflict with releasing an entire season of content at once. If you're going to charge per-month, then as the author mentioned, switching to a weekly-release model seems like the smart move, so you can squeeze more months out of a viewer who sees that content as "appointment viewing". If you're going with a "binge-release" model, I would think you'd charge per-year instead.
Another contradiction- simultaneously raising subscription rates and cracking down on password sharing seem to conflict with each other. The more you raise your prices, the more you incentivize people to share passwords.
On top of that, raising the price in the same month that they announce record profits left a really bad taste in my mouth. I know they're a business, and businesses love to chase infinite growth, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or give them my money.
The best streaming service for my particular usecase, which is primarily watching wide release movies, has been hbo max/go/whateverthey'recallingitthisweek. They get most of the wide release movies I'm interested in, and for the older weirder niche stuff that they don't get, I just buy the dvd/blu-ray and throw it on plex.
I'm also surprised Netflix doesn't have a yearly bundle... that's how Prime gets me, by the time I get charged for a year, it's already too late. Less frequent bills means less chance for someone to reconsider their subscription.
But yes, the constant email they send me about things changing and the price increasing, every email is a chance for someone to realize they don't use Netflix and would rather unsubscribe.
[0] https://popculture.com/streaming/news/netflix-officially-add...
That doesn't sound like very good deal to me, I'd prefer 12 months for the price of 10 or pay as you go for minutes/hours of actually watched content. Though Netflix has so much trash it's not really worth paying for. Had it for many months and hardly watched anything there.
I've got Netflix and then someone will tell me about something very interesting on Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, or Showtime. I'm not gonna sign up for Hulu just to watch 1 movie or a series. I'm not gonna give Comcast more money just so that I can get HBO and a whole lot of other channels that I don't want.
And the marketplace is so complicated. I can pay Comcast to get the History Channel (and a lot of channels that I don't want) or, I could go to another steaming service and get History Channel, but you've gotta look into the details to discover that the "new" episodes are actually 1 season behind.
So, when I think about dropping Netflix, it's not because Netflix in and of itself is lacking or too expensive. It's more about throwing up my hands and quitting the madness of the whole marketplace.
>Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Since then NFLX: -40.90%, SP500: +51.14%, DBX: -10.08%
* 2 years ago (Aug 4, 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054157
>Almost all Netflix competitors (Disney, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple ... ) will have other sources of revenue besides streaming so they can afford to keep loosing money to gain market share. Netflix can't cut prices too much.
Curious where on your crystal ball you see the likes of Spotify and the music (and podcast I guess) industry in 10 years.
Unfortunately it was data-driven. This meant that if a new show didn't catch on within a season or two, it was cancelled. They've killed so many great shows chasing the lowest common denominator.
The formula they settled on was: big name star in a generic designed-by-committee (or AI) show.
Shame.
There was an article in the Atlantic about how people are listening more to "old" music these days, which makes sense, but will have a big impact on the industry as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
They did and they do. They put all their money into the 1st party content. They produce huge number of bulk mediocre content and also some really good shows. I can't see how they could do anything different. It's not enough. They have no competitive edge in 1st party content creation except size. That edge is in danger.
The competition has either deeper pockets, more content, or other income sources.
I have no idea about music streaming. I assume its similar network externalities, economies of size business.
---
edit:
As an infrequent investor, the company must do better than relevant index fund (SP500, NASDAQ composite, and so on) over the next 5-10 years to make sense to me. Netflix may establish itself as a good blue-chip company, but that's not enough a reason to buy it.
That they almost always cancel after two seasons regardless of popularity or story progression. As a result, lots of people are wary of starting to watch anything new on Netflix since it's almost guaranteed to be cancelled prematurely.
No matter how good the company business and it's position in the market is (= future profits), it can be overvalued if the price is too high.
I think Dropbox seems like really nice product, but not at the valuation it had or has. It has no permanent competitive edge.
The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
Still more original than the next MCU movie.
As far as tech goes, I think Netflix has the best and I can see a future where it will provide streaming tech to all other major players.
So, putting my money where my mouth is and buying some shares. Let’s see how this plays out.
We need a 'must-license' system for TV-shows and movies, so that any movie that is available on one streaming service must be available to any other streaming service for the same terms. No doubt this will not mean that all movies are available on all streaming services, but it will mean that there will be actual competition.
The writing was on the wall that Disney+, HBO Max, etc would be attacking them and taking away customers.
Those legacy businesses have other sources of revenue and streaming is their future. They have the means to keep their prices low for many years to fuel growth.
Not sure what Netflix can do to continue growing. Then again, they managed to switch from DVD to streaming years ago. It was rough, they made mistakes but overcame them. Looking forward to see what they do.
Why or why not?
Clear violation of private REAL property. I think a lot think INTELLECTUAL property is rent seeking.
Being overly focused on engagement optimizes what’s easy to measure. It doesn’t always optimize what’s important. In the case of Netflix what’s important is brand strength and month over month subscriber retention. Engagement optimization leads to click-baity crappy reality TV instead of shows that actually drive retention
Meanwhile other services (notably Apple TV+) simply focuses on quality over quantity and starting to do rather well.
Is Netflix on more devices? Does Netflix have technology that make content distribution more efficient compared to other streaming services? Is it the location of the team, CA? I am genuinely interested.
I think it’s inevitable that Netflix will sell to one of the media behemoths. They simply don’t have the time that it will take to make the kind of major pivot mentioned above.
Fragmentation is becoming annoying and unsustainable. I see some streamers as better content producers than tech companies, so they will probably shift towards that over time. Also all these services are upkeeping parallel streaming tech. All this will be consolidated sooner or later.
It's at a point where I'll probably resubscribe for maybe the next season of Squid Game, like I'll resubscribe to HBO Max if they do another season of Righteous Gemstones.
The streaming market is so over saturated, it makes more sense to cancel all your subs, get your entertainment from YouTube, and then subscribe just for a month to binge your favorite shows.
I have enjoyed Narcos, Tiger King, Stranger Things, Queen's Gambit and others.
But there are so many bad shows, that are formulaic, unoriginal and overall, lame.
Then, I have nothing against noble causes such as social justice and such. But compare a good movie, such as Men of honor, or the Green Book, with the unoriginal content on Netflix. It is just not watchable.
Exactly. Same false argument as for torrenting entertainment content. Most people who get it for free will just go without if they're prevented from getting it.
As for Netflix specifically, I don't watch it but I believe the missus is finding fewer and fewer shows worth watching.
I think many just pirate those show they are interested in or subscribe just 2-3 months a year to binge watch.
Next time HN pops up with a licensing thread, it would be helpful to reuse arguments here as to why any company or person should be able to freely do what they want with source code, art, graphics, etc.
Netflix is being run by MBAs. It could benefit much more if it actually listened to their customers instead of doubling down each week on yet another terrible idea.
We used to watch five to ten movies a month via Netflix. We haven't used it in two or three years now.
You know what’s easier than dealing with that crap…
Missing option: woke partisan programming
Putting the face of a divisive politician like Obama on a show? Guaranteed to lose 30% - 50% of potential viewers who won't watch it no matter how awesome it is.
More than half of the most watched shows are not shows that Netflix produced. Shows like Better Call Saul.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
I have and will keep Disney Plus and HBO Max even when I watch them infrequently cause of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Pixar and other big tentpole IP properties that Netflix has none of!
And....nothing seems to be changing...
TIP. wanna survive. give me a build my own tv service.....with timeslots and my own show cycles that I put together from the content.........that would fix binging and would allow me to have a real value add......simple easy fixes....but they are going to try and market their stuff to look better rather than fix it....
fix it....it's busted...
I would probably watch more of their terrible shows if I could listen to commentary through an unsanctioned channel
Hey you know what? I think Steam should probably do just that!
How is this company still alive?
There’s not anything particularly compelling right now IMO on HBO dropping new episodes except for Tokyo Vice… which others am I missing?
Horror? How about The Truman Show!
Sci-Fi? How about The Truman Show!
Action? How about The Truman Show!
Adventure? How about The Truman Show!
Finally I just unsubscribed.
capitalism has always been about infinite growth but seems to have gone wild since everything starting going service-based
Elon Musk, April 2022. Accurate.
I mean, as long as we're going to be spewing content-free sentences I might as well get mine in.
"Woke" isn't a useful term because today in 2022 it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like". "Woke mind virus" is particularly egregious -that's pure hyperbole without even a pretense of meaning.
The problem with Netflix in the main isn't that they show too many people who are white, or show two many people who are LGBTQ+. The problem with Netflix IN THE MAIN is that they are cracking down on a subscription policy no one wants while increasing prices beyond what people believe are reasonable while at the same time hemmoraging content. It doesn't help that they have demonstrated over the last decade that you cannot rely on their own content to actually tell a full story (because it will get cancelled prematurely).
None of that has anything to do with the "woke" bugbear -it would be equally true if Netflix's political stance matched OAN.
You're right that the virus could be a different variant, like the anti-woke variant, and it'd be a problem too if it parasitized as many brains.
It sounds to me like you meant "colliqually" -as in "in informal or slang usage", not "specifically"?
In every conversation I've had on the subject where I've tried to nail down a definition of the term, the intended meaning is always different. Unless I'm very mistaken (please correct me if I am) there isn't an objective universally-agreed upon definition of what Woke means.
It's used the way "liberal" was in the 1990's or "SJW" was in the 2010's -an empty pejorative that ultimately only adds noise to any conversation it's unironically used in.
>It turns rational people into zombies, so mind virus describes it very well.
If you believe in literal zombies, I'd gently suggest to you that your own grip on rationality may not be as firm as you believe.
All I care about is that "woke" is empty rhetoric which is in practice meaningless.
Heh.
building for everybody and in the same time building for nobody
you optimize for the most impact, and yet you forget that the average man does not exist.
at least vudu should have something like the more you buy the cheaper you will be charged
"First Sale Doctrine? Who cares!" -Big Media (probably)
The whole "you're stealing" comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123354) is clear byproduct of all this, with people talking past each other.
**
I can buy a DVD, and loan that DVD out to 1000 friends. Everyone enjoys the movie without paying a dime. The movie studio only makes money of that first DVD sale to me.
--> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone.
Governments around the world can do the same as a public service with libraries that lend out all sorts of media. And, once again, the media right holders only get paid that first sale.
---> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone; and is democratically approved, government sanctions, public good.
Blockbuster and OG Netflix (DVD-by-mail) can buy 1000s of DVDs. Rent them out for profit. Once again, the media companies only profit off those first sales. No pay for view, pay for rental, etc royalty or extra cost.
---> Again, legal, moral, the way things were for decades.
---> More so, Netflix could buy and rent out whatever movies they wanted. Media companies couldn't deny them, no negotiations needed. Thus, Netflix had a fantastic movie catalog, the world was happy.
---> Heck, Netflix could even resale many of these DVDs months later on the used market to make-up costs. Eg. stock up for blockbuster launches, downsize later. Again, zero additional cut given to the media companies.
**
- Netflix the DVD-by-mail company was built on first sale doctrine.
- Netflix the "DVD-by-email" (streaming) company normalized a model that bypasses it, let media companies re-write the rules under the specter of piracy, and ultimately disrupted themselves.
- Sure, their value skyrocketed as the harbinger of the streaming era, but likely sealed their long-term fate in the process.
**
Steaming being "different" is kinda just an accident of history too. Imagine a timeline that turned out different and treated streaming as an evolution of renting tapes -> DVDs -> Blu-rays.
A hypothetical world where Netflix:
- Buys N digital copies of some show, and can only stream to N people at once.
- If I'm N+1, Netflix tells me "All copies are currently being streamed. We estimate a copy being available in 10 minutes. Would you like to join the queue? Feel free to watch Y (recommended by your viewing history!) while you wait. We'll notify you once available and you have up to 30 minutes to start watching before your reservation expires."
- All in all, basically the same as the old Netflix DVD era, where we had queues, multiple DVDs in the mail so we always had something to watch every night, etc. Just faster.
This alternate timeline would lead to multiple competing ventures, no way for media holders to pick/choose services (eg. no "only on X" nonsense) and everyone competing on price, quality, catalog (eg. blockbusters vs all-the-things vs speciality, etc)
It's a shame that simply using a faster postal service (eg. Internet) reclassifies the entire venture into something completely different, and gave media right holders more power over end-user-distribution than all proceeding home viewing formats.
**
Addendum
If someone ever invents a teleportation device (yeah, I know...let me dream), I'll happily pour all my money into a "DVD by Portal" business to recorrect history and get us to a world that is both consumer friendly + convenient.
Such a same that digital teleportation vs physical teleportation forces us to pit convenience vs everything else.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
What's probably going on is after after a few years of pandemic isolation and Netflix binging, the arrival of pandemic triggered inflation, and overall higher employment rates, people just have less interest, time, and money to binge watch longer form content. Many are probably consuming shorter form content (like TikTok), or enjoying more time in public.
We economize by scrutinizing our spending of both money and time. When we feel we have less of both of those, streaming services are an obvious "nice to have" for a lot of people that can be cut from their lives with minimal feeling of loss, especially since it can be substituted with fulfilling time spent with other people.
Also, if you're paying an extra $150 a month for energy utilities and gasoline, it kind of makes sense that you might cancel a streaming service that you watch once or twice a week.
These days the time I spent on streaming services during the pandemic is more likely than ever to be spent having a beer on a neighbor's porch (with them of course!).
Edit: missed a "the"
It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.
> We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had
Speculation on the causes of major changes for which we have no hard data is the basis of the original article and pretty much every comment on this thread. Nobody here is giving investment advice, so I don't know how it's irresponsible.
> It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.
My personal guess (also note the use of 'probably' in my original comment) is when it comes to things like paid streaming services, personal economics is the biggest factor in the decision to subscribe/cancel for most people, and other rationales are mostly tangential. In my experience, the bottom line is what matters in the end.
You'll have better luck asking for prayers.
Is Netflix more "woke" or "less scifi" or "prone to pirating" or "annoying about UI and recommendations" than Disney+ or HBO Max? (Ok, HBO Max has had a lot of cinema-quality sci-fi and similar genre content land recently, so maybe on that one?)
Those services are gaining subscribers faster so any backlash seems less likely, compared to "there is a lot more serious competition than their used to be, Netflix costs the most, and has a far less proven content model."
Netflix is increasingly only worth it for their originals, and now those are head to head against Disney and HBO+Warner cinema originals.
1) Netflix has much more streaming competition now.
2) Availability of good content has gone down as networks reserve it for their own new platforms, and as production was halted by covid.
3) Greater scarcity gives studios pricing power to increase Netflix's cost to acquire the few good shows available.
4) Netflix tried to counter (2) and (3) by making their own shows, but a lot of it is trash.
5) Netflix raised customer prices aggressively, while there's not much on their platform to justify the higher prices.
6) Customers are increasingly savvy about binge-watching what good shows there are on one platform, then cancelling it and rotating through other platforms.
7) Loyalty is for suckers. Churn, baby, churn.
I finally cancelled when I realized that whenever I did go look at it to see what's available it felt like there was more agenda pushing than entertainment, which itself made me check for content less often in the first place. Netflix won't miss my money, I may be in a small minority. It may be they get more subscribers for their politics than they lose (I'm sure they think so).
I'd have no problem paying for the kind of TV we had with Mad Men or Breaking Bad. I'm not aware of any streaming service of that kind.
They want to everyone, or the premier tiers. It's a conflict that can never be resolved.
The fact that they drew a line in the sand is why I have brand loyalty. If they cross that line, I'll no longer be "supporting a company bringing a moral perspective on content delivery" and turn off autorenew: just pick up a month or two a year.
Bottom line: if they think it will improve the bottom line, they will do it.
Incidentally, all this talk of how badly they're doing just reminded me to cancel, which I did, minutes ago.
For me, Netflix content is "OK" overall. But so is content on most of the other streaming services. And I don't really watch a huge amount of video so it makes sense for me to pick a few services and maybe dip in and out. Netflix is probably the one delivering the least bang for the buck to me right now so I'll probably watch a few things and drop it at some point.
Additionally to get people to think twice before unsubscribing increase the price for new subscribers but keep existing subs at the lower rate. You cancel you can't get that rate back.
I miss the days where I could binge watch a series on release date. Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
All the qualities that drew me into streaming have slowly faded away.
I cancelled it when they raised their prices, it made me think about how much I watch things on there. Which was rarely - my guess was around 1 show/month on average.
> Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
Yeah, screw that noise. Torrents are still their primary competitor, and the operative issue is not cost, it is convenience.
People surging ahead leads to a difficulty in conversation that week-to-week episodes do not.
Once everyone is split into various streaming camps, the talking between friends begins to drop.
That said, I mostly don't binge watch and maybe it would bug me more if I did.
Once a week episode is good for episodic content, nit for something with good writing.
I recall hearing a discussion on the extreme desire humans have to hear a story's ending, even when they aren't that interested in the story. There is simply a need to know how it ends. I've caught myself to often watching something I think is a waste of time but needing to know how it ends. This is as much of a weakness as the reciprocity rule.
Netflix burned me to many times on this. It's bad taste to re-use the same story time & time again to pump out tons of content. It's unforgiveable to not finish the story though.
Anyhow, he passed before writing the next book, and it literally bugs me at least once or twice a year, and yet I read it 20? 25? years ago.
So yes, at least here endings matter.
*exceptions for shows, mainly anime, where a season is a self contained story. And Firefly, cause it's Firefly.
Not to repeat myself, but we all clearly need a little perspective, because for several generations the norm has been television shows being cancelled without closure. To have an expectation that all shows, or even most shows, should have proper conclusions is completely out of line with reality.
Haha this just means that I have to wait longer to resubscribe.
To be fair, that was the fate of almost every television show ever made. In fact, your entire first paragraph is just describing what we used to call "television".
- I recently realized I had only turned on my TV just about 4 - 5 times in about 6 months and yet I was paying close to $140 per month, so I downgraded my cable subscription to the minimal (combined cable & internet is cheaper than only internet).
- Also realized I rarely watched Netflix (hadn't watched in months) cos I no longer found shows that I liked and I was paying $15.49 per month. And then I saw HBO Max was $9.99 a month. So I canceled Netflix and signed on to HBO Max. There's also the psychological part that HBO Max allows me to pay for the whole year upfront (Netflix doesn't) so I can close my eyes and just pay them $100 and be done with it.
- I also realized I rarely have time to watch long form content except for weekends. This is one advantage that Amazon Prime has - apart from it being 'free' to me since I already paid for prime, I can rent movies for $2.99 for those few times that I need to be 'entertained'. Maybe I spend $6 in one month and $0 in others. It's still better than $15.49 (or $140) without watching at all.
- It's possible that lots of people have a variation of these reasons. I understand that Netflix had to raise their prices given how much they were spending on content. It looks to me like they 'overspent' on content without taking into consideration that they would have to recoup the cost from increased subscription fees and this might not be palatable to their members given that there are now multiple alternatives
Interesting. My behavior has been that when someone recommends a show on Netflix and I decide I want to watch it it subscribe and cancel which means I pay for 1 month. I watch the show. I've tried browsing for others but hate browsing on Netflix. I'm happy that "I'm done with it" immediately and that I'm not billed anymore. Netflix makes it super easy to start again, and to cancel and also like that having it cancelled provides a tiny hurdle against binging random stuff.
Is this Netflix or do you hate browsing on other streaming services as well?
Regarding UI IMO Netflix is still top. Disney+ is somewhat close in handling but noticeably slower and you notice its focus on movies. Series are not as easily navigatable as on Netflix.
Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.
But with the mute button this is easy mitigated. The mute button is one of the most used buttons on my remote anyway.
Part of people's problem with netflix is that it shows them maybe 100 different shows out of the couple thousand they have at any given time, for the rest you basically have to use a 3rd party to discover them. Sure its prettier than it was back when they put everything in a giant tree/list, but now its a dozen or so vertical categories with 20 or so horizontal items and it doesn't even bother to deduplicate shows out of multiple similar rows.
The best netflixy way for me to discover new shows is to log into my wife's profile where she has a 100 different romance/etc movies. Otherwise "whats-on-netflix.com" for example does a better job than netflix itself, including showing a complete list of new additions, and removals, etc.
Perhaps because the UI varies from device to device.
Things that rustle me... - recommending movies/shows I've already watched. There are very few shows I want to rewatch. - recommending trash reality shows. I rarely watch them. - recommending too many shows that are in a foreign language. I will watch foreign shows, but most of my viewing it's just background noise while I workout or something else where I can't easily watch subtitles. - Auto-playing trailers. It's annoying and loud.
I haven't noticed this in France. For a given series, there's a "season" dropdown that has all the seasons, even some which may be unavailable.
However, I hate dubbed movies and series, and I hate that I can't filter out those titles that, for some reason, only offer a French dubbed version.
The dubbing is also horribly done with bored voices that don't match the actors at all. Yet native language (+ subs if native is not English) is often unavailable. Especially on prime
I love a lot of HBO Max content (especially Turner Classic Movies) but the app is experience is painful.
It feels like they're making decisions to suit themselves rather than me and it winds me up considering they are the more expensive subscription.
However it is irritating that shows I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store occasionally lose their blessed status§ and I can neither put them in up next nor even have the show’s page open to the episode I last watched. Unless I binge the whole show in one sitting I’m gonna be scrolling horizontally past a lot of episodes every time I sit down to watch.
§ my hypothesis is that it is when the package I bought them in gets taken off iTunes (e.g. I got the complete Downton Abbey, but for a few weeks they were doing a every episode and the movie package and you couldn’t buy just all the seasons together, that one even lost its blessed status while I was watching the show, which was a mystifying experience)
Isn’t that right for Switzerland? What’s the issue?
Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.
Well, there are places in Switzerland like Bern that are officially and pragmatically bilingual.
It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.
I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.
It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.
Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.
My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.
What's the huge issue? Is preferring German and being presented French some kind of slight?
Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.
In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.
That surprises me - Netflix seem pretty good at accommodating UK culture as a contrast. Local shows like The Crown, for example.
For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.
Maybe it's both, I suppose.
My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.
The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.
Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?
I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.
Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.
I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.
For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.
I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.
For me, if I want to get the package (in general and not for a specific instance), I'd rather pay upfront (so far as it's not expensive) than the monthly subscription. Psychologically, I feel like - 'I just eat the cost and I'm done'. So I'd rather just pay you $100 for the entire year or say $60 for the entire year of Sirius XM than a monthly thing.
Theoretically you could then resell the same discs if you don't care for copyright law, but I'm too lazy.
What if Amazon instead of Prime Video had an open content marketplace? Sure there would be a lot of rubbish, but with a good recommendation system could outdo Netflix in matching content with consumers, which was Netflix's core competency until they decided otherwise.
Be careful. Its not cheaper after they include local programming fees.
- Netflix with 4K and 4 streaming devices costs 17.99€ here ($19.50), while Disney+ only costs €8.99 with the same features.
- Netflix made and continues to make good content, but since major producers have been removing their content from Netflix and into their own services, Netflix here almost survives on old local shows and new in-house content. Feels like there's almost nothing new to watch. I have rewatched Gilmore Girls 4 times. Disney+ gets you Marvel, Disney, Pixar, FOX, NatGeo, StarWars, Star (lots of ABC content)
-Netflix decided to crackdown on password-sharing: my brother moved away some months ago and has been using our Netflix account, and we don't want him to pay Netflix for himself.
-There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue. Hell to the no.
It's been stated elsewhere here but worth reiterating: the current description of this idea is to give customers the option to have ads in exchange for a lower overall subscription cost and not just shoehorn them into the existing plans.
At least that's the stated intent. I can definitely see where it can lead to a slippery slope where it's easier to just give ads to everyone when they need another revenue bump.
I think we're going to see a price increase to stay ad free or an option to have the same price with advertising. So it will be a price increase to keep your same service ad free.
"Reed Hastings said Netflix is exploring ways to add lower-priced advertising-supported subscription tiers"
https://www.investopedia.com/netflix-q1-fy2022-earnings-repo...
oh geez, that would be the death knell for netflix. that was one of the big benefits they had over cable ten years ago when streaming was still new. i cant imagine paying $18 a month and still being forced to watch ads.
on a side note, im extremely pissed at paramount because their "ad-free" plan was updated to force viewers to watch a 30 second spot at the beginning of every show. if star trek strange new worlds doesnt turn out to be a million times better than picard and discovery i just might cancel because im so pissed i have to watch ads on the premium plan.
So you're upset that you are no longer able to freely breach a conract you agreed to, and have to pay for services you consume?
now, they may have previously ignored breaches of this contract, but that didn't stop them being breaches. you are well within your rights to cancel your contract, all i point out is that it is unreasonable of you to be upset. this is business as usual, and to be expected, therefore a good thing.
lol, lmao, et cetera.
They don't make it easy to discover content. They still have quite a lot of good original content that isn't promoted and a slew of third party things that aren't promoted or discoverable at all unless they happen to make the trending list
The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal.
For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers". Leaving a bunch of stories half told doesn't give me the confidence that it's worth the investment to start on their new content. This is especially problematic because it is a vicious cycle where since they aggressively cancel stuff that isn't performing, people don't invest their time in new stuff because of the expectation it gets canceled, means more new stuff underperforms, leading to more cancelations, and further eroding the trust of viewers. It's also negatively impacted by poor discoverability.
Their UI is seemingly optimized to shove their latest broad appeal stuff in my face and seems to deliberately make it hard to find anything else.
this has 100% been the reason my time spent on Netflix has gone down. seems like everything they make is algo-optimizing shlock designed to appeal to the average consumer.
Or they make a second season so atrocious that they lose the entire audience. For example, the first season of Altered Carbon is one of the best "hard" sci-fi I've ever seen in a TV show. The second season was supposed to have a much bigger budget and had an A-list lead. But it was so horrible that I couldn't even finish watching it.
I do like their DVD service, though.
It means new subscribers are now outnumbered by cancelling subscribers for the first time.
Money is tight. People are closing their wallets. Frivolous luxury expenses are the ones that will be cut the first.
And I also agree that the internet sentiment of "omg too many services, I'm just gonna pirate" is such a minor part of the equation. Social media loves overrepresenting its just world fallacy and thinking that everyone is as invested to screw over companies as they are on twitter or whatnot.
The biggest change last quarter is that Netflix went from having 700,000 customers in Russia down to 0. In other words, they actually had a net gain of 500,000 subscribers in the parts of the world where they still operate.
However, I don't know to what extent Netflix are relying on India for growth. At INR 650/month it's definitely not cheap. Disney + Hotstar, at INR 1499/year is, five times less expensive.
I still have Hulu, HBOMax and Disney, so in 6 months or so I'll probably drop one of those and return to Netflix to look for new content before they delete my viewing history. I've been with Netflix since when they were DVD-only, so they have a lot of history on me.
I imagine that before long, the streaming providers will get tired of people rotating through and will require 1 year contracts.
Changes in post-pandemic behavior, prices increases, more competition, arguably decrease in quality, and no long-term contracts. Doesn't seem like rocket science why they're loosing customers.
But yeah, the rate hikes are also hitting hard. Targeting account sharing more aggressively than they already do will lead to more cancellations. And the day Netflix shows me an ad, I will never use it again.
They are; HBOMax, Discovery+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Peacock, Vudu, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Espn+
Bottom line is Netflix has too much competition from cheaper platforms with better content.
I find the alternative universe quite interesting in itself.
Increasingly, I just go somewhere else.
Don't sugar coat a poorly run company with equally opinionated reasoning.
So Quibi was right! ;)