Netflix Removes “Basic” Ad-Free Plan in U.S. and U.K
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
They can try to raise prices and cut features / content in order to return to the golden age of profitability, but I don’t believe they’ll ever get it back.
Now streaming is putting the TV networks out of business. Nobody is going to make content to dump on streaming for nearly free.
People also forget that in the glory days, Netflix’s steaming movie selection was always bad. Like discount bin at Walmart bad.
somewhat inconvenient ... but all of netflix, disney, hulu etc. ... no ads
... and of course cheap
I like a few of the streaming service originals, though. Those will be harder to get elsewhere, legally.
It’s really nice to be able to stream any of my DVDs or Blu Rays, to any screen, without having to actually having to hook up a player or find the specific disk.
I use MakeMKV to rip, and then Handbrake to encode at a standard quality level (resolution, frame rate, codec, bitrate, etc).
It's been really, really great, actually. I may not be able to get streaming originals, but personally, that's not been even a little issue. There is more excellent stuff available in the existing catalog of physical media than I have time left in my life to see anyway.
I've also been buying new and used DVDs and Blu-Ray that have movies and shows that I hold dear, and rediscovering old favorites. That's been great.
/s in case you couldn’t tell
I’d have to be a sucker to compensate you for your labor.
Heh, you just described taxes.
I personally don't see the problem in this (would like to hear opinions). The current copyright system works to keep rent-income on past productions. If incentives shift to prioritize making profit from live performances instead of gatekeeping access to already-produced digital files, it seems like a step in the right direction.
It costs huge amounts of money to make a TV show, even one that doesn't look technically demanding. You summarise it as "gatekeeping access to already-produced digital files", when as I'm sure you know the costs here aren't the incremental cost of providing you with a copy of that file, the costs are the initial production of the contents of that file which is amortised over however many thousands or millions of people are going to watch it.
As fun as theatre can be, I don't think you'll get many people deciding they want to go and watch the live stage production of the new Mission Impossible (unless I guess every night they blow up the entire theatre, but then you have the same issues of cost).
In my opinion copyright law is overreaching now. The fact that Tolkien's children are still raking in money from his work is somewhat ridiculous to me, there should definitely be better limitations on copyright length, with work entering the public domain sooner than it does now, but I don't think the system is fundamentally broken.
Perhaps this is mistaken. Disney and Nintendo come to mind as very successful but also very aggressive about protecting copyright, even such that (as you brought up with the Tolkien estate) Disney has successfully lobbied to have copyright terms extended so they can be the only arbiters of all things Mickey Mouse (and Nintendo all things Mario, etc.). But Nintendo keeps making (good!) Mario games.
Still, there could be great works produced by independent creators but they seem to be stifled precisely due to copyright law. When Disney bought Star Wars, they decided that all non-film iterations of the stories are non-canon. Imagine being an Expanded Universe creator who made an Official Star Wars Game only to be told after-the-fact that it’s not official anymore. That’s not even getting into fan creations which are somehow illegally distributed for free.
I might agree that it’s not fundamentally broken but it does not seem to work in practice; at least, there are many cases in which it is abused which need to be curbed for me to really consider it a Good Thing. Commonly a person’s labor is invalidated by dubious copyright claims and I see that as more harmful to society than what harms are caused to corporations by individual piracy. Let corporations duke it out with copyright law and ignore the individual consumer, even if it’s millions of individuals. Such a scenario means the business model doesn’t work and that is absolutely not a consumer problem.
(Thanks for sharing your thoughts! There is a lot of nuance around this topic so I apologize if my initial comment over-simplified.)
E.g. Spotify.
You don’t use them because it costs 6 bucks a pop.
That’s a price motive not a service issue.
I think anyone who has tried to figure out which movies & series to watch where and how to line up the billing cycles to move to the next service when you run out of content, will disagree.
This is fundamentally a service issue, providers aren't competing on price or the quality of the service, but by monopolizing the availability of content which makes the user experience objectively worse.
- It has a wider selection of content. I don't have to faff around looking for which content is available on which service.
- There is no DRM.
- Do these services even work on Linux? I know BitTorrent does.
We are probably going to start revolving services through the year, saving things to watch on each service rather than having them all concurrently.
For example I've had offers from Disney+ for a month of Premium for $3 and for Basic at half price for up to 6 months. (To be clear the latter was still billed monthly and could be cancelled at any time. You didn't have to keep it for 6 months. It was just that after 6 months the monthly rate would revert to the regular price).
This was never a safe assumption because the entire entertainment industry cannot sustain itself on a single $15/mo subscription. The "golden days of Netflix" were a product of Netflix licensing shows in syndication, not footing the full bill for their production. Cable and network TV was still actually funding these shows, and Netflix was getting "reruns" a year or two after the fact.
I pay less for my streaming services than my parents do for cable, and the quantity and quality of content at my disposal is still far better than I ever remember getting with cable.
Even if it was exactly the same price, cable would be a worse experience.
I grew up with 5 over the air channels on a good day, so I think we’ll manage.
The only reason it was financially viable was those shows were all subsidized by legacy cable plans, and Netflix was just additional revenue. As soon as streaming had to become the primary financial backer of production, the math changes completely.
I don't know if that guarantees we will return to that feeling that most everything will be on Netflix eventually (or something like Netflix), but it's starting to sound possible again knowing the streamers are starting to feel that pinch on "exclusive content" not making money being resold to other distribution channels.
I also don't know if it that hope excuses the bad ways that the streaming services have been pulling content without warning nor the questionable "coincidental" timing of doing much of this in the middle of a strike in a way that leaves questions about if the National Labor Board is tracking this data.
Setting up streaming software and servers is much less capital intensive than running wires to everyone’s house or operating a network of satellites.
Netflix was a first mover. Turns out they created a technologic berm instead of a moat.
My question is what other industries are going to end up gobbling up their first movers.
Personally I think Amazon is next. They exist based solely on their first mover momentum.
Netflix market cap is $210B, Comcast is $178B, and Disney is $160B. All the other content sellers are far below.
Netflix is a perfectly viable business, and investors are betting it will continue to be a leader in selling video media.
> Turns out they created a technologic berm instead of a moat.
Unless Netflix had a plan to lobby legislators to enact laws coercing content makers to go through them, I do not see what chance they had at making a moat due to the way the internet works.
>Personally I think Amazon is next. They exist based solely on their first mover momentum.
Amazon actually has a moat. Creating all the warehouse and transportation infrastructure and managing the 1.5M employees they have is not a simple feat, certainly not relative to setting up a streaming service. Not to mention AWS.
In no world is that worth more than Disney, who own the rights to some of the world's best known franchises, several theme parks, retail stores, and quite a bit more I'm forgetting off the top of my head. Oh, and they have a service you can pay a few dollars a month for streaming video as well.
At some point investors will realise that while the emperor isn't entirely naked, he's just wearing an outfit he picked up from the supermarket while doing his shopping, and not a revolutionary new material.
Netflix started in 1997, IPO’d in 2002, launched streaming in 2007 (the same time NBC and News Corp launched Hulu), and has reported $100M+ net income since at least 2010, and $1B+ since 2018.
> At some point investors will realise that while the emperor isn't entirely naked, he's just wearing an outfit he picked up from the supermarket while doing his shopping, and not a revolutionary new material.
Netflix is not valued as revolutionary new material. It is valued as having solid cash flow, minimal liabilities (few employees and physical facilities), and low debt.
Disney and Comcast have much more liability from having many more employees and in person interactions with the public.
If by “all content”, you mean, “everything produced originally as a TV series”, sure; movies (particularly, anything older that wasn’t alrrady there or anything not super mainstream) had a nuch better chance of reaching the Netflix disk catalog than Netflix streaming, up until the point when content owners having their own streaming platforms meant even the TV stuff and mainstream movies would often miss Netflix unless it was Netflix-owned.
A prime membership has much more utility than just watching stuff and Amazon have buckets of money to throw at anything they like.
> Unlimited ad-free movies, TV shows, and mobile games
I wish the USA believed in consumer protection, or had false advertising laws that were enforced, because most shows and movies are full of ads, they're just hidden. Ubiquitous computer logos, coca-cola bottles, car brands, etc
Maybe they meant unlimited-ad, free movies, tv shows, and mobile games and messed up the punctuation
It’s kinda funny, as we don’t have 7-11 here, I simply associate them with TV ;)
It came up for me the other day because Heathers was set in small-town Ohio and yet prominently featured a 7-11 in multiple plot points which didn't fit my mental image of (mostly Southern) Ohio. Curiosity turned up that apparently there are a few 7-11s in Ohio if you travel north enough, so it isn't entirely anachronistic.
It's basically the end of the show, credits are rolling as this dude (high on edibles) is fumbling around his living room looking for the source of the music. After a good while he finally finda a pair of iconic red Beats headphones and puts them on and the music cuts to high quality and he starts vibing to the beat as the scene fades out.
I can't remember what the show was, but i remembet how pissed i was for getting hooked into a clever product placement ad.
You mean watch "whatever they have" and only on devices that are on the same network and only when they decide to let you watch them. Good luck watching Westworld on HBO max whenever you want. There are even new shows I want to watch right now, but I'm waiting for the streaming service to finish releasing the season before I start them because they want me to watch their shows like people did in the 1960s. "Tune in next week for another exciting episode!" No thanks!
Woah - it’s gone
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...
Obviously, content owners will probably mess around restricting access to stuff, but the situation is much better than before.
They can shuffle all the other plans around all they want but that’s the price point that keeps me away.
* UK it is double - £7.99 versus £15.99, Disney will also give 2 months free on a yearly plan, Netflix don’t seem to offer a yearly plan.
I wish these companies would charge something sustainable.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare piracy to legal ways of enjoying content.
i would absolutely download a car
Do I feel a little bit bad for stealing content? Maybe. But I'm not paying for 4+ streaming services just so I can occasionally watch shows a few times a year.
Oh well...
They literally doubled their ads overnight a while back and I uninstalled immediately as they had already been adding a good chunk of time to anything I watched.
Also was the same ads over and over.
I personally can't stand ads, regardless if the content is free. So it frustrates me when a service has something I want, but they do not have any sort of premium ad free subscription option.
Now that the free money is over so is the unsustainable free ride. All these VC funded scaleups are trying to claw back value as most of them weren't really profitable, just relied on investors, but now investors want their pound of flesh. It's way overdue wakeup call for the industry.
If a company is promising you something for free, check your pockets.
From my netflix.com/ChangePlan page
> Only people who live with you may use your account. Add 1 extra member with Standard or up to 2 with Premium. Learn more. Watch on 4 different devices at the same time with Premium, 2 with Standard or Standard with ads, and 1 with Basic.
I feel that the last decade, with the explosion of internet and social media, big part of the culture moved more aggressively to consume the latest releases, the most hyped, the advertised in small doses from months and months.
I hope to start buying lovely Blu-rays from https://www.criterion.com to build my collection.
And price might be something entirely stupid like 50-100 a month.
Charter (Spectrum) took over the physical TV service/ISP to the home business.
Discovery most recently took over the media part and now it is officially known as Warner Bros Discovery.