Things Are Going Great at Netflix, So It's Raising Prices
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I don't know who is the target audience. I do see younger generations i.e mine - the 30s and 20s considering this as some sort of entertainment utility and they must have a connection err subscription. It has probably the most insipid content and what many even fail to notice and hence do not acknowledge that it has probably one of the shallow most catalogues, yes even after including its really pathetic quality N-formula content.
It is so user hostile and their intentional dark-pattern interface is not the only problem and yet apparently they are doing well. The interface is literally an ad dashboard. Still people spend more and more time on there
Why is that? I don't even think it's like Apple's growth who actually do few things right and offer better hardware and a streamline non-all-over-your-face software. So what is Netflix's secret? Just being the first game in the town? Or good old addiction? Or both, or all of it little by little?
And there were copious ads on TV too.
I assume the large population that put up with that stuff on TV channels doesn’t mind on streaming either.
When netflix started, it wasn't a substandard product. It was like $5 a month and you got movies mailed to your house! For basically a late fine at blockbuster you could watch your movies for as long as you wanted and never had to drive to the video store. It was an amazing product! There was nothing else like it.
When they added streaming, their DVD library was still king. It had everything. Even weird stuff that could be hard to find elsewhere. Gradually though, the streaming offerings improved enough that people started mailing out DVDs less frequently. Until the TV/cable networks took their content back and started their own streaming services netflix was a really good deal. Tons of great content, low prices, mostly ad free (no third party ads until recently, but ad creep has always been a problem for netflix), and you could watch shows on your own schedule. The rise of netflix originals was a reaction to everyone else pulling their content from the platform and that necessitated higher fees but even that wasn't too terrible.
It wasn't just some kind of social momentum that made them popular. They were once a pretty good service. Very few dark patterns. Customer service always sucked though which was a lot more understandable when they were small. It's just been going downhill for a long time. At this point, they're just being greedy, which is a bad look when so many people are genuinely struggling. I suspect that momentum is what's mostly keeping users around now though.
I've only sought support once since then, and although I could still find service codes sprinkled around, I couldn't find any way to contact support except something like "Did this page solve youi issue?". Which I used to report that some page directed me to click some link that took me back to the top of the support section instead of promised content. I think I had been looking for how to find the promised and announced "Add an extra member" feature…which it turned out didn't arrive in my accounts UI until maybe two months later.
Prime Video and Hulu, on the other hand…
There's an almost full screen ad on the profile selection screen (which used to look like this: https://beebom.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/netflix-pin-lo...). There are always giant banner ads at the top of the screen you have to scroll down from to get to the continue watching category (these ads look like this https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/39lav3/apparently_...). I've seen weird tall ads for shows that span multiple rows (like this: https://www.tvforum.co.uk/tvhome/n-series-44712). Right now there's some strange ad for a "Halloween collection" that spans multiple columns in the "Trending Now" category.
Ads have played automatically at the end of shows or were shown between them (see here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/17/netflix-tests-video-promos...). Ads flash rapidly on the screen if you pause any show for more than a couple minutes. Here's the trending now section surrounded top and bottom by ads: https://phspawprint.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Oct-art.p...
It's important that people are able to recognize ads when they see them. Netflix is filled with ads designed catch your attention or to more heavily promote certain shows in ways other than just listing them in every other category on the page. They aren't third party ads like you see on their cheapest plan, but they are still ads and the more of them there are, and the more annoying they are, the more I want to cancel.
I find the variety of Netflix programs much more interesting than Disney. But that only explains their global strength (where normal user wants to see Korean and local dramas)
But more to my point, many of my friends from places like Thailand or Philipines swear to Netflix exactly because it has high(ish) quality local programming and American and Korean shows. They also have a lot of Bollywood outside western markets (so does Amazon) and these are things that seem completely overlooked on HBO/Disney/Apple.
So yes, if you’re into American content, Netflix is a so-so contender, but internationally it just seems way stronger to me than any other (unless you mainly consume local content)
The thumbnails you click on take you to the show. The fact that they A/B test the images doesn't make them ads. By this logic, a dictionary is chockfull of ads for words.
Right now they have
The Imitation Game
A Beautiful Mind
Arrival
Breaking Bad
Better Call Saul
American Beauty
The Big Short
The Wolf of Wall Street
Maybe these aren’t your cup of tea but they’re hardly “insipid”. Even if those were the only things available it would still be worth the price imo.
Now Netflix seems to be perfectly happy to price out their poorer customers (or sell them out to advertisers) so long as enough people are still willing to pay to get screwed over and over again.
I've had an account from their early days mailing DVDs, and I loved supporting them when they were ad free, but at this point if it weren't for the others who still depend on my account, I'd have canceled already.
Every once in a while I'll go into search and enter random three letter combinations like "Sta", "Tho", "Mon" etc. When I do, I often find things in the search results that I add to my list and would have done sooner, except I never knew they existed because netflix refused to show them to me. I've also been to other people's houses and seen how different the things netflix shows them are.
It seems like all netflix ever shows you is what they want you to see. My guess is that they intentionally hide certain older content to try and drive viewers to newer content so that they can collect metrics. Newer things end up being pushed over and over again in category after category.
I'm not interested in giving them metrics showing how well people like whatever their newest releases are though. I want to watch whatever I want to watch whenever I want to watch it. That was the promise of streaming that netflix never quite delivered on, but for a little while it was pretty close. Now it seems like netflix wants to turn into cable TV. They don't even always release entire seasons to let you binge anymore (they can control the conversation on social media and keep the ad hype up longer if they don't give users the freedom to watch shows on their own schedule)
It really sucks to see so clearly what cable TV always should have been, to come so close to having that, and then have it slowly killed off in front of you.
The other reason might be the way they distribute stuff: from what I've read, they have equipment set up in various locations to cache content to reduce overall network load. So they want you to watch stuff that's cached on a server at your ISP, rather than something in the archives they have to serve from their main location.
Netflix was hurt bad by the rise of steaming services owned by networks and content producers, but that's no reason to take it out on us paying customers. You'd think having the competition would cause them strive for better customer service and a better product.
Why exactly should they do better? If people are happy to keep sending them money, even when the price increases, then they're doing the right thing. It's not like you don't have alternative services to choose from.
If I were the only person using the account I'd cancel, but I'm not the type of person to only think of myself. My canceling would inconvenience other people. There'll be some tipping point where netflix will piss me off enough to cancel anyway I'm sure, but we haven't reached it yet. I thought that netflix would force my hand when they started cracking down on password sharing, but so far it hasn't been a problem for us. If that stays true my guess is it'll be worsening ads that eventually drives me off.
> Why exactly should they do better?
They can tone down the ads for one thing. You should be able to pause a show for more than a few minutes without ads aggressively flashing at you. Multiple times I've seen full screen ads that had to be clicked past just to get to their main page which had a huge banner ad you have to click down from to get to "continue watching".
That's something else they can do better too. "continue watching" should always be at the top. I should never have to go hunting for it. Its contents shouldn't shift around based on what netflix wants you to be watching either. The last thing you were watching should always be first in that list.
As I mentioned, an A-Z listing of every show they have is something people have been asking for from the start of their streaming service. Same with a "not interested/never show me this again" option. It should indicate to you which shows you've already watched. It should provide options for sorting your queue. Provide a way to change the volume in-app. They should provide actual subtitles and not just closed captioning. They should not autoplay shows I only click on to view show information or an episode synopsis (they refused to listen while their customers begged them to stop autoplay while browsing for years, and now they started this new autoplay bullshit instead) and if they insist on autoplaying anything, anything they do autoplay shouldn't appear in "continue watching". They should notify you when things in your list or things you've been watching are leaving the service. In fact, they should have a category/section for shows leaving in the next month. Why the hell do we still have to google around to see what's coming and leaving every month! They could stop canceling their own shows without allowing for proper endings! the fact that they pollute their own catalog with shows they never allow to conclude reasonably is beyond stupid. Instead of having an asset, those shows will be ignored by anyone who already knows netflix screwed the show's fans over, or they will continue to disappoint and piss off the unaware who learn the hard way. I could go on and on about the many many things netflix could be doing better, but if they spent 5 minutes at /r/netflix they'd get an even longer list of annoyances and frustrations.
> If people are happy to keep sending them money, even when the price increases, then they're doing the right thing.
I guess it depends on what we think "the right thing" is. I don't think that greed is summum bonum.
> It's not like you don't have alternative services to choose from.
There are alternative sources. Even for netflix originals. Some of the people using my account would struggle with obtaining those shows via other means. I've resorted to delivering media to them by Sneakernet in the past, and I can in the future if I have to, but I hope I don't have to. Netflix might no longer be convenient enough to prevent people from returning to piracy, but it's still more convenient than collecting and hand delivering physical media to family/friends/lovers.
It doesn’t matter if I use Apple Music and my friend uses Spotify, we can both listen to the same new albums, but we can’t watch shows each other recommend because we regularly have (now “had”) different video streaming services.
You see, most of the people I knew didn't really want or need specific or high quality content - I reckon they only needed something they could fix their eyes to and spend hours and days. Netlix and the ilk gives them that and probably they are happy just doing that.
For my women friends though, Netflix just has them dialed for reality stuff. Selling Sunset, Below Deck, Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, Queer Eye. Educated women with serious jobs, they love to escape with this stuff, IME.
It isn't just the lack of content, content suddenly being removed, or even the expense and hassle of dealing with 5+ different services; it is that the overall experience has really degraded.
I find jellyfin with the content I want to be a superior experience in every single way.
IF content providers would offer a digital version DRM free, I would purchase a ton of TV shows and movies directly.
Anime support could be a bit better. But oh well.
My age group is 35-45, so it isn't like we are broke college students that need to pirate movies, but we've just gotten fed up with how terrible everything has become.
I'd say Microsoft becomes the M...
So it's.... AGAM....or gosh, MAGA? haha
>While we're here, I just want to rant about Netflix, which is an odd case of starting off with a really good recommendation algorithm and then making it worse on purpose. Once upon a time, there was the Netflix prize, which granted $1 million to the best team that could predict people's movie ratings, based on their past ratings, with better accuracy than Netflix could themselves. (This not-so-shockingly resulted in a privacy fiasco when it turned out you could de-anonymize the data set that they publicly released, oops. Well, that's what you get when you long-term store people's personal information in a database.) Netflix believed their business depended on a good recommendation algorithm. It was already pretty good: I remember using Netflix around 10 years ago and getting several recommendations for things I would never have discovered, but which I turned out to like. That hasn't happened to me on Netflix in a long, long time. As the story goes, once upon a time Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. DVD-by-mail is really slow, so it was absolutely essential that at least one of this week's DVDs was good enough to entertain you for your Friday night movie. Too many Fridays with only bad movies, and you'd surely unsubscribe. A good recommendation system was key. (I guess there was also some interesting math around trying to make sure to rent out as much of the inventory as possible each week, since having a zillion copies of the most recent blockbuster, which would be popular this month and then die out next month, was not really viable.) Eventually though, Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less: just stop watching and switch to a new movie. Moreover, it was perfectly fine if everyone watched the same blockbuster. In fact, it was better, because they could cache it at your ISP and caches always work better if people are boring and average. Worse, as the story goes, Netflix noticed a pattern: the more hours people watch, the less likely they are to cancel. (This makes sense: the more hours you spend on Netflix, the more you feel like you "need" it.) And with new people trying the service at a fixed or proportional rate, higher retention translates directly to faster growth. When I heard this was also when I learned the word "satisficing," which essentially means searching through sludge not for the best option, but for a good enough option. Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business. The thing is, you don't need a risky, privacy-invading profile to recommend a mainstream movie. Mainstream movies are specially designed to be inoffensive to just about everyone. My Netflix recommendations screen is no longer "Recommended for you," it's "New Releases," and then "Trending Now," and "Watch it again." As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away. Some very expensive A/B testers determined that this is what makes me watch the most hours of mindless TV. Their revenues keep going up. And they don't even need to invade my privacy to do it. Who am I to say they're wrong?
Netflix may be doing well in the sense that they have lots of revenue, but they're doing awful in justifying why they're worth the cost. I'm convinced that Netflix has less than 200 offerings in total, at least here in Canada. Most of those are going to be things that I would never want to watch, leaving me with 50 offerings. That's just not enough to justify using the service for more than a year, and I think a lot of people are starting to catch on to the fact that Netflix isn't what it used to be.
You could still see your old ratings on the DVD/Blu-ray side, and even still mark "not interested" there. I used to love seeing the predicted rating, and how often it was right or nearly right.
I seem to recall reading that the algorithm that won the prize 'proved' that up/down ratings were as predictive as the 5-star system? My results disagree.
At least they eventually added a two-thumbs-up option. Slightly better than binary. I resort to thumbs-down on stuff I don't want to see (sometimes even though I haven't watched it).