Netflix: ”You get two parallel streams with your family. Family means trust and password sharing.“
Customers: “Farewell pirating. We pay a fair flat and it is automatically shared between Netflix and artists. Great!“
Netflix: “We increase the flat permanently. And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content (e.g. Star Trek Picard, Expanse, Disney). How about ruining it and blocking family members with heuristics, geoblocking, per-device-checks and so on?“.
Customers „I’m done.”
THE END
We accepted and used the fair system. And you tease us with DRM? And HDCP? Increasing rates? And now you block our family members?
I wouldn’t be surprised if artists (filmmakers, musicians…) create a common fair streaming platform. Let us name it “United Artists“ ;)
> I wouldn’t be surprised if artists (filmmakers, musicians…) create a common fair streaming platform. Let us name it “United Artists“ ;)
That falls under
> And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content
The core problem is basically owners of IP all wanting to build walled gardens to distribute them (and get all of the cut), instead of just going "pay us X per view, regardless of who you are" which would allow every platform to potentially have everything at cost of having to actually compete on service, not exclusives.
Verizon, who are well known for being affordable, honest, and "with the times", has announced they're going to bring back "cable" subscriptions - you give verizon a flat rate, and they get you all of the streaming services, presumably for less than you'd pay for them individually.
I wish consumer protection laws applied to cell phone providers. I shopped around a while back, and walked into an AT&T, TMobile, and Verizon store.
They all had big ass signs in the front window saying $25/month per line (with a bunch of fine print that can't be read from outside the store).
Of course, none of them will honor that pricing. Also, none of them actually publish their prices. The best I got was some hand written scrawl from the the customer service person, who had memorized their pricing table.
Of course, after handing the piece of paper to me, he said something like, "so that'll be $85 per line, but in practice your bill will probably be $110. I've seen some people end up with $115/month".
Anyway, that's a long way of saying they can offer to pay me to subscribe to their crappy whatever service, and I'll still refuse.
This sounds insane and I'm incredibly happy for the situation we have in the EU.
You see "9,99€ / month" for a mobile plan? That's the full price they will take from you each month, no more. Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.
>Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.
I haven't seen that but I have had marketing phones where they insistently tried to upsell me on random shit ("security protection") or to increase bandwidth (I had 300Mbit/s, they wanted to sell me 600Mbit/s)
At this point the only people left directly using the infrastructure companies don't care about money. For each of the infrastructure providers, there are many competitive MVNOs with prices plainly on their websites. You should be able to get a regular plan for ~$40/mo, and even a bare bones paygo for $10/3mo.
> instead of just going "pay us X per view, regardless of who you are"
Yeah and this is actually how the music industry is doing this and it works great. Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer etc all work fine alongside one another.
Sadly, I think you'll find the artists have a much less rosy view of that.
"We'll cut the people creating that art's earnings down to millicent's per stream and even screw them over on that, and we'll share all the profits equitably between the rent seeking middle men" doesn't really count as "works great" for everybody...
It s unfair to say that I think. First, an artist doesnt only work for money, there is an element of fame and love for the craft that is bigger than in other profession. Then, I mean, nobody forced them to sign a label and if there was a way to make the audience pay more they d have found it by now.
With a label "screwing them", they get more famous, practice the craft more often in front of more people, and get more money out of it.
Because let s be honest, what s the thing you can cut the fastest in your budget ? Movies, music and paintings. It s a difficult profession with a difficult billing. Labels help more than they screw, up to the artists to shop around for one that has good marketing for a cheaper fee.
Isn't it in the consumer's best interest that the creator is also happy and well compensated as well and that a fair, competitive ecosystem of middle-men (distributors) exists?
It's quite fun that this is essentially the pre-50s Hollywood vertical integration again. I expect this will eventually end with antitrust legislation and mandatory licencing to third parties.
I've got two houses across two states where any one us (four) can be at any time. If they start blocking based on IP geo-location, I'll drop them immediately.
Which is totally stupid because IP geo-location do not exist and everything is based on isp headquarter's address. IP addresses do not have physical location and ISP now have global presence.
According to many websites I come from another country in eastern europe. Which is not true.
If you are maintaining a website and rely on IP geo location, which should really be called "IP crappy geo guess", you are doing it wrong, especially if you set the default language based on this.
Has geolocation gotten a little bit worse in recent years? I understand IP blocks may change phisical location, and don't know if it's IPv4 scarcity or whatever, but apps that use IP location services seem to be mislocating me (like in cities 300km away)
I haven't seen it gotten any better (or worse). It still puts me regularly in other far away cities, in the south of the country, or just in the country. Never in my town. I will never trust GeoIP to figure out anything other than the country.
Even for this it isn't reliable. Depending on the service I can be in different countries. Which is a clear no if you are trying to decide which content you can offer to your customer.
Hulu Live TV is even better regarding location. I have it and had Google Fiber and AT&T fiber at the same address. If I watched live on one it would report on the other than the home location changed and it only gives you so many of those for free before they prevent you from viewing the content (Live TV) you pay them for. So it's only IP and no taking into consideration geo-location at all.
I'd imagine they stick some kind of device fingerprint and only start bothering user if there is too many of new devices that never share same network.
Or maybe ping lan for other netflix app. Or remember the MAC address of router or something.
Perhaps you have to designate a primary device, and then any of the secondary devices that access from the same IP can migrate for X weeks/months before having to be on the same IP as the primary?
I assume he wouldn't care if TVs in other homes stay logged in when he's not there. As long as they work when he visits, wouldn't that be enough? It could be annoying if another family member goes there for a week and it won't log in because the primary device isn't present.
I guess I misunderstood then. So you mean you activate the network with your primary phone and then it stays active for some time. That would actually work for me.
You sure? That hasn't been an issue for me, although I don't know if my parents (in another country) are actually using the account.
The catalog will be different in each country, but that's expected. It's also quite annoying when you get addicted to a show and fly to the other country where it isn't available...
A Netflix account is supposed to be one per family, it was never supposed to be tied to an individual person. Who in their right mind would assume that a package that allowed four simultaneous streams would be for a single person watching four shows at once?
No, it’s clearly supposed to be that one account covers multiple people. GP is fine to complain whether they have enough money for two houses at once.
What about kids who have divorced parents and stay at a different house on the weekend? Do they need to get two separate accounts because “their parents can afford two houses?”
>A Netflix account is supposed to be one per family, it was never supposed to be tied to an individual person. Who in their right mind would assume that a package that allowed four simultaneous streams would be for a single person watching four shows at once?
Like cable, internet connection, or Costco membership - it's per household not per family.
The addition of "household" is a new addition they made, likely coupled with this change in direction about password sharing. The word household does not appear in archived versions of their page discussing streaming plans.
2017 (https://archive.is/KFZtP) "No matter which plan you choose, you can install the Netflix app on as many devices as you want, and enjoy as many TV shows and movies as you want, anytime, anywhere." In 2017, not only were they not talking about households, they were explicitly bragging about how you can watch on any device in multiple locations, which conflicts with the concept of a household they are pushing now.
2021 (https://archive.is/OzbRU) "The plan you choose will determine the number of devices that you can watch Netflix on at the same time.
With all of our plans, you can download the Netflix app on all your favorite devices and watch unlimited movies and TV shows."
But now in 2023 (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926) "As a Netflix member, you are charged monthly on the date you signed up. A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household. Learn more about sharing Netflix."
Your comment adds nothing useful to the discussion, as GP never said it was a matter of cost. I am in the same boat and it’s about convenience and/or the loss of what we currently have. Netflix both raised prices and reduced what you get.
Yeah, it's not a matter of angry feelings, it's just a cost-benefit analysis
I'm guessing they aren't actually going to put this into action in the USA, but we'll see how it goes
I'd personally be fine with paying for 5 different streaming video services, but my wife is too frugal and makes me cancel one when I start another.. presumably a lot of people are in the same boat, and would look at this as a good opportunity to try out Disney+, HBO Max, etc
Just curious, what makes you think they won't do it here? I think they're 100% greedy enough to do it here.
And at that point, I'll cancel. I've already kind of accustomed my parents to it by reminding them that it takes them half an hour to find anything that they even want to watch on Netflix.
I just think they'll play around with it in smaller regions to see the effect and run a cost-benefit analysis before they risk angering their primary money maker
I disagree, if cracking down on friends and different households sharing passwords means I get it cheaper than I’m ok with that.
Their implementation allows people to use their tablet / phone / setup box/ streaming device in multiple locations. Since the technology isn’t available to cater for people living and paying for multiple house holds the options are everyone pays extra or the very very few people that can afford it or an anomaly pay extra
To be frank for the case of someone living 6 months here 6 months there
They can sign-up and cancel cause it’s a month by month subscription
Inflation is caused by the Covid fiscal policies and the money the government gave out to keep those financially impacted afloat but was also abused by many people
That's not what GP said. GP complained about having to pay as if there were multiple households benefiting, when it's actually just one household, albeit a wealthy one. If NFLX said "we're going to start charging rich people more, based on zip code," there would be a revolt.
I would assume it's not their intention to try to "go after" this segment and make them pay more (since it's a small portion of their users, and the revenue opportunity is small), but they've undoubtedly thought about this possibility and the unfairness it creates.
I would hypothesize a revolt for two reasons. First, it would violate people's general sense of fairness that a product is being sold at different prices to different customers. Wealthy people (who are perhaps above-average in terms of retention) would leave to go to other services that they perceive to be fairer.
Second, it would be difficult to avoid overinclusive/underinclusive issues. For example, someone who lives in a studio apartment in a zip code with many large expensive homes would feel they are being clumped with people who are not like them. Is it hypothetically possible to avoid these outcomes? Sure, but it would take a ton of work, and would likely outweigh the benefit of differential pricing.
To be fair, this seems like a very convenient redefining of "household". If a household can, quite literally, span two houses (and states!), then what does household actually mean?
Edit: double checked and Netflix today is clear that plans are for a single "household". No idea if that language has changed over time but I vaguely recall them always referring to multiple "devices", not people.
> those who dwell under the same roof and compose a family; also: a social unit composed of those living together in the same dwelling [1]
It seems more focused on the family unit rather than where they're located. If a household goes on vacation, are they not still a household when they are at their hotel? Why is it different if they're at a condo, which they own?
Disclosure: not that it matters, but I do not have a second home.
I'm curious how you read that and don't see the words "roof" and "same dwelling"? Because... that seems far more focused on where they are located than not? Only thing it is excluding is multiple family units all living in a shared building are not one household.
Oh, I absolutely see that limitation. But as I mentioned in my example, a "household" does not cease to exist when it leaves that shared roof. The group is defined based on where they live, regardless of whether they are together at any given moment, or if they are under a different roof together (and whether that different roof is part of a hotel, condo, or vacation home).
It totally ceases when you leave the shared roof. Is why me and my siblings shared a household with our parents, but don't share one now that we have moved out.
OP referred to an intact family unit that has multiple homes. They are still a household because, unlike your example, the are still intact. It's obvious that once you move out permanently, you're not part of the household anymore. But the original examples, and all of mine, refer to temporary relocations of an intact family unit.
I am sympathetic, but to pretend a household is multiple houses feels forced, to say the least. Would be like claiming you have multiple primary houses. Can make a sense, in very narrow cases. Largely not what anyone thinks that term means. To claim otherwise seems bad faith.
To me this reads as a category error. Households are made up of people, and houses are made of wood. But if you want to pay more to Netflix when you visit a friend's cabin, or your own, I won't get in your way!
And to me this reads as petulant redefining of terms in the hopes of pulling a gotcha.
To be clear, the portability afforded with streaming services is nice. And I'm all for taking advantage of it. But household has always been the combination of a physical house and a social group in it. To claim otherwise is silly.
Can you find other uses of the term that does this? Even "family" is typically constrained to immediate family. Such that nobody expects family benefits at a job to extend to their cousins. Heck, we don't even expect it to extend to siblings or parents.
> And to me this reads as petulant redefining of terms in the hopes of pulling a gotcha
You are the one doing the petulant redefining.
> But household has always been the combination of a physical house and a social group in it. To claim otherwise is silly.
Not true.
Household has a well established meaning that you are trying to redefine. The referent of "household" is a social group and does not include the house itself. The house is merely part of how that social group can be defined.
If your house is destroyed in a fire, you don't stop being a household while it is rebuilt. If you own a vacation home, the household doesn't change based on who might be visiting the vacation home at any given time.
> Even "family" is typically constrained to immediate family. Such that nobody expects family benefits at a job to extend to their cousins. Heck, we don't even expect it to extend to siblings or parents.
You seem to have trouble with meanings. Just because some employment benefits described with the term "family" are contractually limited, doesn't change the meaning of the word "family". In fact, even the term "immediate family" explicitly includes siblings, spouse's siblings, parents, spouse's parents, grandparents, etcetera.
My point was that nobody has ever used household for two houses. Ever. If you can find a place that has been done, I'd be swayed. But I have never ever seen that. The definition posted above has family/social unit and house/dwelling unit. Reading that as one of those being plural is awkward and feels flat out in bad faith to conversation.
Now, I will fully cede that Netflix has redefined their terms and are also at fault in this whole fiasco. They are the ones that tried to build on the back of goodwill by allowing a much more open sharing policy than anything else was ever capable of doing.
> My point was that nobody has ever used household for two houses. Ever. If you can find a place that has been done, I'd be swayed. But I have never ever seen that.
Then maybe you should have spent some time looking before so strongly asserting something that is flat out wrong. Go look at some definitions. There are plenty of legal definitions, in addition to dictionary ones, that clearly contradict your take.
The key element is shared residency and living expenses. The number of homes owned is not relevant.
Point me to some. Seriously, the definition linked here clearly has household as the combination. Where are households defined as multiple houses?
For fun, try https://www.prb.org/resources/what-is-a-household/ which says "A household is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as all the people who occupy a single housing unit, regardless of their relationship to one another."
The census is a great example. If a person is at a location, such as vacation home, when the census counts them, the census counts them as at the location that they sleep at the most. You don't stop being a part of a household just because you're spending the weekend at your cabin.
Even if your 10 person household has 11 homes, 1 primary home where everyone sleeps 183 days a year and 10 vacation homes where each sleeps the other 182 days a year, that would still be counted as a 10 person household by the census.
And both those linked definition make clear the basic point that you are still apparently failing to grasp. The referrent of "household" is the people who share their primary residence, not the residence itself.
Ah, I see the distinction you are trying to make. You are talking of the people in the household. But that is easily seen as a distinct thing from the household.
Consider standard household services. They are tied to the household, which has a fixed address. Is why power company won't give you power for your RV at any other location.
Again, I'm sympathetic. And power companies distinguish this with service address. But this is exactly the point. Every other "sharable thing" will be a distinguished thing that is shared. They will often have vague ass terms that tie it to the people of a household. But they will also have carve outs on how that applies to them.
You're free to think of this as a redefining of terms, but the first person to make that argument upthread was downvoted to grey. That tends to indicate that I'm not the one redefining a term in a novel way.
But to answer your question, economists refer to "household income" and they don't care if you have a vacation home.
If you look at the origin of this thread, it relates to a single family with multiple homes. If you can't see that a family does not cease to be a family when they purchase a second home, then nothing I can say will convince you. Cheers!
Apologies on missing this the other day. The "first person" to make this argument is just getting the ire of folks that are upset to be losing their streaming benefits.
Household income is an interesting one. You have a primary residence that dictates a ton of information for financial reporting. And as far as households go, you only count in one of the houses, as far as a household. The others are non household units.
My entire point is that a household is not a family. Those are different things.
Apologies for missing this. I'm not clear what you mean. They already have the worst services of any "household" you can imagine. Such that I don't see it changing much?
> Netflix: “We increase the flat permanently. And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content (e.g. Star Trek Picard, Expanse, Disney). How about ruining it and blocking family members with heuristics, geoblocking, per-device-checks and so on?“.
Don't forget cancelling shows constantly. I'm not getting invested in anything Netflix unless I know it has an ending already.
Yes, so annoying. Some shows just makes you interested, invested in the story, you learn the characters' names... Then the season ends, you look up when the next season comes out... And you see that the show has been canceled... Happened too many times, last one that really frustrated me was GLOW.
I wonder if it has a vicious circle, spiral component to it, like how Google keeps killing their products because people don't adapt them, because Google keeps killing their products.
Some percentage of users don't trust Netflix anymore and don't start watching a series until they know it has an ending. A new show launches, it doesn't perform too well, so Netflix cancels it after the second season. Now, the people who enjoyed the show will be more sceptical of new shows, and now a larger percentage of users will "boycott" new shows.
> A new show launches, it doesn't perform too well, so Netflix cancels it after the second season. Now, the people who enjoyed the show will be more sceptical of new shows, and now a larger percentage of users will "boycott" new shows.
This isn’t new, rarely is a cable tv show signed initially for more than 1-2 seasons and then if it does well it’s renewed. Netflix is literally following industry standard here so if you’re going to call them out call everybody out.
I think it was the report that went around that Netflix won't renew most shows for a third season because that's when the writers and talent get uppity and ask to gasp be paid well for their work.
I often read a sentiment close to this around the topic of copyright. But what is "fair" seems to be more often than not "we want to pay as little as possible" with no relation to any tangible values, cost or anything.
I remember during my time at university, a popular point was a culture flat rate of 10€/month to cover everything: Games, videos, books, music, you name it.
Of course the media companies would claim fairness for themselves as well. Everybody is for fairness, they just mean vastly different things.
We will achieve fairness once legislation adjust to Intellectual Property abuses, if not in the laws, at least in its interpretation the abuses are pretty clear to me.
IP Protection is for the ownership of the art. Whether an intermediary between the audience and the author exists or not.
Somehow, by extension, we ended up with exclusivity contracts and protection of the distribution. Lobbies made the law against consumers who don't play by the distributor rules, and worse, even against authors of tools made for use against distributors abuses (DRM)
OK, who's to say what is fair, but it's certainly not individual consumers who have the upper hand: actually they do, unsubscribe and going pirating full on, everybody loses.
I pay for a Netflix plan that allows 4 people to stream at any one time. Why does it matter whether those people are biologically related or located geographically?
Because it's a discount for a family, which wouldn't pay for four separate accounts, but are used to share a lot. Families might share a smartphone, but friends and acquaintances wouldn't.
According to a TF article in 2012 - https://torrentfreak.com/top-bittorrent-countries-in-the-wor... - Spain was one of the top 10 countries of torrent downloaders. Is there any statistics of torrent users (by country) for 2023? It will be interesting to see if those million outraged spanish Netflix users have now turned to torrenting Netflix shows.
Are torrents even the primary methods of piracy now? That's an actual question: I get the impression that a lot of piracy has switched to grey market file hosting and streaming sites, but I don't have the perspective to say if that's accurate.
My impression is that the tech-savvy people still use torrents, but nowadays they share these torrents with their less savvy group using things like Plex (and Plex alternatives).
That's what I've witnessed with my Portuguese and Spanish friends anyway. Extended groups who depend on one or more sources of "private Netflix (ie: Plex)".
The arrs are sweet. Plex serves media. Prowlarr maintains a list of torrent sites to use. Radarr for movies, sonarr for tv, and lidarr for music monitor things and auto download, move, rename, etc., and are tied into prowlarr for where to get them. Some examples, every new Minions movie or every new episode of The Witcher or every new album from IVE you can have auto download once available and get moved to the correct Plex library folder with the correct filename, and you can set up metadata requirements like size, bitrate, etc. for those the downloads. Overseerr has a slick ui for discovering media and requesting downloads; you can have it set up to use plex accounts where you or other users logged in with their plex account can request something, and it reaches out to the correct arr for that to do its thing according to the *arr settings for that media.
What's everything is set up, imagine a Netflix where you can also request something not available and get that added in the time it takes to download in the exact resolution, language, subs, etc., that you want with no more than a search and a click.
Yeah what's killing it though is the static prices of hard drives.
5 years ago I bought some 14TB drives for 229 euro. They are now still more expensive than that. This is really a bummer. Too many people move to cloud so the market for consumer HDDs is shit.
There is a full suite of software that helps with torrenting. They are the ARR software, it’s kind of a lose collection of open-source software. Radarr, sonarr, homarr, there are many others. Together, they make finding and organizing torrents very easy as long as you can set them up, typically with Docker.
I stumbled on a paid sub that i am able to access via IPTV / OTT.
Most of my network that is from LATAM seems to be on it. EU seems to be lagging, but iberians are jumping on it slowly. I have no idea what USA peeps are doing.
Buying it involved whatsapping with someone far away and sending pic of the wire sent page. It was cheap and fast, tho highly unorthodox
Service works well. Main issue is that most of the content is in spanish. Only about 2k movies are native english, but i suspect a big chunk of movies may have 2nd audio channel for eng. Most series seem to have that 2nd channel. Content is brand new and works. Also seems like there are a million live channels.
I dont trust web based streams anymore. Too many poppups and games being played with ads. It was only a matter of time until i got kissed by with drive-by malware.
this is the answer, Stremio is the easy-to-use solution that I setup for my parents and forgot about. the comments above with their complicated usenet setups reminds me of the famous hackers news comment when dropbox was released.
I use a plex share now. Soon as Netflix announced the password lockdown I quit their service and signed up to a plex share where I get 10 times the content, more simultaneous streams and all the way up to 4K resolution. Oh and the cost is slightly less then the cost of Netflix.
I don't believe torrents are the primary source. It's not hard to find illegal streaming websites nowadays and they are probably more convenient, but still a good source for malwares I guess.
I guess it depends on the market. In India, all streaming and file hosting sites with pirated tv / movies materials are immediately blocked now. As are nearly all torrent sites. But sharing torrent magnet links are still easier and cheaper than trying to bypass the ISP blocks. And once someone downloads something, it gets shared around a lot.
If you have a look at Amazon prime these days, it reminds me of a YouTube clone, where you have to pay for every video you want to watch.
Only nice thing is, that the channel subscriptions are easily cancelable. Spending 3-9 bucks on a channel for a month is essentially the price for one movie, so it is ok for me to a certain extent.
Users need to accept that Netflix was never going to be profitable that way. We had a taste of that amount of content at that price, but it simply can't be economically done.
Generally a enterprise that is not profitable is using more resources than the value it creates and as a result the economy is better off if it goes under.
This isn't just "things only deserve to exist if it makes someone money" this is "our system systemically discourages wasteful use of resources".
Actors and such need to be paid. Their labor is a scare resource so if they are doing something that's not worth more than their time, they should generally be doing something else. If we all behaved otherwise society would slowly die as wealth got consumed to zero instead of increased with time.
I would even object to calling people “consumers”, only because the conversation involves a (potential) service. It’s like calling us “bipeds” when we talk about us on a shoe-making context.
That's just a description for Netflix predatory tactics. Their narrative is "against account sharing" (which was historically allowed by them) but the problem is actually "rising licensing costs", so their actual enemy is not users but content owners.
The narrative is important. It's important to reframe this as Netflix going against the less powerful side.
Also, I celebrate this has already cost them 1 million users in Spain alone. I hope this backfires on Netflix globally.
Investors are willing to put a premium on growth, even if it means the company is unprofitable (for certain definitions of unprofitable — you have to be convincing that you could be profitable, if only you stopped spending so much on growth). If you're unprofitable and losing users you're in trouble.
Media companies need to accept that the huge margins of profit are not sustainable. Accept that users will not pay exorbitant amounts of money for content and price your IP fairly.
That's just "shareholder value". Combine it with everyone who owns stock expecting it to go up all the time, and you get that mentality. Stocks were once a vote of confidence in a company and their long term vision, and now it's just hyper-analyzed gambling with as short a return time as possible.
Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market. Now we have the additional burden of lumping nearly everyone's retirement accounts into that same system. What could possibly go wrong, again?
I read an article probably 20 years ago, about the things that take down profitable companies, and one phrase that stuck with me was "the relentless pursuit of more".
>Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market
Just the basic fact that an economy that is good for workers, where they are more in demand and make more money, is bad for their retirement because the stock market goes down, is really all you need to know to understand why the stock market is a plague.
Milton Friedman really did a number on people. Has any of his ideas stood the test of time? Everything I’ve seen has led to rampant inequality, and rot in both the corporate and government sectors. Even in the most recent economic crises, zero countries embraced his ideas, and those that tried austerity had a worse outcome.
Netflix got greedy and decided to make all their own content in-house, but they did a poor job of picking shows, and not making too many at once. They burned tons of money on mediocre-to-bad shows, all in the name of not paying licensing to another company, the result being a higher cost for less desirable content.
> The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password
> Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.
So they lost 300,000 paying users whom they think will come back, but 10% of existing users plan on leaving despite Netflix investing in Spanish content.
I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
> I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
That's the case for me indeed. I myself basically stopped watching Netflix, somehow the content doesn't do anything for me anymore.
But I shared my account with family and they watch it. If this gets to us, and I'm the only one who can watch it, I'm for sure cancelling. The family members with whom I'm sharing the account are very unlikely to get their own account either.
(Sharing accounts is a great form of stealth giving to family members who would otherwise not be able to afford such "luxuries". It's much easier to say "hey, I got one free account on my Spotify plan, would you like to use it? Otherwise, it will go to waste" as opposed to awkwardly offering money directly)
Interesting you say that the content doesn't appeal to you anymore. I feel the same way. My observation is that, for the most part, most of Netflix's original content is reality TV and comedy specials.
They don't even seem to be bothering to create great content like Stranger Things anymore. We are at the enshittification of Netflix stage.
You have to love that under "Why was X cancelled" they basically just compliment the show runner and actors for their work or cite "creative differences", rarely do they actually provide an actual explanation, such as "The show had to few viewers".
It's also becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shows get canceled before they can conclude, so I don't watch any Netflix shows now until after the final episode airs. But the final episode never airs because there weren't enough people watching the show while it was in production.
But then why do the rug pull of making one or two seasons of a good show and then killing it? That serves to piss off everyone who took the time to watch and get interested in the show. If Netflix only wants to make reality tv they should just own that.
I stopped even considering Netflix shows with only one or two seasons because they almost always get killed mid-story. Which means I pretty much never watch Netflix now. Out of state relatives using the account is the main thing keeping me subscribed, so when that sharing gets cut off it'll be the end of my subscription.
Short seasons are perfectly valid and have existed since before Netflix. I remember watching British TV shows in which a season consisted of six half-hour episodes, and feeling that more (and more interesting) things had happened in that time frame than a USA season of 24 one-hour episodes.
These days that’s even more of a plus. When someone recommends something to watch the first thing I check is how many seasons it’s up to, then the number of episodes, then the runtime. Shows with too many seasons of too many too long episodes are immediately ignored.
And they have so many (non-'original') where they only have a few series available at the end or in the middle. I don't understand the licencing/purchasing decision that can lead to that. Seems to happen far too often for it to be different studios/licencors, obviously that happens sometimes.
BBC's QI is one example. I understand new series not being available on Netflix (in the UK) as the BBC now have their own subscription platform. But it's not just that, because Netflix don't have the earliest ones either, just a seemingly random set in the middle, perhaps even non-contiguous.
I found that to be one of the drawbacks of Netflix, and all other streaming services. A story that could easily be told in 100min or a few hours takes 10+ hours to slog through. Excessive sequences of characters getting high, or repeating tasks, or irrelevant side quests to pad the content time statistics, or make people feel like their monthly fees are worth it.
Yes, this is especially true for successful shows. They can be told in 2-3 seasons but they end up as 5 seasons. The pace of storytelling crawls to a halt in the middle seasons typically.
I almost feel it is a problem with the thumbnails. Everything looks so unappealing. I've liked a few Netflix shows in the past year (heck if I could name them though), I have a profile on my brother's account, but I primarily watch through an IPTV service. When I browse in the Netflix app I cannot find a single thing I want to watch.
Their entire business model is that there is value in the long tail of possible choices. The paradox of choice is not a complete description of human behavior.
It is outdated. Streaming is now cable, which means the business model should revert back to be cable like. Get a couple of killer titles that carry the brand... Disney is doing this well with the Marvel titles. one ends, a new one starts, and they start putting ads of the "new" thing.
I feel the same way, it's becoming harder and harder to find something interesting. Just the other night we opened it up and couldn't find anything in 5 minutes browsing and just went to watch TV instead. That's not the experience you want your users to have.
their catalog isn't as good as it used to be. They've cut a ton of content for seemingly zero reason recently (including their own shows like westworld).
What I like best about HBO is that they have an A-Z listing of every show they have (something people have been asking Netflix for since day one of their streaming service) and how peaceful it is to use their platform.
You can browse without anything auto-playing, you can pause a show for more than 3 seconds and ads don't start rapidly flashing on the screen, and shows don't jump to more ads immediately as credits start rolling so you can actually let an ending sink in without having to scramble for your remote.
HBO max is just much nicer to use than netflix.
I also really like their "last chance" section because things are leaving all the time and that gives you some warning.
What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.
I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.
If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.
Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.
It doesn't help that their software changes so much from device to device. It's been pleasant to use on phone, PS5, and roku but I haven't tried apple+
Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.
I'm watching korean drama and fantasy, also chinese or spanish, they've got a different way of story telling, and I find the aesthetic appealing, can recommend sysyphus, or so, sci-fi and time-travel
Cold case files, the first 48, unsolved mysteries, any cooking show - "reality TV" is a huge market. It's not all toddlers and tiaras and big brother, those were just the "huge, impossible to ignore" ones.
My situation exactly. We're sharing a 4 screen account with 3 friends and no-one even watches netflix every month - we just liked the idea of having access, in case we want to watch something. We already decided, when netflix doesn't allow low-use sharing any more, we'll just cancel and forget about it.
> "Towards the end of 2018, European Parliament approved a law that requires all platforms that provide audiovisual content throughout the continent to have at least 30% European productions within their programming."
It is so well known that it's common to automatically skip content from within the EU. It's usually low-quality fund-farming subpar filler stuff. The most notable exception are spanish films, and those from lesser-known EU countries. Anything from france and germany is almost by definition trash.
In other words: no different than almost all efforts of the EU to "regulate the market" instead of creating incentives.
My family is in the process of finding the best suitable and possible emigration target. Unfortunately this is common. The hardest problem are family ties and care of our parents :/
If your downvoting because of derailing the thread, I deserve it, go on. I'm just frustrated how the EU is, at least from the perspective of my bubble, losing almost every game it wants to play.
I would say it is known and while they are obliged in a way to do it, I don't believe any other streaming service is doing it in the scale that Netflix does
The mistake Netflix makes is to assume that the families and friends, who have been using a shared login, will signup for a subscription on their own. They won't, the value proposition isn't there anymore and these are people who didn't want to pay for the subscription to begin with.
I have serious doubts about Netflix calculations on this decision, but I also don't see what else they could do. They can't buy the content people want and they struggle to produce high quality movies and shows. Their productions are beautiful, but the scripts are severely lacking. Sometimes they get lucky and do a good season of a show, only to screw up subsequent seasons.
> I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries, and all I have to do is pay a measly $17.99/mo. If that goes away, I will be cancelling my subscription.
> Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries,
You're sharing an account with 20 people across 4 countries? It's honestly kind of amazing that they let this level of sharing go on for so long.
It's hard for me to believe that out of 20 different people, every single one of them would decide to boycott Netflix forever because of this. If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
Extrapolate this across their userbase and it's not hard to see why they're doing it. Obviously some people will cancel, but I guarantee Netflix has run pilot trials and analyzed the net effect to their bottom line.
> If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
While extrapolating over a large dataset, it's important to get the initial numbers as correct as possible. Since the person you're replying to is paying for the most expensive plan (probably to get the 4x devices-at-a-time perk for so many people), the plan those people would re-subscribe at is important (and less likely to be the same plan if only for one person).
They'd need at least 3 people to re-subscribe on either of the two cheapest plans to net a profit, or they'd need at least 2 people to re-subscribe on the "Standard" $16/mo plan to net a profit. Anything less is a net negative. It's a favorably-biased population for Netflix, but that'd still require a 15%-30% conversion rate for users.
I'm sure they'll come ahead in the end, but I imagine a high % of the expected profit comes from cutting costs from serving 20x "free" users per plan rather than converting them into paying users themselves.
You’re assuming they have no variable costs (content fees, peak demand services) in delivering the service. One person at $12.99 a month is certainly more profitable than 10+ at < $1.799/mo.
I guess their calculus is how much does it cost to support 10-20 streaming users. Is it worth getting $18/mo for? I don't know the answer, but that seems to be their approach.
It feels the same as back when the music industry thought that those that pirated music would automatically purchase it if the "free" version was removed. They were wrong then and the streaming services are just as wrong now.
I think Netflix (and others) are looking at that 10-20 x $18/month and salivating, not realizing that the money just isn't there. They need to take a page from the Microsoft book and let people "steal" some of the content so they can have a least some paying customers. It beats having no paying customers.
I'm pretty out of the loop. Is pirating still easy? I thought tbp isn't reliable any more, and finding reliable torrent sites is kind of hard now? Younger people aren't really on the computer anymore. Like your not going to be torrenting off ipads and stuff
TBP is now proxy software that anyone can install[0] which talks to a central API[1] for torrent listings. Each provider can tailor the experience and add ads or donation buttons as they desire. You can search for "TPB proxy list"[2] to find a list of TPB sites. I currently use tpb.party which I find the fastest and least intrusive.
Reading your comment makes me sympathize greatly with Netflix. I don't think they should care about customers who demands a "measly" price to continue their subscriptions.
I was on the fence about it since I share it with 2 people who wouldn't get a subscription otherwise due to technical reasons... but this is really shameless.
Absolutely agree. I also had a family account that kept instead not watching anything anymore. In the end I felt like paying for watching propaganda that I could see for free in national television. This came at the perfect time as an excuse.
I don't think there is an agenda, but design by committee has gotten to the point where it does look like there is one. If you are hell bent on checking the same set of was-well-received-before boxes in every piece of schlock you pump out, people reasonably start to believe that checking boxes is the point. From there any checkbox that doesn't align with viewer's world view is perceived as propaganda.
I mean, what are said documentaries about the nazis like? Are they presenting an uncritical viewpoint? I don't think I've ever seen a documentary about the nazis not include the context of all the horrible shit they did
Not OP. They're pushing an agenda is the general criticism. E.g. I'm all for them not excluding minorities. If the show does good, it does good. It's a universal unassailable good/win. But when they want to enforce quotas and promoting DEI content synthetically and unnaturally, then they've crossed a line.
I think Netflix sees 3 people sharing 1 account and thinks that 2 of the 3 would maybe pay for accounts if they block sharing.
But in reality they end up losing the 1 account instead because none of the 3 people are willing to pay full price individually. They were all willing to pay 1/3 of the price when sharing.
According to Netflix, there is an initial wave of cancellations, but over the ensuing months, they end up with more paying subscribers than there were before the password-sharing crackdown.
They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
> They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
Companies regularly do things that are detrimental to their bottom line because they either misunderstood how their customers use their product, or because they are trying to please shareholders, or a combination of both.
> According to Netflix, there is an initial wave of cancellations, but over the ensuing months, they end up with more paying subscribers than there were before the password-sharing crackdown.
The question begging to be asked here is whether those are new subscribers or people that were using someone's else password, natural growth, or just a good show landed in meantime and a bunch of people subscribed
Yeah, we'll see how this works out for them in the long run. I have a feeling that the end result here is they'll drive away people who use them for years, and would have continued to use them for years out of loyalty, in exchange for customers who are a lot less attached to them, and will probably be more likely to cancel later on.
It's an increasingly crowded market, everyone's distracted, everyone's sick of subscriptions, and nobody has enough money. If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
> If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
It does seem like this was a plan that was in the works for a couple years, and momentum is keeping it moving. I doubt they would have picked this timing if they knew what was coming!
This is where I am. Once they cut off password sharing here I'll be cancelling my subscription. They produce very little content I watch these days and license even less as other streaming services have started ring fencing it. It's not a huge expense, so it's fine as long as my parents are getting use out of it, but once that's gone it's going to make no sense for me to keep paying.
Netflix had some great quotes about this from their earnings and specifically called out Kantar's data would show less viewers in the short term.
They had noted they saw or expected the users who were on someone else's account and who used it actively to come back with their own accounts or convince the account holder to pay for them
Losing 1M users is not good, but isn't the real question how many accounts they lost?
> The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password, according to Kantar’s research, which is based on surveys of household streaming habits.
This makes it seem like they lost 333k customers. I don't know how many customers they have in Spain, but that sounds like a lot. But what does it mean to be "using someone else's password"? Does that include me, using my wife's password? I feel like more clarity is needed.
Apple, Google and Amazon would seem to have a big advantage here in doing Family Accounts.
By putting someone "in your family" you at least feel like you're giving them access to a lot of stuff, so you probably don't do it with friends as much. Plus there is some unique tracking by account even if it's just an email address. I never tried it but I would assume I can't be in multiple "families" at the same time on Prime or iStuff.
Whereas if you're just Netflix, and the only reason I use you is to stream Netflix, what is the barrier to handing out my password?
Good point — if NFLX wants to cut down on password sharing, maybe they should make it so that anyone with the password can order premium PPV content. That would make people think twice before giving out their passwords!
I don’t know about Google. But in Appleland you can have children in your family without letting them use the payment card associated with the family. You definitely can prevent them completely from buying anything (my situation), but IIRC you can also let them buy stuff once an adult has approved. It sounds like a reasonable system.
I am already sharing Apple TV+ using Family Sharing and it's working out great.
There are Apple limits to how often you can change families, and potentially family members could buy apps with your account or use its storage, so you're incentivized to only share with people you trust and not random strangers.
Netflix needs something similar at no additional charge.
I agree with you but also it's easy to not do it right for YouTube movies. You can't share videos with family unless "you purchase them with the family payment method" (source: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7007852?hl=en#zip...). I bought a movie on YouTube a few days ago. SO couldn't find it because I didn't buy with the correct credit card.
I found the iTunes family sharing stuff too complicated and just lent my password to my family instead. Which I wouldn't do with friends because that's actually a lot of access.
How anyone can find Apple family sharing difficult to setup is interesting as it takes I think a total of 6 taps to get setup with your first family member.
It's not that, it just seemed like more moving parts. I don't know what it's going to share and what it's not, or if all purchases are eligible (as it turns out, some aren't).
As for the setup, it'd probably start like this: "Mom, what's your Apple ID password?" "I don't know."
Netflix has family accounts. But god forbid you live in another country and pay the subscription for your boomer parents back home - as not just a courtesy, but also as they’re not capable at all of managing things digitally. Apparently this is a racket
I wonder to what extent tossing away non-paying users will hurt their network effect.
How many people got HBO because their friends (paying or not) were talking about Game of Thrones?
Hopefully for Netflix somebody there has run the numbers WRT one incremental unit of video-delivery-cost is worth more or less than one incremental unit of chatter.
But nobody talks about Netflix shows because there's no shared progress, so you can't even begin to discuss it with your friends until everyone is completely finished with. Then at that point, it's finished, why bother?
If you want to time gate your episodes with your friends you're still welcome to coordinate that with them. Lots of couples do this too ("Don't watch until we can do it together") but personally, no matter how excited I am for a show, if a streaming platform withholds episodes so that they can better manage social media and stretch out advertising I'll just wait until the whole thing is out before I even start watching.
I'm totally done letting media companies dictate my time and letting them make me feel like I'm missing out somehow if I don't jump when they tell me to. I'll watch things on my schedule, when it's convenient for me, and I'll do it at my own pace. If a platform doesn't want to let me do that, I've got plenty of other things competing for my attention that will.
> If you want to time gate your episodes with your friends you're still welcome to coordinate that with them.
That feels somewhat naive. People don't only belong to one friendship group.
> if a streaming platform withholds episodes so that they can better manage social media and stretch out advertising I'll just wait until the whole thing is out before I even start watching.
Sounds like it works out for everyone, then: those that want to watch and discuss week-to-week can, those that don't can wait until the end of the season and watch all at once.
> That feels somewhat naive. People don't only belong to one friendship group.
We did exactly that during pandemic lockdowns. We used a browser extension that let us sync our netflix viewing while we had a live chat running during the show. It meant we could all talk about the last episode during the week and people had something to look forward to. It's perfectly do-able unless you're actually trying to keep your friend groups segregated for some reason, like you've got friends that won't do anything with some of your other friends.
> Sounds like it works out for everyone, then:
It might, except that streaming companies are too stupid to take a long view on ratings. Amazon for example canceled The Tick because they didn't get enough views in the weeks immediately following release. By the time I (and many many others) got around to watching and enjoying it, they'd already made up their mind that it was a failure.
When platforms withhold episodes I'm moving on to something else and it could be a long time before I make it back around to them. If they chase me away from a show and I have to find one that respects my time and that one has got 5-6 seasons, or if instead I pick up a video game that I'll put 150+ hours into it could easily be months before I get back to whatever they are heavily promoting and tracking this instant, assuming something new doesn't catch my interest and take priority.
Release whole seasons at once, and people who want to time gate can start right away and take longer to finish, while people who binge can finish in a weekend and everyone else can go at their own pace, but in any case it's more eyeballs within the same timeframe.
> Sounds like it works out for everyone, then: those that want to watch and discuss week-to-week can, those that don't can wait until the end of the season and watch all at once.
I do this, and then frequently forget about the show at all. Then never watch it.
Cancelled netflix not too long ago. They should never have reminded me to check the view stats of my family.
> If you want to time gate your episodes with your friends you're still welcome to coordinate that with them
Forcing everyone to collectively sit with a single episode per week is fun. Watching all at once makes them all sort of meld together. Having to sit with an episode for a week changes the experience of watching the show. If you can convince your friend group to watch together, that's great, but things like discussion forums and twitter (where a lot of people like to talk about shows online) will always be dominated by binge watchers.
the last time i did this, it was with House, M.D., and it was with downloaded copies (to ensure correct subtitles, right?). Episode came out whatever day, a group of us would gather the next evening and watch it together. We had a blind person and two deaf people in the group.
The only thing netflix (and possibly others, i wouldn't know) have done to improve that situation is adding descriptive audio service, which brings the usefulness of good subtitles to the audio track, so that blind people can experience more of the show that they can't see.
I'm a bad anecdote for a couple of reasons, though: I haven't had a television connected to coax in any way since 2003, and i haven't liked any new television show created after about 2013 or so - furthermore, i haven't really "loved" any series that began after 2004 or 2005. A supermajority of my media (disc and disk) predates the iphone. A plurality predates America Online.
Since i'm already on an aside, i'll point out a couple of things: First, thanks to the likes of MTV's indefatigable pushing in the late 80s and through the 90s, everyone raised in that era (and after) thinks that in order to be engaging, you must change cameras every 3 seconds. Bonus points if there's no story reason to do so. Secondly, or if you prefer, as an ancillary to the first point, the constant viewpoint shifts can aggravate certain conditions; for example, new shows tend to tire me out, and a "binge" for whatever reason tends to leave me with a headache that lasts a couple of days. Third, a plurality (and majority, up to ~75%) of all television shows produced in the US are either directly or indirectly Law Enforcement related, and i'm sure a rigorous study would bear out that has a detrimental effect on both public policy and the zeitgeist feelings of law enforcement and related groups.
I get where you’re coming from on modern TV shows as I still enjoy 80s-90s shows, and some 70s shows more than most modern shows. But a majority of what you listed here is clearly emotional ranting. If you for once believe 75% of shows are law enforcement related then it sounds like you’re not looking deep enough. Granted there are a lot but nowhere near 75%. You also stereotyped a whole generation, though I agree that SOME of that generation has ADHD problems because of that style of cinematography, and it’s only getting worse.
i said "a plurality (and majority, up to ~75%)". I was wrong. Sorry. it's 70% on at least CBS, and more than 50% across all networks.
> Of the 69 scripted television dramas that aired on the big four US broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC) in the last year-and-a-half, 35 were about law enforcement, according to a Quartz analysis. CBS was responsible for 16 of those on its own. About 70% of the network’s dramatic programming from 2019-2020 were about cops. [0]
And that's "Dramas", i guess if you consider "all programming, including for example comedies" the ratio goes down to a peak of 28.7%. however:
> Even many of the non-cop dramas on these channels are so cop-adjacent that one could reasonably argue they are also about law enforcement. CBS’s Madam Secretary follows the fictional US secretary of state, a former CIA analyst. Evil follows a forensic psychologist investigating supernatural incidents. Blood & Treasure follows a former FBI agent teaming up with an art thief to track down a terrorist.
And now, you said:
>> You also stereotyped a whole generation
I didn't, if i stereotyped anyone it was cinematographers that grew up with that as "normal", or, if they didn't grow up with that, at least consider it normal.
I just cant enjoy good shows at that schedule. Crappy episodic shows, sure why not. But actually good engaging shows with coherent story and structure are massively better when episodes are watched closely to each other - so that you remember enough from the first episode when you are watching the last one.
But new episodes were coming out weekly after the first few seasons were released on Netflix.
Wikipedia: "It had fair viewership in its first three seasons, but the fourth and fifth seasons saw a moderate rise in viewership when it was made available on Netflix just before the fourth season premiere."
"Breaking Bad's viewership grew greatly as viewers binged the series on Netflix, helping to assure that a fifth season could be made. The fifth-season premiere had more than double the viewership compared to the fourth season premiere, attributed to the Netflix availability"
Stranger Things is generally a much better show than Game of Thrones (in my opinion of course, but I’m pretty sure I’m objectively correct). But Game of Thrones seemed to make a much bigger cultural splash. Stranger Things—a season comes out, and then we all binge it, talk about that season, and it it all done in a month or so. Game of Thrones had weekly episode-by-episode articles written about it.
Stretching out the advertising is a huge reason why they want to delay releasing episodes. I value my time and setting my own schedule higher. I think that as long as the shows are good they'll find an audience and sustain cultural relevancy long after the ads have moved on to shoving the next thing in our faces.
Stretching out the subscription time seems like another big deal. Disney+ seems to have worked out a magnificently infuriating cadence of one interesting episode per week. There’s always just enough around the corner to not cancel the subscription…
Because you can still watch something that is highly recommended? You think people only discuss shows that are week to week? Plenty of people won't even watch something unless they can binge at least a season.
It's definitely a thing. I remember when Lost first aired I had lengthy discussions every week with friends, I even logged into Lostpedia to browse, exchange theories etc.
By comparison, the first Netflix show I remember really watching was House of Cards. Tried to have conversations with friends about it but inevitably you'd start with "oh, what episode are you on? Is that the one with the...? So you haven't seen...?".
Discussing an entire season when it's complete is definitely less fulfilling than discussing each episode. Depending on the show, of course.
On the other hand, watching episode a week sux. By the end of a season, you don't remember what happened 3 months ago. The series got much better writing over time - but the consequence is that I actually want to see it as a whole instead of little by little with mandatory breaks.
I am not sure it is for me, because I did not watched Naruto and being forced to rewatch same scenes does not exactly sound like fun to me. I do not remember stuff from three months ago, but also it is not complete amnesia.
I like a lot how modern series are written and done. I find it to be massive improvement over what movies and series used to be when I was young. I like the one long story aspect of it all. I just do not want to watch it in one episode a week schedule.
Of course that happens, but that doesn't mean people won't watch recommended shows that are already complete, especially younger people who only know this way.
Spanish here: we had shared accounts for every platform in our workplace. HBO, Disney, Netflix, Movistar, Filmin... As soon at Netflix started the threats, we talked about keep it and try login through a proxy or getting it out of our pooled accounts. Each of us was only following one Netflix show, two at most, so we got rid of it.
Not salty, it just doesn't make sense anymore if you already have four or more platforms.
A little bit of piracy is good though. It’s better honestly than them not watching. They are talking to their friends about shows. Having Watch parties. Whatever. If it’s the choice of don’t pay don’t watch or don’t pay watch there is a benefit to them pirating.
Losing 1M users is not good, but isn't the real question how many accounts they lost?
There's another question: how's the competition doing? Amazon and Sky Showtime are much better in new subscriptions. HBO is 50% in new subscriptions. The measure is killing mindshare.
That’s somewhat relevant, but you have to keep in mind that nflx has much higher penetration to begin with. Percentages are less insightful when the starting points are far apart.
Two notes: not sure if official numbers, but it's about paying accounts, not "users" like the original article. And you'll see also fiber companies like Movistar and the Vodafone thieves, that have their own platforms.
It seems the site is paywalled when not coming from search so in millions of paying accounts:
Stats were given for HBO, which appears to have roughly 1/3 of the penetration — not exactly close. Amazon is the only competitor with more than 40% Netflix's installed base.
9.6 vs 6.6 is like 2/3 for Amazon. Those numbers were for past year. Now there's a new one launching. The market is very fragmented and the fiber is here very strong, with the sports being a big part.
They would have no way of knowing if your wife or you are using your wife's account, so of course it doesn't include that. Why would you need to clarify that? They don't have spyware turning on your camera for facial recognition lol
Streaming platforms absolutely know who is watching. Sometimes it's because they have profiles you can set up, but that data can also come from people watching shows on their own phones/tablets/laptops, what shows they watch, and the hours that they watch them.
My account, with everybody using the same profile, working different schedules, and watching different shows, I wonder what my profile looks like? 0-100 male or female is about as close as they could get.
Image capture isn't the only fingerprinting technique: there are much simpler signals like patterns related to content navigation (just one example: tap vs swipe for advancing paginated content), and the combination of such signals can create a strong fingerprint
Netflix doesn’t need to image capture because they know what content they are displaying. Swipes and taps count for little when the device is a set top box that matches every other set top boxes fingerprint.
Netflix have really dissapointed me. I've been a subscriber since before streaming, and have even been content paying the subscription fee during the "breaks" of not using their service for up to months at a time because I so badly want(ed) them to succeed. I also understood the difficult situation they were facing when the producers of content were makkng ridiculous demands on their distribution, or worse, just pulling their content because they were opening their own service or some fuckhead like Murdoch threw money at them to keep an exclusive lock on it.
Their streaming model of watching on-demand (i.e., not a weekly release, here's the whole show to watch at your own pace) and their investment in shows that were not the usual low-brow trope-laden predictable shit meant I was actually excited when a new show was announced. My favourite TV-watching moments have been getting lost in shows like Narcos, The Ozarks, or even the seemingly polarising Orange Is The New Black.
Now I log in and see nothing but nostalgia tv, trash telly like Love Is Blind, or inexplicably 1/3 of my screen is listing mobile games that Netflix think I would be interested in.
.. and I'm genuinely concerned shows like The Diplomat are just going to leave us all hanging.
Meanwhile the other streaming services are at least as bad, but typically worse.
When Reed Hasting left and Ted Sarandos took over he had a bit of power shakeup and handed over the content reins to Bela Bajaria - who was brought in to head up international over Cindy Holland who was in charge of US content. Holland had brought in House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Stranger Things, The Crown, Ozark and Narcos.
Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?). It also aligns, however, with a timeframe of the launch of the studios having their own top tier services such as Disney+, Peacock and even the new HBOMax (MAX now) all of whom are more tightly holding the streaming rights to the studios to which they're associated.
This for me aligned with when Netflix started going downhill. I have to say some of their newer content seems better but I'm not sure where its going to go. Right now HBOMax and Apple seem to be the most consistent for fewer, higher quality shows which also more closely aligns with my viewing habits. Netflix we keep mostly for my daughter these days and the few random hits that come through on Netflix.
"Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?)."
I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
All the studios were looking over at Netflix making all the money and wanted to disintermediate the middleman, but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. That worked for a bit but it's wearing out.
The solution of just pumping out more is the obvious one to try, but it hasn't been going well.
I'm... actually not convinced that's impossible? The bottleneck on these seems to be quality writing. Generally the actors act, the editors edit, the directors direct, the effects crew broadly succeeds at the effects, etc. But Hollywood in 2023 seems to have negative respect for writing. Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I recognize of course that any 101 course is only the intro and the basics, but current Hollywood writing is not taking the rules, deeply understanding them, and then transcending them by virtue of the deep mastery of their craft... they're just plain writing for crap. They've got a ton of other priorities and "good writing" is so far down the list that it might as well not be on there.
You can't get the best of the best to write for 100% of every season, but a lot of streaming stuff is several cuts below what middle-of-the-line episodic television shows were managing in the 90s in really, really basic stuff. Surely there's enough competent writers to at least get a solid C on the writing front to let all the other factors carry over to "at least worthwhile", if Hollywood would just raise the priority on that quite a bit more.
Tons of high quality content is probably not on the table for anyone, but surely with all these resources we could scrape together some medium quality content more consistently?
One of my friends is a writer, and his take on the problem is that the seasoned writers Netflix used to have (a few years ago) are now all getting fairly "old". Aka around their 50's.
So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing.
But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years.
No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance.
Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)
Certainly I would agree that letting go a lot of experience folks would have an effect on the product.
However, I think this comment could use some more justification:
> But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
Thus the "(heh)" in my post. I recognise the same thing, and found it ironic.
> Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault.
It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".
Barely on-topic, but this is sort of the plot of Reboot, and I remember watching this show seeing the dynamic between the elder writer played by Paul Reiser) and the much younger writer played by Rachel Bloom.
The gist of the (relevant) bit of plot is that the younger writer wants to take an old classic series (ala Full House) but do a gritty reboot of it, but the studio brings in the original writers on to help, and there is unsurprisingly a culture clash.
I remember thinking (of the younger generation) how sad it was that they were so eager to dismiss all the experience of the elders, and how glad I was that this was just a TV show and probably not at all what was happening in the real world. I was safe in that ignorance right up until I read your comment.
This was a great show I can't say enough about. It really mad me laugh out loud far more than any other show in recent memory. (And in the end, if I recall, both groups of writers learned that the other was actually pretty decent at their jobs and had a lot of good ideas.) Unfortunately, it didn't do spectacularly in the ratings and was immediately canceled. I seriously hope someone else picks it up, but I don't know how likely that is.
I've never seen the show but it sounds good and reviews were decent.
Given that it was killed off after one season, is it still worth the watch? Does it end well?
I wonder if some of that is TV writers growing up on ubiquitous TV writing, like how anime is increasingly made by people who just like anime and weren't as interested in a wide variety of media as the older generation.
Bringing up episodic television shows in the 90s brings up an interesting point. For 90s episodic television, script submissions were open to the public. Each show still had a team of staff writers like they do today, but the staff writers would mostly write the really important episodes (like finales and two-parters). The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads. In today's binge-able format, almost every episode is written by the staff writers. (They might still let someone with connections, like an actor on the show looking to make a career change, submit an episode.)
Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.
> The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads
Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.
I worked with a copy writer that had written an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." By coincidence she had submitted an a script for an episode that coincided with a major plot point they were working to (a character leaving). I asked her about it, and it was really the only major writing credit she ever got.
I know that at least Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Golden Girls accepted freelance scripts. You can sometimes find the submission guidelines for Star Trek: The Next Generation on fan sites. You can also tell if this is the case for a show by looking at the writers. If there are lots of writers who only wrote one or two episodes, the show probably took submissions.
All the old books about television script writing I've read are about submitting in this way, but by the time I was actually considering it episodic television was rapidly dying out.
I really felt this when I was watching Andor. It's about a bunch of nobodies in the Star Wars universe, no Jedi at all. But there were so many moments when things just made so much sense, that it actually took me out of the moment in surprise. There's so little good writing anymore that it's shocking when you see it.
>but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription.
And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison.
The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch.
I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.
A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks.
So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons.
Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
This is why all the streaming services are constantly trying to hype up their one "must watch" show. If you aren't watching it now, you're left out of the conversation, and nobody will want to talk about it in three months.
Are they though? Netflix in particular is famously bad at actually promoting their hot new stuff. I suppose they may do it more on-platform and just assume it's enough, but it seems like (and this is just from my memory, which is maybe wrong) that the ads for streaming services generally fall into the "look at all this stuff we have and maybe I won't even tell you what show I'm giving you a clip of right now" kinds of commercials.
I practically never see an ad for a particular new show -- tho in addition to memory faults there is also of course selection bias here.
I think the release cadence can be a double edged sword for viewer retention.
Certainly with Wheel of Time I felt that there was a few weak\boring episodes in a row and I hit the point where I dropped it, for me wasn't worth waiting a full week to see if quality of subsequent episodes improved.
If there had of been a buffer of episodes available I could probably power through the bad episodes until the show picked up again but with weekly release cadence it just caused me to give up on it.
I wonder whether some of the media streaming companies are going to try to use the sports streaming playbook, where you get penalized for canceling and then resubcribing within <12 months.
Those penalties could be "we just won't let you sign up" or "oh you don't get the promotional rate then, your rate for Netflix will be $44.95/mo for the next 11 months".
I wanted a smattering from like 10 different services. No I'm not paying 120$ a month. So I pirated every last bit.
Turns out friends also wanted to watch them so I made my JF instance available via cloudflare. And now I get requests of shows, the arrs parses the request, downloads, and just shows up.
The services had their chance. They failed us. We came with alternatives. Until their offerings are better, we see no reason to change.
A lot of wisdom in that rant. I too have noticed the big gap is writers (who are going on strike it seems). I think we're all going to have to suffer through "stuff written by LLMs" for a while, but I really think that a studio that restructured their revenue sharing to focus more of the proceeds towards writers would find quite a bit of success in today's market.
I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.
Exactly! I had the same reaction. First episode, "Okay, an interesting (if well worn) setup, a lead character that is somewhat interesting, some dynamics." to second episode "Well that really didn't feel particularly entertaining", to the third episode, "not getting better, time to get off this train."
I just watched “Ghosted”. It was somewhat entertaining, but hardly stellar. This is the sort of movie that is being released these days, and we can easily take it or leave it.
Dexter Fletcher as director piqued my interest in Ghosted just a wee bit. I read The Rachel Papers as a youngster and quite enjoyed the film when it came out (in which he plays the main character in the book).
I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)
I feel the same is also happening with Rabbit Hole, though I might persist with it. The Kiefer and Charles Dance in the same series, what's not to like?
The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue.
On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage.
The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.
> Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that.
I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons.
Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.).
Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.
Well said, writing makes the difference. Quite a few great movies have an extremely simple setting. Even if we establish that writers can't write anymore, let's turn to books not yet televised?
One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.
> I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
This. There simply isn't that much really great content.
“I wonder if, say, a bonobo throwing shit at a whiteboard full of titles as a method of deciding what projects to make would have more or less success than all of these other ‘deciders’ who think they know what people want or don’t want.”[0]
Why is Netflix not following short high quality 1-3 min videos model which is popular with young crowd? They already have Fast laughs tab which mimics that.
Youtube / Creative studios could pitch 1-3 min video ideas which Netflix could greenlight and provide just bare minimum capital to produce. If the final film is good, Netflix could buy the film and release on their platform.
Current Trends which are in favour of above idea:
1] Story generation will get cheaper thanks to ChatGPT.
2] Film generation will get cheaper thanks to Stable Diffusion.
3] Short video formats are already very good, engaging.
The pitch/studio model does not work for short content, and it never will. It's too slow-moving and corporate. The videos that succeed in this format are zeitgeist, flash-in-the-pan trends that are faster to produce and more dynamic than even the laziest reality show. The production value doesn't really matter--if anything it's a downside past a point.
If hackathons in software work and produce good product ideas, why can't the same be possible in creative fields? Cutaways in Family Guy are already short jokes which are shared without broader context on social media and they are popular. Netflix can always A/B test newly introduced content to determine engagement. Already built up cultural context (e.g. idea of multiverse, matrix and so on)need not be re-introduced from scratch, so no need to spend screen time on them.
Odd1sOut (Youtube Creator) has a animation series on Netflix. So in some sense, Netflix is already doing it. They just have to create a marketplace for this.
Not sure why Quibi failed. Maybe trying to get distribution/tech and content right at the same time didn't work for them. Netflix doesn't have distribution problem, just content and it should try to iterate on what works.
Personally, there are so many short stories (e.g. by Greg Egan, Borges, others[0]) which I would like it to reach mass audience. Rights are tricky issue though.
Quibi was interesting - the more I think about it (I work in this space) the more I think they actually might have had something.
The reason they failed is mostly because they went too big too fast. They spent almost a billion dollars in content at launch and expected to get a ton of people subscribed quickly at $8 a pop. Had a bit of a chicken and egg situation there. They needed enough quality content to justify that amount per month. But it was all new, untested content. When they didn't get the subscribers they had pretty much zero runway to ride it out and iterate.
Quibi failed because they over capitalized it and then pulled out when it didn't have the xxM DAUs. They basically launched and had an amazing journey in the same month.
To be fair to the backers (such winning personalities as Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, ugh), it wasn't a case of 1M DAUs when they wanted 5M. It was more like 5k DAUs when they wanted 5M. The idea was dead on arrival, no amount of money and effort would've saved it.
I'm starting to wonder if Netflix is maybe just trying harder in newer markets.
I cancelled my subscription out of frustration at the crappy content I saw all the time in the US app (and the terrible discovery too) -- but now I keep seeing ads for fairly compelling Asian shows and I might resubscribe "in" another country.
If you are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, the stuff you get to throw might not be so good when you're competing with Apple, HBO, and all the rest. In a smaller market maybe the best people are still willing to be thrown at the Netflix Wall, so to speak.
For me it started going downhill with the high quantity of shows molded for ESG, now I download well-reviewed shows to my Plex even if I missed binge watching easily with Netflix.
>Funny how saying Bandersnatch was innovative gets HN absolutely livid.
... huh? I didn't say Bandersnatch wasn't innovative and my feathers are far from ruffled. I just don't see how citing one thing from five years ago that no other streamer, nor Netflix themselves, have replicated since (correct me if I'm wrong) is a strong is example of Netflix being "innovative".
I'd argue that other streaming providers would've explored this sort of thing already if they felt there was enough interest. Anecdotally, I'm in multiple communities that involve the discussion of film and television and people just aren't asking for that sort of thing.
Bandersnatch was a silly gimmick, not innovation. Sierra was doing stuff like that in the 90s.
Choose your own adventure TV may be for some, but I hate it. I want to be told a story, not just pick how I want things to go.
Besides, that or AI genned to taste would remove the social aspect. I love discussing shows, movies, etc with friends. That gets hard to impossible in this model...
Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).
Severance was great! I watched For All Mankind and Foundation, which both had great production values but were hurt by cheesy storytelling and sometimes iffy acting.
I'd love to see TV+ try something more experimental.
The first season could have been better, but it has great production values and as far as I can tell they see it as an investment and they are not going to cancel it soon. So for now I'm optimistic about a second season.
Many shows have hit their strides in later seasons. IIRC I found Breaking Bad a bit boring in season one. (Granted, probably the writing was already better than season one of Foundation.)
I know some people are really irritated by how it differs from the book, but I really enjoyed it, especially "The Empire". I kinda want the bad guys to win, lol
Lee Pace and his character arch carried that show. Everything else was terrible. I LOVED the books and felt personally affronted with how they butchered the content. These are some of the best science fiction books every written, and THIS was the best they could do with it? The only way they could have screwed up this badly is writing egos the size of Jupiter and zero oversight.
I really enjoyed foundation. I just had to let go of the book series and take it as a new universe and I’m really looking forward to what they do next.
Apple TV+ has really surprised me. They've quickly become my favourite streaming platform, and somehow even got me interested in Major League Soccer (a sport I didn't even follow previously) enough to subscribe to their MLS Season Pass.
I really hope they don't fall into the Netflix habit of cancelling shows before they have time to find their groove (Mr. Corman was really creative and just getting good and got axed), and some of their dramas are starting to veer into the forgettable "Netflix Hallmark made for TV" territory.
Mr. Corman was tough to see cancelled but that show was hard to watch. It was scarily depressing and I while I think some people say they want a show like that, I don’t think it pulled the viewership numbers to keep it on air.
I really wish YouTube allowed 1.10 playback speed. It’s just fast enough to save you some real time on long video series, but slow enough that you can still absorb difficult subjects. Even slow talkers become fast talkers on 1.25 speed.
I agree, I like 1.1 speed. The playback dropdown actually has a "custom" button in the top right of the dropdown on the desktop view of the site. You can set 1.05 and 1.1 playback speeds with it. It's a little annoying to use on mobile, as you have to switch to "desktop" view in the browser and can't use the app.
Honest suggestion, try getting used to listening to things at faster speeds.
I started listening to podcasts at increasingly faster speeds, going from 1.1 to 1.2 and slowly increasing it. It only took a few days to a week of listening to slightly-too-fast-for-comfort content before it started sounding normal and I could bump it up again. Now the slowest I listen to is at 1.5 (going up to 1.6 or even 1.8 for my "filler" podcasts). Videos I can crank even higher, since the addition of visual content and/or subtitles can help process the audio information.
I now watch half my videos at 2x speed, and 1.25 or even 1.5 are how 1.1 used to seem for me.
SmartTube (for Google/Android TV) used to allow this but a recent update has removed the other speed increments and it now only lets you use the usual increments you find on YouTube. :(
Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content.
Which is a win for literally everybody. The consumer wins because they get a very high amount of enjoyment for their invested time. The service wins because the less time each loyal subscriber spends actually using the service the less their bandwidth costs are.
I skip most of the Ted Lasso scenes with Mr Gruff and lil' Ms SideBusiness. If you had told me back in season one that I'd prefer watching the scenes with Mr BoringHomeLife, I wouldn't have believed you.
Interesting. I also like the Apple TV+ content, but my list is completely different. I liked BlackBird, Invasion, Slow Horses, Servant, and Tehran...and mostly didn't like the ones on your list.
Watching on the Apple TV+ app on an Android TV it frequently replays the same episode I already watched or starts at some random time earlier in the episode than when I left off which is a pain to fix using their scrubbing feature which is itself a bad experience.
Agreed. Apple TV in general has that feeling of quality. Another great one there that I'd highly recommend is Slow Horses.
I feel like I must mention though: as soon as For All Mankind decided to have a teenager seduce a grown married woman I lost interest. Then to top it off, they continued that plotline into the next season. What a shame.
Disappointment can only come from your own expectations. Good doesn't last. I like to have a mindset of using these kind of things while they work for me, until they don't, then leave and not look back. Don't get attached to commercial endeavours.
> Disappointment can only come from your own expectations.
Reductionist victim blaming and, frankly, nonsense. Pessimism is not healthy.
I supported their business (by paying) because I liked their operating model, and their campaign (for lack of a better word) to keep adverts out of the platform and to support "better" content.
I am dissappointed that model has, apparently, failed and they are pivoting away into yet another low brow, low IQ, garbage distributor - even if it is an inevitability.
I think some people's expectations of Netflix were downright unrealistic.
When they started streaming, the platform was paying pennies to license shows that were already in syndication. Programs that had already made their money in first runs on network TV and cable.
As streaming became the de facto distribution method for new content, of course the cost of licensing that content ewas going to go up. Streaming licensing fees are no longer just gravy to the studios, they are their primary source of income.
The idea that Netflix could somehow afford to bankroll the entire entertainment industry on $15/mo subscriptions is ridiculous. There were three possible outcomes:
1. Netflix becomes the new cable and charges $100+/mo
2. The output of the entertainment industry shrinks until it is sustainable on $15/mo subscriptions
3. Competitors start popping up and fighting for market share
None of which says "Make a million garbage shows and movies that nobody asked for and few actually enjoy - then raise monthly rates to bankroll these pet projects".
Here's an idea - quality over quantity. Make fewer, but better shows and movies.
Quality over quantity completely ignores differences in taste. One person's best show in the universe is another's torturous crap they'd avoid like the plague even if they were paid for watching.
It's perfectly possible to ignore that and still aim for some focused quality, but that's the path to becoming a niche operation. Might as well switch to pay per view.
The main challenge streaming networks are facing is that there is no attention on-ramp now that nobody is zapping through linear tv anymore who might get hooked on an earlier iteration of the franchise. When I know that I am multiple installments behind in $franchise, my willingness to pay for the latest one is zero. And if earlier ones are the same price as the latest, they will feel overpriced. That's why the focused "I subscribe x because of some specific production y" that would be implied by quality over quantity doesn't have much future, they need habitual subscription where discovery just happens.
I thought about listing all the popular, critically acclaimed shows that Netflix has cancelled on a cliffhanger or without a “final season”, but that is a long list and there are plenty of BuzzFeed type articles about it. Not every show is going to be a hit, but Netflix consistently abandons great shows after 1-2 seasons because they aren’t Stranger Things level popular. So now they have a catalog of great shows no one wants to watch or recommend because why would you start a show that you know ends after 1 season on a cliffhanger? How many shows could have been tentpole shows, but people are hesitant to start them when they know how cancel happy Netflix is?
Netflix is shortsighted and myopically focused on tentpole shows that directly lead to “new subscribers” that join just to watch that show. All while ignoring having a strong catalog, since it is hard to measure how a cumulative collection of shows drives subscriptions.
> But how do you determine what's "high quality" and what isn't?
There's zero chance Netflix isn't aware they are peddling more junk than gold these days. It's a gamble to have more content than anyone else - and it seems to be slowly killing them.
Everyone has a story about spending 45 minutes surfing Netflix trying to find something interesting to watch while dinner gets cold. Everyone has stories about how awful the latest Netflix Original is, etc.
The amount of poorly dubbed foreign films is appalling, for instance. That's not a gripe against foreign films, it's a gripe about the utter lack of quality Netflix green-lit straight onto the front page of results. These things could be done well - but often are not.
That is Netflix trying to carve out their niche in timeline #3. They think they can compete with the other services by having a little of something for everyone.
The poor average quality of their content is why I cancelled Netflix and switched to a mix of HBO, Hulu, and Paramount.
The Criterion Collection now offers a streaming service, which consists mostly of what would be considered "better options" than the typical mainstream chaff.
I genuinely don't understand this sentiment in 2023. Maybe in 2003 it was reasonable, but if you have the money, just spend it to buy the content you want. I get that there's a lot of "crap" that you don't want to see, but I appreciate some of that, and I'm sure you appreciate some of what I call "crap". I don't see how you go from that situation to justifying not paying for it. There's a price for the content and it's not $0. You can either pay it, or enjoy free things. There's so much content out there.
Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023, with so many options for consuming media legally, on whatever device, at any time? That was the dream of pirates in 2003, but we've achieved that dream legally today and it's still not good enough for the pirates it seems.
I think I'd need to see more to consider it an argument for violating the law. I'm all for civil disobedience if the cause it just enough. Preserving media seems like a good idea, but it doesn't seem like something we need to break the law to get passed. Also, the civil disobedience line is really undercut but posters (some in this thread) who broadcast their real reasons for pirating have nothing to do with ethics, but fulfilling individual wants and needs without remorse.
If art has value, then its form has value as well since art devoid of form is just communication which is no longer art.
If the form of art has value, then the original form of that art has at least as much value since it reflects the original intention of the artist which inherently has value by being part of the historical record.
If the original form of art has value, then there's value in preserving it for future generations to appreciate.
If there's value in preserving the original form of art, then there's value in distributing it widely since history has shown time and time again that copyright holders alone are not enough...
I use plex as an interface and it organizes my content in an easy to find and watch manner.
It’s the fewest clicks to see new content.
Comically I subscribe to many online services (Hulu, Netflix, apple+) and will end up discovering and watching new shows through plex and my rss feeds than the actual apps.
So pirating still gives me the best user interface. Especially with combining content from multiple services.
Also, it’s not just pirating. I ripped my couple hundred dvd collection years ago when kids kept breaking DVDs.
Comically, the cheapest way to watch most movies is to buy the dvd at Walmart for $4 and rip it to watch through Plex. The file never goes away and it skips the frustration of figuring out if Wolf of WalStreet is on Netflix, or Hulu, or HBO, some stupid one off streaming service that I’ll never use (peacock, paramount, whatever whatever).
So I think it’s the same reason in 2023 as it was in 2003.
So piracy gives you the best UI. Sure. But why do you believe your need for the best UI is enough to clear the bar for ethics when it comes to violating other people's IP rights? Stealing food from the store is way more convenient than going through the line. Best UI there is for grocery shopping.
I certainly wouldn’t steal food from a store as that deprives the store of food. That seems cut and dry.
If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal. It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society. So I don’t feel bad when I subscribe to HBONow and also “illegally” download torrents so it’s easier for loved ones to watch.
I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So we need some distinction between essential rights that seem real to me (bill of rights stuff) and “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry (content industry is only like $100-200B globally where agriculture is $1.2T in the US alone).
I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution.
> If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal.
Context and perspective. We're talking about a media landscape that is flush with content, to the point where people complain that it's all just rehashed. There's plenty of media to go around.
> It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
It deprives someone of their rights, which is something I think pirates don't really care about at all, as it's never considered in the calculus. It's always "what's more convenient for me and my desires to consume particular media, rights be damned". I wish pirates would just be frank and admit this like the other poster who was replying to me.
> I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society.
Me too. But I also enjoy the rule of law and the hard work of people who make content that I consume.
> There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I would feel more sympathetic to this argument if pirates had ever given an inch, or seriously attempted to organize to fix the law in the US over the past 20 years. Instead, they just kept pirating as hard as they could, even when the industry moved toward streaming services, and rationalized their behavior away.
> I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So you're saying my strong feelings about copyright infringement are due to a PR campaign, and not a carefully considered position I've come to on my own, through my own experiences as a content creator, artist, and owner of copyrighted works?
I understand that some people are so blasé about violating copyrights, they don't even think they could possibly be doing anything wrong. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have to spend money and resources to defend their rights from violations of law by others. I fully understand that digital media and physical goods are not the same. But I categorically reject that zero people are harmed when copyrights are violated.
> “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry
As I said, copyright is a fundamental provision of the US Constitution. We can talk about the parameters of "securing for limited Times" but "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." is not up for debate. The word "exclusive" is important here.
And as for the size of the industry interested in copyright... upending copyright would also upend trademarks and patents. There's a much larger industry (well... all of them) interested in those forms of IP.
> I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution.
Copyright was 14 years at the time of the Constitution. If it was still that, I’d have no problem waiting it out and only watching material 14 years old.
Following laws isn’t always ethical. The constitution also allowed slavery. Do you think owning slaves was ethical? There’s lots of instances where laws are out of sync with ethics and morality, and, hopefully change over time.
In the past 20 years gay marriage became legal and I would argue it’s always ethical. Same for recreational drug use. And therapeutic mdma and ketamine. The list goes on and on.
Especially when the copyright laws aren’t the result of some specific debate and determination but by very targeted lobbying by Disney and others to extend copyright from 14 years to its current length of life+70 years or 95 years for corporate works.
Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
I’m not making a judgement on your beliefs or how you formed them. I don’t know you. But there are PR campaigns to promote copyright targeted toward school kids (remember “don’t copy that floppy” [0] and “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1]) and I think they are in alignment with “copying a friend’s video is like stealing bread” so you just seem to be using simile analogies. It’s quite possible that you reached the analogy independently. It’s also possible that you aren’t aware of how you reached this analogy and are influenced by advertising and PR, just like everyone else.
Let's take a moment and recap this discussion. I put out a call for a "full throated" defense of pirating. In your reply, your full throated defense was that:
"pirating still gives me the best user interface"
To support this argument, you cited the various inconveniences you face when dealing with copyrighted works. Only after more prompting have you landed on a high-minded, ethical argument. Why didn't you argue this in the first place if you feel so strongly about these points? Why was your first foot forward an argument based on convenience?
Personally I pirated a ton back in the day due to convenience. Why did I stop? Because now I have money and it's all on my TV one click away. It's so convenient today compared to 2003, so that's why I don't understand why people who can afford it still pirate. I can understand why people without money would, but still... it's like $10 a month for all the music in the world, anytime, anywhere; whereas back then all you got was a CD for $10 that you could play in your crappy boom box or walkman. As a young pirate, Spotify was my dream growing up, and now that it's a reality, the pirates still aren't satisfied.
> Do you think owning slaves was ethical?
I think you know the answer to this question.
> slavery... gay marriage.... medical drugs.... etc...
Everything you listed was changed due to robust and organized social movements to effect that change. Because the societal ills were so egregious, society mobilized to neutralize those.
If you want copyright to stand next to slavery, gay rights, and the drug wars as a worthy social cause, it's fine to make that argument. But you've got to back it up with a robust social movement centered around effecting change, not selfishly consuming.
When I look at the last 20 years of piracy, I don't see the same kind of movements. I see a lot of petulance disguised as civil disobedience (looking at the Pirate Bay), and a joke of a social movement (the Pirate Party), but other than that really nothing. Could it be because most of society doesn't really care about this issue the way they care about human rights? Maybe society recognizes piracy as the selfish act it is. I know that's not popular to say here on HN, but as a former pirate myself, I really can't justify my behavior any other way. I'm certainly not going to compare my actions to those of civil rights leaders and the movements they formed.
And if I did feel so strongly about the ethical nature of my actions, I wouldn't start by grounding my argument as "pirating still gives me the best user interface". Because if I did that, others would think that's what I really care about, and any ethical considerations would be secondary.
As I said to the other poster, I'm not judging you for this. It's okay to be unethical and selfish. I'm very unethical and selfish as a person (most people are), so it's okay if you are too. You can also be ethical and giving in other areas of our lives. Just be honest about your motivations like they were, and it's all good.
> Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
My reply to you in this regard was in response to your assertion that copyright is not an "essential right", but instead a "right" only due to successful lobbying. My point was that this right is grounded in the Constitution itself, and no corporations today lobbied for that.
It's true that rights holders have broader protections today, and as a rights holder, I appreciate that. But as a citizen, I also recognize that the term should be much shorter, and we can indeed reform the whole system. But I wouldn't go back to the drawing board, because that requires a rewrite of the Constitution. As long as it's in the Constitution, rights holders will have representation to make sure our interests are protected.
> I think they are in alignment with “copying a friend’s video is like stealing bread” so you just seem to be using simile analogies.
I think what's actually happened here is that you've internalized these more than I have, and are jumping to conclusions. Because I didn't argue what you quote there, so let's go back and look at what I actually said instead of paraphrasing.
"Stealing food from the store is way more convenient than going through the line. Best UI there is for grocery shopping."
I was not saying that that copying data deprives someone of property, but that convenience is not an excuse for violating the law. I made no argument regarding deprivation of property. Stealing food and violating copyright are both illegal. I'm not saying they are both stealing, as was the argument when I was growing up. It doesn't matter that one is physical and one is digital. You are free to make the argument that the acts are different and therefore one should not be illegal, or the punishment should be different, but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that both are de jure illegal, and the convenience argument doesn't make one better than the other.
> Everything you listed was changed due to robust and organized social movements to effect that change. Because the societal ills were so egregious, society mobilized to neutralize those.
People had illegal gay sex for centuries before society mobilized. So it was the groundswell of “unethical” activity that eventually led to social movement. Same for drugs and whatnot.
I think the societal change for legalizing what I think is ethical (and what billions of people think is ethical enough to do despite laws) will come about after many years of people just not caring and doing what’s convenient.
The convenient argument is just the most straightforward and I think why people continue to pirate. So that answers your question. All the other parts are going into additional detail that you requested.
It’s like if you asked someone why they illegally smoked pot 40 years ago they’d likely say “because I like to get high.” That doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep reasons why, just that that is the most important one.
Obviously legalizing pot cost corporations lots of lost revenue. And modernizing copyright will cost corporations lots of lost revenue as well.
> No body has been deprived of anything, it's just copyright violation.
The second part of your sentence doesn't follow from the first. If someone is violating a copyright, that someone else has been deprived of their rights to control their IP, and they're owed compensation. That's the system we set up, so that's the system we should follow.
If a rights holder wants to grant you the privilege of copying the data, that's great. Many of them actually do that. But that doesn't mean we're allowed to just violate the rights of those who choose otherwise. The response should be to consume media that is offered in favorable terms, not to pirate media just because you feel it's convenient.
Granted fair use is a thing, and rights aren’t unlimited. I’m not arguing against fair use, but many here advocating piracy are not arguing from a fair use perspective. Or are you trying to argue that all piracy is fair use? That would be a more interesting argument than pointing at the existence of fair use, not that I would agree with it.
I bought and ripped the stuff we tend to rewatch a lot (The Office, Friends, Star Trek, Stargate, etc.) and am serving them from a local Plex instance.
I occasionally pirate episodes of TV shows that would require another subscription (already paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO and Prime). Honestly, I'd much rather cancel all that and just pay à la carte for content as long as it's something reasonable (like $0.50 - $1 / episode or ~ $10 / season and $2 - $15 / movie - that adds up to about the same cost based on my family's viewing patterns, plus I get flexibility).
It was nice when Netflix was the only game in town and it was worthwhile to pay it for the library, now it's too much to pay all these services for just a pile of 99% excrement.
This, absolutely this, for my wife and I. Movies and shows that we love, we also download because it's often been inevitable that they get dropped from a streaming service at some point. Or, they're moved over to a new service (see: Peacock/Office) and we don't think that paying an additional monthly fee just to access that one show that we only occasionally watch is worth it.
Similarly, if the streaming service continues to play ads despite paying for the service, we will just pirate the content.
> Similarly, if the streaming service continues to play ads despite paying for the service, we will just pirate the content.
Why though? Why don't you just watch some other content? There's so much out there, and you have so many choices, available without any ads, and also if you choose you can consume free content as well.
Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
>Why though? Why don't you just watch some other content? There's so much out there, and you have so many choices, available without any ads, and also if you choose you can consume free content as well.
Because that content isn't this content, and I want to see this content.
>Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
First, see above - that content isn't this content, so if there's not a suitable alternative, well, c'est la vie. I've demonstrated that I'm willing to pay for these things, albeit to a point. If the service goes beyond that point, and I still want the content, then I'll obtain it via other means. Besides, much of the specific content I'm referring to in this scenario rakes in massive profits every quarter and is doing quite well for itself regardless of whether or not I "violate IP laws" to obtain it. That's setting aside the fact that it's been shown that piracy doesn't harm sales[1]. Further, in spite of our pirating, we'll still often inject money back towards the IP via other means.
> Because that content isn't this content, and I want to see this content.
I see. So is this your thought process?
1) I want it
2) I can't have it my way
3) So I take it, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks
Is that fair, or no? I notice you offered some rationalizations for your behavior, but those doesn't really change the above calculus right? They are provided to justify it.
2, fixed) We got to have it our way for a while, then more companies wanted a piece of the pie, and now we don't get to have it our way anymore.
They listened to consumers for a while. I stopped pirating for a good chunk of years because everything was glorious in the world of streaming. But after we finally got what we'd been asking for, they stopped giving that to us.
So, yeah, I'm going to go elsewhere to get it, your judgement be damned. I won't be losing sleep over it any time soon.
I'm not really judging, you do you, but you are confirming my original thoughts as to the motivations behind pirating being rooted in selfishness. I'm very selfish myself so that's not a statement of judgement.
Good question; I can find gimmicks and talk about how I hate ads and whatnot, but really, it's because I don't assign the same value to an infinitely copy-able digital asset (which is confounding since I work in software).
I did a lot of pirating when I was a kid; I still do a little now (but a lot less), mostly out of frustration with the cost and availability of the content on streaming platforms. I wouldn't steal stuff from a store (because I know that causes actual material loss among other things), but making an additional copy of a TV show episode (which I wouldn't have bought anyway) - it's a philosophical question whether that causes a loss for someone.
I do this. Buy DVD box set for ~one year of subscription fees, rip it all, store it in the cloud or on an external drive. Do this once for each show you like - probably less than a dozen. Legal, easy-ish, and I'm set for life.
I don't pirate because I just can't be bothered. It's all too much work for a short temporary experience, but I do remember the promises.
Streaming was going to "save us" from the big cable companies. No ads, just pay that small subscription fee and watch what you want when you want it.
Now there are a dozen subscription fees, I'm getting ads anyway, and I'm not getting content I want to pay money for. Some are even streaming live TV now, with no way to watch what you just watched again.
>I don't pirate because I just can't be bothered. It's all too much work for a short temporary experience, but I do remember the promises.
This is the opposite of my experience. It took next-to-no effort, maybe an hour or two one time, to set up my Synology NAS box with Plex, Sonarr and Radarr. The result isn't something temporary, it's a fully-working system that obtains all of the shows and movies I want to watch and drops them onto Plex almost immediately.
All I have to do is fire up Plex and the latest episodes of everything are right there, often within an hour of them airing on the east coast. I'm on the west coast, so this sometimes means I get to check them out before they air here.
The result is a carefully curated library that's far more tailored to my tastes than any algorithm has offered me on any service.
Pirating popular shows is actually pretty darn easy, and you get the benefit of watching it with your favorite player wherever you want to, not with the crap player they offer under scenarios they dictate. Want to watch an HBO show offline on a plane or train, no problem. I actually “pirate” some of stuff I pay for.
> the benefit of watching it with your favorite player wherever you want to, not with the crap player they offer under scenarios they dictate
This is the part I don't get. Why do you feel you have this right?
FYIW, HBO Max allows you to download episodes for offline viewing, so it's not exactly true they are dictating the scenarios. I watch HBO all the time on plane rides.
So, if someone pays for HBO Max and watches the latest episode of Barry at home via the app, but, as I do, feel that HBO's UI/UX is dogshit, and they then download a copy of it and slap it on their phone or laptop in a way that's more comfortable to them for their flight tomorrow, what's the difference? OP continues to pay HBO, but that next view is just on a local device.
Edit: HBO Max downloads "expire" after 30 days, and you have 48 hours to finish it once you've started[1]. You're also limited to 30 downloads at once. This is hardly 'convenient' for some people.
I use Apple Shortcuts + VPN + seed box and the shortcut grabs the magnet link and hits my torrent boxes API. I shared the Shortcut with my wife and it has made pirating so dang convenient and easy we’ve filled up 20TB of space, whoops, time to delete some shows.
It’s also fantastic because I know -exactly- what my children are watching and if there’s some episode of Paw Patrol that’s particularly annoying it get deleted.
I put far too much time into my server but now that it's up and running it requires zero input. I tell it what I want to watch and it serves it to me on a gold platter.
Simplest answer is because one can. It is much safer to grab any digital content than physical goods. If it were easier like this to grab food from stores and restaurants, grab homes of other people, they would do that too. Its not even hypothetical, in many parts of the world this all happens very commonly.
For what it's worth, I am willing to pirate shows/software but would never steal physical goods even if there was a gurantee that I would get away with it.
> If it were easier like this to grab food from stores and restaurants, grab homes of other people, they would do that too.
You are implying that everyone pirating content would do these things if the chance of getting caught was low. I would posit that some people who pirate would, but it's a stretch to say that the entire group would.
Taking your simplest answer: just because one can does not mean one would.
I agree. I haven't watched anything on Netflix since 2019. Don't have D+, Hulu, HBO, or anything else. I have YouTube TV which I use pretty much only for sports.
Pretty much all the other video I watch is independent content on YouTube. Just people talking about and showing stuff they are interested in. I'm sort of amused that these people come up with more compelling stuff to watch than the big studios with their huge budgets, writers, celebrities, etc.
I'm not sure what the huge problem of wading through things you don't like. I don't like 90% of what Spotify has on it, so what? I just don't click it.
To succeed they had to make streaming video easier than torrenting it, and cheap enough to attract the casual torrenter.
And like every company, v1 was run by the founders that understood their customer base.
Of course, we're at v2, with legions of sales, accounts and advertising execs, and layers of management whose performance and pay is based solely on company performance.
The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023.
Competition is coming at them from all sides.
I know that they get precise viewing figures for their series, but cancelling some of them is just baffling. No more chance of "Growing The Beard" for shows given the crowded marketplace.
I cancelled a year or so ago after they cancelled some of the programmes I used to watch. The only thing left on Netflix for me is Stranger Things and that's not enough to keep me.
> The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023
Netflix didn't drop the ball; it was clearly never going to happen. When Netflix launched their streaming service, I thought it was a dumb idea because I figured it was 10 years tops before all the major studios could run their own streaming services, at which point Netflix would have no content to stream (unlike mailing DVDs, you need permission from studios to stream their content).
Most of the movie studios jealously guard the rights to their movies; Netflix got a lot of its early streaming content by sublicensing from Starz, which pissed of the studios (most notably Disney, but there was murmuring from Sony as well). At this point, Netflix invested both in TV back-content as well as creating original content.
We are now entering an era in which Studios can potentially have complete control over legal distribution of their content, and they look likely to do so. I'll pause for a moment while you try to buy a copy of the (now 3.5 year old) Mandalorian season 1 on DVD or Bluray...
I'm not sure why music ended in the "(almost) 1 site to rule them all" while video did not, but a couple possibly contributing factors:
1. MP3s had a one-two punch of coming practically out of nowhere, and portable players that significantly improved on the walkman/discman experience. Napster wasn't even around that long (2 years, 80M users at peak) but planted pirated MP3s as a big deal. Then the iPod came around and being on iTunes was important to stay relevant. If you're on iTunes, why not be on all streaming and purchasing services at the same time?
2. There is a long history in the US of compulsory licensing of music for various purposes. It doesn't cover on-demand streaming, but does cover satellite, terrestrial radio and "internet radio" services.
3. Retail media sales have long been the public metric of success for music; for film studios it's been retail ticket sales. The music charts even have formulae for translating streams into equivalent purchases of physical media.
Use Reelgood or justwatch to search, and you can still find good stuff.
Netflix may have a quality problem, but another one (and a much easier one to fix) is their stupid recommendation algorithm. It shows me nothing but trash and genres (like Love is Blind) I absolutely dont want to see, while I have to use a 3rd party service to dig for gems.
I cant help but wonder if thats skewing their own metrics. People are going to watch trash if thats all they present.
Justwatch refuses to show me multi channel searches without amc+, for some reason. Either a really annoying advertising plot or a glitch with my account.
I stopped watching new Netflix shows after they left too many unfinished. I might consider it if it was a finished series, but it was too frustrating to start watching something, have it end a season on a cliffhanger, and then get cancelled before things got resolved.
I think they lost a lot of customer goodwill with those frequent cancellations. Even if they didn't want to finish the series, investing in a short special episode to wrap some things up might have kept more of that alive and made me more willing to invest my time in a newer series.
I'm not an expert but it really seems like Netflix is doing self inflicted damage with some recent decisions. Maybe an exec failed upwards and ended up in charge of some policies they shouldn't have been trusted with...
"Meanwhile the other streaming services are at least as bad, but typically worse."
So then isn't it just good? Cable didn't have on demand and you couldn't share even in the same house. Beyond basic cable channels you needed a cable box for each tv for around $5 a month in the late 80s (around $11 today).
A Brazilian man speaking mexican spanish as Pablo Escobar, with mexican actors using mexican slang in a show about the colombian drug trade, completely omitting Pablo regularly raped and afterwards executed 13-15 year old girls and other insane stuff.. this was not a popular show in Colombia
Netflix has always been unwatchable crap or woke garbage. Time to unsubscribe and pirate
Netflix should be a little ashamed that they revived the cult of Pablo Escobar. The amount of memes and “sigma male” videos featuring Escobar is embarrassing. They turned Escobar into a folk hero, not a scumbag criminal.
If you came away from narcos thinking Escobar was a good person, you only saw what you wanted to see in that show. Any amount of rape wouldn't change that. He blew up a plane full of innocent people...
I see the plug doesn't seem to be going well, but it interesting to me that Amazon is the only service with something somewhat similar with Prime's X-ray. I know it's easier for them since they have IMDB, but I don't understand why I can't at least have a "Cast/Characters" popup in the other services. Even if it's just the whole cast and not contextual to the scene.
You make a great point. X-ray is a prime example of the potential for extending and enhancing the viewing experience, even with something as simple as a persistent character/cast sidebar. Netflix has a version of this but as a separate site called tudum that feels more like a information dump. And Disney has disney extras which is primarily behind the scenes videos. I suspect it's harder for them to do in platform-agnostic way. Amazon has the benefit of IMDB as you noted, while Netflix, Hulu et al would have to build from scratch.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference they say so I'll take that ha! Any suggestions on how to better approach these things? I'm like a fish out of water when it comes to branding, so would be happy to learn from anyone with constructive criticism. Thanks!
No one is owed but this question is flawed. Users were paying for 5 households. Now they can only use it for one. However you look at it, its a reduction in service or an increase in price.
Not really that surprising is it? I'm waiting for the day they send me the inevitable notice to pay more, aka the day I cancel Netflix.
They could get away with this if their offering was substantially better than the competitors but thse days it's not. Pumping out complete crap like 'The Floor is Lava' and the 9 millionth cake contest isn't what built their massive customer base. These days when a new hyped show comes up its often not even worth watching until you know for sure it's not already been axed, having left the show on a cliffhanger.
Netflix axing incomplete shows has become like Google killing products: people are starting to become aware of it, and that puts them off picking up new products.
It's also self-sabotaging behavior from the point of view of a back catalog. If people know in advance that a show had an unsatisfying ending, they're not going to recommend that people go back and watch it. But then Netflix and everyone else seems to treat shows as disposable these days, as if nothing mattered six months after it came out. Yet people still talk about The Wire (first broadcast 2002)
This happens with a lot of modern media. There's a lot of indie authors that keep starting new series which get dropped or continue getting written based on sales. But once you know an author is prone to dropping a series without finishing you stop picking up their books.
It's actually really frustrating to see an author continue starting one new series after another rather than finishing any of their existing works. It's probably not as fun or exciting, but it feels like an integral part of bulding trust. If I'm going to get emotionally invested in a series I want it to have a real ending.
In Japan it's very common for a series to get a single anime season, but if you're really invested in the story you can continue reading the light novels. But if a story is a Netflix Original, there's no source material you can turn to when the series gets cancelled.
I wish one of the streaming services would give a "no major loose ends" guarantee.
If a show really needs a cliffhanger the show should budget for an extra episode to air if the next season is cancelled. If they don't want to do that, just end the season finale without a cliffhanger.
If Netflix had this guarantee, I would watch a lot more series. (I'm still a bit upset that HBO cancelled "Beforeigners" that had a major cliffhanger)
On that subject, I really like what Josh Whedon did with Buffy's season 4 ending episode, "Restless", where the big bad was defeated on the penultimate episode, while the last episode serves more as an introspection on each character's fear.
Per Josh Whedon commentary [1]:
"This was one of the years where I was pretty convinced we would actually be picked up for another year, so we left a lot of things hanging. But at the same time I always felt if this was the last episode we ever filmed, it would be a good last one because it really did just get us into the minds of our characters, whom I love very much, and let them just sort of exist."
I'd even settle for a sit-down with the writers and show runners where they go over what the ending would have been, even if they don't get a chance to actually film it.
This was my main problem with Netflix and why I cancelled it a year or so ago. When I realised we often couldn’t find anything we were bothered about watching, it just became a waste of money.
If they were smart they'd realise they could launder their overall viewer figures in the stockmarket and (ponzi-style) have the latest shareholders pay them* for inflated 'low rent' users instead of scaring away those users and trying to turn a profit on a shrinking viewer population tolerating higher fees.
* via SBC with SP maintained by higher viewer figures.
The only new show I thoroughly enjoyed on netflix lately was "who is the mole" which is based off the dutch hit series "wie is de mol" which is an absolutely fantastic and unique game show.
Let me add a couple 100 more to that count. Did you know that netflix doesn't support resolutions higher than 720p on windows/linux? You could subscribe to the 1080p plan (like me) and the players will stream 720p videos to you with no indication whatsoever. The only way of checking the netflix video resolution is `document.querySelectorAll('video')[0].videoWidth`. There are FF extensions but they don't work for every title.
Yes. Chromium and “Edgium” add a lot of their own closed-source services before releasing package. One example is that “Translate website” toolbar that Chrome has, which sends the entire content to Google’s servers using their own API key. That’s not present in the Chromium source.
No, but I wouldn't pay 65% more unless I could actually tell the difference. I could probably tell the difference between 1080p and 720 on my laptop, but I doubt I could tell between 4k and 1080p so I wouldn't pay for that.
thats the thing, you can actually tell but for adaptive streaming its harder to be definitive. Also content resolution becomes secondary when you are neck deep in show & storyline. that does not means its insignificant, just that its effects are subtle. In fact, this is so much more true for HDR vs non HDR.
Source: I've done a lot of HDR processing development for a leading media company.
Also the software restrictions on the linked Netflix page seem to be arbitrary. When I download a movie in a DRM-free .mkv file, I can play it in all my browsers, all media player apps (typically VLC and MPV), and the HDMI version doesn't matter.
From the comments in this thread, many are not understanding that password borrowers are typically contributing to the account owner's monthly subscription, and many account owners, when faced to the full price of the subscription will eventually unsubscribe as well.
5€ month for what Netflix has to offer is one thing, 18€/month, for many, becomes an instant no-deal.
I'm not sure if that's the case necessarily. I'm sharing my account but people aren't sending me money every month to cover expenses.
Instead, we pool accounts. If I wanted to, I can get Disney+ and regular TV, while I provide Netflix and Amazon Prime in return. If all else fails, there's a Jellyfin server that gets regular use.
Everyone pays full price, but everyone only pays for one service, maybe two. The fragmentation of services is the real killer here. This wasn't a problem back when Netflix first came here and basically offered everything there was to offer until then Disney clawed back a whole bunch of its properties. €18 for Netflix would be fine if you weren't also expected to pay €17 for Amazon Prime and €19 for Disney+ and €14 for Paramount Plus and €15 for HBO Max (only available on some ISPs).
I'd pay full price for a streaming service that had everything and I think many people I know would too. I'd even be able to look past the stupid 720p limit (I run Linux so I cannot be trusted with the noisy 1080p encodes). Instead, my workflow now comes down to "check Netflix, if not found, download torrent".
These companies could've had the Spotify of video streaming services, which basically ended traditional music piracy, but instead wound up burning their version of Spotify down for a short term profit.
Depending on the service/people sharing with, I personally witnessed both sharing costs of the single service and distributing full ownership among different services...
There are people who want to control all of them while absorbing costs, there are others who just want access.
> If I wanted to, I can get Disney+ and regular TV, while I provide Netflix and Amazon Prime in return.
Reminds me of old days when all we had was dialup and we would pool our warez downloads with the community. I send you Seasons 6 & 7 of Buffy and I get the latest Season of Stargate in return. All burned on CDs or DVDs shipped via post.
They know who all the password sharers are. They've spent months, or even years running models to predict the fallout if they cut off password sharing. None of the actual results are going to be in any way surprising to them.
So while people here think they're doing this to their own detriment, their legion of scientists have already told them the end result which is obviously not detrimental or they wouldn't be doing it now.
As a "scientist" mentioned in your comment (they call us Research Engineers), I have to tell you that this is a business decision. One or more than one suit in the C-level made this decision.
And, as a scientist, you cannot build a model with a never-happened-before phenomena. Only "risk specialists", "risk engineers", etc. which are different names for BSers will even try to "predict" this.
How can one build a "model" with no x (password policing enforcement) and only y (stay or drop) is beyond me. If anyone does, I will show you an idiot/BSer.
I am sure this is a business decision. Or MLEs/Deep Learning Engineers are going beyond the capabilities of their fields.
Sure, you can predict if a user is going to drop if a show he was binging is going away or his watching pattern, time spent watching, etc. But to build models with password policing enforcement? Hah!
Trying to predict whether this decision is harmful in the long run is not in the realm of science, but of art, business, or bullshitting.
I don't know if NFLX did a smaller scale pilot study and tried to build a model, but that would be inadequate.
By this logic big tech companies could never make mistakes since they all have legions of data and analysts, which is just objectively not true. Collecting the right data, analyzing it well, and using that to make the right product and business decisions is non-trivial work. Some folks think that you can blindly throw big data at a problem to solve it, but that is usually not the case.
They can run all the models in the world but it only takes one misunderstood factor to underestimate the fallout. I think they want the other streaming services to follow suit (like Apple with the AUX) but if the others dont bite, Netflix screwed themselves. Most of their users feel betrayed at a time where competition is more than ever. You dont have to be smart to understand its not a good move.
> We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts. “In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” Netflix said.
Do you think most sharers are contributing to the price? I really don’t think that’s the case. I’ve never heard of anyone charging family members for access to their Netflix account.
There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords, or more well off siblings letting less well off siblings use their account.
>> Do you think most sharers are contributing to the price?
All of them? Certainly not. Many? Yes.
>> There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords
Yes, but although we don't have details on demographics, in Europe it is widely "accepted" (for lack a better word) that many friends, relative and even acquaintances share an account and its costs. I don't have number so consider it totally anecdotical, but it is honestly common sense, especially in southern and eastern Europe. (I am from Italy, FWIW)
edit: this is also true for Spotify Family accounts.
Agains TOS? Sure. Do they do it anyway? Yes.
It is very common sense here to say "Ok, I'll cover Netflix, you'll cover Disney+/Spotify/other"
The moment when one of this services doesn't allow sharing anymore, this system will fall, and users will be incredibly more selective to what they will subscribe to.
This anecdote resonates much more than explicit sharing of costs, thanks.
I suspect this might be cultural, and not just at a country level. I wouldn't dream of charging a family member £5 a month for something, I'd either let them use it or not. But that may not be true everywhere. Between friends it makes a lot more sense, but as I said I've typically seen Netflix/etc shared in families not friends, probably because the lack of money changing hands makes it easier.
This is my take as well. All people I know either share the expenses or share different streaming accounts, which by extension is a share of expenses, just across the streaming universe instead of only Netflix. Now Netflix may not be too hurt by being the first to do this, but if all the streaming services do this, it will basically amount to a price hike for most people.
I didn't attack Netflix at all. You seem upset that the market dynamics seem to behave in a way you don't like/support. Am I the one that has to grow up?
It's funny. Right now I have access to around 5 streaming services while I only pay for 2. My girlfriend's friend has access to Netflix, my sis HBO. I provide access to Disney+ and Prime to my family. I used to get YT premium from my sis's boyfriend, but they detected I'm not in the family household and they kicked me out. If it wasn't because other people use my accounts (and I use theirs), I wouldn't be paying for disney+ or A. Prime.
Maybe other people are in the same situation as me. There's a tenuous balance in the streaming service subscriptions thanks to the fact that people can share their accounts. If they close the door to account sharing, maybe the subscriptions will start falling like domino pieces.
It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.
Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies.
Nowadays, if you want to watch a particular movie, you have maybe a 10% chance that it is available on the streaming service that you are currently paying for.
And it makes more sense to just buy it directly, than pay monthly.
Nothing in your post has anything to do with free markets... markets maybe, but copyright is not a "free market".... it is by definition a monopoly
a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library
Jup, gp was talking about unregulated markets. Those surprisingly often have winner take it all outcomes. I don't want to go back to company towns.
BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(
So an independent studio would produce a show, put it on all the platforms and the platforms would pay based on views? Sounds like youtube. The current model works because producing a television show is way more complex than making an album, it is way too much risk for indie companies to absorb.
Where precisely is the risk? If you already produced the content why not make it available on multiple streaming sites? Is it the production studio asking for exclusivity or the streaming outlets?
the most lucrative scheme for productions, while also staying within that invisible boundary of not alienating consumers, for films and series: the exclusivity deals.
How's that dr watson?
In an extreme example you are paying a long term subscription, let's say $200, for the exclusive privilege to access say 2 shows. That's $100 for one aficionado, per production.
What you are advocating for is
for each production to be made available on dozens of platforms each having most other productions, you end up with a prorata/ratio of that aficionado who viewed yours, but also happen to have viewed 8 other productions. Unless the viewer pays up 20x or 30x for some universal subscription, that's far less revenue than $100.
In practice subscribers simply won't even spend 10x. Why? Because they are only ready to pay 10 times more for certain beloved productions, but very little for those that aren't deemed that necessary to watch. So they tend to accept to pay a lot for a few hits, even if they have to give up on all the rest.
Why does it not work the same for music?
First, it used to. Apple, in the good old Steve Jobs days, did it good to break the practice. With iTunes. Which managed to catch up with every other platform and integrate well to provide a UX leaving the competition far behind. Pressure power, and master maneuvers accomplished the exploit. Apple TV didn't show the same prouesse, maybe Jobs started to fade away, Apple didn't make a great screen display like they did with the iPod to gain that consumer pressure against the trad distributors, and it was simply a much harder battle due to the second reason below.
A great tune is played many many many times. An average one at least far less. So the prorata formula used to compensate the owners, works OK. The pareto distribution applies where great hits get accordingly rewarded.
With movies/series, unless it is one of those rare non thriller/mystery gem, it is watched once and for all. A one to one view to reward system puts greater productions at a deficit.
I doubt the Entertainment industry saw all of this from the get go, but they have decades of accounting experience and shaped it up once cable/satellite tv with network channels became prominent. It roughly applies the same with with streaming.
Does it make it right? Legally it seems that they win, those exclusivity contracts are legal. Building a platform and funnel your productions through it only as well. Although legislators needs to step up their game, end the lobbying thr led to this abuse of Intellectual Property rights, to finally enforce what it is and just it: ownership of the art, not of its distribution.
This is quite hard to achieve with original comment getting the spotlight and being a differentiator between services. For "the rest" of the content, I think the situation is pretty much close to streaming services with music.
Agreed, but I think it only works to a point. Content is becoming more commoditized/more generic (maximise margins/cash in on some big trend). This, coupled with way too many new services claiming exclusive originals and people are deciding to not even bother watching it or just to sail the high seas. It's much like at one point the music streaming services had exclusives too. Sorry Spotify I'd rather just not bother listening to Rammstein than have yet another subscription.
This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in.
I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying.
The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot.
That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price.
Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription.
Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it.
The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced.
When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it.
I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap.
I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.
Customers benefit from benevolent monopolies. If you can get everything you want from one place and for a good price, why would you ever shop around? One place caters to all of your needs, so you always know where to go. The problem is that having a monopoly doesn't incentivize benevolent behaviour.
If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.
That's only if you consider streaming services a separate market than cable television. With the decline in cable subscriptions, that's clearly not the case. Netflix was just the hot new innovator in the entertainment delivery market, and now everyone else has caught up. The same market Blockbuster was in.
As an old movie kind of guy: I don't get why nobody wants me to have a big economical catalogue of all the movies. If you want to watch stuff from before about 1990 your best bet is pirating it off Youtube, oddly. Or hoping it's part of the 20th Century Fox that ended up on Disney+.
The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free.
(Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)
That's the paradox: everybody wants to build and operate that since it's obvious everyone would subscribe to such a service, it'd be a cash cow, a golden goose, etc. But nobody wants to share their slice of the copyright and licensing pie with anybody else for revenue reasons, brand reasons, whatever, so we're slowly moving back toward the cable model with 200 subscriptions and nothing to watch. Torrents will be back, big time, since they actually provide the service everybody wants.
This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring.
The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though?
It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment.
The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
I'm quite sure that the tax receipts from the sale, rental, and performance of the copyrighted material more than adequately covers the portion of those costs borne by society. (In fact, that's probably a fair part of the reason that government is willing to support lengthy and obstructive copyright protections: because it adds government revenue far in excess of the cost.)
I don’t know how one would tease that out of any tax receipt date, compared to economic loss due to suboptimal allocation of society’s resources.
Suppose copyright law was 15 years instead of 100 years or whatever. Society still gets the tax receipts and benefits from creation of the media, but the shareholders who own the media do not get to collect a price premium from the extra 85 years. That money can now be spent by consumers elsewhere as opposed to supporting media owners who already had sufficient incentive to create the media.
The question at the end of the day is, does a 100 year copyright term incentivize the creation of media with so much utility compared to copyright term of 15 years such that it makes sense for society to transfer extra resources to the media owners for an additional 85 years? Amongst other externalities to consider.
The real question is why do people feel like they deserve to have access to absolutely everything? The home entertainment landscape has continually moved towards more options, better technology, and more access, and always at a cheaper rate per hour of programming than before. Of course, if you want to maintain access to absolutely everything, then your cost is always going to go up, because the pool of absolutely everything continues to get larger and larger, not just from new content, but from the inclusion of old content that wasn't available in any form before. There is a disconnect that comes from the fact that people can't/don't actually watch that much.
The only thing keeping cable alive today is live sports, but that eventually will be folded into existing streaming services or they will have their own services. Which brings me to my next point. There will very likely be 200 subscription services (if there aren't already), but the more there are, the more niche and specialized they will be. But importantly, you will be able to choose what you want (a la carte). This is a far cry from cable because cable has never been a la carte. They've always required you to purchase at least a basic package with 30-50 + channels, and each channel getting a couple bucks each month. The consumer's total cost is at least $50 / mo, probably more
Compare that to one of the typical big streamers which are $10 - $15 per month. Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney - each of these alone has more content than you could ever watch. As long as they are all around to stay in competition, then prices will remain low. The absolute worst thing that could happen for consumers is for streamers to combine and form a conglomerate. Now that would be like cable - they'd have a monopoly and they'd end up charging you more overall than you were paying before, and then singling out "premium" content for even more money.
If you feel like you have to subscribe to all of them, that is simply a marker of their success in marketing to you. There is enough content (good content that you WILL enjoy) on any one of them. Or hell - even on Youtube which you can watch for free, there will be enough content to keep you from getting bored.
I don't know if I'd use words like 'feel like they deserve'. I'd rather use 'feel like it isn't possible because somebody said so'. It evidently is possible technically and people (IMHO correctly) are fed up with studios not being able politically to work together to provide a good service - IOW they vote with their wallets.
From another old movie kind of guy: it's full of beautiful 1080p Bluray x265 torrents out there. Teams like VXT or RARBG release more old movies than one can watch.
I host a weekly 80s/90s obscure movie night (mostly Hong Kong action Z-movies, Godfrey Ho and the like) and RARBG has come in surprisingly clutch. If the movie got a HK theatrical release it's the first place I look. Japanese stuff too.
Other surprising sources: Tubi which often has better quality video processing for the stuff where the VHS/DVD master is all that exists (protip: yt-dlp works), and Internet Archive where people upload all kinds of stuff, including Blu-Ray rips.
A ton of stuff is also on YouTube but it's often a low-quality master and/or edited for content so it's usually a last resort.
Mubi (https://mubi.com/) is nice. You don’t get a huge catalogue but they cycle it very regularly with varying thematic focus and showcase a mix of old movies and new art releases. It feels a bit like a cinema club. I recommend.
Sadly people focus as definitely shifted toward serial shows rather than films so movie streaming is not really an interesting market to address. I’m really confused by that because the feeling I get from 90% of the show I try to watch and always fail to finish is that there is a good movie hiding in the indulgent editing. Even prestige TV shows are full of padding.
Mubi's catalogue is tiny, and I find their marketing and interface (which strongly imply all the shows that have ever been been on the platform are currently on the platform, misleading). Criterion Channel (https://www.criterionchannel.com/) is a similar art film / critically acclaimed film network, which an enormously larger and more diverse catalogue. Officially it's only available in the US but if you sign up through a VPN it works everywhere.
I’ve been subscribed to Criterion since the beginning and it’s the only service I’ve kept without cancelling, or desiring to cancel, since. If the catalog is up your alley, highly recommend.
That said, I also buy their Blu-Rays during the sales, so I might just be a fanboy.
The number of movies I wanted to watch in the last few months that where actually available anywhere on streaming was devastatingly low. Some where available, but only dubbed (which I don't watch), most where not. Not even to buy.
So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)
> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.
I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this.
Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability.
When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.
Competition has forced all these streamers to up their game and produce more good shows to stay popular. Netflix has never been a one-to-see-all service. When Netflix was the only major streamer, other networks and studios were also producing great content. It's not like they came out of nowhere. You still had to find other ways to watch the very best shows and movies across all of TV, which at the time means you would've had to have a cable subscription with premium channels like HBO and Showtime. And if you just decided on a random movie, there is a way better chance it is on Netflix now than there would've been ten years ago.
Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.
That’s correct, and I’m personally dissatisfied with the content currently available on Netflix, as well as the distribution of content across too many services. But it would be disingenuous to describe it as a market failure when the market was responsible for creating the industry in the first place.
If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.
It's so weird that they still haven't learned to provide multiple audio tracks and subtitles. I don't know how sizable the portion of the market is that they lose this way, but people like you and me won't ever consider one of Google's services to rent films. Presumably, US-centric decision-making is to blame.
Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.
I enjoy YouTube movies model for that reason, I wouldn't mind an overlapping service of all streamers and just pay to rent / buy almost everything on-demand.
> If they close the door to account sharing, maybe the subscriptions will start falling like domino pieces.
If people turn out to not watch that much content to warrant 3-4 subscriptions per (strict) household, I wonder if this could lead to a Highlander-like streaming showdown: There can be only one. The thing there is that Netflix should try to avoid the showdown, not push towards it, because they are the least equipped to win:
- Disney+, HBO Max (Warner) -> Own/produce AAA content.
- Prime Video -> Deep pockets, bundled as value added service, own distribution infra.
Netflix has a looooooong arm of international content. Which is probably an important reason why they are by far the largest internationally. I don't see anyone replicating that anytime soon.
Good point. Which makes me wonder why Netflix pushed back against EU regulation that would put content origin quotas [1]. They should be lobbying for that, as they would have to do very little (compared e.g. to Disney+ or Amazon) to be compliant.
That international content is quantity but not AAA quality. Dark is probably among the best and it doesn't clear the bar... 1899 is better, but cut short after 1 season. Most others are noticeably low budget.
My personal bar of what counts as AAA I guess? It actually started quite well, but second half of the series drags down the average in terms of story/screenwriting/camera/VFX. It doesn't stand near the likes of Foundation, Game of Thrones, Mrs. Maisel, Mr. Robot, The Wire
Doing TV is a marathon, perhaps Dark showrunners are more of sprinter people and should do movies instead.
You'd be hard-pressed to find much that's going to stand with Game of Thrones on production values.
Dark, I'd agree, faded in terms of the plotting as it got kind of all twisted up in itself toward the end, but I still liked it quite a bit. And you could say similar things about some of your other picks, like Mr. Robot (or Game of Thrones for that matter). Sustained excellence season after season is really hard to achieve.
Netflix had first mover advantage, but that ship has sailed. Their only real moat now is their original content, but when stacked against Disney or HBO it's a pretty weak moat.
That's AAA TV content. Maybe a tellatle of an ongoing diversification of streaming services between "TV-like" and "cinema-like".
Sure, all of Apple, Amazon, Netflix have dipped their toes into AAA movie production, but their collective throughput isn't anywhere close to becoming "players" in the field.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
If Mrs. Maisel is not AAA then I don't know what is. Probably in top 5 shows of the current golden age of western cinema and TV (yes, TV is now way ahead)
Maisel has been canceled. Ended, more specifically since apparently the creators made the decision.
Point taken, though. Still, if they only have a 1/10 chance at being good I am not taking the chance. It's like the netflix stamp is a kiss of death to me now. On the rare occasions they get it right they muck it all up after season 1.
If I hear good word of mouth about a show I may check it out, but I don't waste my time giving Hollywood the benefit of the doubt anymore. They have to prove they are worth my time and at the moment no streaming services are worth the amounts they charge.
To me "canceled" is only bad when it's cut short like Firefly. Maisel had a good 5 years/seasons worth of run. Otherwise you can say "canceled" about every show that isn't running today...
If I could afford it in terms of money and time I would probably subscribe to all of them, I mean why not? To go see one movie costs about as much as a month of subscription to one streaming service. So subscribing to Netflix, Prime, Apple and HBO costs like going to see 4 movies per month, except you get more than 4 movies (I think a season of a good TV show easily worth multiple movies).
I appended it with it being more correct to say 'ended'.
Aside from that it didnt start with 5 in mind, it just kept going till the creators decided to nix it.
That's not the same as having a 5 season vision and completing the story you wanted to tell.
And for sure to each their own, if you enjoy the services by all means continue being a patron.
I'm over all of them personally, even disney+ is going to start charging to watch new movies on it.
If there was one place to watch everything I'd be interested.
But I'm tired of lack of content worth watching, constant fluctuations in what's available, and horrible UX designs for no discernable reason.
All that coupled with the constant preaching has me watching more older movies, and occasionally something new worth watching like Super Mario.
So the money I used to spend on subs I now use on watching the occasional movie in the theater, and more storage for my ever growing media collection I know will always be there.
> I used to get YT premium from my sis's boyfriend, but they detected I'm not in the family household and they kicked me out.
I'm surprised you achieved that at all. Google accounts are locked down hardcore... As it should be
My gf wanted me to share my ChatGPT plus account but I signed up via Gmail and it was impossible.
All of these sites can easily lock it down but choose not to. We're probably living in the Golden era. Although I still think Netflix's multi location accounts are far more expensive than their utility. And I fully see Netflix as an essential service but spending $35CAD/m is a serious consideration when I already buy 4 streaming devices that will very likely result in $18/m max if I pull the trigger.
For YT premium it's not necessary to share your account, you can become part of the google family group and tie the group to the YT premium subscription. They realized that I don't live in the same household (I am quite far away), so it was pretty easy for them I guess.
It's funny that they didn't explicitly kick me out. They simply asked me to contact their customer support and certify that I did indeed live in the same household.
If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free, quality, and meant to enrich the people instead of advertise and moralize to them.
I really don’t understand how a DVD collection is an “essential service” either. Or why you would effectively choose not to look at your watching statistics and then simply buy the media you watch the most.
Is this a serious question? Why am I not buying DVDs on eBay?
At least ask why I'm not pirating it 24/7 when I already have an Android box connected to my TV w/ Kodi installed with 3rd party pirate extensions which gives me up-to-date lists of every show/movie available on Netflix/Hulu/Disney/etc (including their trending and genre based lists) with each show being a single click backed via 10 different HTTP pirate streaming servers they index...with the alternative of another app which let's me search any torrent movie ever and stream them on demand via my Fibre internet connection.
I use Netflix etc because
a) the recommendation algorithms are better than any 3rd party service like Reelgood hopes to be even with OSS plugins that track my torrents
b) I live with 3 "normal" people in my house who don't care to navigate the imperfect UI of my Kodi streaming/torrent apps no matter how many times I tell them it's better and has everything they need and more for "free"
> If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free
Who would foot the bill to produce this content? You suggest that content would be "free"... but free to who? The consumer, right? It certainly isn't possible to produce high quality films for free. People pour their blood, sweat and tears into these productions. Why should the fruits of their labors be given away for free? Would you wake up early every day and proceed to work eight hours for free?
So, like only have PBS? That could be better for society I guess, TV is a bit waste of time after all, but I think it won’t satisfy all current streaming service users.
No they cannot. And I am not just speaking in abstract terms, in the 1960s and 1970s (and even before) many shows were made that had a moral core but did not moralize at the audience.
Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
The only shows that I can think of like that now are Black Mirror or perhaps your odd HBO offering, but those are not shining examples, and often, even if they do discuss or engage with deeper concepts or ideas, it’s not handled in a way that allows for nuance.
(Black Mirror is happy to be quite crass at moments, same with HBO and other “top-tier” shows.)
>Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
Your memory of these shows differs dramatically from my own. None of the ideas discussed in any of them were complex or nuanced, much less culturally transgressive (no, not even Star Trek) and they were often ham-fisted and moralizing. I mean Star Trek and Twilight Zone so much so they became tropes and subjects of parody.
> Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
There's something in this. Tickbox diversity is a lazy solution that doesn't really satisfy people who want broader representation while at the same time causes the rightwing culture warriors to go increasingly berzerk. Writers need to get better at doing incidentally diverse shows, because "hello I'm a token look at me" is bad characterization. Or address it by commissioning a broader range of shows from different settings; not everything needs to be a flagship.
While at the same time there are still lots of odd misses (Ghost in the Shell 2017 managed to annoy almost everybody in this regard).
I've been a subscriber to basically everything for years. The only reason I haven't cancelled 90% of them is because my retired parents use my accounts. I almost never use the streaming services they use (I use YouTube Premium _a lot_, but I don't share that).
Given our combined minor usage, the day they lock one of us out it's all over, I'm cancelling them all!
I don't invest in streaming produced series any more as they have a tendency to want to eat their cake and have it too. They won't tie up a series but don't commit to producing a second one to tie it up, then arbitrary cancel them. It's like reading The Hobbit and the last two chapters are missing, never to be written, and there are plenty of actually finished books out there!
That sounds complicated, but with today's sponsor - piracy - you can get any content from any subscription service with just a few clicks for the low price of zero dollars. Sharing is caring :)
It's often of poor quality and not in 4k. I rented a movie from YouTube the other day and the stream supported HDR, and if I had a 5.1 surround that would have worked, too!
If you're not watching 4 hours of TV per day it's not that expensive to rent content, but I'm saying this from the point of a westerner. For other parts of the world a $5 USD for a movie for 48 hours doesn't make any sense over straight up piracy.
This really depends on how good of a pirate you are. If you put in some effort, you'll be watching 4k blu-ray movies in a higher bitrate than streaming services offer.
Yep. I actually prefer, ahem, sourced content because it looks better even on my iPhone. Apple TV+ is pretty good, but the other services are really stingy with bitrate.
I haven't encountered poor quality recently on usenet. Except for shows that are so old that it doesn't make sense to go higher than 720p. The tooling has also improved greatly and can be automated to the point that getting a whole series is a matter of 2-3 clicks.
As Netflix says, they end up with more subscribers at the end of the day. I'm sure all these services will follow suit once they reach some point of growth, or rather a halt to growth. It's kind of crazy they've let it go on this long. It's weird people actually have the gall to complain about this move like they feel they deserve to get things for free. Either you pay for the service and password-sharing doesn't affect you, or you freeload off someone else and you're getting it for free. Either way, there's not much reason to complain
It was part of the business model. I've certainly kept my subscription longer because family was using it, so they've gotten more money from me by allowing password sharing.
This is across four countries. They've already seen growth in Canada [1].
The math makes sense to me. If the average "sharer" shares with three people, they could lose 66% of the active users in the "sharing" population, before losing a single paying customer. Who knows what the average actually is [2].
I think a lot of people are only holding their accounts because someone they love use it for access. These people would probably cancel it first thing, if their loved ones can not use it.
I've had Netflix since it was DVDs by mail. I still pay for Netflix, but rarely use it. First time my sisters can't use it I'll delete my account. I honestly just don't use it enough to justify the price.
$NFLX brought in customers with the Sharing is Caring campaign. If at that time they patted themselves on the back for customer growth, they should hold themselves responsible for the about face and customer exodus when they have changed their stance to Sharing is a crime.
I doubt these two scale linearly, otherwise how would they make money? Also, I could imagine that the people that want their comfort show to be running in the background 24/7 are the ones that won't cancel their subscriptions. It's the occasional watcher that will most likely deem netflix worthless to them, so their subscriber to usage cost ratio might even worsen. I'm just guessing here though, obviously.
I definitely agree, it all depends on their profit margin correlation to their infra cost. For a normal SAAS I'm assuming it's not very strong, but for a video streaming business, I think the cost is much higher and therefore a lot more highly correlated. We also need to take into account the reasoning behind this decision. They're also removing multiples of users but losing only one membership so it's even more skewed towards being even. In the end, I'm assuming this is a calculated decision from their end, so they should have the numbers, if they're skewed in their favor they'll proceed, if not, they can always backtrack and not release this in the US, which I think is why they're releasing to smaller markets first.
All good points, especially the one vs many membership to viewers ratio. You're probably right (at least I hope so) that someone will have run the numbers. I guess we will see.
Actually, if NFLX pivoted their DVD-rental business (which they are planning to sell) to Digital Dowload-to-Own, there are new customers they can bring. Also, since it is a transactional business, there will be a steady income stream with every new release and people who want to own the Blu-ray equivalent digital edition.
They probably are worried about the cannibalization of the subscription base and hence caught in the Innovator's Dilemma.
But note that it correlates to a loss of paying users too. "Only" 2/3 of those users were sharing a password.
There's another danger here for them, and that is cultural. Currently e.g. my girlfriend users my password. It means we both watch the same things, and talk about things that are on Netflix, and that serves as a reason for me to keep watching Netflix too. A whole lot of my Netflix watching is down to her. If she were to, say, spend her time on Disney Plus instead and talk to me about series there, I might end up spending more of my time on Disney Plus, and value my Netflix subscription accordingly lower. Do that to enough users and you'll start losing them.
As long as people keep watching Netflix they have a chance to convert them to paying users, but even if that fails, at the very least they have a chance to prevent those people from converting their paying customers to users of other services.
If I was Netflix I'd think long and hard about less invasive means of doing this, such as e.g. putting restrictions on additional household that might nudge them towards paying (e.g. limiting number of profiles so people need to share profiles; putting ads for Netflix in front of shows on "secondary" locations etc.) without outright pushing people off the service.
> As long as people keep watching Netflix they have a chance to convert them to paying users.
I'm not rejecting this (and I'm also not a fan of Netflix's practice here), but when REALLY thinking about it, how would that work practically without devaluing your product/service?
If people are repeatedly sneaking into your cinema and you don't crack down on them, but let them watch every time because one day they may buy a ticket, what's a path to conversion here...?
The only values provided are the content itself and the quality of service. NOT restricting access to the content but making it less convenient for everyone will just devalue your service...
Hence why my last paragraph contained ways of putting restrictions in place that'd make it less practical/desirable to keep sharing. (Here's one more suggestion: Add premium content, and let anyone buy from any profile... Now you have a strong incentive not to share with people you can't trust to not buy stuff on your account... I'd never share my Amazon Prime Video access for that reason).
In terms of conversion avenue, consider e.g. kids moving out of the house. My son has his own Netflix profile. For now there's no incentive for him to get his own, and having him get his own would be impractical because he most often wants to watch it on my TV. But once he has a family of his own running into a profile limit would be an incentive to get his own subscription eventually.
A lot of people are in situations where they initially legitimately are in the same household, then move out for all kinds of reasons (flat shares, kids moving out, breakups), might not want the hassle of switching profiles right away, but eventually want more flexibility (more profiles), or privacy.
(Incidentally, a feature they really need is a "convert this profile to a separate subscription"; that goes for a lot of services that are not at all geared for a situation of kids growing up and wanting to untangle their online lives from that of their parents)
A lot of this problem would also just go away if they priced based on a combination of simultaneous streams and number of profiles and stopped worrying about where they are. E.g. there's never any reason for more than 5 simultaneous streams from my Netflix subscription. But if I had to pay per simultaneous stream I'd probably only want to pay for 3.
You don’t need to convert every potential customer when you are the biggest and most profitable streaming service. The bigger risk is losing that position when paying customers go to co prying services.
Yes, but the bigger picture is much more interesting IMO, as Spain has become a highly-competitive market for VoD, is overly saturated with suppliers and we're in a recession year with rising cost of living.
Put into context of the same source's (Kantar) report from end of last year on Spain's VoD consumption, it would be much more interesting to know
1.) how many paying subs each of the providers lost explicitly, and
2.) whether the ~1,3M spanish households which access 6 or more (!!) VoD-services have reduced their "portfolio"
Kantar[1]:
- By September 2022, the number of households that used at least one video streaming service in Spain reached 66%, 12.4million households.
- VoD-enabled households accessed on average 3.3 different video streaming services, with 11% of households accessing 6 or more different VoD services.
- 2.7% of Spanish households took out a new Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) service in the last three months.
- 23% of those planning on cancelling at least one SVoD service in the next quarter are doing so to save money, the #1 reason.
And that opens another risk for Netflix. Paying users that canceled will be more eager to check the competition, and migrated user is harder to regain.
Anyway, the catalogue is so fragmented that cyclic migration makes sense.
The paying user in Spain is already among those who use on average 3.3 VoD-services. He already thoroughly checked the competition, he's merely deciding to cut his cost.
So in the end the issue is the competitiveness of the content at the given price for this market.
Netflix’s current plan makes people pay for four devices even if they only want to enjoy 4K videos by themselves. That creates an incentive for them to share their passwords and split the costs with others. Wouldn’t it be more effective to limit all plans to one device and tier them by quality? That way, password sharing would be less appealing.
They shouldn't have tried to tackle password sharing. Instead they should have enforced concurrent streams and let people pay for more concurrent streams.
Psychologically it's very different and people paying for the premium plan of 4 streams would probably not be affected.
Netflix has been enforcing concurrent streams for a while now, no?
Four adults that live in four different houses sharing one Netflix account might not ever bump up against the four concurrent stream limit. Their concurrent usage might be quite similar to a family of four under one roof.
But critically, the four adults are all technically capable of paying for their own subscriptions, while the children of the family of four are not.
Netflix is expecting to lose some (or most) of the people who are sharing passwords, but if some nonzero portion of them end up coughing up money for their own subscription, the effort is worthwhile.
I think the parent comment was suggesting that they allow more concurrent streams for additional money. ie: $4/month per additional concurrent user, now you have 10 friends on it for $56/month.
> Four adults that live in four different houses sharing one Netflix account might not ever bump up against the four concurrent stream limit. Their concurrent usage might be quite similar to a family of four under one roof.
Realistically, the case to allow password sharing is four family members, living under the same roof, but not sharing the same internet connection.
If the family is watching Netflix on their own phones over cellular (respectively: on train, out walking, at work, at school), you can't impose password-sharing restrictions on the account without fucking more than one of them over.
If, for example, when you click "play", some other user on your account gets kicked off with an error about hitting the stream limit, then you will forever be worried about hitting that limit and inconveniencing family - so you may upgrade sooner. Being kicked out mid show and unable to continue until you click to upgrade is going to lead to lots of people upgrading in frustration.
I'm sure this move is partially because of copyright holders. Bet that they get their cut per stream and account.
My hypothesis is that Netflix knows that account sharing is a net positive, as it cannot be curbed without losing a significant amount of subscribers, and many people aren't willing to pay $10 per account.
Exactly! But that's just how it goes. Once leadership identifies a problem, it takes a lot to dissuade them. They saw password sharing as a fixable problem, an area of loss revenue that they had to do something about to counter the metrics of stagnating subscriber growth. Very little would change that, even though your approach would prove to be quite beneficial
Spot on, my boy. A lot of folks see this as a consumable like music and should be a free commodity. I akin this to free music for download and the death of an industry. A NEW industry popped up and gave us streaming music and there was no longer a need to OWN music. Artists were also given tools to expand their music on every platform w/ very little investment.
The shared resource thing, is just Netflix turning a blind eye, because their business model worked for a time and allowed this to happen. Now that DVDs are all but dead, this was the next logical business revenue model that needed a revamp.
How can anyone blame Netflix for FIXING a loss leader in their business line(s)? We all run and work for start-ups .. its the natural progression of finances at scale.
I once heard a story about Microsoft: a research group had discovered that they could control the radio-frequency emissions of computers with code, and could broadcast the license serial number of running software. Unfortunately, the signal was too weak to detect unless a large number of computers were broadcasting the same license number. But you could easily discover companies that were illegally sharing licenses by driving a radio equipped van around the business district. (I probably have most of the details wrong; it's been years.)
Anyway, the punchline was that Microsoft wasn't interested because it wouldn't catch all illegal licenses.
They envision the back pats they'll give themselves for the success of their great idea, but not the fallout of their terrible idea. Sycophants should never be given authority.
Did they? This should certainly reduce their expenses related to their streaming infrastructure. And if most of the affected people weren't paying anyway, it will have little or no effect on their revenue. It will result in less word of mouth, and possibly a bit of negative press.
If subscriptions don't go up afterwards and streaming infrastructure costs are a sufficiently small portion of their total expenses, then I could see it being a net negative. In any case, their biggest problem is that their content has become so mediocre, but this action won't have any effect on that.
Some folks run businesses that succeed, other ran (past tense) start-ups that failed.
Unfortunately, the lasting affect will be a net positive, because sometimes you have to just be the adult and say loosing money isn't an option. I would like to call this shedding the college weight, and firing 80% of the work force, because the business will die otherwise in the case of Twitter.
Would you rather run a business with much higher ROI with a small user base and run a lean business, or a fat business with super scale data but bleeding out money? I'm not sure I get the argument against this.
There’s an element of critical mass involved - a streaming platform can only afford to create so much of their own content if they have the revenue to back up those costs. Less users means less revenue means less content, and at some point things might break down.
They could have done smart things like telling you have hit the stream limit at a key moment in a show - perhaps 10 mins from the end. When you really don't want to just say 'nah, I'll watch the rest another day when I'm not at the stream limit'.
This is already a thing. I pay for the 4-viewer plan for my family of 3, because when we were on the 2-viewer plan we would frequently get denied access to streaming because the other 2 were already watching something.
I'm in Spain and I heard of others that are cancelling. I'm sharing a family member's account from the Netherlands and it's still letting me share :P But once the ban hits the Netherlands too I'll just switch to piracy again.
Netflix was good while it lasted but it's over now. Even after this they will want to keep increasing revenue so they will keep adding more barriers. It's the typical platform enshittification, once they reach market saturation there is only the way downhill for the customer.
The others are subsidising their offers now to gain marketshare but once they gain a foothold they will do the same.
This trend may be masking the fact their Spanish originals are overall pretty poor. In my opinion, Money Heist is the only high quality Spanish show they have produced. These days their non Spanish output is not that good either, though. Netflix should study World of Warcraft's player exodus after 2009 or so, as an example of what happens when you offer too much low quality content to the masses.
IMO this is what happens when you create data-driven series. Being a good producer of shows is a different business than being a tech company.
Plus losing the old catalogue rights that they got for cheap. Once other companies saw it was viable they were not interested in selling the rights for cheap.
On the other side, every time I use another streaming service (channel4, any German tv, even hbo) the basic player experience is much worse than netflix. I will miss them but, like Blockbuster, it is a matter of time.
Are you Spanish? I find the Spanish content pretty good, it's the woke American shit that they force into the platform that is a bore to watch, like the Nth heroine who just so happens to be a black woman. Maybe make it a guy from Kansas for a change? Of course, you might have a different opinion.
The movie "The Green Knight" came into Germany's Netflix recently. An English movie about an Arthurian legend and you can only watch it in German without any subtitles. Ludicrous.
Can someone shed some light on the regulations in practice regarding subtitles? As an expat living in Germany, there's plenty of times that the offerings have no subtitles in English and are dubbed. Do they have to pay more license fees to include English subtitles?
If it helps... you're not missing much. The movie is incoherent even in English, and a deep understanding of the source material.
It's a fascinating and beautiful artistic experiment, but I don't think it's a successful one. A viewer might well enjoy it better without dialogue, because the dialogue doesn't really make it any clearer.
That seems weird, I have no idea of the answer, but in the UK there's typically several audio options and several subtitle options. Stuff that's surely pretty niche in the UK even (i.e. would be surprising that they paid extra for it) like French-dubbed/subtitled originally-Hindi films.
It's strange that Netflix would do that. In Germany, they pioneered consistently offering original audio. (For instance, Amazon Prime Video was available earlier than Netflix here, and originally most of their catalogue was dubbed to German exclusively.) Plenty of services where you can rent this movie also offer it in English (OV): https://www.werstreamt.es/film/details/2097679/the-green-kni... So it may very well be some weird licensing deal where they only get to offer this specific film for streaming without a surcharge if they stick to dubbed audio.
This frustrates me to no end. I haven't encountered the issue of having German audio only, but so often there are no English subtitles and it drives me mad.
What I truly don’t understand is why everyone decided they needed their own streaming platforms. What’s the strategy there? Why does Disney need to invest resources into Disney+ when they can just sell the rights to their content to one or two Streaming platforms and make more money? Did they think it would be cheaper to build their own platforms? Same for all the others. Who cares if Netflix owns the streaming user-base if you’re still making more money off the content? Is there some user data play I’m not aware of?
Disney is very protective of its brand, so having its own platform makes it very easy to control how its content is distributed / recommended / categorized. Plus they get to see micro details on how people engage with it - is there a spot in a film that is too tense, and kids stop? Or where action flags, and people take a break?
Well, if everyone uses Netflix and content owners don’t have their own platforms, then Netflix can twist their hands to get better deals on content, because they are the only game in town.
I see this trend increasing a bit for everything else too: companies are realizing that their brands are slowly degrading when they outsource "just the e-commerce/delivery part", because they realized a bit too late that it's not "just" the delivery part.
All these centralized platforms (amazon, netflix, ...huge brands acting as a single marketplace) own (or, ... are "aware of") metadata about your content, e.g., what people like, what they buy, etc. Which is what content creators need to build more content.
Shall we even talk about the "copy/paste" of products/shows (see Amazon Basic brands), I guess Netflix did the same (from sellers they became producers). That's when things have to come to a hard stop.
That's my 2 cents.
I am still surprised that services like Spotify and Deezer exist - you pay X euro/month but you get a s*tload of music, which should cover 90% of what people search for. Maybe the "delivery first, producing later" doesn't apply there, I guess.
> Why does Disney need to invest resources into Disney+ when they can just sell the rights to their content to one or two Streaming platforms and make more money?
I think they assume they can make more money doing it themselves. They can probably generate more revenue, but the question is whether they end up ahead after accounting for the cost of creating and maintaining the platform.
> Why does Disney need to invest resources into Disney+ when they can just sell the rights to their content to one or two Streaming platforms and make more money?
Is this true? Presumably their intention is to make more money by doing it themselves.
Of course. Around 10 euros that divided by 4 means 2.5 euros a month per user (or 2 divided by 5, it's unlikely that 4 people are watching at the same time) is a fair price, the cost of 2 coffee, you say screw it I pay so I can just take my remote and watch whatever I want. Reason why they made success.
For more than that, for example you have to pay a full subscription of 10 euros, you consider going back to pirating. By the way I'm in favour that Netflix enforces this policy: so people will start pirating again, and we will see coming back forums that share torrents like it was back in the day.
I think that when we realize that this day with gigabit fibre connections that are the norm and that contrary on when Netflix came out that you needed to leave the computer running all night to download a movie we can download a 4K torrent in a matter of minutes all these streaming companies will fail for good.
I don't miss the days of torrenting. The thing that still stands out in my mind is having to slog my way through tons of pornographic advertising and popups to find a single actually working torrent link.
I torrent all the time. Those types of websites are long gone and these days as blockers in browsers block all other ads on torrent sites.
I pay for Netflix and Prime but torrent all the US content because they’re not available in my country. If they were available for a fair price maybe I would stop torrenting but they’re not
I've been using the internet for over 30 years. Last 20 years I do not remember seeing a single ad. How do you even download torrent? The torrent sites are just texts based magnet links.
How do they detect account borrowing? only through simultaneous use? When I pay for the service I expect some low number of simultaneous clients (say 2-4) to be able to stream. Obviously sharing my password means sharing that quota and if the number of concurrent streams is 1 then the password isn't shareable at all.
What I don't like though is when there can only be a fixed number of authenticated devices, whether they are ever used or not. Once you have logged in to N devices (5, for one service I subscribe to) you can't log in to a sixth. Even if the first 3 are phones that are on the bottom of the ocean. At that point you need to call customer support to clear your authenticated devices. Hassle.
What kind of crackdown did they pull here? in legal terms only? Or in number of concurrent streams? or in number of authenticated devices?
You have to tell to Netflix what Wi-Fi network are you using (your usual Wi-Fi is assigned by default). If your device doesn't connect to that Wi-Fi network at least once in a month, your device is blocked.
You can still share accounts using a personal VPN network.
> At that point you need to call customer support to clear your authenticated devices. Hassle.
Yikes, which services require you to call support in such an instance? In my experience you can often kick out old devices right from the new device that you are trying to use (annoying, but manageable).
This is a swedish sports streaming service (cmore). Not sure if they have fixed so that this is possible to do by the end user now or no longer required, was a couple of years since I last did it.
Probably geo IP and calculating feasible travel times. E.g. if 2 clients connect that are 50 miles away within 5 minutes creds are obviously being shared.
That would give way WAY too many false positives. If I'm watching on the bus while my wife watches at home it would trigger. Similar if we have 2 homes etc. It would also rule out anyone using VPNs etc. Seems like a complete no-go and would see a huge chunk of paying users go simply because the product is now much worse for people who are not sharing accounts. That just can't be it.
Probably they recognize ips so they'll realize that you are sharing if you are logging in from another ip over time. I think it's like at least once every 30 days or so, that'll protect most people from false positives when travelling.
They probably also fingerprint devices as well and correlate those times the devices are in the same area, etc. With user agents/device IDs, IPs and time you can work out quite a few relationships.
If I'm ever blocked on some fuzzy reason I'd leave the service in a heartbeat. If they have clear rules then at least I can somehow learn to avoid the traps, such as having to connect from an IP or having a specified number of devices. But if I can get kicked out of the service right before/in the middle of a game, then I'd quit my subscription in a hurry. They just can't use some method similar to how financial fraud is detected. But while fuzzy rules don't fly, I can't see any rigid rules that also wouldn't be a hassle for paying customers.
Been using netflix for 12 years now. If they roll this out for me i will instantly stop using it.
I pay for 4 screens not because i use it but because i set it up for my parents and wifes parents who just don’t understand how that all works. Additionally i have a house in two countries and if they make that a pain in the butt for me I’m done as well. I’m paying for convenience I already know how to pirate all of this for free if they want to push me back that way.
Netflix knew this was happening and it’s why they introduced number of active screens. Now they aren’t happy with revenue and need to move the goal posts and paint people using the platform as intended previously as lazy or freeloaders.
Yep, they're forgetting that convenience is really all they offer to an individual customer. Pirating a show is still very easy, and if you want to support the creators of the show, buying their box set off of Amazon or whatever other storefront isn't too hard and cuts out the middleman. The only reason I tolerate their skimming from the people that actually create the content I watch is that it makes the process of both watching the content and supporting the creators of the content totally painless. As soon as pirate then buy boxes becomes easier again, that's what I suspect a lot of people will go back to.
This kind of thing is exactly why most of my media library is on iTunes (and Bandcamp) because for the longest time, I had to work abroad and it was the only service that allowed me to watch what I paid for and allowed me to buy more.
Even Steam used to be an issue: I could play my existing library abroad, but not purchase more until I was physically back in the country.
I imagine they're trying to prevent the reverse, purchasing a cheap subscription in a developing country to use when you actually live in a more expensive country.
I believe they need a license to stream in different countries. If they don’t have a license to stream in Thailand I don’t think they will let you watch there.
I don't really care about Netflix anymore, or any other streaming service.
I subscribe for a month, watch any new shows or movies I like, cancel and move on. All of my devices are 4K+HDR capable, I don't know why "up to 4 devices" is even relevant anymore if you can't share the account with anyone else. My family? Living elsewhere.
Now that there are dozens if not hundreds of streaming services offering exclusive content there is no paying customer growth possible anymore. What are they counting on? That consumers will pay for more than one subscription on different platforms? While they essentially only watch one at a time? How stupid is that!
Well done, españoles! I hope we Argentinians also have the strength to say F-U to Netflix over their dumb policies.
From TFA:
> "Globally, more than 100 million people use an account they don’t pay for, according to Netflix."
"They don't pay" is one way to see it. Another way to look at this is that a group of people (wider than Netflix would like) are paying for these accounts. This used to be a cool feature of Netflix! They shouldn't take it down (within reason), otherwise downloading pirated shows becomes way more attractive once again.
The question no one is asking, how much money are they saving by kicking out the moochers? I'm not surprised if a significant number of Netflix users are sharing their accounts with others. If this move ends up saving them money, then... sucks, but it's understandable. The big problem here is they've trained users they can get away with this until recently, hence all the complaints.
I don't think this is primarily about saving money on licensing or bandwidth or whatever. It's more about what percentage of the accounts that are sharing will pay for an extra user, or will have one or more of the ejected users get their own subscription, and whether that added revenue comes out to more than the loss from people just dropping the platform.
Comcast has thousands of movies on demand. But the list of them they show me is always the most popular, so I just see a handful of them. Other services do this, too, like Netflix.
For crying out loud, Comcast showed me The Lost City as the first one for about 6 months.
Clue: If I don't watch the popular shows you show me month after month after month, show me something from deeper in the catalog! Or even just throw up random ones.
Everyone getting angry at Netflix but not the real source of all the problems; the suit&tie media execs who are forcing these companies to shake their hands for exclusive deals, and pocketing fat wads of cash from these contracts.
Even before streaming, this has always been an issue and it ties in with the ludicrous amounts of money paid to movie stars, the cost of which is carried onto us consumers; and yet people blame movie theatres for the ludicrous prices, how fucking shortsighted - do people even think at all?
Why the hell is RDJ making 40M for a Captain America movie? Why is Will Smith being paid 40M for King Richard? Why Did Johnny Depp get a 35M wad for Pirates?
Sure these actors are all skilled professionals, but do we honestly believe those amounts are okay? It's clearly all of our collective, consumer faults at the end of the day; story of human history.
That said, actors get paid because they employ good negotiators. RDJ took a huge risk pinning a great deal of his career on the Marvel movies back when it was a very niche movie, much like Sir Alec Guinness did with Star Wars. That said, some of the amounts entertainers make is absurd - top athletes make stupid money too, but at least their prime earning years are significantly shorter than actors or musicians.
Entertainers also make a ton because the people paying them also make a ton, and those people can afford to lobby for IP protection (see: Disney) and utilize "creative" accounting strategies such as Hollywood Accounting and collectively, we don't do anything to combat such blatant fraud, because it keeps the circuses coming, and politicians cannot disrupt the bread, nor the circuses, unless they wish to get voted out.
Big name actors end up doing movies that flop all the time and it doesn't affect their career, they just pocket the cash and move on.
But yeah you're right, it really comes down to consumers and they way that we consume. If people are willing to pay $15 for a movie ticket then companies will charge $20 and people are oblivious to the fact that it could cost $1.
I always thought these types of services didn't go after account sharing as a form of flexible pricing. The users who are OK paying $10/mo pay that. The users who wouldn't pay $10 share an account and get a slightly less convenient service.
Are their profit margins so tight that a 1:2 paying non-paying user loss ratio is a net win?
probably it's stupid on their part, but on the other hand users cost them money too. If you have two users on one account - one watching from 8-12 in the morning, and the other from 4-10 in the evening, if you get rid of one of them you are streaming 4 hours less for the same price. So I guess this kind of thing must also affect their calculations on this matter.
If Netflix was struggling to be profitable, I might understand. But they're really just upset that their increase in profit YoY is not doubling fast enough. So I cancelled. Plex is great.
I don't understand what people are doing to be able to assert that a streaming service is more convenient than piracy. For me, piracy is more convenient than streaming by a significant margin.
Visit one of the very public torrent sites such as rarbg, search or browse for something of interest, copy magnet URI, switch to terminal window, type aria2c "[magnet uri]". Just minutes later have the file in working directory. Now you can play it with MPV and have instantaneous seeks and no garbage web players.
Sounds like a lot more steps than clicking play on a web app. You also have to do that for single episode of a new tv show as it gets released as opposed to clicking play on a web app
Perhaps Netflix is finally coming to conclusion that they can't keep increasing prices for honest users forever so as not to anger sharers and free riders.
With energy prices shooting up, that scanned server cost is more significant now than it used to be, and per-user bandwidth costs don't drop forever due to economies of scale, so there may be more cost efficient promotion methods than 700,000 non-paying users.
There was a study a while back (can't find it ATM, I'll have another look later) that suggested those using other people's accounts were more likely to be heavy users in terms of bandwidth than average, so perhaps this sort of thing has been factored in to the plan.
Having said that, I can't imagine they expected 300k dropping their account now they can no longer share it. Perhaps there are a lot of friend groups clubbing together to share the cost of subscription services like Netflix.
Energy prices in Europe are dropping significantly. Spain's pricing is down to 2021 levels again last month. No idea where they host their data in Europe but it's much the same in other European countries.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267552/spain-monthly-wh...
Arguably that $39 offers a lot more value by giving you access to valuable statistics than the $20 that gives you the opportunity to waste some time staring at the tele. And I'm not saying there's no value to entertainment, but there's plenty of more fulfilling things to do when it comes to entertainment.
Bandwidth isn't an infinite resource. It effectively is up to a certain scale and with a few caveats (the costs are not consistent globally) but I'm sure Netflix is beyond the scale where it can be assumed to be and at that point they will be bidding against other big users for peering priority.
With a dedicate server I have some stuff on I can upgrade to 10gbit unmetered for a lot less than 10x the cost the current 1gbit unmetered link (in my case neither dedicated, but 1-shared-to-10-shared will likely scale in cost similarly to 1-dedicated-to-10-dedicated). With another where I have a total bandwidth cap not a speed cap I could likely extend that cap relatively cheaply. At the scales required by a small company, even one running SaaS services, the same is usually true. But at Netflix's scale a small percent increase in any particular locality is still a huge amount of extra to ask for, and it might not really be available (it could be allowed to eat into slack for a short time, this is one of the reasons why networks are provisioned for more than 100% of expected use, but if the extra is needed permanently then infrastructure upgrades may be needed). They can get around lack of cheap bandwidth by instead temporarily increasing compression rates (this will in fact happen automatically, as dropping overall bit-rate is supported to deal with congestion at the level of a user's connection and that will kick in due to congestion elsewhere too) but this will be easily detectable by some users (particularly those with huge screens and great eyesight) who will compare the quality with other streaming content providers and talk about the difference which may affect future sales.
> on top of this their caching strategy becomes even more effective
Caching in terms of keeping data geographically spread will reduce international bandwidth needs, and ISP-level caching through their local boxes will help considerably again (and get more effective as more users join from the same ISP), but there will always be an amount of traffic that needs to travel costly routes (the ISP level caches will only be large enough to support the best caching candidates, like new high-profile shows, a small proportion of the whole catalogue, and many ISPs do not have that facility at all).
> ““Not only are we placing content on all of these servers around the world, but we are pre-placing them based on what is popular. Because we predict what is popular, we’re able to put it as close as possible under the correct server,” Haspilaire says. “This pre-placement of our films and shows allows us, based on prime time viewing hours, to store 100 percent of our catalog locally."
And they have 17,000 of these boxes. Extra users in these areas will have essentially zero marginal cost. And outside of that, I don't believe the bandwidth market we see - in terms of upgrading our small servers - has any resemblance to the deals they can do.
They still expect more paying customers from this step.
> Last week Netflix missed expectations for new subscribers in the first quarter, but the company said that the password-policing plan and a cheaper streaming version with ads will accelerate growth in the second half of 2023.
They’ve ran test in a couple of countries. Maybe an initial drop in subscribers followed by an increase is in line with their expectations.
I wonder how much this affects the public not talking about the shows and this leading to less engagement. And thus snowballing into even less users, as there is less people to promote shows etc.
That may very well be. But now, their engagement metric on hours viewed [1] is going to drop like a brick and the analysts who started tracking that for the past several quarters will be scratching their head.
But 1 User is (probably) a Premium user. If you remove 3 users, the Premium user could downgrade to Normal. Personally i share with 3. The 3 watch from time to time Netflix, they will not buy an account, only 1 oder 2 Month a year.
If these 3 go, i can downgrade my package to 13 Euro (in Germany) and i will only order it 3 - 4 Month a year. Currently i pay every month 18 Euro.
The time changes, Netflix is not the only player on the market, we can choose now from many.
My brother pay for a "multi-device" account. When they introduce this and the family get cut off he will most likely unsubscribe in time or downgrade to a personal account.
They are probably going back to torrenting and similar.
When disney was slow to rollout in some countries my friends did not want to wait for Mandalorian to drop with Disney plus over there in Europe. They just downloaded it for free and did not even need to sign up for disney when it came one year later.
If the streaming companies start to provide subpar and cumbersome service and charge hundreds of dollars for it per year I can see people going back to proven and free ways that were very popular 15-20 years ago
In Spain piracy is technically illegal but so far the MPAA equivalent could not successfully sue common citizens for pirating. As far as I know at least, perhaps there have been some isolated cases. I have always been downloading pirated content, and still do for content that is not on one of my 3 streaming services, without worry, just the technical hassle.
I once won a lawsuit against the MPAA in Spain. AMA lol
FWIW YMMV and laws change so I wouldn't advise anyone running such a service from spain doxxed. But using it? It's not germany where predatory lawyers will try to sue you out of torrenting ubuntu or whatever
In my case It was link sharing, no torrents, and at that time that didnt constitute -public publishing- as the link linked to some 3rd party host, and it was also user generated content.
FWIW they've only won some fringe cases where they scared the person into accepting the charges.
This is the movie studio/streamer endgame.
Netflix validated the concept and was able to get short term licences while the traditional movie studios watched these licences run out.
Netflix now must create new content and compete with the old(and dated content as well as the new stuff from studios and others.
Seems logical to get rid of the free loaders. Not sure how they fight copy streamers of their content unless them embed a steganographic ID in whatever they stream and scan streams for that ID and cut that subscriber off = lots of detailed work, but it could probably be botautomated - except for private streams that can not be automated via FTP etc - that would also have a subscriber cost as well.
Netflix is facing an existential threat IMHO, so they need to limit free loaders AND create new content AND defeat ripoff streamers- a true challenge. I am content to pay Netflix...
I don't understand why people are in such uproar over netflix pricing. $10 a month is an incredible price for what you get.
There's not alot you can do for $10 these days. You can barely grab lunch in lots of places.
And you're talking about a whole month where many people use it for hours every evening?
Imagine Netflix was $1 or $2 to unlock for 24 hours. I think alot of people would consider that fair. Many would pay the same to tip to someone who took 30 seconds to serve them let alone a couple of hours of entertainment.
But then that can easily escalate to $30-60 a month without batting an eyelid.
If you barely watch Netflix at all, maybe less than 5 times a month, then $10 might seem excessive. But then are those people the ones putting in the effort for a Plex server? Presumably it's not worth the effort either.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
My view is that there is less and less stuff on Netflix that interests me. Shows that I liked in the beginning usually turn into the typical American never ending twisting drag out. There are weeks where I don't use it at all.
While 10$ is not much for some it can be a lot for others. E.g. youth unemployment and job security are big challenges in Spain from what I've heard.
I'm not justifying the password sharing. I think it is wrong to assume that all users can be converted to paying customers.
I wonder if this will cause some people to actually share accounts more than before, not less. For example, I pay for my own account, despite my brother asking me to share with him (we're both employed and in our 40s, and I feel like we should pay our own way). He eventually set up an account and shares with our parents. So between us, we are probably paying about $40/mo for Netflix.
With this new system, I might decide that I should jump onto my family's account for $5.99 or whatever, since this type of sharing is now blessed by Netflix. That would cut their revenue from our family to $32 (an extra $6 for my parents and me) from $40.
I can understand the outrage over content, wokeness, the direction, etc. But being angry over having to pay for services rendered? Come on. Don't use Netflix (or the alternatives) as a comfy Piratebay. Get it together, we're not children.
Or the value proposition under the new conditions for many users is simply not there?
Paying $X per month and allowing family and friends to watch is both convenient and cheap enough so it doesn't bother you. It's like paying for electricity in a family house.
But when you are forced to be the only user of your paid account you evaluate if the cost for using a service 5-10 hours a month is truly justified.
Degrading people as "children" is not an interesting analysis. It's obvious that Netflix made their bed by flirting with users that like account sharing (long ago). It will not be easy to take that away now.
I understand this and will grant you that. But I'd bet a fair chunk of cash on this password sharing being something other than spouses sharing or running a de facto family account.
I mean: fine, Netflix sux, etc, tt's not worth $X. All fine.
But what's happening here is not that and you all know it. It's easy and cheap to just share passwords. When you do that, you're saying that I should pick up the bill for you. And my answer to you is: tf I'm not! You pay for you, I pay for me.
Fair, both sides should act in their best interest.
What I think is happening is that people realized they aren't getting much value from Netflix and this also served as a wake-up call for them to cancel. If you look at other comments you'll see several stating exactly that: they no longer think Netflix is worth paying for even if they have no trouble at all paying for it only for their own usage (and I'd think 99% of the users of HN can afford it easily).
It's also very possible this will end positively for Netflix i.e. they might want to get rid of the "leeches" and end up only with the paying users that obey their rules. If there are enough such people out there to cover their expenses AND turn a decent profit AND if they are loyal then Netflix will find themselves in a businessman's dream scenario.
In the end time will tell, as it happens with everything. I am mostly just offering you explanations for the current reactions to the news.
Many people already pay for the service. They pay for a multi user account, the problem is that they are cutting off people that are not living under the same roof.
Then they require you to pay an additional $8 for each extra member, it that would be the premium cost (approx $19 where I live) and an additional ~$16 if you add two users. That's $35 a month for a service that is filled with woke bs content, 10% of what you get in the US due to geofencing. This is the way it usually goes for me and my gf:
1. We finally find a movie we want to watch, after a lot of time researching
2. We search for the movie name and where we can stream it for money
3. Oh it says its available on Netflix, HBO and some other renting stores.
4. Oh they were all not available to us. Sometimes we can "purchase" the movie for like $20+ but since that is just a ridicolous amount to watch a movie once we usually don't watch anything at all or pirate it for free.
I have a really hard time seeing a bright future for Netflix in the EU if they continue down this path. Honestly that is probably a good thing though, since european alternatives can take that market share.
The problem is that for europeans that want to pay for contnent it's STILL hard. I still have to download stuff from pirate sites since most content is not available to us for reasons unknown.
What do you suggest that I would do when I want to watch a movie that is not available anywhere? I am here ready with my wallet but no one seems interested.
At least in Germany I can find a streaming source via justwatch.com for most movies that I want to watch. Often they are included in one of the flatrate offerings, but the vast majority of classics are available to rent from Amazon and Apple for ~4 euros.
So of the two alternatives: pay $X for a full subscription or pay $X * 0.2 for a shared one, you are choosing to pay $0 because it is annoying to pay money compared to not paying money?
If it's not good enough to warrant either $X or $X * 0.2, then cancel it. I.e.: Netflix sucks, cancel it!
Y'all are defending not paying while still using said service with arguments that don't support your case.
I stopped pirating stuff a good 15 years ago and Spotify and Netflix are both part of the why. Now, they both kinda suck and I might actually cancel Netflix. But you won't find me on Piratebay for that reason. It's just going to suck for a while.
> Y'all are defending not paying while still using said service with arguments that don't support your case.
I am barely using Netflix though. But yes it happens that sometimes I'll watch something on Netflix, perhaps once or twice a month. Will that warrant a $20 monthly subscription? The answer to that is hell no. They offer a bad service and require us to pay a lot for it so it's simply not worth the money.
I don't pirate that much either anymore tbh. I most often than not just do something else instead. Sometimes I'll pirate it if we really want to watch a movie and it's not available though.
I can't be arsed with the piracy bullshit any more.
The reason that I've not canceled Netflix even though only using it pretty rarely, is that it's still very cheap and I have the "biggest" option. 179 SEK a month in Sweden which is about $17. This is about a third more than _one_ lunch in the city will set you back. Are we really crying over this amount?
I agree with this sentiment but this isn't Netflix' fault (nor is it any of the other service providers'.)
But then this still comes down to a sense of entitlement: I should be able to have access to anything and even though this has value to me, I shouldn't have to pay too much for it.
I do feel this myself as well, however. Definitely not above that. But let's be real here, still.
I feel the same. Netflix (and other streaming sites) provide insane value for a measly subscription price. In comparison, I think books, DVDs, CDs are way overpriced. Youtube Premium is the other thing. They make their own advertisements go away for $5/mo in Hungary, which is half of a cheap meal at a restaurant, and people act like it's pulling teeth.
I know, right? It's so stupid. Similar situation to paying for games. My friend group still games - and we have been growing up in an era with no internet, and rampant piracy. We could barely afford the cheapest hardware, and we have never paid for software. Nowadays though? Every one of has a good job, and gaming comes out way cheaper than any of our hobbies. Some still act like it's the end of the world dropping $20 on a game the group will play.
Fascinating to get downvoted for saying: pay for things you use. I hope you're proud of yourselves.
My salary comes from people that buy product from my employer. What you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys. (No, I do not work at either of the streaming services.)
The problem isn't paying for Netflix, it is that their earlier "love is sharing a password", "sharing is caring" etc. campaign made it seem like password sharing is sanctioned and therefore included in the price. I understand that people are upset now that Netflix have changed their stance without changing the price.
Also I think the downvotes are because of your tone, e.g.
> you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys
I live alone. If I want to share the second screen that Netflix forces me to buy with my brother, why should it matter if he lives with me or not?
And don't mention TOS, they can write whatever they want in there. I wouldn't care if they didn't permit me to watch it in bed either, I watch where I please.
Every 24 hours, my stream quality resets to 520p. Then I reset ESN and it goes back up to 1080p... for another 24 hours. Kodi plugin. I pay the UHD tier, by the way. The second they ask about possible account sharing, I am canceling.
Tesco loses a million "users" over "checkout avoidance" policing.
There's a concern that word of mouth recommendations of Tesco Finest products will take a hit as a result of the measures.
It would really help if the headline differentiates between a "user" and a "customer." If a bunch of people who had someone else's password are no longer able to watch Netflix, that is probably what Netflix wants. If millions of customers have cancelled their subscriptions, that is not what they want.
The article makes it sound as if there were 660k people who are no longer watching on someone else's account and 330k customers who have cancelled. Not sure if that is a big deal to Netflix or not without more historical data.
Regardless of the decision on password sharing, I hope they create a way to port a profile into a new account. I wouldn’t want to lose my saved movies and viewing history if forced to switch accounts.
I think they would have done well to allow many people to share an account, but require all users watch the same thing at the same time, and play and pause in sync.
The fact you're sometimes being forced to watch something you didn't really want to watch, and forced to negotiate with your friend/neighbour over when exactly toilet breaks are going to happen, would lead to lots of users deciding it isn't worth the hassle and they'll subscribe themselves.
So basically they saved money on streaming bills, reduced "ghost" numbers from the bottom line, and maintained probably about the same level of equity.
The only reason I still have a Netflix account is that I was sharing it with my parents. Now I'm simply not watching Netflix anymore, and frankly the quality of the shows has been waning enough that I think I can get a subscription for one month once a year and catch up on everything that is worth watching. Ideally shows that were allowed to be completed instead of getting canceled on a cliffhanger.
If my parents decide they had enough as well, there goes that subscription.
The upside is people are realizing this is disposable income, and in face of though Economic times, they can ditch subscriptions. Before Netflix was a staple, now people in Spain are either using more Amazon or Disney (both cheaper) or binging Netflix one month (or going back to torrenting / IPTV)
I think Netflix opened Pandoras box with this decision. They made clients aware they can live without it.
> “In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” Netflix said.
Seems like it's going according to their plan. People are free to cancel, but it looks like they ran the numbers and people are willing to pay.
Netflix’s subscriber count has been going down for a while. It spiked during Covid because people had to stay home and just watch netflix. With inflation, etc it’s very much possible that is just the number they would have lost anyways. In fact, we don’t know if the password change reduced this number because of some people bought one after sharing.
Will this mean future Netflix only works for people with a permanent home broadband service with a fixed ip address to identify as their home? I mean if you use mobile internet for your broadband, hidden behind cgnat and school or public wifi networks how will they differentiate between you and someone freeloading off your account?
The only reason I don’t cancel my Netflix is because between a few households, we get just enough viewing out of it to keep the subscription. Prime, Apple, Disney and Sky have got better content. (Actually, I just remembered that my Netflix is now bundled with Sky, so I guess I’ll be keeping it for that reason.)
The dumbest part of this is that they're doing it at a time I've never cared less about Netflix content - they lost a lot of the best reruns and only put out 1 decent show every couple years. Even though this doesn't affect me, I still question why I still have Netflix.
Netflix sucked after Hulu and other streaming services pulled their own network shows from it. They tried to create algorithm based shows which they were extremely predictable and sucky. Sorry to see netflix go down like this but for the last 5-6 years it was unbearable. Mediocre normie shows.
It’s 2023. Companies: you’ve raised prices, made service worse, reduced customer service. If you continue to penny pinch, it really doesn’t take much for me to cancel and never come back. You’re not a landlord or an energy provider: I don’t need you. Screw your greed.
I'm honestly a little surprised at how little backlash Netflix has gotten for this. They seem to be doing great despite treating their users like poop. Then again, the competition isn't that much better either.
It's important to consider Spain is a wage-constrained country, so our disposable income is not comparable to that of the average American, German, Britton or French. These moves have a greater impact on us vs. the rest of the developed world.
10% of the population in spain was using netflix before this, as a reference 12% in germany, not that much difference. We'll see, but I think it has more to do with the decline in quality of the content and people sending a message than anything else.
Spotify, Netflix and co. really put a dent in the availability of illegal downloads, to a point where most users would pay to use them, but they must be careful how hard they want to squeeze people.
Also it becomes difficult for users to pay for more than 1 or 2 things, monthly.
Unfortunately they put a dent on the availability of legal content too, in the past few years, by becoming producers and pushing media conglomerates off their platform. Which makes pirating an attractive proposition yet again.
So it lost users, not paying customers. I don't see how that's bad for Netflix. Everyone is in a tizzy about not being able to use a product for free. Pay for your shit. Netflix owes you nothing.
I feel strongly about it - and I don't even have a product to sell.
They will lose me as well if they try it here in the US. I pay for multiple screens for a reason.. if they try and restrict this to specific devices and locations … value proposition changes and I am out.
What happens when companies try to squeeze customers, layoff employees, and assume they're amazing while delivering less cool, less value, and threaten the bargain that was already established.
Netflix created its own demise, and I think that's been obvious since they started creating, and then cancelling, shows left and right with no ending.
I understand content creation is HARD. Like, really hard. I get it. But their strategy in recent years has been "take aim at dartboard, throw, but as soon as something potentially veers off course, even slightly, run and pull the dart out of the air before it hits the dartboard."
They produce and cancel so much content before the content is mature that it turns people off.
Keep in mind Netflix originally grew because they had all the content, and now everyone worth watching has their own platform.
I can't help but draw parallels from how Netflix manages their content to how Google manages their products. I listened to a podcast where they explained the economics of why Netflix is doing this and it's basically because they have to pay fees to keep the show up. This causes a similar pressure that seems to felt inside of Google, if something is not a smash hit right out the gate, kill it. But as we saw with Google, this is not a viable long term strategy, you save money in the short term, but in the long term people stop using your products / watching your shows because it might be gone tomorrow so why bother.
I think their hangup is, because they have SAG/Unionized actors/actresses, that they actually have to pay higher fees per each subsequent season (season 2 actors get paid more than season 1, season 3 actors get a bump from season 2) so eventually all but the most hyper-profitable shows get cancelled, and even then, some of the most popular ones still get cancelled because said show eventually becomes unprofitable after season 5 or 6 even if like 75% of the entire customer base is watching the show.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Netflix's addiction to data and revenue optimization becomes their demise.
I think with the money they have, Netflix should try producing a show that has 1, or 2 seasons, and has a concrete ending with little to no room for another season....and see how it does. People will invest time into something that they know has a definitive ending....but won't if they know the show might be canned and the story is left on a cliffhanger.
That's a job well done, isn't it? Cutting 1 Million free riders from the platform will make the company more profitable as there are costs associated with each stream.
netflix scammed me early on in their development before it was a household name, by requiring someone to pay for a subscription to redeem a gift subscription. I bought a gift sub from them that was unredeemable by their nonsense rules, basically. As a result, i simply acquired everything i would have watched on netflix elsewhere instead. They've lost years of revenue from me for one month's stolen sub fee.
Did they forget that piracy is a service problem? This is just going to have the same effect
Of course people are moving to piracy. No one wants to subscribe to 5 services á 10 bucks to view all their shows. This is gonna blow up sooner or later.
At this point it kinda looks like Netflix directors are purposedly trying to kill the company. No way these people can be this bad at managing a company.
Sincerely I left Netflix at the start of the year due to their apalling content, not really due to the password sharing policy (which was also applied where I live). A couple of my friends did it for the same reason.
It was not enough that they are just putting out low value productions, but they also feel the need to lecture me in every show about their radical political ideas.
I can't even name a really good series that came out on the past 2 years from Netflix, while on HBO and Prime, at least there were some really good ones.
Looking forward to that as well. I use a large scale FTTH provider with multiple virtual operators, some of whom (like the one I use) have their gateway elsewhere.
You know how to make account sharing really onerous? Mandatory MFA (and don't allow sane solutions like TOTP or U2F enrollments).
Or, you could mandate that every account must use a SSO identity service, like Google/FB/Amazon/Twitter. Then small-time account sharers would need to consider whether they should give away keys to the kingdom as well.
Netflix has the crappiest content of all the major streaming services. The Originals all seem like they were picked by combining a random array of keywords.
They haven’t even had any major hit since Squid Game.
They need to take a leaf out of HBOs book and hire some top tier writers and give them all the freedom.
It’s funny that a lot of these comments seem to be kids paying for the subscriptions of their parents. The boomers really are masters of dining out for free.
You can also anger users which will destroy their loyalty. And without their loyalty, there will be no profit.
Part of the fun experience of using Netflix was account sharing with your friends. It was a social aspect that contributed and encouraged keeping the subscription. Without it, using it alone is getting really boring.
What kind of woke crap? I don't really understand the definition, but that's because it is US identity politics and nobody wants to define it apparently. But maybe from afar you have a particular definition?
Like when you change the gender/race of literature/historical characters to hit a diversity quota or when there is a whole carousel of movies with the genre “Black History Month” which is a US thing. That kind of stuff
That seems like a better point -- at least, the part about changing the gender/race/etc of a real (or perhaps mythical, but well established) person. Although I gotta say, I sure did enjoy Hamilton in spite of the wild disregard for trying to make the actors resemble the people they were portraying.
Certainly more solid than what I usually hear from local people, which tends to just be complaints that a minority position was represented at all, even if it is an entirely new character. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Why did you delete the variety link? It was a thoughtful exploration of the problem. This is undoubtedly a complex issue but I don't know that their approach can be dismissed as "woke".
She literally says it was a political act for her, but the most problematic is this:
> I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that
if you try to lump all the cultures of africa in a single word 'black' that is synonym 'african-american' then yes it s very woke and insulting to egyptians (who are more culturally arab than sub-saharan). Asking egyptians to see themselves as african-american is profoundly american myopia, but netflix doesn't even see that.
>So, was Cleopatra Black? We don’t know for sure, but we can be certain she wasn’t white like Elizabeth Taylor.
Seems like a fair point. I'd take this outrage more seriously if the same people were also protesting about the innumerable portrayals of Cleopatra by white actresses.
>but over the trailer of the documentary (i added the link) which literally says she was a black woman.
Err, no, it doesn't literally say that. There is:
1) A man with light brown skin saying that he imagines Cleopatra as having the same skin tone as him and curly hair, which is entirely plausible (though far from certain) given what is known about her ancestry.
2) A woman saying that her grandma told her that Cleopatra was black.
It's nothing more than a nod to the longstanding controversy over Cleopatra's race and appearance, which far predates anything usually covered by the meaningless term of abuse 'woke'. Part of the problem here is that 'black' as a racial category didn't really exist in Egypt in the 1st century BC, so it's a bit of a silly debate anyway.
It briefly shows one person saying that their grandma said it. There's no suggestion that any particular claim about Cleopatra's appearance is endorsed by the documentary as definitely true. In general, as I'm sure you're aware, it's misleading to say that a documentary "says X" if X isn't a claim that the documentary itself is endorsing.
> they could at least show a bust of her
Are you sure that they don't? This is just the trailer.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to describe woke. It’s mostly genders and race, it becomes a problem when you’re trying to watch a movie and you start noticing the minority token that exists exclusively to gain imaginary social points but adds nothing to the story.
This isn’t anything new however, cinema is soft power and the US has been at it for nearly a century now.
Not every story with a black person in it has to be a story about the person being black. We're pretty used to seeing shows with white characters whose whiteness doesn't contribute anything to the story. The implicit rationale here seems to be that any character who isn't white and male needs a special justification for existing.
Is that not a perception issue, and more descriptive of the viewer than any specific action on the part of the creator? How do we objectively define what 'adds nothing to the story' looks like?
You can't objectively define that because what adds nothing to story A could add everything to story B. However, it's not very difficult to read an individual story and pick out which parts do and don't contribute to the plot well. This is just talking about Chekov's Guns.
How is someone having a particular ethnicity a Chekov's gun? When a show introduces a white character, do you expect there to be some kind of plot payoff in a future episode where the fact that they're white makes all the difference?
I get the US woke vibes from TV commercials. Plenty of black people on TV, but over here the US style black are a very small minority. I see much more black people on TV than in reality.
Meanwhile, the Turkish/Morrocan/Islamish people are mostly absent in the commercials, even if 10% of the local people have that background.
Apart from that, it all somehow feels fake and USA. It's hard to define, but everything is subtly wrong.
Weird thing, the local commercials somehow adapted around 2000. You get the same black people overload and US vibes in commercials from EU-only companies.
Yep same here and also for some strange reason, there is always a mixed race couple and the man is almost always black and the woman white. Almost never any other races involved basically and it's almost never a black woman and a white man.
It makes me a bit disgusting when it's so obvious and somehow it's like many, many companies colludes to spread this image. It's shit like that which makes conspiracy theories seem less like theories.
If you're in the EU, why bother with American content? There's a lot of EU content, plus all the Korean stuff. I'm learning French and have been watching lots of French movies and series that only have French subtitles.
Seriously. It doesn't matter that scooby doo is different or the little mermaid is different or that any thing is different.
What matters is that we have ONLY REMAKES and REMIXES and REHASHES instead of new content. Woke or not, I just want to see something original instead of dug up oldies.
I learned in this thread that apparently there's a remake of Perry Mason? Did that need to be a thing??
