Netflix will end its DVD service after 25 years
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive.
At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and I was rewarded a free month.
After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard drives started getting large enough that I could just store all the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final transition.
I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays, with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many movies barely elicits a shrug.
But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world. Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.
Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either gave them away or donated them...
I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where I couldn't copy the file back off of it.
Used to use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink
I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a date to blockbuster was the norm.
The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.
I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either.
Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.
Netflix' key metrics are basically around retaining subscribers and attracting new ones. Except to the degree it supports those goals (and there's obviously a correlation), they don't actually care how much you watch, how much you like the content, how easily you find content you like, etc. Correlated, yes. But not one and the same.
It's the opposite. The primary cause of churn is that there is nothing a subscriber wants to watch. You might assume that a recommendation helps a user maximise the amount of the library they will watch but it actually helps the user conclude there is nothing they want to watch and leave.
Netflix wants their library to be more like a one-armed bandit. Users have to gamble on whether they will like something and they will never know they have run out. They want the user to keep hanging on, to keep scrolling, assuming something great is just around the corner, never getting to "I'm done with this".
I noticed this effect with the DVD subscription. If you added 3 discs to your queue, they would send the first two but not the third, waiting for you to add some less desirable titles to your queue, which they would send before they sent your high priority title. If your needs get satisfied, your subscription ends. It's a fundamentally user hostile business.
People naturally respond to such things and use them to segue into another topic as part of conversation, and sometimes it is nice to have someone tell their recollection of a story instead of getting the wikipedia version.
I encourage you to stop doing this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be about privacy in general, but video rental records are protected differently from some other data because of the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part because reporters were able to get his video rental records whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember all the details). As a result of the Bork situation, federal law was passed to protect video rental records. Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something similar with its Beacon program.
Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or potentially "outing" anyone.
I recommend reading The Bork Tapes Saga when you get a chance: https://web.archive.org/web/20071009144531/http://www.theame...
The Video Privacy Protection Act should be expanded to include all PII.
if is_netflix_show() { return 0.95 + rand(0.00, 0.05) } else { hide_rating() }
Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just amassing a library.
For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've atoned for some of these 'crimes'
I saw another similar quote about amassing knowledge is pointless if you don't actually do something with it.
It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.
Subtly closes the garage door
nuh uh
In photography circles, we would call this GAS - Gear Acquisition Syndrome - when people buy a lot of gear and gadgets but hardly use them.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonym...
Cyclists too, are notorious for frequently pointing out that the correct number of bicycles to own is always n+1, where n is equal to however many you currently own. :-)
On the gaming rig thing, I had a co-worker once who spent a lot of time buying and modding mid-level electric guitars. He was not really a player, he just liked doing the electronics work and being able to accept that was one of my milestones towards maturity.
Of which have meticulously hand-picked artwork: 10k+
Of which actually played: 10
The irony is this was around 2002 to demo a video on demand over the Internet system to some execs at Microsoft. It was a really, really nice UI and nothing like it would be replicated for years, really until Netflix launched their own product.
The idea was summarily rejected as "people like having things on their shelves." A weird response because the same folks were paying me to destroy the CD market.
CDs are usually read from the middle, going outward. Unlike records. If I had to guess it was probably the outside that started flaking
For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.
https://www.soundandvision.com/content/flashback-1984-suprem...
LOL. There were entire organizations doing copies.
DVDs are read/written from the center out.
For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful.
I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD collections. I don’t think any of them lasted long. Heck, some of those could have been a single person mailing out and restocking discs.
Of course if it became common again it would probably be met with a new era of IP lawsuits, even though it seemed to have been settled previously. Oh, and it would likely only be doable legally with content that had a legitimate physical media release, which is becoming somewhat rare.
Probably more likely that Redbox will soak up most of the business and we’ll lose out on the interesting long-tail part of this.
I need to go in and fix broken links, but I tracked 5+ years of Netflix mailings (dropped DVDs into my sixth year).
What I rented, when I got it and shipped it back, when they received and mailed another, and what mailer I got (local address or further away).
One of the posts:
https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-mad...
It was definitely interesting to have a record of how turnaround changed over the course of the month).
This was late 90’s, so broadband was still very nascent - downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming mission.
you got throttled!
By gaming the promotions - get a free month, pay for a month, cancel, get promo for free month, repeat - i think he got maybe an 8 month subscription and only paid for 3.
And he’d do the same - as soon as a movie arrived, make a copy, drop it back in the mail that night. I think the max was maybe 24 movies a month.
He amassed a collection of over 200 movies that way. Then he cancelled and had movies to watch for the next 2-3 years.
As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.]
I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in.
It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars.
I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre.
It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.
I had never thought about this. In Thailand they definitely do close the door sooner, or straight away, and everybody does it all the time.
I recently read an article (maybe even here on HN) that explained this fully.
Basically, in the US, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the doors must stay open for a minimum time (which depends on some variables). The door close button can only have an effect after that time is elapsed, but in many (if not most bases) the time after which the door automatically closes is set to that same minimum anyway.
There are, of course, always exceptions. Some reading I did earlier suggests that there is some variation based on elevator brand, and possibly even then whims of the building owner (in terms of what instructions they gave the elevator installer about how they wanted things to work). Curiously though the "door open" button does usually pre-empt the (automatic) closing of the door, even in "normal" mode. At least IME.
I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.
IIRC the "placebo" buttons, where they exist, were not installed as such, but simply deactivated after the traffic light control system changed, since uninstalling them would be more expensive.
How do you know you haven't?
The only difference is that those kind of non-buttons are painted a different colour, plus with the older style of buttons that you physically have to push in order to operate a switch, on those non-buttons the push-plate is fixed in place and cannot actually be pushed. (Some people occasionally still try to.) With the newer style of button that operates via some sort of electronic touch sensor and therefore has no moveable parts to begin with, the only distinction might be the colour? (Not sure, because the intersection I regularly pass by on the way to work still uses the old-style buttons…)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330251
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900576#17906527
BBC: "Does pressing the pedestrian crossing button actually do anything?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6326588
For example I used to live near a major junction, for about 18-20 hours per day the buttons have no effect because there is traffic, the junction's computer is adding walk cycles where they fit in its schedule anyway so there's no difference. Testing would show no effect.
Late at night you can see the buttons work, there is no traffic so the junction is left with the fast through lanes green indefinitely, but pressing a pedestrian button causes your walk cycle to run immediately.
On the other hand I work on a University campus, the University would prefer to shut the road through the middle of it, local government said "No" so the pedestrian crossings are set to run very frequently with no penalty delay, meaning most of the day if you push the button you get a walk cycle immediately. During term time it's probably quicker to drive around the campus to the far side than use that road - because somebody will push the button, probably more than once, there are like four crossings with this treatment. So on campus it's very obvious that the buttons work.
At some point, after years of clicking the almost invisible [x] on the top of "hot singles near you" and ads for mail order brides from various countries and patiently telling Google it wasn't relevant, I got fed up, tilted, clicked the ad, found the contact address and explained in sufficient detail how Google scammed them by including me and others who absolutely weren't interested at all.
Sometime after that it suddenly stopped and now I only get irrelevant ads, not disgusting, embarrassing or insulting ones.
I can't say if what I did made the difference or not, but I can say that years of telling Google did change nothing. (Or to be fair: when I said I didn't want Russian mail order brides they would admittedly show me some other nationality next time).
Also today I have almost completely[1] given up Google and I don't feel I break an unspoken contract by blocking ads anymore.
[1]: Visited Google the other day and noticed they had brought back a working context menu with a working "view cached result" option, but it would take 200 more such fixes, many of them much bigger, to restore Google.
How did you fill your Plex server? Where did you acquire the movies?
Streaming requires negotiating licensing rights, with each IP owner independently.
This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
A major problem was the high breakage rate for the DVDs they were renting. This created issues with the supply chain of new DVDs to replace broken ones since DVDs are not considered continuously consumed, disposable products. Additionally, it made it easier to manage the bursty nature of demand for particular DVDs since you no longer had to optimize the economics around the number of rentals per physical DVD.
It was Redbox that got the studios on the ropes. Not only were home entertainment revenues dropping because of over-saturation, a bad economy, and burgeoning digital rental options -- and these were revenues the studios had started to rely on and build into their budget forecasting for films that would often only become profitable after a successful home release -- being able to get a new release for $1 from a kiosk (a kiosk that can store 500 copies and might be loaded up with just the top X new releases) and then returned and re-rented within 24 hours, that was a problem. Because now I don't have to pay $15 for that movie I'm not sure I'll ever watch again and that will clutter up the living room, I can just drive up to the grocery store or the gas station or whatever and grab a disc and go. And a website will tell me where the disc is available if it's out at the place up the street. And it's $1 and I can just return it right after I watch it. $1 rentals was a threat, but Netflix never had that pricing. They were like $7.99 for one out at a time and then it would go up from there.
But the studios didn't have a problem with Netflix and in the early years, were probably able to get better terms (for the studio) with them on bulk purchases than they had with Blockbuster.
Studios didn't start to have to grapple with Netflix until Netflix signed its landmark deal with Starz, allowing it to stream Starz's catalog of content (there was no provision in the Starz contract with studios that disallowed offering a digital streaming option -- future contracts obviously added those clauses but that would take several years to expire), thus truly making good on Reed Hasting's vision of having the internet deliver movies.
And even then, the relationship was adversarial but also somewhat necessary from both sides, because Netflix needed to license content for its library, and studios needed that sweet licensing revenue (at least before Netflix started to create its own content that competed directly against the studios).
To use a Non-US example of the judiciary looking the other way because the letter of the law is satisfied, but not the intent:
https://www.mei.edu/publications/temporary-marriage-iran-and...
It did not last long.
It wasn't the buying and reselling. It was the editing and digital lock picking.
Went to the Supreme Court, and they got owned. Company was shut down.
IIRC the trouble came down to the notion of retransmission (thus copyright violations). The argument that it was being sent to just one customer was not really accepted by the justices I think.
It was several markets, not just NY. Houston was one because I remember briefly subscribing to Aereo.
It is, however, not legal to rent CDs in the US. Because the US is weird.
That changed with DVD, where the studios stopped differentiating and went direct-to-consumer.
The proliferation of DVDs without the need for a distinction between home video and rental is part of what led to the decline of video stores (in addition to the real threat, which of course was streaming) because consumers could buy their own movie collections instead of renting them for $5 for 2 nights or whatever Blockbuster used to charge. I became an avid DVD collector as a teenager in the peak DVD era (1999-2003) and a combination of unsustainable online stores (many that were dead by 2001) selling DVDs at rock-bottom prices (even during release week) and Blockbuster's lackluster selection led to me getting a Netflix account in 1999 (thanks, mom, for the credit card!) and then building my own collection of what would become thousands of titles, rather than rely on the chains. I still have a great affinity for local video stores and support my OG hometown video store (Videodrome in Atlanta) and Scarecrow Video in Seattle, b/c curation is key.
Now, when the DVD boom flatlined in the late 2000s, three of the major studios refused to sell directly to Redbox until 28 days after a tentpole got a home video release because they worried about kiosk rentals cutting into their home video revenues (which at this point, had often started to overtake or match theatrical revenue), but Redbox got around that by just buying through other distributors or buying out Walmart, Best Buy and Costco stock. They also sued the studios that were refusing to sell to them directly. The reason the studios went against Redbox was because Redbox undercut them by offering rentals for $1 a day and most people (obviously not me), stopped collecting movies.
But again, the first sale doctrine means that they can't require anyone to buy a different version. This is the same with book publishers. They try to strongarm libraries into buying library copies of physical books but the truth is, if a library needs a book or needs more copies, they can buy them from Amazon or a bulk distributor all the same.
The site also still had a social component back then with star ratings, lists, you could see what your friends were watching and comment. There was almost a goodreads vibe to parts of the site - it was fun.
This is why I think it was smart they started releasing content weekly instead of all at once. Give people a chance to build excitement and talk about something.
If you want to get a copy before it’s for general sale then you need to sign a contract, if you buy it at Walmart you don’t.
However, the physical disk is protected by First Sale Doctrine. You can sell it, rent it, auction it, destroy it, whatever you want. The same applies to, say, your laptop. You can do whatever you physically want to your laptop, even if you can't copy your Windows license wherever you like.
When direct-to-consumer happened, there was typically not any difference between when a large rental chain got a disc and when I could pick mine up on Tuesday morning at Best Buy (or get it in the mail, sometimes arriving the day before) or wherever.
Some chains like Blockbuster did sign rental agreements with studios both because of the bulk orders they needed and because for a few years, Blockbuster had to stock VHS tapes AND DVDs and the studios would basically make them sign those agreements if they still wanted to get VHS tapes -- but nothing stopped them from carrying the home release versions from retail if a rental copy was not available. And as you say, nothing stopped the indie shops from buying Tuesday morning at 10am and then immediately putting them out to rent.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20967268/redbox-disney-m...
In fact plenty of the movies you and I have probably already seen ("Easy Rider", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "The Graduate" for example). So perhaps even before I began going through the list I may have seen 20% or so.
But there are also a lot of early films from the 1930's I had not seen, and plenty of foreign films. In fact, now that I'm working through the 1970's, "foreign films" is more or less the rule.
Sadly the foreign films are the ones hardest to find both on Netflix and at the local library.
It still does. Just think of a movie or show and search for it, and they'll probably have it, although they seem to be missing the occasional season.
I think the DVD site would still be popular if more people were aware of the size of its catalog. Most probably assume it has the same catalog as the streaming service.
To me, the quality of the content was better in the DVD service.
I watch a couple of DVDs from Netflix each week. I haven't streamed anything from Netflix since 2020.
I don't mind buying the movies, but Netflix has some movies that aren't anywhere. Not even on ebay.
California folks, worth knowing is that most (if not all) library systems in California will give a card to anyone with a California ID, even if they don’t live in district. When I lived in Santa Monica, I had cards for Santa Monica, LA County, LA City, Orange County and Beverly Hills.
My previous city library was a pretty good supplement to Netflix. But my new city only has new stuff. An only does inter-library loans for printed material.
West coast libraries are unusually well stocked for DVDs because occasionally (before streaming) a movie or other entertainment company will get caught doing some minor misdeed, and was able to pay the fine by dumping DVDs on rural library systems.
This is something I've wondered about. I've never subscribed to either CDs or streaming but my impression of streaming is that there are hundreds of movies not tens of thousands. Wikipedia says that in 2005 Netflix had 35,000 different movies on disk, presumably many more by now. How many different titles does Netflix streaming have for the USA service ?
That site claims that they've got about 3600 TV series and 3700 movies in their US streaming catalog, as of January 2023.
Investors should be diversified; firms should be specialized.
Agree that streaming never looks as good as what I get from Bluray.
And here I thought I should go check out Netflix DVD catalog before it closes for good in September.
Is that actually true ? I thought buying a disk and then lending it for money was a breach of the copyright ... isn't that pretty much what that big block of text says at the start of every disk delivered movie ? At least where I live !
I got a LG C1 tv, upgraded netflix to 4k streaming ... and was disappointed, until I started watching bluray.
Here in the middle of nowhere, the public library's selection is slim, recent, and popular. It's hard to find classics or art house or cult film - the kind of things that nobody streams because streaming service libraries are slim, recent, and popular. I can use InterLibrary Loan to borrow up to 3 DVDs at a time.
The "borrowing" time is time from request to time of return, then I can request 3 more. This works out to about 3 DVDs a month.
I was doing DVD.com for another ~12 a month. Total about 15.
Now that fifteen movies is become three, I may have to see if I can get a library account from the local university and also ILL through them.
Yet another way in which streaming content providers seem to be incentivizing piracy. You can certainly pirate a full-quality blu-ray copy of a movie.
The bigger problem with Netflix 4k though is that the "look" of every show is extremely uniform -- to the point that its almost like the same people made every show! This is suspected to be due to the small set of "approved" equipment Netflix requires the producers/cast/crew to use and standardized post-processing. They should allow more freedom in that respect -- many non-Netflix shows these days have a lot more personality simply because they don't have that muted/desaturated Netflix look.
No idea why they don’t up the bitrate considering bandwidth is extremely cheap and they do a lot of peering.
We have H.266 / VVC that is a lot better at the smaller details. Would love to see it being tested for those who are extremely sensitive to artifacts.
It's not technically streaming because any movie that you rent first has to be fully downloaded to local storage on one of their devices. And you're talking $6K for an entry-level device, just for the privilege of being able to rent/buy movies from their store:
https://www.soundandvision.com/content/kaleidescape-compact-...
However, rentals/purchases are equivalent quality (if not bit-for-bit identical) to Blu-ray media.
The company was started by one of the founders of NetApp back in 2001, so it was way ahead of its time. I guess it's survived by sticking to the niche high-end audio-visual market.
Core Pure Stream has a max bit rate of 80 Mbps. So yes indeed, it's comparable.
This is silly though: "To enjoy at the highest speed of 80 Mbps, you need an internet speed of 115 Mbps or faster. Ethernet (wired LAN) connections are limited to 100 Mbps due to the TV's product specifications. Therefore, to enjoy 80 Mbps with the Pure Stream™ functionality, you need to connect to a Wi-Fi router that supports IEEE 802.11 ac/n (wireless LAN)."
https://www.sonypicturescore.com/faq/EN/us
Why would Sony hamstring their TVs with a fast-ethernet port?
Also, I wouldn't buy a Sony TV just for this service. Seems like a weird value add.
Compression artifacts bug me as well but if I’m watching something great, I forget about them pretty quickly. Same goes for black and white movies or foreign movies with subtitles. If it’s good, that all disappears.
An aunt of mine even positively preferred fullscreen, distortion be damned.
Some 4k movies are phenomenal - like 2001.
But some are sort of unreal in a different, uncanny valley way. I think it is HDR, or maybe the digital cameras they use. Almost like low contrast.
It's a great reminder to focus on what value you bring to your customers (watching videos), not on any particular business model or way of doing business.
But, the the first version of realvideo was released in early 1997. I remember using it to watch pirated streaming video of Star Wars special edition and South Park season 1 (I just checked and those were both in 1997). It was acceptable quality (slightly worse than VHS or video CD) if you had a cable modem.
The DVD shipping business would’ve been called Qwikster.
Guess it would’ve died today had it happened.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netflix-idUSTRE78I23B2011...
I highly doubt that we are going to see that again this time around.
My son was playing in one of the various non competitive soccer leagues here, and one of his volunteer coaches was a lovely woman who had mentioned she worked at Netflix. A day after the Qwikster debacle, after they announced they were abandoning the decision, my son had practice and while hanging out I happened to have a moment with the coach, and I said something along the lines of "Wow, so that was quite the screwup at Netflix, hey?" Complete with a stupid grin on my face.
And she responded with sort of a sour face, "Well, you know, Reed really thought it was the right decision and we supported him." And then she walked away.
Wait... "Reed?" "We?" Uh-oh.
How bad did I just jam my foot into my mouth? Badly it turns out. I went home and looked her up and sure enough, she was a c-level exec and was obviously part of the decision. And here I am, one of the many moron parents she has to deal with as a volunteer coach seemingly mocking her about it at practice during what was probably a very bad week for her. I felt like a total ass.
I apologized the next time I saw her, but you know, that doesn't really do much. I've since learned to not assume any more.
And "the terrible quality of primetime network TV programs" for retiring me from TV piracy ;)
I resisted for so long. But now my library is so big. I feel like half the random games I get are only available on steam or other like services anyways.
Then you need trakt, torrent search engines, and plex. ;)
Valve seems happy with it being good enough that just copying the game folder won't work, and thus pirates must seek out specialized tools.
Of course, all of that assumes the game in question even implements the Stream DRM. Which is completely optional on the game developer's side. Many do implement it, since they are pulling in the steam sdk anyway. (Even then it is not strictly needed, I've had steam achievements pop while running a DRM free version of the same game before, because the developer specially wanted that scenario to work. I suspect it also requires owning the game on steam. I wish I could remember which game it was that did this.)
I've been relying on it to bring me stuff on services I don't subscribe to. That's how I'm watching Picard, for example. There's not much else on Paramount I want to see. I could subscribe and then ditch it, but it has been convenient to just have DVDs arrive in the mail.
But there's less and less of that, and enough stuff on their subscription service that I've got plenty of entertainment. (I try to limit my staring-at-the-flickering-box time to a half-hour or so per day.)
Any such options? Amazon Prime shows movies’ star ratings (from IMDb?), but didn’t let users rate movies, AFAICT. I’ve found Taste.io https://www.taste.io/ recommendations to be very good, even with fewer ratings than I gave a Netflix.
I'll give taste.io a spin. It looks like it might be a bit streaming focused. I know letterboxd is where real film fans go, but I'll miss that usually spot on star prediction.
> At any time up until October 27, 2023 a current DVD subscriber or former DVD customer whose DVD subscription was canceled within the past 9 months may download their data, via our Data Download (https://dvd.netflix.com/Download), which includes: Your queue, Your rental history, Your ratings, Your reviews
Meanwhile Netflix DVD service is a small, national business that had a good run against blockbuster, but it was its sister service that killed blockbuster.
I think Netflix was right to try and push it into its own company. That way it had a chance to survive providing a niche service in the states.
Of course it’s just a distraction inside Netflix, no matter how nice the upsides are to its loyal followers.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
As a movie lover, Netflix was a great way to get stuff that was either out of print or sometimes prohibitively expensive (certain Criterion discs, box sets of TV shows) that I couldn't find anywhere else. I was/am an avid movie collector, so I often bought when I could, but Netflix was such a great way to rent stuff I didn't know if I wanted to buy or not and an early way to binge-watch TV seasons I even paid for the 4 or 5 discs out at one time option at one point. I probably still have some DVDs from Netflix that I forgot to return (and then reported as "lost") in boxes somewhere.
I still buy a lot of physical media, even though I then almost immediately rip it to my Plex server, because I prefer the bitrate and extra features -- I buy digital movies/TV shows too because iTunes always has sales -- but the era of renting a physical disc ended a long time ago for me.
Still, seeing this makes me a bit sad, just because of the memories I have of a simpler time and because the selection was just so fantastic (still better than what you can get on streaming for some stuff).
It was until it wasn't. It was about 10 years ago I first noticed the "unavailable" section of my queue getting bigger. I cancelled my subscription somewhere around 2018 when I completely ran my queue out and still had 10 or 15 movies in the "unavailable" section. Some were even movies that didn't appear to be out of print.
In it's heyday I agree, it was the most reliable place to get anything, but towards the end they chopped off their long tail and therefore neutered their usefulness to me…
I’ll torrent things if they aren’t available any other way, but I hope that isn’t the case.
While I'd also pay what producers deserve, in some cases it's not possible. You could pirate the content, and buy something (e.g. Merch or something similar where the funds go roughly to the same place as if you've obtained a legal copy of the actual content) other than the actual media from them.
If buying a 4K Blu-Ray copy of a movie is 20 dollars, but I'd prefer an MP4 on my computer (and don't have a disc player anyway): I can simply pirate a BRRip torrent, but get for example a T-shirt of a similar price, or perhaps even directly donate money to them if possible.
I believe its fair play.
Redbox and the library are great suggestions, thank you!
This is on a 5Gbps/5Gbps fiber connection.
A lot of scenes look very impressive until you start seeing artifacts and hearing poor sound.
My subjective opinion is that Netflix has the worst video quality, though I've had some really bad experiences with Amazon Prime too. But Netflix is worse for me because some shows on Netflix can never get to the max bitrate they offer. For example, the last season of Peaky Blinders on 1080p Netflix had a ton of very noticeable compression artifacts, but that's not always the case for 1080p content. They just encoded it very poorly on the backend.
Apple TV+ has the best bitrate (up to 40Mbps), and Disney+ and HBO Max are decent as well.
Oops.
EDIT: The thread also states you need to be a Master Gamer, and an account older than 1 year. So very tough requirements, although you can get to MG without uploading anything.
Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they’re showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.
Well, it turns out they were right. A standalone DVD by mail service with it's own name might have actually been able to hold on. It was a good service that died in the shade of Netflix's brand.
As it is, I miss being able to just watch whatever I want and not being locked into Netflix's dire content library. Want to make it through the Best Pictures nominees? Good luck without having 6 different streaming services.
I only finally cancelled it during the pandemic when I starting finding that Netflix just stopped bothering to buy a lot of titles that I wanted to watch; lots of stuff that I knew was out on Blu-ray would only be available in DVD, or would not be available at all. And there weren't any new release movies coming out because of the pandemic.
So I finally gave up on the disks.
It's the only way to see a ton of things short of piracy.
I try to be sympathetic to the entertainment industry when it comes to the topic of piracy, but they're really working overtime to make it harder and harder to be…
E: Not to say that Netflix should just dumpster it all. I'd love to see a pennies-on-the-dollar buyer beware 'these might be scratched to hell' wholesale for anyone who cares to pick some up. Whether its a la carte, or "Buy 10 <genre> for $X" or, well, who knows. Just about anything would be better than tossing 'em all into a landfill.
You mean like Netflix is doing now?
(not hating, get rich if you can)
The Cambrian explosion of cinema is still waiting to happen, but generative AI is poised to deliver on that sooner or later.
House of Cards was a big deal for being a streaming-first big-budget TV show. That's commonplace now. That wasn't that long ago. Since then, all of the major players have joined the table, sunk audacious sums of money into developing new projects, and there's more high-end TV made in a year than I can watch.
Cue the flip "but none of it is any good" comments but nevertheless, Netflix blazed that trail.
They would order movies and send them back again. Sounded like too much trouble to me, because I had a DVD renting machine next door.
When streaming became a thing, I didn't remember the name and thought Netflix was a brand new thing.
Or who wants to refer people to obscure titles, even if those people normally aren't interested in a huge catalog?
(Are we back to monitoring eBay for used discs of titles we want to watch? Do we end up paying for all the umpteen half-butted streaming services, every time we add another service to get a specific title? Is there some tablescraps streaming service that can pick up all/most obscure titles, to supplement subscribing to one mainstream streaming service rather than all of them?)
- the Queue
- Reviews and suggestions from my actual IRL human non-algorithmic friends
Netflix knows what’s best for Netflix I guess, but those two features are what made the service for me. I discovered so much great stuff with those two simple functions.
One man owns the patent.
And it all seems pretty hard on the disks. I've had a few disks arrive broken, including one just recently. I know that sometimes they have studio agreements to burn their own custom disks, but sometimes they're just paying full retail price.
Netflix got rid of much of its back catalog of cinephile movies a long time ago. I suspect that they just stopped replacing them when the physical disk broke. I don't know how big the market is for people who want obscure movies; I'm sure it's not zero, but it's probably not enormous.
I discovered that I'm just not a cinephile. I would love to love old, great, less-well-known films, but I just use TV these days as mindless distraction. It's the cinephiles (and fans of other material that doesn't get picked up by streaming, like some anime) who really lose out in this.
I think old movies will find their way, there is a relatively small number of them but there is an awful lot of TV (also probably just awful TV) that I have a very hard time finding someone wanting to pay to have it streamed. Other than some pop culture memories and nostalgia, I don't know that there is a great loss; the really high quality content tends to live on. It doesn't feel right. When Netflix DVDs are gone, there is a lot of stuff that I don't know where you could find it.
Side note: would love to know my ltcv - almost an annuity at this point.
Thankfully nobody encouraged me and I never wasted blood and treasure on the project ;)
But I have fond memories of this service, of which I was an early adopter. My sons and I were among the first to sign up for the disc we could insert into our Nintendo Wii and watch the early Netflix streaming service, too.
Netflix has been a clear positive in my family's lives.
It was a unique kind of fun that I can’t seem to reproduce anywhere else these days.
Which is just my way of getting to my wish that my local library could duplicate dvds for loan on demand. Rather, I have to request and wait. Seems ridiculous for digital media.
I know they've started as a physical rental service but I always though they've ended that at least a decade ago, if not more.
Can't believe they were still into it in 2023 anyway.
I still purchase a lot of Blu-Rays, but I guess others lose a source of ripping now. That's unfortunate.
Sad times.
Now we have ever reshuffling access to a smaller select catalog of stuff. Ever piece of content has to be fueded over by lawyers & rights holders. DVDs and Blurays exist but primarily for mainstream content & republishes of old & smaller content is rare.
Netflix has attained their goal of disrupting reliable access to the form's moving pictures.
OK, that's three words.