Netflix lays off 300 more people – almost 3% of its staff
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Compared to the other streaming services, Netflix will get dropped long before even Apple TV+ in my household. Adding ad-supported tiers is fine, they just better never add ads to the current paid tiers. Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying. They already limit the simultaneous streams and that seems fair. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort figuring out if logins are coming from different households.
this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?
using your logic we might as well just have 1 account and share it with every single person on the planet.
the only reason that netflix is getting flack for it is because they were super lax with it for such a long time and now everyone feels entitled to it for some insane reason.
This line of thinking leads to the ludicrous existing patents that describe scanning the room to check how many people are in a room and once crossed a certain threshold, the movie or show automatically stops airing.
Oh you better believe that if this was possible to do with physical books, it would be done.
The only reason this isn't much of a thing with ebooks is that if you use the bigger ebook services you don't really own the books in the first place.
If you are paid member of a library, and the library has ToS which does not allow you to lend your book to anyone else, then yes you are at fault when you share.
There are limits even there.
Does any of those services have "multiple simultaneous streams" plans? I'm paying Netflix for 4 simultaneous streams (their naming: "Number of screens you can watch on at the same time") and they should not care where I utilize their offer.
You’re too fixated on this stream limit. It’s not the only limit of the contract, even if you wish that was the case.
Rather than paying for the whole year I’ll pay for a month or two like I do with paramount+ and Disney+.
I’m sure they did some financial calculus to see what’s better but it’s not like other companies haven’t made terrible decisions in the past killing their business. I’m sure blockbuster had bean counters justifying their choices too.
Customers aren't reacting because it hasn't happened yet outside of a few tiny test countries.
Excluding no longer being able to do business in Russia for sanctions purposes, Netflix gained subscribers rather than losing them last quarter.
4 streams simultaneously could all be from different locations, even different countries and still be a household subscription.
One watches at work, another family member is on holidays abroad, the other watches at home and the other via mobile Internet on a train. Should this considered password sharing?
You. Not your neighbor. Not your friends.
Strictly by the sentence you quote to make your point, you would not even be allowed to share your "simultaneous streams" with members of your household. Which makes this quote rather useless to argue for your assumed right of sharing your streams with anyone you want.
If you bought a sort of “family pass” to a movie theater that allowed your family to watch unlimited movies, you wouldn’t expect to be able to pass the family pass around to other families.
Netflix is literally just the digital version of a family pass to a movie theater. Everything is priced according to models of single households using single accounts, down to the licensing costs and royalties.
Not to mention some families are fairly distributed and any tech savvy person has many viable alternatives.
I also see how this is hard to make fair for edge cases; it should just be clear what it means. I think 1 geo location at a time for x screens is clear. One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work? Are they going to time the ‘remote’ watching for what a typical vacation or work outing might look like?
Anyway; instead of clamping down on password sharing, why not add tiers based on number of geo locations with those screens? 4 screens in 2 locations, 4 screens in 3 locations, 4 screens in 4 locations and that’s it. These locations are not fixed, but this is easy to measure and enforce for them, while, as my situation above, is less obvious.
I think making it clear what is allowed and what is not from the start in verifiable terms, is important or users will get angry as they seem to be now.
I think they will gain a lot of members that way too, since people get used and attached to a service and now need their own accounts.
Netflix's problem was to cut quality to control costs _before_ they raised prices. If they had raised these prices while they were still the ascendant service I'm sure you are right and people would have grumbled while ultimately signing up. Then they could have cut costs slowly and most of their customers would not have noticed the boiling of the frog. As it stands they are driving their customers away at the exact moment that their competitors have finally gotten their house in order and opened their arms to Netflix's client base.
Like look at just AppleTV and HBOMax. AppleTV is dumping a massive amount of money into the aesthetics. Even the screensaver on the machine is this beautiful 4k resolution photos of landscapes, all while they are obviously not skimping on writes. HBO has been in the quality tv space for longer than Netflix has produced content _and_ has paired with Adult Swim(a channel that is unique enough in content to drive people to pay for packages just to get it, much like sports in the past) to get all their content. Both of these are cheaper than what Netflix is proposing as their monthly costs.
I'm not sure why Netflix thinks people will accept a more expensive, and worse product in the face of this competition
Does nobody here pay tax? Household has a pretty clear meaning, people ordinarily resident overnight in the same household.
Spotify has the same restriction, and uses ML to enforce it to some extent, and nobody using the service legitimately has any issues.
This mindset is baffling. The contract was always that a subscription was for a single household. The fact that they were flexible about access for many years is irrelevant.
You’re not buying the right to share (or resell) your account to whoever you want. You’re buying the right to stream within a single household. It doesn’t make sense to get so upset when they simply hint at enforcing the agreed-upon terms of the contract more actively.
Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.
I feel like everyone is forgetting that Netflix is licensing content, not just selling access to streaming bandwidth.
The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households, not the idea that a single login can be used infinitely by as many people as long as an arbitrary simultaneous stream limit is enforced.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
Several streaming services already have mechanisms to check account sharing. It’s not new. There’s no indication that Netflix plans to go full draconian and limit to a single IP with zero flexibility, despite what people here seem to be assuming. The account sharing detection logic used in other platforms is quite forgiving, and honestly it’s not terribly difficult to detect long-term patterns where two separate locations are constantly using the same account with users never returning “home”.
The initial premise seems slightly manipulative to me I guess, if you paid by the hour or something, no password sharing problem but less profits
Content licensing is based on whatever imaginary rules you want to make up. The OP is providing a plausible line of reasoning where you can marry this stupidity with something quantifiable (i.e., streams). That sounds quite reasonable. Ultimately, it's their service. They can do whatever they want. As for why the OP is bothering, I can only guess that netflix has built the reputation of being a tech company and the OP thinks that they may show some internal consistency. Otherwise, media companies make up rules all the time (for eg., no sports in your local area).
They are likely to err on the side of caution. Spotify already does this, on the same restriction, and it is a complete non-issue.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms.
It really doesn't. Do you live in the same house? Then you're covered. And there's lots you can feed in to a ML model to catch out people who have devices that have literally never appeared together in the same household to spot suspicious activity and, for instance, for 2FA.
If that just stops people reselling accounts to strangers in different countries alone that's a significant win for Netflix.
I don’t spend enough on amazon to have a prime account for myself, but am happy to pay for it since my close family members use it enough to make the subscription worthwhile. If they were to stop using it, or amazon limits the address they ship to, I would cancel.
Just as a personal anecdote: I have Netflix, Paramount, HBO Max, TV2 Play, Paramount, Viaplay, Discovery+ and Disney+. And probably some that I'm forgetting. I don't really watch that much TV, and the only way I could justify this was by sharing the accounts with close family. The problem is that we're not in the same household. The moment this stops being a viable option we're likely just going to cancel the subscriptions. You can rent a lot of movies for $150/month.
The amount of subscription services are getting out of hand. Even my car has one, and the only value proposition it provides me is not having to connect my phone as a hotspot (which is kind of pain with an iPhone) and real-time traffic data. For $15/month.
Oh absolutely, it's frustrating. And whats even more frustrating is that some of those services refuse to have their content on other services but don't provide their service outside of the US.
I wanted to watch Dragon Ball Z last week. It's on Funamation and AnimeLab. Well neither of those services are available in Taiwan, so, only option is to pirate it.
I want to watch Star Trek - Strange New World. Not available on any service in Taiwan.
So I pay for Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, and PrimeVideo.
HBO is available in Taiwan but you need Taiwan credit card... so I can't register with my Singapore card. Paramount, Hulu, not available here.
Sometimes I dont mind paying for these services but they don't want my money.
But at the same time I'm paying for 4, I don't want to pay for 10.
We are at the point of the priacy hat meme.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...
So do it. It takes seconds to cancel and subscribe. If you want access to everything all at once, then pay $150 per month. If you cannot afford $150 per month, then spend an extra minute or two per month canceling and subscribing.
I find it to be very convenient, and more convenient than it has ever been in my life.
Also, they encouraged it, and not in a wink/wink way...explicitly: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_sr...
I think a lot of people in this thread are too fixated on the idea of “streams” and they have lost the plot. Netflix is a content producer and licensor. The streams are just a means to deliver that content.
They advertise it in terms of streams. Whatever business arrangements they have with their providers is irrelavent to me as a consumer.
It'd be like if you went to an all you can eat buffet, and people started saying its not fair if you eat too much because the grocery store is charging the resturant per item not per person. It is totally irrelavent ti the person eating at the resturant.
This is not a new trick.
That said, very openly turning a blind eye to something and then suddenly not is essentially unilaterally altering the terms of the deal. If i ran a business and suddenly changed the pricing scheme, that's my right, but i would understand if x% decided the value proposition no longer made sense and left. I certainly wouldn't be offended - its just business.
Apple and Amazon just want to make their bundle more attractive.
From my vantage point as a customer and observer, they are a company that really had first mover advantage with a quality client anywhere. But the experience stagnated and the focus of the company flipped to consuming/wasting as much time as possible. IMO they got fat and happy when the main competitor was Amazon Prime Video, which is a flawed service in many ways.
Now there are competitors who are really good. Disney+ is a superior experience (on Apple TV, anyway) with a better catalog and better features like search. Peacock is pretty good too.
They lost the plot when they decided they couldn't just be a distributor but also a creator. They went too hard too fast and they don't have compelling content.
The Disney+ model is so much better. They suggest stuff, but I can wander and discover in the library of thousands of Disney titles if I so desire.
I don't see how pissing off paying customers will increase revenue. Netflix needs to figure out how to make content to keep the current ones.
Almost all companies over-expand the way they did, and almost all companies are feeling the shock of the economic downturn.
They have every right to crack down on password sharing. The fact that people think they are a bad actor for this is evidence of the total lack of moral compass in our society today.
This summer, YC is funding a news service that only has 1 subscriber by design - the login is shared worldwide. Database architecture was dead simple and can scale easily to other planets. Cost of the subscription is pegged to the GDP of the Earth so profitability is not an issue.
Every MBA wants to create predictable success with a recipe or a formula but it doesn't work that way. And if you do stumble into an an Ozark, it doesn't mean you can just create 100 Ozarks. Quibi tried to spend their way into original content. It failed spectacularly then.
Many shows were cut short. Without the direct feedback loop of ratings it can be extremely difficult to know what to renew and what not to renew. The wrong metrics can lead you astray. Some shows had too much money. Others not enough.
And the real big lesson in doing all this is that the economics of big budget movies completely fail without theatrical releases. You just cannot recoup production costs otherwise. There's a reason Top Gun: Maverick delayed release 2-3 years.
And if you overspend the only way to recover that is by raising prices. Do that too much and it becomes a vicious cycle just like cable TV of ever-increasing price hikes to balance out the inevitable subscriber losses.
Kind of encouraging in one way, because the natural response to the observation that movies suck today is to claim that Hollywood is just making what the "masses" want. Nope!
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised theaters seem to have actually bounced back reasonably well from COVID. I guess that a lot of people find them, among other things, a relatively low cost/low friction option to get together with friends, go on a date, get out of the house, etc.
When we sit at the trough, DRM is heavy-handed and media is expensive to purchase or rent. Piracy is the best option for most consumers.
Then some enterprising people pitch the media companies on a way to implement some hurdle pricing to jumpstart their moribund sales. Presented with an easy cheap way to pay for legal access to entertainment, people jump on board.
As money starts to roll in, the business types start to eye vertical integration. The upstarts see the writing on the wall and try to find a way out. Prices rise, but the content is still easy to access.
Now the rightsholders start to rein in their former partners, and implement their own solutions. These are terrible and myriad. Costs spiral, while the consumers are spoiled for choice.
Decision fatigue sets in. People find their niches, cut coupons, and share esclusive releases between family and friends.
Eventually the fragmentation becomes exhausting, and only the most line-toeing consumers bother to jump through the hoops necessary to pay for many kinds of content. Back to square one.
They also need to give shows some kind of ending even if they are not part of their long term plans. Having a library of shows without ending is not attractive to customers.
AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality), what is the last critically acclaimed series on Netflix? I am not saying that your shows need to be critically acclaimed but you can't be in a state where your shows are getting panned criticlaly and on top of that not giving endings to your semi popular shows.
I watch Mythic Quest. No one else I know does.
Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.
OTOH, overall. Netflix is still huge. Just when I’m on HN of Reddit this never appears to be the case.
I never found For All Mankind or any other Apple TV+ show to be sterile (well, maybe apart from Severance, but that is deliberately done) - to me, they have an unparalleled production value. Nothing comes even close in the streaming landscape. I wonder if that is creating that feeling for you.
AppleTV like HBO is trying to follow a strategy of focusing on the quality of the product over quantity. It seems that most of their shows esp as of late get excellent reviews and look very expensive. It probably doesn't have the viewership of the bigger streaming services like Netflix/Max/Disney+ who have more populist content but they are managing to differentiate themselves from the other services.
Once you want a music subscription and a family-size amount of cloud storage (the 2TB plan), you’ve basically got the whole Apple One bundle justified.
On top of that these services all further increase the friction of ever leaving the Apple platform.
Apple is the most valuable company in the world for a very good reason.
Once I saw those two ended for the season, I also ended my subscription.
No it hasn't, Apple TV has been making shows for a narrow demographic of people who hang around on HN and nobody else.
That's fine and all, I hang around on Hacker News and I like that, and Apple can afford to dump two billion dollars a year in a furnace and set it on fire to make Tim feel like a Hollywood big shot, but it is not a successful service by any conventional metric.
Just go to HBO to see the antithesis of netflix's model. It's possible to consistently put out quality, you need the right people involved. You can expect that to die soon btw since the suits at Warner fired the head of that company.
> you need the right people involved
Even then it's tough. The Mandalorian was great. Then The Book of Boba Fett came out and was not only a disaster, but also made the entire two seasons of The Mandalorian pointless. Similar to season 8 of Game of Thrones killing the entire show, because who can recommend a show that sets up the central expectation in season one that is so horribly resolved in the very last season. It's now a show I'd recommend to my enemy rather than my friend. TV is tough. And I don't think streaming is kind to shows that don't nail every season. This is content that is part of a catalog. It's not something on NBC on a Thursday night. Syndication isn't just a nice windfall. It's the entire point now.
What is the difference? On the surface, it doesn't seem like music recommendation should be a very different problem from movie recommendation.
Unrelated to this: I find the comparison between Netflix and Spotify interesting in general. Why do I get (pretty much) all the music there is on Spotify, but I cannot subscribe to a movie / tv streaming service that lets me access all the content for a flat fee? As a consumer, I would much rather have the choice between three well polished streaming platforms that all offer the same content compared to the current situation where you have a fractured catalogue on platforms of wildly varying technical quality (looking at you, Amazon..).
Browsing Netflix for 2 hours only to watch nothing is so common it's memed after all..
The place Netflix really shines for me is the acquisition of non-US content. I particularly like political dramas from other countries. Even if some smaller countries aren't producing content that is quite as polished as we might expect here in the US, that's some of the charm, seeing how they make shows.
* I can't defend the browsing of Netflix -- that's just ridiculous
If they'd fire the people that invented Auto playing shows/movies and hired some curators to classify their content in the vein of Pandora's "Music Genome Project" they'd easily have the best service.
They need to merge with a traditional media company I think, paramount or Warner discovery would make sense.
At the rate I watch new TV/Web series, there are enough in Netflix right now to last me 2-3 years.
The recsys is shit.
After I search and manually add shows to my watchlist, I see them as recced and with 98% match.
I never see shows I would really like recced to me by the recsys.
I always find shows by word-of-mouth and by searching You.com (prev Google). I just search what I want. I see many lists appear on the results.
I take a mental note of series appearing in multiple lists and synopsis liked by me. This is how I discovered Broadchurch, Bosch, and Mozart in the Jungle.
I used to browse Reddit a lot (had to cut it due to lack of time) and watched shows and movies that came up a lot during free discussion or viral askreddits or some weekly threads.
This is how I discovered Clue (1982), Superbad, etc.
Yes, video streaming is pretty fragmented. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people who complain about that also complained about the $100/month cable bundle. I probably pay half that now for more choice. (I only lose out on live TV but I could have that if I were willing to pay for it.)
Paramount is actually interesting because to my eye, unless you're a Star Trek fanatic, they don't have a super-compelling catalog that would lead me to subscribe. But Paramount+Netflix would be an interesting combination. No idea if the economics would work. I suspect Netflix subscription prices are about as high as they can go even if you add in Paramount's library.
Is it really that hard for a billion dollar company to find good storytellers and content producers?
Yes. Ask pretty much any studio ever. The promise that data would be this magic ingredient for quality content [that connects with audiences] ended up being pretty much BS. The percentage of content I genuinely want to spend my time with across all services is very low.
At one point in time Yahoo could not decide whether it was a media company or a technology one.
Netflix for all intent and purpose is a tech company (they have engg' blog but no 'content' one), but is that the path to success?
Pretty good comparison, i see it the same way, Netflix is a CDN, specialized on delivering Movies, but pretty bad a searching ;)
Companies forget that this is a two way street, and employees may be doing their own “keeper test” now that $nflx isn’t a wallstreet darling and needing to downsize.
What's really odd is that they don't have what anyone would consider a normal searchable database of movies, they're very much into pushing recommendations using their biased AI learning models. Compared to IMDB their interfaces are all incredibly non-user-friendly.
There have been so many other high budget flops on Netflix that are promoted, and then derided by critics (and customers).
However they also create artificial breaks now. When I realized that BCS is interrupted for many weeks before the show resumes I finally quit. I am not paying for watching nothing.
It releases weekly because Netflix get it outside the US at the same time AMC air it on television.
I think Netflix should move to a weekly model for their content but they haven't done this.
But then there is even less left that I really want from Netflix. This also explains why this show is so much better than the other stuff on Netflix.
BTW if you don't mind me asking.. why would you prefer a weekly model as a consumer? The only reason I can come up with is that people fear to read/hear spoilers from other who are "faster". Is there something else?
Not only they are losing subscribers and money, their competitors are still gaining users and can afford to lose them; Netflix cannot.
At this point Netflix is a feature just like Dropbox, Box, DocuSign etc and cannot afford to lose a significant amount of customers for their services. It is a different story for Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+.
On a side note, a few months ago, I was receiving many recruiter-supplied positions for building out streaming services. These positions seemed to pay well, require a deep understanding of video streaming, and a vigorous interview processs. I wonder if these newly created positions will be the first to go as big entertainment tech consolidates its workforce.
The reason boiled down to the fact that each family has so many entertainment dollars they’re willing to spend. All they do is shift those dollars around rather than spending a larger share of their disposable income overall on entertainment.
...I'm sorry, what? Give the Gervais, Burr, Chapelle bits a watch. Even after the backlash they remain on Netflix. The guys in the youtube clip couldn't be further off the mark.
Being not americans, we were really tired about this, up to the point we say "ok, let's give this series a chance, but we stop at the first evident 'yankeeland move' (that how we say it)".
For anyone who hasn't watched it yet, it has something to do with the lengths big corporations go to to prevent internal knowledge getting out. The premise of the show (all in the trailer) is that people get an implant so they have two separate lives at work and outside, where one is completely unaware of the other.
It's an excellent show, just surprising to see Apple putting it out, since their R&D team is basically the closest real-world equivalent we have.
Sell Mortimer, SELL!
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2019/release-of-1...
I believe that is what people complaining about 'woke' Netflix shows are referring to. Not the existence of them, the feeling that they're being promoted to everyone. They're welcome to continue, and the subscription numbers can either go up or down.
That's really the last thing I care about from VOD service. Also judging by cast there are hardly any BIPOC people in 13 reasons why, seems pretty white to me.