Netflix loses 1,794 videos from its streaming catalog
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is not going to work. As a consumer, I am not going to subscribe to a dozen different streaming video services, one per distributor who thinks they're too good to be aggregated. I don't care how good you think you are or how good you're going to be, and frankly I don't even care if you were each trying to charge me a dollar a month, because it's just plain too much hassle to be subscribed to one service per distributor.
Even free, it would be a bad deal. It's not hard to imagine a world where Warner Brothers works on my phone and my XBox, but not my PS3, Fox works on my PS3 and my Linux computer, but not my XBox, Discovery doesn't work anywhere because they don't have the technical chops to properly set up their network, and on and on it goes. There's a lot of distributors, even accounting for which of you have merged and operate under a dozen names. None of them as good as Netflix, working in as many places as Netflix, and as reliable as Netflix. (Oh, you think it's easy to serve video at this scale... yeah... heh heh heh. Your little websites with bits and snippets of video was barely getting your feet wet in that world.)
And of course it won't be free. Perhaps $9.99 a month for "everything" is unsustainable at any level (even though Netflix is generally not exactly the freshest content in general), but I'm just not going to chase you all down to give you money individually, and I know at least some of you are going to get really big heads and think you can charge $19.99 or something for a vanishing fraction of Netflix's content.
This is bullshit, and nobody's going to put up with it. I don't necessarily want there to be just One Uber Aggregator either, so you're going to have to deal with Amazon and Netflix and iTunes, but you can't go it alone. I'm not going to follow you. You're lucky I've even heard of you.
Even HBO is either going to become an aggregator with a viedo side business (see Netflix) or eventually join one.
Btw, can someone (Netflix?) chime in on the app performance? What's the deal with the start/stop time on a PS3? I can't decide if it could also be the Netflix app, as it seems to chug slightly when just browsing video thumbnails -- maybe this is related to some PS3 sandbox or resource allocation. I feel I shouldn't have to wait for thumbnails to load when scrolling left-right in a category -- the row should start pre-fetching. Likewise, selecting a thumbnail shouldn't take so long to load the preview panel.
That said, I still just leave it in the Netflix channel all the time because the (young) kids use it and it's easiest, especially with the hundreds of recommendations it shows so they don't really have to search by name at all.
Then again, I'm almost never loading the channel, I just leave it in Netflix, since that's all I really use. The launch time is essentially NIL.
"Netflix contacted Mashable to state that it prefers to license TV shows and movies “on an exclusive basis… [to] provide a unique experience” "
1) Netflix turned down a reasonable new "non-exclusive" contract from Warner Bros.
2) Netflix came up with its "prefer to license ... on an exclusive basis" policy as a face-saving measure after Warner Bros refused to renew the contract.
I'll call it "Netflix"
Caption below screenshot of homepage for new Warner Bros service sums up the lunacy of this:
The Netflix competition heats up, for the 55+ demographic.
But you are right that 50 different competing video services would be absurd. Perhaps it would be better to distribute videos in a marketplace, like steam did for games. They set their own prices so they don't have to worry about "exclusivity". And then they could allow for subscriptions to watch unlimited content for a set price, for people that value that.
The weird thing about movies is that they aren't like other commodities. People want to watch a specific movie, even if there are others that are just as good. Supply and demand doesn't work as well.
But I am worried about Netflix becoming monopolistic. They aren't now because they do have competition and have only a fraction of movies and TV shows available. But if it or something like it becomes the dominant video streaming service, they could charge consumers or producers whatever they want (within reason) because there are no other platforms to distribute your movies, and no one else has the ones you want to see.
In fact, I'd suggest a better defense for WB et al against Netflix as the uber-distributor is to make it easier for someone else to set up a distributor rather than harder. Of course nobody's going to run a major video distributor out of their metaphorical basement, but putting in place relatively clear expectations about policy and pricing, and opening the content to anyone who meets those expectations without too much grinding negotiation on a per-service basis, will tend to undermine Netflix's singular power. If, say, Wal-Mart knew they could get fair and nondiscriminatory pricing on a whole whackload of content while they were still kicking the idea around, they'd be that much more likely to jump into the game.
If artists were pissed about being paid pennies by Spotify and Pandora, film houses are about to sail down the same river of hurt.
Wait? What's that you say? You'll hold your content hostage? Compete with free (Pirate Bay, etc).
Not many people realize this fact. As our ability to record and retrieve stuff increases, the prices for 'entertainment' or 'art' will drop. Production of any unit that is not consumed (i.e. used up/destroyed) will result in surplus. The counter-example is food. Food production will still be valuable in the future because the old food is used up or destroyed. Movie and music production, book writing, etc. will be near worthless for most folks because there will be infinite choices.
Might want to start planning your children's future careers appropriately!
I'm not saying it's going to happen for sure. It didn't with music or games, however those industries are not exactly the same. I'm just worried it could.
Also, I don't believe it's clear that it's a winner-takes-all category. We're maybe in the first mile of the marathon, though Netflix has a huge lead. So long as there are viable aggregation competitors to Netflix that are willing to pay premium prices for exclusive access to content as a means to acquire subscribers/customers, Warner and other distributors/studios will sell exclusivity. Based on this comment [1], it sounds like Netflix chose not to renew.
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/30/netflix_queue...
Maybe HBO can make it on their own, but I doubt it. The money-per-show in this market is getting diluted, fast, as the past now competes with the present more than ever and creates an ever-larger supply. This tends to have only one effect on prices. If all video production stopped right now I could probably easily survive for another 3 or 4 years before I even really noticed.
Neither Netflix or Hulu have got it spot on but they are leagues ahead of any of the old school distributors and rights owners who clearly don't understand or indeed care about their audience.
The Netflix catalog changes almost daily, but the bigger changes tend to happen on the 1st of the month, because that is just when contracts tend to expire (lawyers like it that way). Other big changeover days are Jan 1, July 1 and Dec 31.
The 1,794 movies represent a small fraction of the total viewing on Netflix.
One or two of my personal bills are due in the middle of the month, and I find even that fairly annoying.
I wish they'd raise their price and get more content contracts. $15/m for good content is better than $8/m for stuff out of the Walmart $5 bin.
Exclusivity shouldn't matter. Subscribers don't care if content is available elsewhere. They already have a Netflix subscription.
This is exactly what Netflix is, said perfectly. Tons of old content but nothing remotely recent. Nice!
Many people want a-la-carte cable where they get to pick what they want - why not video services? Why not have it be so open that anyone can provide anything to anyone else, ala the more open app stores?
This is the route that most of the settop box vendors like Roku and Apple are going, and I tend to think it'll win in the end.
Aggregators like Netflix survive based on their marketing and negotiating strength, and economies of scale with servers and such. I tend to think that the latter will become less of an issue as technology progresses, and the former will be around as long as people are making media - this entire thing comes down to setting a price on specific content.
Netflix does neither.
There's almost no advantage to a-la-carte streaming services. Are you going to pay less? I seriously doubt it, unless they do something like charging twenty five cents per hour of streaming of a movie/show. Are you going to get access to more content. Not likely unless they do the $.20/hour thing, since I'm not going to pay monthly fees to 10 different services.
Also Netflix provides DVD service that I still use. Having a unified search experience and ability to manage my queue is useful. As is a unified rating system.
Lastly, Netflix simplifies things greatly for my child. If my child now has to figure out which app to use for each show -- that becomes a nightmare. Shortcuts reduce this, but now the child has to learn a bunch of UIs as each service will likely have a slightly different UI.
Besides people tend to spend a set amount on entertainment every month anyways. If they weren't going to buy it anyways, and it costs nothing to distribute it, you might as well let them watch as much as they want. This wouldn't work for goods that actually cost money to distribute (well some people disagree.)
I think the difference is that with cable you're picking genres a la carte, as opposed to picking based on production/distribution companies.
For example, if I'm into sports and news, a la carte cable would let me subscribe to, say, CBC, CNN, TSN, RSN, CTV NewsNet, The Score, etc. A la carte video services like WB is doing here don't give me such options. If I like the Harry Potter movies, I have to subscribe to WB's service to watch them. This costs $9.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. Then say I want to watch House Of Cards on Netflix, that's $7.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. So it starts to look a lot like the current cable setup people complain about: you're buying bundles of stuff you mostly don't want to get at the stuff you do want.
I will not go back to 49.99 cable or subscribe to 5 different 9.99 accounts.
netflix is the spotify of the movie world, embrace it movie moguls!
Also, they could go global with that kind of pricing, even in poorer countries.
Even 2 tier would be OK, like $10/month for the current line up + $20/month extra for "Netflix Premium" that allows me online access to whatever is on DVD.
I could then, as a consumer member of the aggregator service manage my subscriptions. Maybe I want all Starz and WB, with nothing else. Perhaps that's $8 for the WB catalog, and $4 for Starz.
Rights holders could even partition it's offerings into different subsets, WB Modern ($5), WB Classic ($5), WB Full ($8).
Searching would show available or all shows depending on the search type, and for non-available shows let me know what subscription I would need to get.
I pay for two Netflix accounts to salve my moral principles. I would love to pay content creators in the most direct fashion, maximizing the money that goes to the people who make TV shows and movies, minimizing the money that goes to ad firms and middlemen, and eliminating any money that would be spent lobbying the US Congress to destroy my civil liberties and privacy.
Anyone have a suggestion on a better place to send my conscience money?
Netflix used to be an example of the "long tail" provider where you could find content that you want, because of the breadth of the offering. Not anymore, it seems. It was a fine ride while it lasted, but looks like the age of Netflix as a primary place to look for movies to watch is at its end.
I felt Netflix was moving in the right direction in that regard. But if their selection is reduced, if multiple systems are too hard to use and manage, or if different things work in different ways on different devices, I may be willing to put up with the hassle of copying files over the networks myself.
Please Movie Industry, give me what I want. I'm willing to pay you money for it. Stop screwing around.
There's no other market in the world where this is a valid practice. I don't understand how they are able to fly with this crap.
Of course the result is "piracy". If someone wants to view content that's not available through legal channels they'll find another way. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with copyrights. It just means the business model is wrong and the people in charge are fools.
At the start a 14 year copyright term (+ 14 if author was still alive and chose to renew) was considered sufficient in the U.S.; these days, it's life + 70 years. And copyrights are recognized (more or less) internationally, and we live in a time when nothing has to go out of print and most copyrighted material can be paid for and delivered over the Internet rather than cranked out on a printing press and carried by horse into the territories.
In other words, routinely creating artificial scarcity strikes me as a relatively modern usage of copyright protection -- there might have been the odd case where somebody only wanted to produce five books or something, but as a matter of course it seemed like authors wanted to get their material out there. Things seemed fairly hunky-dory until copyright terms got extended, publishers and movie studios began amassing libraries of content, and alternative strategies to simply publishing content to meet demand became viable.
If nothing else, it seems weird to me that a radio station can go out, buy an album, pay set royalties to the appropriate organizations, and be clear to broadcast or stream... yet the equivalent does not exist for streaming audiovisual content.
On second thought, however, isn't this basically a la carte programming the cable companies have been refusing us since forever? A few different $10 services is a lot better than a single $100 service, 70% of which I don't watch.
Seriously, their movies selection wasn't compelling enough to warrant the money for streaming. Without TV shows the business would already be a bust.
Although if in future they managed to add tv shows as they were aired I'd happily pay 2/3 times of what I do now.