Hacker News Reader

Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely shocked. Apparently I know nothing about consumer behavior.

Withering library, reneging on account sharing, poor quality streams, rising prices, addition of ads and so on.

Just how badly do they need to screw their customers for it to have consequences? Is their brand recognition just so strong that they can overcome all of that?

View on HN

The ugly truth is that the competition is largely worse. I recently wanted to watch a show only available via a third party thru Amazon prime, so I purchased a subscription (on top of prime), only to be served a show with adds every 10 minutes. It was truly awful

Which subscription (so I can avoid it)?

Paramount, Starz, any of them do the same thing.

Netflix is one of the most data-driven companies there is. They know exactly how much customers care about those things, as measured in dollars of revenue, and they account for it in their product and content decisions.

As a consumer, I wish that consumers as a whole were more price- and quality-sensitive and more ad-averse, since that would make it rational for companies to offer me better, cheaper products. But based on revealed preference, they’re not, so they don’t.

Give it time. Soon innovators dilemma will kick in and a cheaper service will appear and Netflix won’t be able to fight it because it will be locked in into their current commercial model. It will be the new Blockbuster story. I can already see the FT story title “The history repeats itself for Netflix”

If I were a entrepeneur in this space I'd call my startup "Blockbuster's Revenge"

The average person has 0 idea Netflix has made any changes at all :/

> poor quality streams

Relative to what? No one cares about this past a certain point.

Let's say relative to DVD quality. I can see how someone watching on a 6" display might not care, but when you invest in a half-decent 4K TV and pay for 4K Netflix, you wouldn't expect to see plainly obvious compression artifacts. Their color banding in dark scenes is atrocious, especially on 4K OLED TVs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com