Netflix is turning into cable TV | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is turning into cable TV

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71 pointsmfiguiere100 comments

It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It's a pretty unremarkable movie, but I remembered liking it as a kid for whatever reason and wanted to see it again.

Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it?

I would kind of love it if there were a modern day TNT / TBS / USA that had all the movies you half-remembered from long ago, but Hollywood can't get their heads out of their asses long enough in the scramble for each individual property to have its own streaming service to pick up literal free money that is just sitting there.

This is exactly why I miss the old, neighborhood, mom-and-pop DVD-rental store. The place near my apartment back in the early-2000s pretty much never removed anything from the shelves, so you could find almost any movie ever made. You just had to wipe the dust off some of them.

Same, except the one in my hometown hadn't even thrown out the VHS tapes yet. There were still aisles full of early 80s movies in their faded, original edition boxes that had probably been there since the store first opened.

I remember finding "Breakin'" (the original, not Electric Boogaloo) in like 2003 when I was still in high school.

The owner was a pretty cool dude, I remember apologizing for returning some cheesy sci-fi flick really late after forgetting I had it. He capped my late fees to one day and said "Don't worry about it, you're the only one who ever rents that."

You had me at "Breakin'". That owner is the coolest guy in your hometown. LOL

If you can erase the past, you can control the population by influencing their collective memory.

are you implying that the collapse of mom and pop DVD rental stores is part of a plot to manipulate society?

Maybe not directly. But killjoywashere makes an interesting point. My understanding, for example, is that the official Saturday Night Live clips on YouTube have been silently edited to remove "problematic" skits.

The collapse of rent-what-you-want has definitely helped the rise of rent-what-we-want

You can rent movies online though. Steaming catalogs are a moving target but online rental catalogs usually have most stuff available. You also don’t need to drive down to the store and risk getting a scratched up disk that skips over a key scene when renting online.

To go back to the OP’s example, Prime has Taking Care of Business available for rental for about $5: https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Business-James-Belushi/dp...

Any movie ever made in the US, that is…

It depended. I mean, nobody's going to have everything. It wasn't too hard to come by _man bites dog_ or _run lola run_. European art house stuff. A different place had a deep Spanish selection. In my part of the u.s. southwest, Bollywood, Japan and Korea were under-represented.

I'd imagine different proprietors had different tastes. See something they liked, if it rented, look for more of that flavor.

>it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access

It's not the studio, it's whatever local rightsholder owns it for your country. Where I am (Canada) it tends to be Bell, which is a content creator, ISP, and cable providing monopsonist. If they don't want to sell the rights, or put the price too high, the streaming services won't have it.

Long story short, blame your local politically-connected middle man and fire up the torrents

Don't even get me started on the absurdity that is region-locked content in the age of the Internet.

> Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it?

Just wanted to say that's it's surreal to be making a comment in more time than it probably takes to search for and start watching that movie on the Web.

There should be a version of the bible where Jesus gets taken to Pilate immediate after pirating the fish and loaves.

Oh, I already found it and watched it. It's just silly it wasn't possible to do that with any of the services I pay for.

> Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it?

It will be available to any of those streaming services that the studio deals to take if they want to.

But those services buy x number of titles for y amount of money and your film is very obscure and would not get watched enough to justify a streaming service selecting it.

It is trivially available for an individual transaction, where the economics of making it available make more sense (but not infinite sense, listing/encoding/ingesting etc are not free, and people assume even the most obscure film generates more revenue than it actually does).

Odd argument, in the heyday of cable TV you had no control over what you could watch, it was just whatever TNT/TBA/USA decided to air that night. Not sure how your anecdote indicates netflix is doing a bad job at being cable tv.

True, the on-demand part is better, but I'm mostly talking about the breadth of the catalog. Turner was able to get broadcast rights to a whole bunch of movies that the studios didn't really know what to do with. This is partly why The Shawshank Redemption is now one of the most beloved movies of all time. It was pretty lackluster at the box office, but then in the late 90s and 2000s it was just on TV all. the. time. A lot of people who might not otherwise have watched it got to see it.

On demand is not that helpful if you don't want to watch any of the things that are available.

I remember visiting the UK in 2000, and there was a movie on TV that looked familiar, called Filofax. Me and my friends eventually recalled it was the movie called Taking Care of Business in N. America.

Interestingly, looking it up just now on Wikipedia it appears to be the first screenplay JJ Abrams wrote.

It is! It also had Gates McFadden (Dr Beverly Crusher) and John De Lancie (Q). A surprising amount of Star Trek crossover.

In the U.K. I can rent that with a couple of clicks for £3.50 from half a dozen stores including Apple, Amazon and youtube. Inflation adjusted renting the vhs in the 90s cost £5.90.

Hulu streaming + a couple of other crappy channels. lots of mid-to-low tier media there, but also some gems.

sometimes you just want a sloppy cheeseburger, and same idea in the TV context.

The free ad supported streaming services are where these kind of movies are ending up now. Services like Tubi, Freevee, Pluto.

looks like its on Disney+ Canada, but agreed that is extremely limited given the age of the film:

https://disneyplus.com/movies/taking-care-of-business/1cZIoq...

And of course it's available on the pirate bay.

As usual, it's a service problem.

Netflix produced some interesting original shows. Most of them got canceled after a single season, on a cliff-hanger. That got frustrating, so we stopped watching Netflix original shows. Then we stopped watching Netflix. Then we canceled Netflix.

I am fine with "extra scene to setup the next season cliffhanger", but sometimes the "mainline story" isn't even finished. The season just stops at some point before the payoff, then gets cancelled in the off-season.

You know it. I won't watch a Netflix series until the series finale. I don't need any more rugs pulled out from under me.

I feel the same way, but at this point, I have extended the same policy to Disney and Amazon to at least some degree. If I can't verify that the show has a decent conclusion at the end of what is already released, I avoid it.

If it’s not available in a box set at the library, I won’t get it.

If it is, well I got it from the library and saved a subscription.

Fair point, and I'm with you on that. If a season is truly a self-contained plot, like "Fargo" or "Reacher" or "True Detective", fine. I'll start watching once the whole season's available. If each season is an act of a larger story, no way.

Right? We just canceled Netflix after 15 years or so of subscription.

Their content discovery is garbage, their licensing decisions questionable, and their original content typically B- or C- grade.

Sure, I liked Sandman. But a light bulb flipped when I watched prime and saw maybe 60% of the content looked interested. Netflix was maybe 2%. Hulu near 25% without add-ons.

You want customer loyalty? Add a new season to recently canceled things, with extraordinarily high quality. That's what kept me engaged for several years!

Ironically I find Prime to be the worst platform. Aside from The Boys and Star Trek (most of which isn’t on Prime anyway) I can’t think of much I watched in the last 5 years that impressed me.

The Tick was amusing, but that’s quite old now. I did like Rings Of Power too, despite its many flaws. But The Boys is probably the only stand-out show on that platform.

It’s also got a horrifically bad UI too.

Netflix can definitely be hit and miss but so are all the streaming services. Disney over milked Star Wars and Marvel. Apple has some beautiful looking shows but a lot of them are forgettable. Because nobody is sharing licenses it means everyone is rushing out content for contents sake. It’s the same race to the bottom that you see with YouTube / Twitch streamers.

If you like The Boys, you may also enjoy Gen V.

Personally, I liked Gen V more than The Boys, and that is saying alot

If Amazon has good content they're not doing a great job advertising it, my impression of Amazon original shows is basically a knock-off versions of existing shows.

This has been happening for years with the spawning of all these streaming services.

At one point a lot of content was on Netflix but now it’s been bundled into the owners own streaming platform.

So we’ve effectively went from cable tv to digital streaming freedom and almost back to square one.

Most of those owners are bleeding out, so to stanch the flow they are licensing their content to other companies like...netflix.

It'll end up with a little oligarchy of a small number of streamers and then quality will plummet and ads will be unavoidable.

And pirate bay will once again be the place to go

You both are using future tense for something that's already happening for at least a year now.

It still is, for me. And 1337x.

one company (netflix) delivering the majority of streaming content wasn’t “digital streaming freedom”. you enjoyed the price compared to cable. it went from $100+/mo to $10/mo

and now the price is going back to where it was to get a similar content experience

> similar content experience

You mean 5 channels of shopping, 1 channel for black programming, several in Spanish, 10 news channels all with BREAKING NEWS, sports channels that I don’t watch, kids channels that I don’t want, reruns of Law and Order and COPS, 1 or 2 female-oriented channels like Hallmark, reality TV, cooking and baking TV, America’s Bachelor…

No thanks. I’ll keep my $100/month.

No, you’d still end paying that but in subscriptions to several streaming services and then some extras to rent or buy shows that are not freely available anymore. In the meantime those other channels that a smaller number of people watched just get cancelled.

Unbundling was never going to make watching cheaper unless you limited the shows you watched and were lucky enough that they shows you wanted were available on the same services.

These fragmented "plus" services ultimately led me to stop watching them altogether. Subscribing to each one becomes costly, and I don't find them compelling enough to justify the expense. In fact, I can't even recall the last Star Wars movie I watched.

We've been okay cycling through them every 6 months or so

While I agree that there is ongoing enshittification, I do not think it's fair to say we're back at square one yet or any time soon. With Cable I am forced to buy a single ~$70+ plan with 100s of channels I don't need. With the streamers, at least I can get their ~$20 options independently.

Yep! And you can alternate from month to month, you don't need to get ALL STREAMING SERVICES every single month. Unsubscribing is extremely easy.

Now try to disconnect your cable and reconnect it months after months.

We are nowhere near the cost and the pain of cable

I just want a 4K Originals Plan with 1 screen.

Features:

    - Only Netflix Original content (in 4K)
    - 1 screen, since password sharing isn’t allowed anyways
    - No ads
    - No WWE
    - No smartphone games
    - No licensed content (which seems to be mostly 1080p anyways), since I can watch that elsewhere

I will offer $14/mo, at most.

Why should I be forced to pay for a bunch of stuff I don’t want or can’t use?

This is why I don’t have a Netflix subscription.

I subscribed for one month back in December to see how good/bad it was, and I was not impressed at all for $23/mo. The licensed content almost exclusively being 1080p just added insult to injury.

We're experiencing a re-bundling, you'll have to wait for the next unbundling.

It's insanity. I can't even watch 1080p content from most streaming providers on my desktop. It's always capped to 720p on Chrome/Win11. And even when a service offers 4K, the bitrate is abysmal. Trying to watch Dune via HBOMax you can see color banding and blocking throughout the entire movie.

> It's always capped to 720p on Chrome/Win11.

Netflix appear to be testing 1080p in Chrome for Windows, and support it in Chrome for Mac now.

The best I can do is 5.

Sometimes I wonder what our media landscape would look like if exclusive licensing deals were prohibited. You still own your IP, you can sell it, but whatever price you set, it's the price that anyone who is interested in your product is allowed to buy.

I'm not sure how this would interact with companies that both create and distribute content. They'd either be forced to come up with a price, or else maybe that combination of services would be disallowed under an extension of market consolidation/monopoly rules?

I dunno, all I know is that the current regime sucks in everything from streaming to sports broadcasts.

Radio has compulsory licensing. It seems to work ok. And the dvd era Netflix owed their existence to 1st sale doctrine. But the studios would fight it to the bitter end.

What about the opposite? Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.

* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.

* As michael1999 suggested, compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.

* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.

* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.

Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:

* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.

EDIT: The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!

[1] Something I understand already happens

> a graveyard of prematurely canceled originals

This is the crux of the issue for me. I lost interest in even trying new Netflix shows because they developed a reputation for cancelling lots of good, not great, shows with loyal followings because they weren't pulling in blockbuster viewership numbers on the level of Stranger Things. This spray and pray strategy is fundamentally disrespectful to the audience.

And the ridiculous thing is, streaming services should be better for slow burning, loyalty building IP. It doesn't matter when your friend tells you about the thing they like, you can start from the start anytime.

The loyal fans will watch and rewatch the old episodes for years and years to come.

This cancel early and often model is the exact opposite of the business model streaming services should use.

I feel like mainstream TV wasn't much better at that. The vast majority of TV shows I got into seemed to get cancelled after 1-2 seasons.

While they seem to have a bad track record by public opinion, it's unclear how much worse Netflix was at this.

I did a quick google to see if I could find any statistics, I got bored looking for some better data but did find this article claiming that from 2009-2012 "on average, 65% of new network television series will be canceled within their first season.": https://screenrant.com/tv-success-rate-canceled-shows/

Could be, I'm not really old enough to remember how linear TV dealt with new television series. Perhaps it is mainly a problem of perception. When you turn on the hotel TV and see a Law & Order rerun playing for the umpeenth time you aren't really thinking about all the other shows that never got beyond a pilot because they couldn't outperform a juggernaut like Law & Order and earn a slot in the schedule.

The way Netflix seems to drive every season into a cliffhanger ending and then cancel seems pretty short-sighted though. If they just let stories be a little more self-contained, then these one-season shows (dare I say "miniseries"?) would accumulate into a catalog of stories that are actually worth a damn for the audiences that find them later. Every piece of content in the library that they don't have to pay to license can earn back an ROI from a niche audience over a much longer period of time since they don't have to optimize the limited number of hours in the schedule like linear TV.

I think there is an emotional difference also that plays a role here. With traditional TV, people I think were maybe more accustomed to the idea of "you get what you get". Don't like what's on? You can change the channel, but you can't pick out exactly what you want, so you have to get used to settling for "good enough". So you leave Law & Order playing in the background even if, really, police procedurals aren't something that inspire passion in you. But with streaming, there is the illusion of infinite choice. The magic of it is getting exactly what you want exactly when you want it, and the magic fizzles the moment the thing you like and very much want to continue watching gets unceremoniously cancelled. It feels like having a choice taken away.

Didn't they cancel Stranger Things because the viewership dropped a little?

I don't follow it closely enough to know. I would assume because the child actors were aging out of their roles.

Related today:

Netflix adds 13.1M subscribers, tops revenue estimates

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111287

I'll always have some sympathy for Netflix because they were effectively first.

I remember waiting patiently for Netflix to arrive in Australia, and then as soon as it did arrive, a flood of competitors decided to "me too" into the party. They were too afraid to be first, so I've stuck with Netflix out of respect for their blazing the trail.

The competitors such as Disney and Paramount have caused the enshittification by fracturing the offerings; walling off their IP into their own individual gardens rather than licensing it out.

Ideally there would be multiple Netflix equivalents, with slightly differing value propositions, but with significant overlap in content licensed from the likes of Disney and Paramount.

That's not the present we've found ourselves in though. It's an interesting outcome of how "the market" works.

I feel like I'm an apologist for Netflix, and so I must be to some extent, but Netflix are reacting to the market it finds itself in, in order to remain viable.

netflix is also the only independent streaming service i am aware of. i am not interested in services owned by apple, disney or amazon or any major film studio.

They pivoted over ten years ago to literally “become HBO” and while that was a pretty weak vision, I think they succeeded.

They didn't really have a choice. They knew everyone else would eventually create their own streaming service for their own content, so they needed content of their own.

They did have a choice to create a platform to commoditize other streaming services by creating a hardware platform for the living room, but instead they figured they had a better chance at playing in the smaller content creation market. Netflix could have kept and built Roku and at this point been in a better long term position with more categories of entertainment.

If by "become HBO" you mean become as bad as the current state of HBO, sure, in which 99% of the content is trash but there's a show or two that are still decent.

Tragically most Netflix originals are hot garbage. I'm repeatedly amazed at how BAD television is today. I guess I pay for Netflix because every so often there's a show like The Crown which is actually commendable, even if I don't strictly love it.

It's becoming TV. All it needs is a live news & sports section and you'd never need to leave the Netflix app.

Then we're back to bundling.

Exactly what is keeping us from having a system where viewers just directly pay content creators? (And the likes of Game of Thrones is distributed therein?)

Distributed risk. Publisher's lose money on lots of content under the context of earning it on others. If somehow you could mega selectively pick it would be very expensive.

There's a lot of movies available to "rent" or buy for a couple dollars, but more people pay for bundles than a la cart.

Ever since HBO merged with Discovery, the content library has become garbage. It’s all reality shows, real housewives, tons of low effort content. HBO used to be the spot for edgy/racy content, great movies and really great shows.

You have to think big.

The market for trash TV is enormous.

HBO had saturated the quality market for a long time. If it wanted to grow, it needed trash.

AND you can anyway watch the HBO shows. It's not like they are removed..

Unless you’re being sarcastic, go try and watch West World on Max. As a bonus, you will discover one of the reasons we cancelled Max.

Eh, a couple of originals out of 100s HBO has produced. I am okay with that.

Probably one of the reasons it rebranded as "Max"

“Live long enough to become the villain.” I guess we should all be more cynical

Now that it’s about eyeballs and ad buys, streaming will shed the narrowcasting and will run back to broadcasting and a more modern monoculture.

"Netflix is shit". "No one watches Netflix anymore". "They cancel all the good shows". "There's nothing worth watching anyways". "Banning account sharing was a boneheaded move and everyone is going to cancel because of it". "Netflix is worse than cable now".

Also:

> Netflix tops Wall Street revenue estimates and adds a record 13.1 million subscribers in the last quarter.

At some point all the terminally online people on places like Reddit and HN have to realize that they don't represent the general population.

You have to be nuanced about those numbers. My parents, who are definitely not Redditors and were concerned that I frequent news page for Hackers, have gotten into the habit of cycling through the streamers every few months. How many of those 13.1 M are genuinely new versus returning subs who will cancel in 3-6 months and contribute to Disney+/Prime/Paramount/etc "growth" (again)?

25% of Netflix subscribers churn every year, so they have to reacquire all their customers every 4 years. Other streaming services like Starz have 100% customer churn per year! Tough business.

> it's got old movies

An incredibly small catalogue of old movies

> it's got WWE

Not in my region

Perhaps enshittification is like the capitalistic version of carcinization [0]. Stuff like TV or the music labels or the movie industry became the way they are because it has been proven to generate the most revenue. When a new service comes out after some time it naturally tends to gravitate to the proven strategies of money making which in turn makes it seem we are going "back to the cable days".

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

Netflix's situation was unsustainable. We were getting content very cheaply because they were skirting a lot of agreements that made sure all the people in the process got paid. Most of big tech's innovation was just doing this: skirting laws and agreements and cutting people out of the gains.

Also, companies initially allowed netflix to stream their assets because it was at first thought of as free money. Example: "We are not going to loose viewers by letting them stream our Breaking Bad, why not?"

however, cannibalizations did occur, and netflix inevitably became a competitor.

Once upon a time streaming required the highest end hardware and software you could get your hands on. This meant that only a company (i.e. Netflix) that specialized in streamimg services could offer such expertise, thus if you wanted your content streamed you would sign an agreement with them.

Nowadays "streaming engineers" are a lot more available for building a company's streamimg platform and costs have gone down significantly so everyone is just ending the deals and getting back their stuff

"Most of big tech's innovation was just doing this: skirting laws and agreements and cutting people out of the gains."

Interesting cuz the vast majority of any tech innovation is cutting people out and using fast and reliable machines to do work instead...

Ah yes, because Uber and Airbnb definitely cut people out of the mix

You think taxis and room renting are innovations of uber and Airbnb??

It seems like this is a consequence of the ZIRP era ending. Now that the disruptors can't justify their market growing business models with free investor cash, they reinvent whatever business they originally displaced. See Uber pricing being competitive with taxi pricing, and every tech startup turning into a B2B SaaS, and of course Netflix.

I saw a great piece about how every cable channel eventually ends up the same, even if originally specialised.

E.g.: Originally, MTV was the the MUSIC Television channel. Now it's reality TV and soap operas.

MTV is the Ridiculousness channel. I thought that's all they played.

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