New Arrested Development will appear exclusively on Netflix Streaming
netflixstreaming.blogspot.com
netflixstreaming.blogspot.com
Arrested Development certainly has risk though. It's impossible to pick up where the show left off six years ago.
Hopefully if this succeeds Netflix will consider following up by reviving Better Off Ted. A similar, critically acclaimed, and more recent show with actors that seem generally available.
You're right that Netflix would have to build an audience, but if they are able to create exceptional quality shows, as HBO and AMC have done, then they can very print that certificate very quickly (within a couple of years).
For the first few episodes, each main character is going to get a recap episode of what they've been up to.
(Now my personal opinion:) Of couse, the other characters are going to show up but I think it's a very original catching up if they do it from each character's perspective. It will allow for a deeper understanding of their world and when they bring things back into a meld it will be that much more funny because of the conflicts set up in the first few episodes.
I have to disagree with this, Firefly is not the type of show Netflix should be focusing on. They need shows with low production costs with broad - lowest common denominator appeal. Expensive shows catering to a niche market (which they pretty much already have captured) is not what they're trying to do here.
There's a few ways they can go, sitcoms and short form comedies are going to be much more profitable for them at this point so Better off Ted is a much better fit.
Then there's the Showtime/HBO premium market (which folks are already paying for as a premium service). But even here I think they'd play it safe short term - more Sopranos and True Blood type mass appeal then Boardwalk Empire and The Wire (both are great, but much more focused market).
Like Arrested Development?
Not necessarily. The geek market has little loyalty to Netflix, and would just as easily switch to Amazon Prime or any other streaming service which showed up, especially if it provides better features or selection than Netflix. But if Netflix has shows which won't appear anywhere else...
They won't. Their days are numbered.
Building the future is hard and it's messy. Netflix has been taking it on the chin this year as they've passed through a really rough patch.
In the end, though, I'd put money on Netflix existing in 2020 before I would any given broadcast network. TV is dead.
Netflix is trying to redefine distribution. They're not going to win by placating the dinosaurs of distribution's past. If the Arrested Development deal works out, production companies may see that they have new options for financing their projects and might get better opportunities to reach an audience than they'd ever get on TV.
So it's simple: take the issue by the balls and control your destiny or bow and scrape before moronic suits who don't understand technology, hoping and praying that they won't change their minds each time a licensing deal expires.
Someone is going to have to deal with the question of live sports coverage, somehow, before this can happen.
Alternatively, ESPN could stream (and should! Could you imagine if they got the ad money directly for the Super Bowl??? I bet ESPN would be licking its chops for that kind of money)
I consider it a solved problem. I bet more of the big sports leagues would _love_ to cut out the middle men and monetize viewership more directly somehow (like NBA league pass and MLB.tv are).
The NFL is pretty much the trend setter in the sports world when it comes to media. They were the first to figure out the right way to do a TV deal back in the early 70s, the first to start their own network, etc. It's only a matter of time.
It has a 2-tier price system. At the lower price, you select up to 7 teams to watch; to get all 30 teams, you have to pay a little bit more.
It's not a perfect system, but it's getting better.
The hope, I suppose, is that future TV deals will decrease to the point that the leagues realize that they can make more money by just distributing it all themselves. That's seems to be what they are setting up at least, but the short term they are making so much money off of TV licensing.
The NBA All-Star game has been shown online for the last few years and it's a better experience because you can choose from four cameras (one of which was following a single player, very cool). That part of the technology is awesome, but I suppose you'd have bandwidth problems at a large enough scale.
What's going to be interesting is when both real-time rendering and motion capture get good enough to serve as a vehicle for live sports. Imagine being able to put the camera anywhere you want, or on anyone you want. That will kill TV sports if nothing else does in the meantime.
> fibre accounting for half of all broadband connections in Japan (55%) and Korea (52%). Other leading countries include the Slovak Republic (28%), Sweden (24%) and Denmark (12%).
http://www.telconews.com/2010/12/11/oecd-internet-economy-br...
Netflix's streaming isn't more innovative and Google's streaming or Amazon's streaming. Netflix's advantage used to be to get people DVDs cheaply and quickly. That's not an advantage to take them into the future. Unless they can find a way to stream movies cheaper than Amazon I don't see how they can survive as an independent.
I think Microsoft should buy Netflix and B&N to compete with Apple, Amazon, and Google in the tablet/content space. As an independent company they are dead in the water.
EDIT: fixed typos
Netflix has very little cash in comparison to it's competition. I'm glad they are trying to remain distinctive and keep innovating but any of their competitors can simply buy a studio and do the same thing.
It's possible Netflix sees the future by becoming like a TV channel but for the internet. And have people pay a monthly price to view this TV channel. Some other content producer would be another channel. I don't see this model working out. Rather, I see producers selling their shows to content distributors like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix and letting them fight over subscribers. If this is the case then Netflix has no advantage.
This is what the future will be - then somebody just needs to figure out how to get Netflix, Amazon et al to work together so that consumers don't pay multiple subscription fees.
This is why the Netflix stock price went so high - because so many analysts wrote reports about how Netflix is new media, and it may well be.
tl;dr networks = dead
And I think the thread they're picking up with AD is perfect -- just imagine all of those long-lost fan favorites like Firefly, AD, and now Community getting picked up and streamed on Netflix in a climate where the show's creators are at least theoretically given freedom from network meddling (not to mention the much more realistic "ratings" that would be possible like this). I may even pay for that, and I almost never watch TV and generally hate it, but if Netflix cultivated all of the great content that the mainstream networks regularly threw away, they'd definitely have a much brighter outlook.
The problem I see potentially arising out of this is the conflict of interest for cable companies as online streaming continues to override cable TV viewership. With Netflix picking up shows that had initially been considered by premium cable networks like HBO or Showtime, how much interest will Comcast have in keeping pricing for internet access out of the ridiculous ranges and varied pacakges of cable television?
And it's not like Netflix isn't willing to pay. Netflix paid $30 million per movie for exclusive early access with Dreamworks. Previously HBO held the contract for only $20 million per movie [3].
Media companies are just telling Netflix to flat out screw off or at best pay a ridiculous sum that nobody else would be expected to pay. Each one has a different threshold. HBO has zero tolerance. Starz had quite a bit up to a point. But eventually they all put on the brakes to keep Netflix in check.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/03/netflix-locks-down...
[2] http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/23/cbs-will-remove-some-showtime-...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/netflix-sec...
It's obvious why they don't want to, of course. If they control distribution, the theory goes, they can charge basically whatever they want. And of course they can control legal distribution quite easily, but that's not enough, is it?
Its not much harder to capture netflix than any other live show.
You can buy $100 capture cards and record live gaming. DRM isnt an issue since you dont even need to crack the source.
If Ron Howard wants to throw up a donation button somewhere for all us internationals I'll gladly chip in though :)
I suspect you are right, but I sure as hell hope you are not.
The copyright battle has been lost for a long, long time now.
I'd rather pay 8 dollars a month for hassel free streaming and millions of other people would too. This is big business.
But just because it's originally owned by a digital streaming company, doesn't mean someone like the BBC couldn't buy a license to air traditionally.
It's Europe, where netflix hasn't launched yet, that is left in the cold.
I hope that the programs they produce will be free of advertising.
Agreed. They should be, right?
Nothing annoys me more than paying for a movie ticket and sitting through 10 minutes of commercials before a film.*
I would hope after the customer backlash over the pricing change that Netflix will be smart enough to stay away from commercials.
* Drivers who camp out in the left lane annoy me slightly more. "Stay right except to pass."
But more importantly, pre-allocated seats encourages people to show up late to the screening and miss the ads and trailers, and potentially even miss out on the concession stand. If you don't have pre-allocated seats, you need to turn up early to be assured of a good seat; and what are you going to do in the (initially darkened) cinema waiting by yourself, if not consume some snacks that you bought.
The cinemas around me (London) charge extra for the privilege of pre-allocation.
I don't go there much since it is too expensive and it isn't kept clean but at least the seats are numbered.
The local cinema were we use to live didn't have numbered seats and was much more cozy.
Is this really a problem? All cinemas in Norway (that I know of) have pre-allocated seating, but there is never anybody who ensures that people sit in the right place. If you find that someone is sitting in your seat, you simply tell them to move. I've never heard of anyone refusing to move.
I've watched movies in cinemas all over North America, and the only one that ever had numbered seating was a dinner-and-a-movie place where your seat was used to keep track of your order.
I love movie previews.
Some theaters I go to play commercials (i.e. ads for products) before the movie previews.
I would more than happily sit through a long block of all the commercials before the show if it meant that I could watch the show, in its entirety and without interruption.
I can't find it, but I recall a conversation with Joss Whedon who proclaims the commercial interruption to be the hardest thing in TV-writing to accomodate, and are the most jarring obstacle to an otherwise well-told story.
That way I don't get constant adverts for women's skincare products and get stuff about new video games instead.
A month of Netflix costs much less than a single movie ticket. Sometimes I wonder how they manage to keep the subscription rate so low without advertising.
Till they keep screwing people outside of US, I'll head over to the torrents.
If you pirate instead of paying then you make distributing to your country unprofitable; that sounds like the opposite effect from what you want.
You can't be a dedicated fan of a US show outside the US and thoroughly enjoy it without pirating it first (...and then, buy the DVD). The only other option is to only watch DVDs and never talk with anyone online about the show, for fear of spoilers.
Didn't they learn anything from the Phantom Menace fiasco? The movie was the first highly and universally anticipated movie since highspeed internet became available. It was released 5 months later in France. It was a total fiasco. Instant surge of piracy, a specific screener became widespread and the only way for Star Wars fan to "survive" a five-months online lockout from their passion. This event was the origin of worldwide releases of blockbusters by movie studios, and the reason why movies nowadays get translated/localized before they are released in their own countries.
The studio has to weigh the benefits of a worldwide launch (possibly reduced piracy?) against the benefits of a staggered launch (ability to pay for and schedule proper promotion, localization, and advertising in each market.) Sometimes the studio makes the wrong choice, ether the wrong economic one or the one you don't like, but that's their prerogative.
Meta: I'm surprised be the amount of piracy entitlement on HN, which I expect has more content creators than the average net audience.
Heck, let's drop the masks, the majority of your paying customers even bought their very first computer just to be able to do that over the past decade.
I'm not advocating piracy, I'm explaining why it exists in the first place. When the pirated product is available immediately instead of months/years later, and with better features than the legit one, it's foolish to expect even paying fans not to pirate things nor look into piracy as a distribution channel. This is a challenge that content distributors need to deal with, one way or another.
Saying that people shouldn't pirate digital goods because it's illegal is all nice and well, but is this even enforceable? It's my own humble belief that it's not, not with the current state of the art, and that yelling at piracy is like yelling at windmills. Just deal with it and improve your product distribution in every possible way so that piracy is not exactly a better option.
It works, Apple proved it, Steam proved it.
This is similar to the popular treatment of abandonware.
But that's the error they will never realize because they are so used to think of the world in old terms.
As much as you'd like to believe that a niche group of American viewers alone convinced the creators that furthering the show would be a good idea, that's just not true.
If you love the show so much then pay don't pirate.
>> If you love the show so much then pay don't pirate.
If you can't watch a show on netflix/hulu right away one day later, it's nearly impossible to use the internet anymore without getting spoilered (one word: DEXTER. I simply wouldn't be able to think about something different, let alone wait fucking 1 1/2 years for that shit to appear legally on DVD). So, in this case, people are much more likely to torrent something, to "quickly catch" up. The other use case however is, that you buy your dvd box, for example after each season, to re-watch your show and show your support. And be proud to own it physically.
Completely different things:
- Torrent d/l == catching up, satisfying your addiction
- Buying DVDs == supporting shows/movies you love
EDIT: Other sources seem to be indicating that it will indeed be exclusive.
Might end up just downloading it. Not waiting if they decide to screw over Canada.
What makes you think it doesn't?
We can't get Netflix here.