Hacker News Reader

Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has the quality of streaming content gone massively downhill? We are in the era of the McDonald’s of streaming.

Everything is low quality mass market crap.

At this point I’m only watching pre 2016 content or foreign stuff. It’s just so bad.

And this is the stuff writers went striking over. I mean I’m not surprised they are threatened by AI, it’s not hard to copy American films and tv at this point.

It’s like no one, not even hbo appreciates the importance of artistry any more. It’s all data driven, but what you get then is standardized crap. It might work for some industries, but definitely not tv.

View on HN

It has. I was just having this conversation with a friend the other day. Despite Netflix having all their analytics/viewership data, they consistently crank out garbage. You might get one or two releases a year that are good, but that's it. I know its subjective, but the few shows that I enjoyed were cancelled or just shelved.

They weren’t perfect, but I want normal Hollywood studios to come back. There was a lot more on the line when it came to creating movies/series and a lot more effort went into creating them. It took actual talent to make something great, not data.

The same is happening in the music industry. I know pop music has more or less sounded the same throughout time...but these days its almost indistinguishable. Studios just pick a public figure to sing a generated song, it goes viral for a few months, rinse repeat. I have a hard time telling the difference between artists these days. Their vocal range/tone is almost identical in some cases.

We have an over abundance of choice when it comes to media and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Its now a chore to sort through the garbage and find actual talent.

Sorry for the rant!

No not everything is bad. Severance, The Bear, Succession off the top of my head are totally worth watching.

These are all great series, but they are also on three different streaming services, which from a consumer POV is exactly the problem. Everybody wants a marquee drama series to draw the punters in, but the punters don’t really want to be shelling out for every single streaming service just to watch the one good thing on each of them.

So a sizeable chunk of the potential audience picks one channel at a time & chops and changes between them, cutting revenues by 4x, or else they drop them altogether because it just gets boring trawling through the piles of low-grade content trying to find something worth watching.

When you broadcast a TV series you get Nilson ratings.

When you run the a streaming service you get data on when people go and take a toilet break.

This is not very useful for already existing catalog, but when you write new content there will be pressure to adapt the material to the data and so all the new stuff ends up being bland and boring ("we get 3% more viewership if the leading lady is blond with shoulder length hair", means that every tv show will be blond festival).

Nilsson Schmilsson — I think you meant Nielsen.

Though Nilsson Schmilsson makes for better conversation than tv ratings anyhow

It probably started with cable TV and the need for filler for things like the Disney Channel.

Myself, I'm catching up on all the films made before 1980.

If you want to go back further, Netflix's streaming service was worse than the DVD mail service (during its life span, of course) in terms of selection and cost. A good business finds ways to extract more value out of less capital over time.

I have to wonder why consumers so desire new content. Old films and TV shows have much the same entertainment value, and are vastly cheaper to stick through some AI to turn to HD and strip out the no-longer-politically-acceptable jokes.

There is also a wealth of content from other countries and languages, which could be translated with a little AI assistance to do lip sync etc.

With far more content than anyone could reasonably watch in a lifetime, I really don't see why anyone is investing big money into making new stuff.

Why would you feel the need to have AI "cleanse" older shows? Otherwise, I agree there is a rich history of films.

It really depends what the watcher desires... A lot of audiences will say "ewwe, I couldn't possibly let my children watch that, there are homophobic slurs in it".

Or parts are simply outdated and won't be understood by viewers - like a key element of a plot being that someone erased an answerphone tape - perhaps in todays world you'd replace that with messages showing one tick only...

Luckily there’s tons of movies that don’t have those slurs for people to show their kids.

I'm not a fan of this approach or instead of somebody jumping on a horse and riding two days and two nights they should be driving a SUV to destination, in a couple of hours and with AC. After a while movies become historical movies even if they started as contemporary. The 90s stay the 90s, the Old West is the Old West, etc.

My kids kind of enjoy older films where, for example, a person is on a land-line telephone and someone in another room picks up the receiver of a phone on the same line to listen in. They had no idea.

It's educational, historic.

I would prefer, for future generations not me, to leave the original dialogue. They could include an intro putting the show in context and explaining current value set shortcomings instead. It would seem more productive to learn from the past values and see how they evolved, not simply erase them.

Sensibilities and context change. Even my FIL hates movies from his generation because he sees them as poorly acted, regardless of any other aspects. He prefers more modern work.

> and strip out the no-longer-politically-acceptable jokes

Sounds like clearplay and vidangel have a new target consumer base and media pool.

Shocks me that steaming failed to implement that feature. Years ago, broadcast TV would air edited versions and the cost of that editing must be higher than a GUI feature to play one set of scenes instead of the full movie.

I would prefer if the current zeitgeist didn’t go around stripping older content of what it deems incorrect. There’s no guarantee that twenty years from now there won’t be a totally different view of what’s correct anyway.

> I have to wonder why consumers so desire new content.

After watching kids grow, it struck me.

That's how we learn. New stuff = different stuff = learning. My kids would look at the floor for a bit as babies, it would be interesting. After a while, watching the same "old" tiles would become boring, not much to learn from there (color, hardness, temperature, grip, etc). So they'd start looking for lint, pebbles, bits of paper or dirt on the floor, cause that was new :-)

Content creation piggy backs on this intuitive understanding and hacks it, since as you say, old content can have great educational and entertainment value.

But I think it all boils down to "new = potential for learning" being wired into our brains.

"New" to your kids was always something pre-existing, though.

"New content" is something that did not exist before.

I'm willing to bet that any given adult has a huge trove of extant material that would be interesting if they could only discover it. But the cult of the new opposes that.

People want the same content but new, shoveled out almost exactly the same but slightly different each time.

This is most obvious in certain “genres” of entertainment but it has always existed - romance novels, simplistic comics, etc.

I want to say this as kindly as possible, but if you wonder why consumers desire new content then I'd have to wonder how varied is your film and TV taste.

Times change, genres evolve and twist and become something new. Spaghetti Westerns blew up and had a mass craze, then died off. Weird westerns gained momentum and survived to this day. Film depictions of what the future looks like will be vastly different in the 60s/70s versus how it is today. Modern shows like Andor show that aspect of retrofuturism mixed with modern designs. Animation was mostly restricted to childrens work in comparison to today where you have things like Scavanger's Reign.

This is without talking about the change in attitudes towards various minority groups.

I think the parent is wondering why consumers care about novelty ("varied taste") instead of quality. Of course, you can have both or neither. I don't know, but the epics of Homer lasted thousands of years because, presumably, people thought they were just damn good. Will Andor, a disposable Disney show, be remembered in twenty years, let alone 100? Probably not.

I have to wonder why people listen to things other than 1940s big band music. 1940s big band music have much the same entertainment value as modern music, and are vastly cheaper.

I stream YouTube daily. Ted lasso is pretty good when I heard it in the background I started to watch it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com