Netflix kills casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Personally I watch so little tv/movies that any subscription was always overpaying. I still did it for a while, because the price wasn't high enough to push me to seek out other options.
I'm no longer subbing and moved on, but the right holders are seriously detached from reality if they think this is a sane business strategy
In general, iTunes content purchase licenses are owned in perpetuity.
You do need to download the bits and have the files on hand, as (a) Apple may lose the right to re-deliver the bits to you, or (b) you may change regions (e.g., move from Australia to Canada) and find the re-download isn't available in the new region.
A good deal of stories were published in 2018 about Apple revoking or removing content, but when threads are pulled, the examples generally fell into these two camps. If you had kept the content yourself, you got to keep enjoying it.
> Personally I watch so little tv/movies that any subscription was always overpaying
Agree there's a good chance many households could purchase their preferred shows for less than the "watch throwaway stuff" subscriptions -- and then own them. This suggests a more ideal pairing is purchasing, plus something like Pluto.
All my purchased music on iTunes disappeared. Luckily I had kept copies of the files.
1. Start chrome, navigate to tv.apple.com, click on the #1 show of the day (no problem)
2. The site tells me I can sign up for the TV service that I already have instead of offering a play button.
3. I click on the "sign up" which pauses for 10 seconds then tells me I'm already subscribed why did I hit the button you idiot.
4. I back arrow to the original page, it still asks me to sign up, hit F5 a couple of times to no effect.
5. Reload tv.apple.com from the start and navigate to the page, now it finally shows a play button.
6. Hit the play button but it gives me a popup saying that I need to verify the three digits off of the back of my credit card. I enter the digits and click the next button, but nothing happens.
7. Off to Google where I learn that if that happens you can log into accounts.apple.com first to avoid it.
8. I go through the login process on apple's site, which involves pulling out my phone to scan a QR code.
9. On the Apple site I try to go to the AppleTV+ options, which requires a second QR scan on my phone because it's apparently a different account.
10. On the site I verify that it shows the ATV+ subscription is active.
11. Return to tv.apple.com and click on the show to see that it again says I need to sign up to the service.
12. Click on the sign up button again to be told that I'm already subscribed.
13. Go back and reload the page entirely again so the play button reappears.
14. Click on the play button and get asked for the three digits again. Groan.
15. This time the next button actually works (miracle!) and it loads a second page talking about parental controls with another non-working button on the bottom.
16. I close the window and click on my profile in the upper right, verify that the parental controls are off.
17. Attempt to watch again, but again get stuck doing the 3 digit verify and get stuck on the parental controls window.
18. Go back to the settings and try turning on parental controls, which requires setting a PIN and doing another account verification, but leaving them on the most permissive settings.
19. Return to the site, to discover that it asks for the 3 digits yet again and then send me to that parental controls screen again.
20. Go back to settings and turn off parental controls because that didn't help.
21. Hit up Google again and find a person who suggests that switching browsers might help. I'm running the most common browser with no extensions that I use for these streaming sites because they can be such a pain in the ass, but sure.
22. Fire up Firefox with uMatrix and Adblock+ and have to do the login stuff yet again, but this time the show actually plays.
So to watch an hour of TV I had to spend over 30 minutes faffing about with the stupid website. It made me pine for the days of piracy when this was all so easy. I also downplayed how many times I had to do the reload dance to even get the play button to appear, going back to the start only worked about 1 time out of 3.
This isn't the only time I've struggled with streaming sites. Acorn for example simply refused to stream to my home. My wife is really into British mystery series and was pretty excited about it, but we had to drop it because their website simply refused to deliver the video and their tech support was completely unhelpful.
I have sympathy for you, that sounds hellish. But. You are aware that Apple has never been in the web content business, right? And I’ve never heard of anyone watching Apple TV from a browser. I didn’t even know that was possible. I thought the channel existed as a means to sell Apple hardware, because it does work beautifully on their devices
Now I do the math in my head, is it easier to just pay for the optimal way to do things instead of faffing about with all kinds of extra tools.
For this case I still have my 7-8 year old AppleTV 4k (1st gen). Haven't touched my "smart" TVs "smart" features. It threatened to install an AI update a while ago so took it offline.
ATV just keeps chugging away, our family uses it at least an hour a day, sometimes more - especially on the weekends. No lag, no slowness, every major streaming provider has an app for it - no-one wants to ignore one of the largest set-top box markets.
I did the same thing with Youtube, I pay them every month for Family Premium rather than figure out adblocking on about a dozen devices around the house - I do NOT want my kids being exposed to the kind of ads YT runs.
(Which was fun, you _cannot_ add children under 13 to a family account on Youtube, they MUST watch the ads, no way to pay for them to not see them...)
How much easier do you want it to be?
We are seeing FAANG-era companies switch from one to the other increasingly aggressively in the post ZERP era.
Still the best way to watch movies and shows.
Even if we pay $100 dollars every month to streaming services they will never not be too dumb to know how to make a convenient player that isn't hostile to its users.
They aren't dumb. They've realized that a large section of people will not bother, and aren't capable of sailing the high seas. Hostile behaviors won't change until it hits their bottom line, and because they are an extremely profitable company, it won't happen for a very long time.
Whatever happened to the media players that had built-in torrent searching and streaming?
Let them enshittify their apps and just tell your friends and family offline how to have a sane video viewing experience.
While traveling I was so pissed with the Apple TV player's performance on less-than-lightspeed internet connections, I ragecancelled my subscription and just yo ho ho'ed the last couple episodes of Severance
- Kodi on a TV that has been stripped of as much of Google as I could find, streams from the shares
- VLC on my PC, streams from the shares
- VLC on my phone which is always VPN'd to my local network and streams from the shares
- VLC on iPads on which I usually drag and drop some shows/movies ahead of time so I am not wifi-dependent
We've rebuilt cable boxes, but somehow they're even shittier than before.
My family won’t adapt to anything in the living room with a keyboard and mouse, and getting a reliable remote on any PC based solution is often problematic.
A bit convoluted I guess but it's still under 1k loc so w/e.
Or what about the Steam Controller? It's UX is similar to some nicer smart TV interfaces.
The real solution is you build an app that is nice for your family to use and just tells the boxes what to play. Sure hope your family doesn't use iPhones!
But Windows 7 is gone, and so is the TiVo Slide remote.
Turned out after I had already bought all that stuff due to flakiness that it was just some bad RAM that, really, was overkill - I could have just taken out the bad sticks and kept on rocking, in which case it probably would still be our DVR.
Cable TV wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty damn good, especially in allowing everybody to have access to just about every show that was produced.
That the "replacement" model is disappointing and a worse experience, really shouldn't come as a surprise.
These days, you'd have to pay me $20+ per hour to watch cable TV.
I did have basic cable for a few years in the early 2000s, and I did enjoy watching Star Trek TNG reruns. Because there wasn't any good alternative back then in the dark ages.
Netflix has produced a few decent shows but most of its stuff is "targeted towards morons" or "pure garbage that insults my intelligence" - Love is Blind, Is it Cake.
Commercials arent great but they are passive - easy to ignore. Much rather have a 3-minute commercials break where I can go to the bathroom or check my phone than having to actively scroll for 90 seconds switching from app to app and navigating their awful interfaces to get back to the show I was watching the other day.
But that's just me - glad you like our new television overlords, they certainly love anyone bashing cable tv!
I expect there to be more aggregate junk on Netflix just because there is no floor: networks have only 168 hours a week to fill, while Netflix can throw anything at all on the pile.
But it doesn't matter, since unlike the networks, they're all available at once. If something insults your intelligence, you don't watch it.
> But it doesn't matter... they're all available at once
I'm sorry but streaming everything is not a panacea. The spigot of worthwhile content is not endless. Ok great you binge-watched the entire season of Stranger Things over two nights. What will you watch tomorrow? And the day after? How much of the show do you actually remember? You lose out on the fun of discussing each individual episode with like-minded people, the wondering about how the next episode will resolve the last episodes drama, maybe watching an episode a second time and catching some additional detail.
I can assure you that watching great television - Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Larry Sanders Show, Homicide: Life on the Street - one episode per week is vastly superior to binge-watching it, even if it feels inconvenient in the moment. (Of course this is with the convenience of DVR so you can time-shift occasionally)
I use Fedora for this purpose, used to use Debian. You really just need a system with a web browser, file browser, media player and torrent client, and some way to remote control the computer from the couch (ideally from a phone).
Sadly, I don't know of any nice off the shelf solution for that last part. KDE Connect is an option but it kinda sucks. I've always had my own Remote Desktop web interface service type thing running on the machine (though Wayland has kinda thrown a wrench into that for now...)
If you use Kodi then you could try Kore (their remote app). I tried it once a long time ago and it was alright, but it's hard to beat a keyboard. I think similar apps exist for VLC and other media players, but I haven't looked into a solution that allows controlling the entire computer via a phone.
You need to be able to provide keyboard and mouse input from a phone. Not just control Kodi or VLC.
That said, at some point I think yes, you just get a bluetooth mouse/keyboard to go with it.
I don't do any live TV / DVR stuff. Most of the time I just use the browser or VLC.
Piracy
My guess is that adblock became too easy on smartphones, so by forcing people use the app on the TV it makes harder for people to bypass the ads.
That's pure speculation, as I don't have any subscription from netflix. But I've used this method with the HBO app and it works 90% of the time, so I'm assuming netflix has the same issue.
Not within native apps. Your only option is essentially dns/hosts based on both platforms however this can also be done on the router. On Android there is ReVanced I guess. But these are almost as technical as a pihole. What is the percent of people who know of DNS based adblock but not pihole?
Edit: And DNS adblocking can be done on android tv.
You also have the option to put a piehole in your network. It is pretty easy if you have some technical knowledge but I would say that it is generally out of reach for the general population(non-tech folks).
But on android you just open the settings, search for 'private vpn' and paste an url. This is way easier to do for someone with no technical background. Even chatgpt should be able to correctly guide you through these steps.
- Netflix
- Youtube without ads via Firefox+uBlock Origin
- Ripping DVDs and converting to .mp4
Those Small Form Factor PCs have only gotten cheaper over time - the most powerful PC I've ever owned in 30+ years is a $300 Minisforum (16 Cores, 16GB RAM) that's doing similar duty in the garage.
seems pretty obvious to me:
netflix wants to charge separately for mobile device vs television.
if you "cast" you don't need two subscriptions/account options.
The frustrating thing is that we've had all the tech to make this possible for at least 10-20 years now. Yet "smart" homes are getting worse with every passing year. Why? Because consumer technology is monopolized by a handful of large corporations whose goal isn't to make people's lives easier but build walled gardens and restrictions to best extract every last cent.
Offering such a flexible smart home requires a huge amount of coordination work, customer support, and just taking the blame sometimes for the inevitable bugs.
Yeah competent companies are willing to take on all that, if you pay them a lot, which is why high end smart homes are flourishing.
Citations needed, I can provide a lot of examples of high end equipment providing a worse experience.
Even superyachts nowadays are starting to see that from what I’ve heard.
The ideal integrated smart home was already achieved before smartphones existed.
Recent advancements have mostly been about pushing the original 100 million+ usd cost lower.
Imagine you want to do some home renovations but the builder of your house has installed a kill switch that will detonate the entire thing to the ground should you try to move even one brick without using their preferred contractor.
Imagine the manufacturer of your couch shows up to your doorstep 2 years after you bought it and says they need it back. But you paid full price for it? Nope, you actually bought a license, and the license has now expired. So will you get a refund? Lol, nope.
All of this would be laughable in the real world, yet when it comes to tech we look at the same practices and go "of course, all this makes sense".
So no, this isn't really about the "huge amount of work" it would entail. Companies are perfectly capable of doing this work, and happily do so as long as it benefits them. The problem is that there is no regulation in the space and customers have been trained to accept these practices as a way of life.
A lot of it was in the postwar period. You had a booming population that offered the opportunity for easy corporate revenue growth. If you wanted to make more money, you just sold your good or service to a person who didn't have it yet. That was simple enough because there were people - a lot of them - aging into your market. Let's say that the microwave was the smart home appliance of the late 60s/early 70s. You want to sell them. Well, that's easy, because there are a bunch of people building first homes who want to update their kitchens. Make the case that your microwave belongs in it due to the convenience it brings.
You're a futurist. What would that microwave look like in the future? Well, surely it would just be purchased, you'd put it in your home, and it'd have all sorts of features to make your life even more convenient.
These stories were written with the assumption that, at least in the West, that would continue forever. The Baby Boomers would have enough kids to justify the same sort of marketing strategy. And then those kids would have enough kids. And so on and so forth.
That didn't happen. The birthrate began to plummet in the 1970s and hasn't increased meaningfully since. There are fewer people naturally aging into your market, to say nothing of resources becoming more scarce as time goes on.
So what do you do if you are charged with providing shareholders ever-increasing returns on their investments by selling goods and services? Well, you try to extract more sales - or value - out of a smaller number of people. You don't just sell a smart home device; you require it to be tied to a subscription that must be paid monthly, and make the person using it buy a new one every so often to keep the revenue coming in. You could also collect the data on how they use the device and sell that to people looking to influence the purchase of further goods and services.
The microwave is now a "smart" device that will do all sorts of things... but you'll need to keep paying for it, over and over.
Same with music players, lighting fixtures, televisions, laundry machines, and everything else we've seen get the "smart home" treatment.
Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account that part. It was about the consumer, not the supplier, but the consumer can only be made to consume so much based on organic growth.
> Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account that part.
The futurists did take this into account, they just weren't writing utopian fiction. Weyland Yutani, Tyrell Corp, and other Megacorps were the futurists warning us what could happen if we let profit and sharedholder value becomes the most important thing in society.
(it's a woman, presumably just arrived on a flight, catching a taxi to her hotel)
What these ads (and much speculative fiction, say, Arthur C. Clark particularly the "newspads" (tablet computers) in 2001 and "minisecs" (smartphones) in Imperial Earth) portrayed was capabilities without consideration of commercial and market imperatives. Capabilities promised empowerment and enablement. Markets delivered enshitiffication and enclosures of commons.
And as Timothy B. Lee noted, "the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T". AT&T's networks deliver much of the content and messaging which was portrayed, but the services themselves are not rooted in AT&T, either the original firm or its remonopolised successor organisation.
<https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6113853/we-live-in-the-future-a...>
Microsoft's vision was portrayed as well in the Bill Gates book The Road Ahead, published about the same time (1995). Again, it envisioned much, but little of that vision was delivered directly by Microsoft (though much of it was in fact experienced on computers running Microsoft's operating system, at least until the smartphone revolution supplanted it).
I feel like what has always been trickier is control and coordination. There haven't been many people to step up and own the higher level, the thing that coordinates devices.
It's notable to me that recent successful cast protocols (like Netflix+YouTube's original DIAL, Chromecast) have really simplified. Are bottom up flows. They have allowed the phone (second screen) apps to have a direct way to cast, inside the app. To one other screen, to such an extent that multi-room audio works by first making a group that then presents in the app as one device. (Sonos' proprietary casting is the notable exception.) Where-as historically casting was possible but often used dedicated apps, a UPnP Control Point, that talked to a different UPnP Media Renderer to point it at various UPnP Media Servers. A tri-part system, with control as the third point.
Netflix hypothetically could have used the UPnP to do casting. Phone acts as a Media Server (but serves up one-time-use URLs on the net for actual media) to the movie on question. Then act as a UPnP control point to control media playback. But they made DIAL, which reduced it to a two system network. And to have more resident native apps running (with rest channels open between the devices).
It's interesting seeing what folks do with Google Home and Home Assistant. Orchestrating routines and triggers and what not is kind of neat, in some ways wildly hard to imagine from "back then", but also feels so short in other ways. Is such a primitive level of control. It feels like the task of making actual systems coordinateable and orchestrateable, the real dream of ubicomp, is indeed quite far away, unowned, even though in many cases we have advanced computer protocols afforded to us.
Other services were aggressively throwing Black Friday sales in order to boost their subscriber counts. I picked up HBO for 70% off, and there were also Hulu and Apple TV discounts. And I didn't need any of them because there's plenty of ad-supported content on YouTube, Tubi, and other services.
I'd prefer video streaming apps be required to support Casting/AirPlay.
It has no physical buttons to manage schedules, just a "spot clean now" button.
I hand-wrung when I bought it -- knowing it was a risk requiring I trust them -- aand I was bitten.
Awesome.
Welcome to the future.
I had hoped Home Assistant might be able to handle it but it appears their integration just sends the data to NEATO, which no no longer works.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/neato/
Blarg.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44508062>
The Radithor reference is of course quite apropos, and I'm a fan of effective and principled regulation to avoid that and numerous other market failures.
Education in general, and about critical thinking in particular, could help.
And they got so fed up with eating food that make them sick that we passed the Food and Drug Act!
You can vote with both your wallet and _you actual vote_.
It took a hundred people, including young children, dying in sheer agony from a 100% preventable poisoning by a "medicine company" who's business was essentially dissolving off the shelf medicine powders in liquid and selling the result to really regulate chemicals meant for human ingestion. It took a president with a sympathetic ear and immense popular support for government in general to be a force for reigning in powerful corporations.
That company not only did not test that concoction on any living thing before bottling it up and selling to thousands of unwitting people, but the chemist in charge didn't even check the literature to see that the diethylene glycol he used was already thought to be lethal and had known kidney toxicity.
The company DID test its flavor and color and fragrance.
Why would they test anything else before selling it? You could be a hugely profitable company selling products that did nothing to the people who took it. Testing your products was a waste of effort and would not get you more business!
Your average consumer CANNOT judge accurately whether a medicine works. Your average doctor fails at the task, which is why we have to do blind studies in the first place.
What was true of consumers in the early 1900s is just as true today, and applies to all sorts of things that aren't medicine. Consumers will never be experts. Consumers will never be as equipped to evaluate something as the capital rich industry that produces it. There are inherent information asymmetries that make even idealized market theory fail.
That one is very specifically failure or regulators and absolutely should subject to regulation. We can bicker about whether repairability should be regulated ... but false claims by the manufacturers absolutely should.
It is absurd to blame the user for this one.
Over here in the EEA, governments using regulations to create the market pressures I want to see has a fair amount of success, FWIW
So miss me with this caveat emptor libertarian fantasy land ("openly lies about its specs" is the buyer's fault?!)
* "There's a sucker born every minute" and
* "caveat emptor" and
* "If I can trick you into giving me your money, that's your fault"
Regulation helps discourage that.
In this case, "REG-U-LATION" actually "caused" the issue. Up-to-date LIDAR of every home in America was deemed to be invasive breach of privacy so was regulated out. This product didn't successfully account for future non-technical issues.
I "foolishly" tried to reward a previously known-good vendor by buying a product from the company that had sold me a vacuum that worked for ten years... which brings up the next truism:
* "Past performance is not an indicator of future success"
Move fast and screw society for tasty RSUs!
But the parents without kids, will they at least continue to be leafs? (Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry...)
Do you mean required by law?
Buy into their ecosystem and things "just work". Except when they don't.
Its a cross cutting requirement that adds value for the platform.
I consider it a device perk. I bought the iPhone and Apple TV largely because of airplay so if they remove that functionality it will move me to use other streaming services that support it or I’ll just buy movies again and stop paying streaming altogether.
This feature was one of the main reasons how Netflix movies/shows could be captured/uploaded to piracy sites in full quality as soon as they were released. People recorded the video output and uploaded them. This is to remove that path. Kinda obvious if you ask.
Edit: GP's username should have been a hint...
A year ago I went on vacation with my family, and the kids wanted to watch Netflix on VRBO‘s TV and so I logged in to my account on the tv. And of course I forgot to log it out when I left - so, predictably, the next people decided they hated my taste and went through and deleted all my likes and dislikes, and rated I swear 100 teen romances. I somehow got my account logged out of that TV, but the account was trashed and unrepairable so I lost about a decades worth of history and started a new one.
Afterwards, I thought I should’ve just cast from the kids iPad. And now that won’t be possible.
How can this improve the customer experience?
Oh. And ads. There's another can of worms if you need to serve ads.
In this case it could be that Netflix is an asshole. Or could be that they really could not figure out proper device attribution and ad reporting to the leeches that are the content owners and ad networks.
I have no concern whatsoever whether this is about licensing or just money grubbing. You're making things suck for the paying customer. But to be fair, all the streaming services are chasing the last few drops of blood from the stone trying to stop people from actually watching from two screens they paid for in two different locations and other idiocy. I canceled Netflix a while back. And I only watch prime video through an ad blocker on my PC now. Clearly I must hate freedom.
That's the thing though. Streaming services have very little say in how the content is licensed.
> the last few drops of blood from the stone trying to stop people from actually watching from two screens they paid for in two different locations and other idiocy.
Those restrictions you're talking about? They literally come from licensing terms that rights owners impose.
(Most) streaming platforms would gladly not spend a lot of time figuring the devices, what they are playing etc.
However, that is not the storyline services like Disney and Netflix have been telling. They have gassed on and on about stopping piracy. 2 screens isn't piracy, it's any family with someone who travels or is away at college.
The solution would appear to be an official android API for streaming content from mobile devices that has resolved these issues or locked out the rights holders. That would require spine so not expecting it, sigh. But they're sure happy to pick on sideloaders.
How would you lock out rights holders who hold the rights to content to create such an official streaming API? Such an official API would have to abide by all the licensing rules rights holders impose.
I'm a bit surprised that you think Google and the streaming services are helpless here when pretty much every foundation model effort has stolen tremendous amounts of IP to build their AI models without consequence.
Otherwise, frog.pot.boiled, no?
They own about 0 rights to the content they stream.
Netflix almost collapsed when major studios pulled their content to create competing platforms. That's why they spent to the tune of 8 billion dollars a year to produce their own content and flooded the service with mediocre movies and a bunch of Korean movies and series. Also that's why you can watch the content they have rights to in every country, download it etc.
That's the same reason why AppleTV is busy creating their own content etc.
If streaming platforms dare to go against rights holders, the lawsuits will hurt even Google.
As for AI: it doesn't hurt the rights holders yet. The moment it does, you'll see lawsuits.
Other than Wednesday, at this point there's nothing I want to watch on that service anymore. I truly do not miss it.
What I do miss these days is all of the wonderful summaries and presentations about AI and other research papers on YouTube that are now dominated by horrific notebookLM AI slop podcasts.
I will probably never stop being astounded by people who read simple unambiguous texts and then go on having arguments with voices in their heads.
> at some point, the free market works this out
Oh, it has. You're looking at what the free market has worked out.
> Other than Wednesday, at this point there's nothing I want to watch on that service anymore.
Indeed. And literally told you why. Let me quote myself:
--- start quote ---
Netflix almost collapsed when major studios pulled their content to create competing platforms. That's why they spent to the tune of 8 billion dollars a year to produce their own content and flooded the service with mediocre movies and a bunch of Korean movies and series.
--- end quote ---
Look at how a powerful non-helpless streaming service (in your head) could do nothing against rights holders imposing their will on it (in the real world).
I'll give you one guess on how Amazon Prime operates, and whether or not it applies the same rules license/rights holders impose.
> Netflix disrupted Blockbuster, now we need to disrupt Netflix.
So it started with bold claims about "all we need is an official API for streaming to lock out license holders" and about something about "free market and disruption of Netflix".
> And nothing warms the cockles of my hearts like watching the naysayers like you get proven wrong yet again.
Again, you're arguing with voices in your head.
Adieu.
But I got rich (oh who am I kidding? Really rich) investing against your viewpoints the whole way. And for that I say thank you for being the way you are. May you enable a whole new generation of multi-millionaires with your negativity.
Toodles! And by all means don't respond and reinforce my opinion of you even more.
Chromecast works in my EV for every other streaming app, so the licensing seems to be a solved problem for them. Netflix, however, never worked and my EV manufacturer had to release a support page specifically for Netflix not working.
I suspect this is just more account security. I remember paying $20/mo for a premium plan with a set number of screens on the contract…but one day their side changed and those screens had to be on my WiFi. I was no longer paying per screen. I was now paying per-household, but I never agreed to that change.
I cancelled Netflix after 15 years (DVD era) and have never looked back. Just hostile decision after hostile decision.
Then, some new, money-grubbing PM rolled in and decided to lock my parents out of my account. Okay, byebye Netflix! You jacked the price too high anyway.
Even that often comes down to licensing. And it's as stupid as you describe it.
The fact that casting is still supported for older Chromecasts only on ad-free plans makes this the likeliest explanation to me. Netflix doesn't want to be paid lower rates on ads that are actually getting shown on the TV.
A hostile move, but understandable money grubbing.
This is less understandable.
like you said, money grubbing. they need to grow this quarter, remember?
> For consumers, DIAL removes the pain of having to launch the required app on the first-screen [eg: tv] before interacting with it from their second-screen [eg: phone].
https://www.dial-multiscreen.org/
Growing up in the 90's, I was obsessed with ubiquitous computing, with an idea that there would be computers everywhere & we were going to need "the network is the computer" type thinking to let us make use of ambient screens, speakers, cameras, lights, etc. with Casting being ascendant and ragingly excellent, and Matter finally bringing some reason to IoT (but computer to computer notably weak) it's amazing to see some of that world.
I cannot for the life of me imagine why Netflix would be trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle now. We're ina user I would be pissed. I almost never touch my TV remote, and turning back the
I also want to mention that there is an open standard at the w3c, Open Screen Protocol, that's built by the Second Screen Working Group, to handle these flows in an open specified way. Matter has a Cast spec as well, but seems to only work with native apps that are already installed on devices, where-as DIAL (in many cases), Chromecast, and Open Screen Protocol all have modes where the target TV or speaker or whatnot open a given URL, so they can work with any* app without the 1st screen/tv needing explicit support. https://github.com/w3c/openscreenprotocol
This and refusing to work with the Apple TV app are the 2 big examples that come to mind but there are likely others.
I am not really sure what this solves though since you would still be using their app.
Them refusing to work with the Apple TV app was one of my biggest reasons for canceling. They really need to get knocked down a few pegs.
Not that I think Netflix is being anything other than shitty here. But Apple TV is equally egregious in not supporting Chromecast.
In this particular situation I am referring to the Apple TV App not the OS or Hardware. The ability to find shows and movies to watch across all (except netflix) of your streaming services.
According to the article they dropped support for Airplay a while ago.
Netflix refuses to participate in “stuff this user watches”, it would be trivial to do, but Neflix jealously guards its viewership numbers and I expect this is the main reason they don’t do it. That and… they’d rather you just browse Netflix and not watch other services.
The “stuff this user watches” app is very useful! I like it a lot, when I’m not watching Netflix stuff! It works with every service except Netflix!
But the moment the family shifts over to watching some Netflix show, it forces us out of the habit of using the TV app, and then we go back to the annoying “spend 90 seconds trying to find what we were watching on Hulu” experience, which is worse in every way.
The point of the app was to consolidate all of your watching across various services to a single source. It could work with third party apps and can sign up for various streaming services from within the app. This is a major way it differentiates from the Amazon Prime app that you can still use the third party apps.
So it playing third party content was always the point of the app, Apple TV+ just fit nicely within that app. Less them being competitors and more just why it exists in the first place.
Netflix to my knowledge is the only one that is resistant to using this service, I have not seen any other not work with it. The app is very convenient for keeping up with what I watch across services.
I'm suddenly feeling that the next step for Netflix is making a dedicated streaming hardware device solely for Netflix. Subsidized by ads of course. Like the reverse of Roku.
"... the decision was made to improve the customer experience." Of course that's a lie, but it is ironic, as the reason why chromecast was initially conceived was that TV UX is horrible.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-owes-3387-mln-chromecas...
I still have my dead 1st gen and I look at it with fondness. I'm not surprised the mega corporations don't have the same feeling, but it still feels bad when they want to take away something they made that I actually liked.
I loved the service but now its literaly unusable for me. whoever came up with these new policies should be "voluntarily" relocated to gaza.
I've resorted to piracy now. Its hard to imagine a company going through so much effort to not take my money.
2. Put file onto computer. Maybe the computer you already downloaded it onto.
3. Plug computer into TV or monitor.
4. Open file to consume content.
One of these days I'll get around to setting up something like this for my dad:
- laptop sits under the TV (maybe asleep), occasionally checking for commands
- dad sends command from his computer "I want to torrent"
- laptop sitting under the TV hosts remote web interface for qbittorrent or similar
- dad sends command from his phone "I want to watch movie now"
- movie starts playing on TV from laptop, and dad can control it with his phone
I’m so glad we use plex, have thought of making the jump to jellyfin though. I tried to use my MacBook Air to watch their excellent Michelin Stars show, but couldn’t watch it on 2/3 of my monitors because they don’t have HDCP built in. Modern disk drives are so cheap you can just download everything in 4K HDR, paired with an OLED display it’s absolutely breathtaking how good modern media can look.
So anyway, with the Michelin show I just downloaded it off a torrent site instead, which is a hilariously easier user experience and it’s caused by the very HDCP that is supposed to prevent piracy.
Yes, that's what it means.
Some other streaming apps encourage using their mobile app as a remote, so I would imagine they are making it clear that the app should not be used at all here.
If I were a subscriber this move wouldn't make me switch to a costlier plan, I'd rather unsubscribe entirely
Netflix sees no more technological future or market opportunity for themselves that will increase profits, so reduction of features and up charging are the only strategies.
It’s a testiment to the blindness and stupidity of their workers and leadership that in the era of the most cutting edge breakthroughs in video, Netflix believes the future is in removing functionality.
... and what are those?
You can do multi scene coherent video generation with off the shelf mobile apps right now.
We are living in an era where extending nostalgic IP is just a few steps away. It may take time but it will start with cartoons and go from there.
but good damn is life nice when you just have files, a network and zero drm and limitations
Friend with a Netflix account comes to your house, casts Netflix to your TV. No need for you to have a Netflix account in that case. Whereas, they want to force you to also have a Netflix account to watch on your TV.
Enshittification is done because it is so reliable. Customers just keep buying, doesn't really seem to matter how poorly you treat them.
Shrinkflation has gone on for decades and there's nothing stopping it from continuing because what are you going to do, not buy 90% of products in the grocery store? Good luck.
The problem is that businesses reach a sort of escape velocity where you can abuse your customer and they either do not react to it or have no other choice. The entire economy has worked to ensure that every consumer experiences trained helplessness when it comes to consuming, because that's more profitable.
On the plus side, all UHD Blu-Rays are free of region-locking.
When you pay an arm and a leg every month for Netflix, you're funding a studio that pumps out the equivalent of screeching goblin sounds. Makes no sense.
Netflix running their own studio was a reasonable attempt at regaining some exclusivity, even if it's been executed poorly in many cases.
I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep my subscription as we've hardly used it in months at this point, but I also don't have any other subscriptions any more either, so I'm not exactly a great bellwether.