Netflix launches an ad-supported tier
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about.netflix.com
Most of the brouhaha around this will be pricing-related: will Netflix use this to boost their prices???? Will I have to pay more??????
I dunno. Maybe. Doesn't seem unlikely. I don't really care, though, to be honest. $5 a month doesn't make a huge difference.
What concerns me is that this changes Netflix's incentive structure. Prior to this change, Netflix had one customer base: the viewers. So content was produced with the primary goal of making the viewers happy, enough so to continue paying them month over month.
Now, the shift is towards also having another customer base: advertising buyers. Will they have direct input into what content is produced? If not direct, will they have the right of refusal, or pressure? "We won't put our ads next to that" will likely reduce the amount of "that" being produced. Additionally, since ads are shown per time block, this adds an incentive to produce content that takes longer to watch rather than content that you can enjoy in concentration.
I find that's issue with startup culture where they have lost billions of dollars in name of growth and now they need to recover
That's the main reason I won't even consider YouTube Premium - pointless to pay for "an ad-free experience" when, instead, you get a 5 minute segment in the middle of a video shilling for [flavour of the month]VPN or Audible.
If you are playing a playlist of music videos, "standard" ads ruin your playlist. And music videos don't have sponsor interruptions.
That said, the "sponsor segment" has become a staple in the YouTube channels I follow, and it is noticeable, but most authors will helpfully place it in its own segment, where you can skip it. I never watch the sponsor messages, because why would I? Ads suck.
That said, sponsorblock works decently well for automatically skipping sponsored messages.
You can't really complain, though. It was nice to have better-quality content for cheap while it lasted, so we can just appreciate that. But now you actually have to pay what things are worth. I don't see the problem.
That’s a hell of a lot of compromises.
It feels like 80% of the catalog is Netflix homebrewed garbage, another 10% is foreign dubbed garbage, and the remaining 10% you've probably already seen.
I honestly have never thought harder about outright cancelling Netflix. I'm very close...
Every time I log in to watch something, Netflix recommends TV Shows and Movies they know I have already watched because I watched them on Netflix. The rest of the recommendations are Netflix original content, of which I find maybe less than 10% to actually be worth the time to watch. I have never before left so many movies and TV shows unfinished... and the list continues to grow.
I cannot recall the last time I searched for a movie and found exactly what I was looking for.
The value of Netflix has decreased sharply in the past few years.
I'd honestly pay them extra for a good UI that showed ONLY that. Limiting yourself to english is extremely shallow.
Most of the Netflix-made catalogue is garbage regardless of language.
I get what you and parent post are saying, but do remember Netflix caters to other audiences. "Foreign" is relative. To me, English is a foreign language.
I agree that being exposed to movies and shows from all over the world is a good thing.
Foreign to whom? Or do you mean, whatever your nationality, Netflix has a constant 10% of "foreign dubbed garbage" that will be foreign to you?
Let me state it outright: I believe you're a native English speaker, likely from the US, and you believe "foreign" means "not made in America". Am I wrong? The point is: Netflix caters to a global audience. Korean shows aren't foreign to Netflix's Korean audience. So it's very unlikely that there's a constant 10% "foreign dubbed garbage" for any given spectator.
Also, I may be wrong, but every Netflix show I've seen is available in its original language (plus some additional dub options, of course). So you never need to watch the "garbage dub".
Dubs can be done very well - see Squid Game. The voices matched the characters in both body/expression and situation. The mouths fairly closely matched the voices as well, and in some scenes you might even forget they're dubs you're listening too.
The problem is, Netflix seems to push poorly done foreign films with even more poorly done dubs way too often.
> Netflix caters to a global audience
The catalog you see is what is available for your country. Which means it's curated for your country and it's interests, and/or allowed licenses. I have no doubt the Korean version of Netflix is filled with native Korean shows/movies. For some reason though, Netflix is pushing French and Belgian movies onto the US audience, mostly with horrible dubbing coupled with already atrocious acting. It feels like a "these are cheap, stuff them into the catalog!" sort of thing... meanwhile US viewers can't watch shows they actually want, like Better Call Saul season 6...
> The catalog you see is what is available for your country
That's not really relevant to my point, is it? In any case, I can assure I can see plenty of Korean, Turkish, Swedish, etc, shows listed on Netflix.. here in my Latin American country.
Any way you look at it, the assertion that Netflix has "10% foreign dubbed garbage" is poorly phrased and probably false.
I'd guess most people wouldn't notice really.
> 10% of the catalog unavailable I wonder if this'll be hit Netflix shows (e.g Money Heist, The Crown, The Queens Gambit) or niche shows that have significantly less viewers.
If you are watching it on your phone, then I completely agree with you, but I don't do that.
And then there are young kids, who truly do not give a shit and if you've mainly got Netflix for them, 720p would definitely be fine. Though their kids' content is so bad, on average, and last I checked you can't narrow kids' accounts down to an allowlist instead of just "everything Netflix marked as for-kids", that I wouldn't recommend turning kids loose on it, personally, even with time-limits.
If you're a college student or not making a lot of money, and therefore not traveling a lot -- this is awesome.
If you watch 10 hours of Netflix a week, you're watching about 3 and 1/2 hours of ads a month. All to save $3. Not to mention having access to less content.
I'd be interested in ballpark resource estimates for added complexity and staffing for operations and for the ad business units.
Most importantly, is most of the cost up-front in infrastructure development, or do the ad business units themselves eat so much they don't make sense below a certain level of adoption?
i.e., - How many ad-supported users does Netflix need for the ad tier to justify its fixed and operational costs?
- What about cannibalizing the higher tiers? Can ads end up being a net revenue loss even if they pay for themselves?
- If it is complicated and hard, and they get it right, can it be a moat for them?
Way too many questions.
For example Walmart+ bundles Paramount+'s ad tier. T-Mobile currently bundles the Ad-Free Basic/Standard depending on wireless plan, maybe they'll move to the Ad tier.
Once you can show ads in one place, the pressure to show ads across the board will become enormous.
The differences between the successes and failures comes down to content, not business models. And Netflix' content is very thin for my tastes.
Sure, F2P games (which are never just ad supported, mind you) can be wildly popular and profitable. But not all of them. For every exploitative success like Diablo Immortal, there are thousands of games which hit the app stores and quietly vanished.
Ads otherwise are extremely jarring.
> In the UK, there will also be nationally recognised brands such as HSBC, T-Mobile, GoCompare, Lidl and Ernest Jones.
T-Mobile hasn't been a consumer-facing brand in the UK for at least seven years.
You have to click through the link to see that "in the US" actually means
> Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US.
This needs much more detail. What isn't available and in what regions?
lol