Netflix is removing offline downloads from its Windows app | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is removing offline downloads from its Windows app

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Coming soon: A new Windows app experience

The update includes access to live events, compatibility with ad- supported plans, and more! Downloads will no longer be supported, but you can continue to watch TV shows and movies offline on a supported mobile device.

All these streaming downloads are still worse experience than torrent. Can't download 4K (and can't stream one because it thinks your connection is too slow). Downloads expire in 30 days. And let's not forget geolocked content, hard to search catalog, lack of subtitles, etc.

They're really intent on worsening their value proposition

I think nobody’s discussed yet just how few people likely use the Windows Store app version of Netflix.

Windows has basically no marketshare on tablets compared to iOS and Android. You can kind of sort of consider the Surface Pro to be one but those users are using them much more like traditional PCs.

The Windows Store not even that popular within Windows itself.

I’m not that surprised that Netflix isn’t prioritizing support for features on that platform.

At least for me it's my primary use for Netflix. I know I'm a statistic of one but when travelling I carry a company laptop and don't intend to carry a tablet as well for entertainment.

I don’t mean this as an insult, but I am surprised whenever I hear of someone using a work laptop for personal use. So much risk for very little upside.

Netflix app is available on windows store (aka not blocked by IT). I carry the laptop cause I need it for work, I don't want to carry an additional large screen device.

I have always just dealt with a second device because I have no interest in doing anything on my work system that isn’t work.

That includes basic stuff like checking personal email on a large screen.

Activity monitoring software is far too common for me to be personally comfortable with doing something as basic as watch Netflix on a work system. All it takes is one screenshot of a romance scene for my company to accuse me of watching porn on my work system.

An iPad added to your bag won’t break your back or your bank.

There's not much risk in accessing your Netflix account from a work device.

Low risk but very high consequences.

Are you willing to bet your primary method of paying your bills and funding your entire existence that your company isn’t using monitoring software and that you’ll never accidentally pull up a NSFW scene on Netflix?

To me, a $329 iPad is a pretty cheap price to pay to never have to worry about that.

I understand your mindset and also live this way, but we are the outliers. Normal people don't see a risk with this, and the upside is that it's there.

you need that app to watch in higher qualities due to drm and/or hdr. the browser only supports sdr upto hd or fullhd iirc.

regardless it is a baseless thing to say for a service we pay for. if this happens in macos we would see disproportionate uproar compared to their market share.

That isn't correct. Edge has always supported the same resolutions and HDR as the app, and Chrome now does as well if you have the correct combination of hardware.

MacOS has literally never had an app due to it's market share, or any download functionality at all, and Netflix blocked the iOS app from running, so I am unsure why you'd bring that up.

Netflix's value proposition is no longer what it was even a decade ago.

Competitors and alternatives to 'netflix-&-chill' exist at lower price points.

I'm not sure why folks are still giving Netflix money.

We give money because they still have good value proposition.

Or we forget to cancel

Does Netflix still have that pretty cool feature where they paused your subscription if you didn't use it for a few months? It was very cool seeing it happen when I had my Netflix account!

I think most of these services should just not charge you if, during any given payment period, you don't use the service. If I go to the trouble of canceling I'm likely not coming back; especially since the friction for re-subscribing is higher than just logging in and it automatically being 'unpaused'. I'm also more likely to cancel a service if I haven't used it for three months and see its cost me $60 just to have.

Back in dvd shipping era I found myself with netflix subscription that I didn't use for a very very long time. I asked if they can give me some credits or discounts or anything really. The answer was no. They never got another cent from me since.

they stopped my neflix streaming, because I didn't use it as much.

And just recently they stopped my dvd service because there's no market for people like me. 9I was actively using - it had access to all the good movies)

I can't help but think of temple grandin and comfortably guiding cattle to the "endgame"

https://www.grandin.com/design/curved.handling.facilities.ht...

Bundled w/T-Mobile

Netflix feels like they made a very bad bet that their technology was some sort of leading advantage (which was silly because if BitTorrent exists then fairly obviously...no it wasn't).

It has the advantage over torrent that you don’t have to hide yourself behind a VPNs to keep from getting sued for illegal doings.

The point is that if an ad hoc distributed network of unfunded peers can do it, the barrier to entry is not that high for any well funded major enterprise which wants a slice of the pie.

Basically I'd be curious to know if they felt internally that they'd transition to a service provider or something if they had to.

The plethora of streaming services suggest you’re correct in the barrier not being that high.

On other hand you needed VPN to get interesting content... So quite a wash, I don't know where they are now with geoblocking.

That's not a technology moat, that's a copyright moat.

Presumably by competitors and alternatives, you aren't strictly referring to streaming platforms. What of it? People still want to stream film and tv, and among legal platforms Netflix is still tops.

Could be that they don't use internet so they have no idea how to get those cheaper options.

I agree that there are competitors but I think the obvious answer is that Netflix has content.

There is a laundry list of specific shows that have a wide following on Netflix.

Here’s a list of 100 critically acclaimed ones: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-netflix-show...

They’re starting to do live sports as well, like NFL games.

I would say that all the major streaming services are gradually becoming roughly equal.

Speculating here: maybe they found out that it was easier to bypass DRM on windows? So they'd rather shut it down.

I would guess it's pressure from rightsholders, assuming whoever made this call inside of netflix knows this isn't a good or common way to get or create pirated versions of media. I don't think defeating DRM on at-rest files is going to be any easier than the DRM on streamed chunks of files.

"Microsoft PlayReady - complete client identity compromise": https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2024/May/5

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40308261

I'm a Windows developer.

If any Netflix engs would like help supporting this on Windows like their other platforms, I would be happy to help out.

Netflix salaries can pay for any imaginable feature, this is a business decision, not a technical problem.

Some netflix programmers make more than some neurosurgeons according to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...

How awful way to announce a redesign, is dark comedy a la Coen Brothers.

For the affected users who use that feature, at least is available on the browser? For at least Chrome desktop on Windows should work, not sure about Firefox. YouTube Premium just recently enable the feature for Firefox (or Firefox for YouTube, don't know).

> Netflix is removing offline downloads from its Windows app

Yeah, but who uses that...?! I didn't even knew it existed.

Yet another area where piracy offers the superior watching experience.

I feel piracy offers a superior watching experience in all areas once you set it up. I guess the setup part is where Netflix is better?

There's also that pesky thing called a conscience that makes people prefer legitimate sources first where possible even if the "watching experience" is inferior

If I was giving money to groups of attorneys so they can lobby for laws to persecute individuals, build locked down computing platforms, and generally work to destroy the open Internet, that would weigh pretty heavily on my conscience.

Personally, I have a conscience which informs me not supporting platforms. Why can’t I pay the artist directly, with no middlemen taking a cut? Distribution is easy. Put a QR code which links to some industry website that has crypto wallets for each of the artists involved on a project. I want my money to go to them directly.

Until the day where artists start posting their wallet addresses, I’ll keep pirating. The guilds should really get on with being the equivalent of a Patreon.

Why a crypto wallet. Why not a normal bank account? What exactly, does crypto help with?

I generally agree with what you’re saying, but in Netflix’s case, much of the stuff that’s actually worth watching is made by none other than Netflix.

This is a good point. I for one will not be watching the movie Atlas until I see bit coin wallet addresses for all 700+ people listed here: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14856980/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_...

I just want to watch things without paying 5$ ppv or 100$ in combined subscriptions.

Charge me $15/mo to watch what I want and they would have my money forever. I would never torrent again.

Then do something else with your $15 a month. No one is entitled to content at their desired price.

Entitled no, but I don’t pirate and I don’t pay for streaming either because I simply don’t enjoy the product from any of them.

If I haven’t watched anything in 3 months the value proposition just isn’t there so I cancel. Any yea I’ve cancelled every service because of that basic formula.

Why are you defending monopolies?

Are you claiming Netflix is a monopoly in streaming?

Can I watch same show on any website of my choice?

Can author really choose not to publish in top 3 streaming services?

One guy preferred the experience of using my car to getting his own, so he took it. I suppose it was convenient for him, and a lot cheaper than paying anyone, but I did not enjoy it.

Many differentiate between goods which are not exclusive, but your argument doesn’t.

You can buy individual seasons of shows for about $15-$25 each.

$5 for a rental is nothing, and you don't need to subscribe to everything at once to watch what you want.

It’s not really cheap in time or money (hard drives cost money, if you want a good experience the server needs to be on basically all the time which costs meaningful amounts in energy use) but enough things can’t be had any other way that if I want them I’m gonna be doing that regardless… may as well get everything high-quality and in one interface, then.

I would much, much rather just pay some reasonable amount to achieve similar results, but you literally can’t.

Maybe it wouldn't please some, but 1080p is good enough for me, and so a €14/month server from a seedbox provider with a 3TB drive is terrific. It has one click installers for Plex and all the various pirate tools. It's a little slow if transcoding, but again, good enough.

I know there are more works out of the box piracy solutions—I meant that you can’t simply pay for a non-piracy “everything, including these 70 things that can’t actually be purchased at any price right now, in one streaming interface and high-quality”. It’s not an option. I see now that the way I phrased that was unclear.

Ah, yes..I thought you were saying a high-end piracy setup is expensive[1], and it is. So I was trying to say a "good enough" one is cheap.

[1] Though probably never as expensive as the sum of all the legal à la carte services for anything you might want to see.

A reasonable NAS these days is ~£400, with disk.

A Netflix subscription is £17. Pays for itself in two years if you have no other services

The VPN cost to keep from getting sued should be included in that price.

Is that even a risk?

Maybe. A more significant risk is being hassled or throttled by an ISP if (and essentially only if) you're doing (not necessarily illegal[1]) P2P file transfers on their network.

At least given the lack of alternative ISP options in my area, I'd rather pay Mullvad €5/month than assume this risk.

[1] https://i.redd.it/jzf5jegdyb171.png

Or dispense with the hard drives and server, rip or download immediately before watching, and delete immediately afterwards.

Think of it as a video store with one hour delivery.

For backups, assume that if it's readily available via physical media or piracy, it's easily replaced, archiving anything obscure or important by the usual means (hard drive, cloud, tape).

WRT your last point: given that essentially all Blu-ray and streaming releases are immediately and widely pirated anyway, why are official DRM-free downloads of at least older back catalog titles still not a thing? Perhaps in conjunction with a streaming service with a rotating selection that offers discounts to subscribers on currently-streaming titles, à la Game Pass?

I set up my own media server and run Infuse on the AppleTV. For my wife and kids, it's the ultimate setup.

Everything is in one place (not spread across different apps), the UI is consistent and not buggy (official apps can be terrible at times). All they do is put in a request to dad and their TV show or movie appears shortly after in the "newly added" section on the TV. Not only that, but content doesn't disappear from one service without warning. It's always going to be there, and I get to curate the kids content.

It require piracy, and the kids don't know that, but it's the only way to get this setup.

It doesn’t require copyright infringement. If you wanted, you could buy and rip blurays.

Not OP, but I'm not going to pay money and spend more time and effort to still break the law for the eventual-same result. Ripping DVDs and Bluray disks requires breaking the encryption. The keys have leaked, it's relatively easy, but it's still objectively illegal here in the great white North.

Yea, you’re right.

Yeah the only reason I pay for streaming services is convenience of finding new content. Disney plus is crack for kids.

I missed the boat for some of the invite only private trackers and I don't have enough time to set up the crazy cool torrent streaming equivalents. Kid stuff is so hard to find on the bay.

One day I'll take a week off of work and get my Xbox Kodi set up right with my stream box to do it.

Don't look into stremio

I won't and you're not a gentleman and a scholar ;)

Pretty sad. They are so lucky it's impossible to run something else on Windows that can record what is on a screen into a file. If such a capability existed, what would they do? /s

You should try doing that for the Netflix app. It’ll surely work, because nobody’s ever thought of that hole before!

Unless you want the DRM to limit the delivered resolution to a pretty low point then Windows cannot see into the encrypted video memory, nor can anything in userland.

What if we load our video rip code as a kernel driver? Has this been done to circumvent Windows Netflix DRM?

It doesn't matter because of HDCP.

Isn’t HDCP primarily concerned with transmission of protected content to TVs and such?

If we can load code into the kernel of the device doing the video decode, how can the DRM prevent us from just dumping the data as it’s being decrypted / streamed?

Then you won't have signed drivers so it will fail.

You're being sarcastic but what you said is literally true thanks to the cancer that is HDCP

HDCP is easy enough to downgrade and then remove.

My interpretation is that this change is the result of the "Recall" feature on Windows which captures the activity on the machine... does the timing line up for that to be plausible?

That wouldn’t affect Netflix at all, since it respects the protected draw or secure draw or whatever rights management term it is

Microsoft Information Protection

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/information-protection/dev...

It's unlikely that recall will be able to bypass the DRM on netflix

It's not that we can't afford to pay for the content, it's that we don't want to pay the amount they want to charge. The cost/price disfunction in entertainment is amazing, you would think by now it would be trending closer to cost, but no: *wood, Bolly and Holly, is owned by Lawyers and Financiers who love that massive 3x speculative gain component, and don't want to settle for an ROI which matches the real world 7% longterm across all investment. The thing is, that across hit and miss, they probably DO match the trend. But this is so much more exciting for them, than simply producing material with a lower ROI expectation.

Chasing "gone with the wind" box office success is more gooder better than chasing "I love lucy" success.

I sometimes wish that the idea a film was a box office smash had never taken hold, and that movies were 10c entry and bring your own coke was fine. Watch at home is now trending up to a spend per month which exceeds the amount I ever used to spend to go and watch the same material in a cinema.

I seriously miss FTA. I even miss the shitty ads we had when it was 3-4 FTA channels. I miss the sense of communal alignment when people watched entertainment broadly inside the same window of time. I miss the back-pressure that a TV station doing binge watch has to actually think about it, rather than just feed one ep. into another.

I kinda miss the midnight switch-off and the vanishing dot in the middle with the Ooooooooooooooooooo RF tone.

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