Here in India, Netflix costs ₹500/mo. Amazon Prime costs ₹999 for the whole year. Both are much pricier compared to regular cable TV, which gives you hundreds of channels for a few hundred rupees per month. So there's a saturation point to at least some of their international expansion unless incomes start rising more broadly...
Also, anecdotally, I only have so much time for 'prestige' TV. They cover Delhi and Youtube in ads everytime they have something to announce--Altered Carbon, which I watched, but then they had Lost in Space, Wild Wild Country, and now a show set in Mumbai called "Sacred Games"--while it's great for subscribers to have a wealth of new material to watch all the time, there may be an inflection point beyond which producing/acquiring more content doesn't grow their audience...
Surprising how the ratio is so far reversed in India. Here in Canada (which is a similar market to the USA), Netflix is the cheapest option. Cable TV is several times more expensive for even a basic plan, and Amazon Prime costs about the same as Netflix (but includes the other Prime services).
Not only does this statement not make any clear sense (why does English speaking #s affect price of the service?) but India has the second largest English speaking population in the world.
Can you explain why it's irrelevant? It's unclear to me how market size is impacted by the fact that there is a larger pool of people that aren't in the market.
That is probably the most insightful comment here. Who realizes india would have the second most. If Indian had the same income levels as the west the English market alone could challenge the US.
Sure, but if you go to India right now I can assure you that you wouldn't be able to have a decent conversation with almost anyone not educated from a decent college, Im not sure what the degree of proficiency is from that figure you got over there but the extent of most peoples English would be pointing and using one or two relevant words, not making complete coherent sentences. Back to my original comment this is the reason why people in India dont subscribe to netflix, its a killer deal and less expensive than what they pay for cable (plus they can watch it on their laptop so - the cost of the TV too) but I guess they wouldn't be able to follow the storyline as clearly.
And about that not making sense, I meant that it would be cheaper than paying for cable TV
The parent says that Netflix costs ₹500/mo in India, or $9.60 in Canadian dollars, which is almost exactly the price it costs in Canada. I wonder if Netflix prices their plans at approximately the same price worldwide to prevent arbitrage since people living in expensive countries could subscribe in cheap countries. (Netflix allows you to use your subscription worldwide when you're traveling -- so people could claim to be traveling.)
> I wonder if Netflix prices their plans at approximately the same price worldwide to prevent arbitrage since people living in expensive countries could subscribe in cheap countries. (Netflix allows you to use your subscription worldwide when you're traveling -- so people could claim to be traveling.)
Is the Netflix catalog the same worldwide? I was under the impression it varied based on the country your subscription was based in, due to licensing (different companies own the distribution rights for the same content in different countries).
If that's true, the problem you describe may not exist. An American trying to save money by subscribing to an Indian plan priced cheaper for the local market may just get Indian content, which may not be at all want he wants.
You're correct that the Netflix catalog is different for each country. However, the shows you're offered are based on your current location as determined by your IP address, and not according to where you bought the subscription. So the American subscribing to a cheaper Indian plan, would see the US catalog when he logs in from an ISP in the US, thus he would still get the shows he wanted and save money if the Indian plan was cheaper.
OP is comparing apples and oranges. Cable TV with less channels and no HD is cheaper maybe than Netflix. With all channels and proper HD it will be about same as Netflix price or more.
Prime is cheap because Amazon is still trying to acquire their market in India and can afford to lose money for a while. Contrary to what OP said, cable TV with HD, and most of the channels that a family would need is definitely more expensive than Netflix.
Pakistan here, its for 1k pkr/month here, and there aren't really that much programs in Hindi or Urdu so only people who speak good English (and have 1k/month to spare) can buy it. And there aren't any repercussions for torrenting and the internet generally sucks so..
I live in Bangalore and I feel I have no time to watch a "serious" show like sacred games or altered carbon. You really have to sit down and pay 100% attention to the show to fully understand what's going on. Contrast that to general Indian TV where I can take a pee break and come back and still understand everything. I didn't renew my prime and netflix subscription last month.
Also, for India, people miss the broadband cost. Because to consume Netflix, Prime you have to take into account the broadband. While as alternate media it is fine. It still can't replace cable TV. Not at this moment. It is still costly to replace all media consumption through data at this point. Once the broadband penetration and price fall further it will be different story.
I actually bought it quite sometime ago, but that means I have a lot of shares, and the more shares you have the more small movements in price start to add up to real money.
Right now I’m down several thousands of dollars on NFLX, which could have easily been a few international vacations. It’s not the first time or last time stuff like this happens, but everything was rallying so nicely the past few days it’s a shame to see that get back tracked. And of course, other tech stocks are down with it which also adds to the pain.
You can't predict the market but I think they still have some growth ahead of them and that their shares will still rise. They won't rally and grow as much as they have forever but I don't think the market has softened up for them yet. I'm going to buy while they are a little down.
I do think they will grow but now I’m planning when my actual exit will be. I think I’ll give it another year or two before pulling out and realizing the gains.
I took that advice several years ago when I started investing, but a big mistake I made was choosing a value fund instead of growth fund. Could have got so much more.
"Sucks if you bet on black" - buying shares hoping for an earnings surprise to pocket some free gains is the middle class version of having a good feeling about a horse.
Well, they're not free gains. It's also not any different than buying on any other day from an investing standpoint. Risk is still the amount of margin requirement (excluding derivative hedges).
Opening a position on the day of the earnings announcement is generally a bad idea regardless of whether you’re right or wrong about the direction. Volatility is effectively priced in at that point.
While implied volatility is a feature of derivatives (and by extension, options), the price of an equity does undergo volatility, particularly from the heightened trading activity in anticipation of e.g. earnings. Volatility is not restricted to the definition of implied volatility.
No, I'm not. I'm not talking about implied volatility. I'm talking about the way in which the stock price significantly changes in anticipation of the earnings announcement. Volatility is a formal variable for derivatives, but that doesn't mean equities (and the broader market) do not also experience volatility.
Kinda sucks when shows leave Netflix and don't get replaced; half the appeal of Netflix is the ability to quickly switch between Futurama and Always Sunny, and more importantly to be able to watch those shows on a platform that doesn't completely suck (FX's app has got to be one of the worst apps I've ever used). When "Parts Unknown" was about to leave Netflix, I really questioned whether it was worth keeping my subscription. It feels like it's happening at an accelerated pace in the last couple of years.
The original content is good, and I realize that those shows leaving Netflix is probably more about Fox/CNN than it is about Netflix, but still makes me less interested in Netflix nonetheless.
They've been so aggressively getting rid of "real" content and replacing it with their in-house productions, the quality of which has slid quite a bit as they've ramped up volume.
I'm on the verge of canceling it, since most of what I want is on Prime anyway.
Well, I’ve got the opposite reaction with Amazon: I can’t watch even some of their own shows when they get released in US. For example The Man in the High Castle’s second season whas unavailable here for quite a while after the release. You can’t blame the content producers here.
I don’t think they’re replacing their content on purpose, they have no choice. Around ten years ago when Netflix streaming started to take off studios thought they were taking Netflix for a ride, selling new-fangled “streaming” rights for old catalogue films that otherwise weren’t making much money. Now the game has changed and Netflix effectively can’t afford to renew these contracts, so little by little the stuff people actually know and love is leaving the service. To Netflix’s credit, they started trying to make their own content, but for every hit there’s about twenty misses. And frankly, even if everything they made turned to gold they still wouldn’t have age-old classics that everyone still wants to see.
I actually think they’re going to be in a lot of trouble a few years down the line as their catalog is going to be a handful of great originals, tons of garbage originals, and a bottomless pit of Z-grade studio films.
I took the N out and realized that would never fly. As Netflix is the odd duck of the group, maybe some banking associate put it in there just to give some ferocity to the acronym (I.e. engineered a backronyn).
Their licensing deals with studios such as NBC, Fox etc. are time-based. Netflix is not purposely getting rid of shows. Nor is Netflix the one deciding that "Parks and Recreation" is to only be available in the US.
Netflix is producing all of their own shows precisely so that they will no longer be held hostage by other license holders. Of course, now everyone doing the same thing, and consumers are left having to subscribe to a ton of providers (even when said providers currently are in a "drought" between seasons of your favourite shows) and jump between apps to get what they want.
(As an aside, Hulu stands out here in providing a "pause" button on your subscription. But it's month-based, and you still have to manage that yourself; it doesn't automatically credit you for those months when you didn't use the service.)
Another anecdote: I’d have cancelled Netflix a while ago if my family wasn’t using it. Their UX has been on a steady decline for me:
- Audio previews make it so I never want to browse for what to watch next. I hate having to fumble with my tv/home theatre remote because of this.
- If you leave it hanging, the previews count towards a watch! Wow. God help you if you wanna make some popcorn.
- Their sorts are always shuffled around, pushing whatever content is on their agenda.
- Im bilingual, and I can’t belive there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows. I can’t watch a show like Narcos without having subs for either English or Spanish. This might sound nit picky, but bilinguals aren’t exactly edge cases, either (SV is full of bilinguals!)
I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them. But damn it is infuriating. Crazy that my favorite netflix client is the one Apple designed for them in the older Apple TVs
I have noticed lately that the "Are you still there" message has gone away. While it is nice when you are awake, it sucks when you fall asleep and wake up on season 6 of something when last you knew you were on season 2. Then you have to figure out exactly what episode you fell asleep on, not impossible but can be a pain.
Hate that option. I tend to work from home and leave my TV with something on. Picking up my remote every few hours is a waste. I don’t see why it’s so hard to let users turn it off.
What's going to happen when Originals directors realise and make the first 10 minutes much more compelling than the rest, by making it unrepresentative of what the show actually is? Hmm, I might already have experienced that...
I honestly don't care about what ranking they use as it gives good results. Thumbs up, 5 starts, 10 starts, %, it's all the same. What frustrates me is that even after changing it, the recommendations are still just as bad, so the whole change was basically pointless.
The recs were very good back when it was the DVD service.
Wild conjecture: A paucity of things to recommend, combined with a desire to not concede that there are only like 3 things left I haven't watched yet but would be likely to give 5 stars, prompted them to first tweak the recommender's calibration, then eventually to wholesale switch to a metric that blurs the distinction between, "Yeah, I'll watch it", and "That was great!"
My guess is that they’re using variable-scheduled rewards: they’ll recommend you a bunch of shows they know you’d only give 3-4 stars, and “hold back” a 5 star show, surfacing it at some random set time since the last time they gave you something good.
Such a strategy would get you more addicted, but also allow them to stretch their supply of subjectively-five-star-rated shows at the same time. It’s win-win ...for them.
In my case, I think it's even more stark: I've definitely wasted the odd hour hunting for something to watch, and, in the process, have become keenly aware of just how minuscule their library is right now.
They're building it back up with their private content, but, quite understandably, only in some very focused areas - presumably, the stuff that they expect to have the widest appeal. They originally built their business on basically owning the long tail, but now they've been forced to forsake it.
I think that's where a lot of the discontent is coming from. Folks are realizing that Netflix has turned into something very akin to the Blockbuster outlets that everyone had once cheered them for running out of town.
I visited my father this weekend who has an older 'smart' tv and the app on his TV was still using the star system. It also had no auto-play which was awesome. I wonder if he's using an older version of the app and if there's a way to roll back on newer tvs.
I've shared a lot of your issues with Netflix as well, and I don't think it's nitpicky to want to watch Narcos without any subtitles. I feel like especially for that show where it really tried to capture the feeling of Colombia watching it and having to read half dialogue takes away from my enjoyment.
You can always just give up on their UI. I've seen my friends open their phones to search for a show to watch instead of using the Netflix UI to find something. There are multiple sites with listings, which suggests this is a fairly common practice.
Yep, I always open Netflix, tell myself my show should be near and start scrolling, then give up and use the search. It's so so bad. Now with the audio previews, I just bookmark shows and go straight to there. Their UI is completely useless.
100% on the bilingual thing. For my family and I, it's kinda awkward - weird localization failure for such a large corp. Not to mention completely botched translations like the title of Money Heist (actually called The Paper House), which is the dumbest name I've ever seen.
Translations of movie titles are a pet peeve of mine. They are bad everywhere, and have been since way before the times of Internet streaming.
My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
> My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
Same. In Spanish that title was translated as "La Jungla de Cristal" (The Glass Jungle). There seems to be some common agreement here :D
The problem with the UX of netflix, spotify, etc is that their tied to the service, they have a monopoly on that service. I should be able to watch content I've paid for through they player I want with the features I want and not be forced to use the netflix player. I just want a textual list of shows available, apparently this technology is beyond the abilities of the tech team at netflix.
Autoplay is another pet peeve, I like the feature but if I fall asleep then netflix considers the show watched and removes it from my continue list.
The worse it get's the more I'm tempted to go back to less legal means of acquiring content, then I can watch it in any player without an arbitrarily gimped resolution.
I've started to get fatigue with the style of a lot of NetFlix shows. They're not just designed to be binged on, the plot only exists if you binge on it! Instead of having one plot every episode, most series seems to have one plot every season and then they draaaaaaaw that shit out like it's you're last Christmas cookie before the New Years' diet.
Yup. After being burned on this, I avoid Netflix-made shows altogether. I love binging interesting shows. I hate being dragged into binging by some screnwriting dark patterns.
Season-long plots are awesome, I personally much prefer shows with a long story arc than ones in which episodes can be watched in any order.
The complaint here is different though. Netflix-made shows seem to be deliberately designed so that all plot subpoints get dragged through the entire season. Each episode will introduce something, later episodes will occasionally remind you of it, but you have to wait 'till the very end for everything to be simultaneously resolved. Basically, what would be a classical story arc gets stretched in a way that 90% of its mass falls into the last episode.
(And then the resolution turns out to be meh, and you end up wondering why did you just waste 10 hours of your life on this show. It's quite like modern journalism - a bit of clickbait at the beginning, then a long article giving exactly zero useful information, and then a meaningless conclusion at the end.)
I share your observations, but wanted to add the their browsing system is just bonkers.
Discovery is impossible — imo they overoptimize for engagement and make it hard to explore the catalog. I find out about many new shows via PR placements in newspapers.
Flixbox is USA only, but there are some websites like unogs.com who can handle more countries. In addition to a more convenient browsing of the catalog, if you also want an alternative recommendation system (with really accurate and unbiased predicted ratings), there's the Windows/Mac app Coollector Movie Database: https://www.coollector.com/
I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched or had no interest in.
On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well.
If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.
And herein lies the issue with filtering/tailoring based on what you've watched/liked before: it can never 'escape' and give you something different that you might actually really like.
I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.
And it would be so simple to solve. Prepare a tailored list. Instead of using it on all available space, fill only 90% of the space with items from the list. Fill remaining 10% with random items that do not belong to that list.
Yep this is how you’re supposed to escape from a local maximum. But maybe Netflix’s usual customer doesn’t stick around long enough to have this problem so it’s not worth fixing. I can’t imagine none of their machine learning engineers know how to fix this.
Yeah, I bet they know. Question is, do their managers want them to fix this?
There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.
I think that could be solved by having a button to mark something as watched, removing it from recommendations and the catalog other than the list of things you watched.
You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.
And it's not just the subpar discovery features. It's the combination of awful discovery and their abysmal recommendation engine that renders exploration impossible. When will those engines understand that I'm not interested in every mediocre drug/crime/sports/[any other broad topic] documentary just because I watched this one exceptionally good documentary that happened to deal with the topic Netflix now decides to push down my throat?
I want outstanding content regardless of topic and these days Netflix seems to be delivering less of that or at the very least makes it incredibly hard to find in a sea of mediocre content.
Discovery is pretty much impossible for anything with a lot of products, I think mainly because there's no way to account for someone's personal taste, a pretty intangible concept.
Trying to find actual hidden gems on Steam or iOS is a nightmare, to the point where I waste the time I set aside to play games because I'm looking for one instead. Same with Amazon, the best it can do is "people who bought this product also bought this other sort of related product."
I also agree that UI like Netflix currently has -- big giant vaguely descriptive rectangles that only fit a handful on screen at once -- make discovery super discouraging, since it becomes tedious to scroll through everything and find more info about it.
> no way to turn off captions for some of their shows
There are all sorts of inconsistencies with subtitles and dubbing. For example, suppose a show has options for 5 languages, but not Portuguese. If you switch your profile to Portuguese (i.e., by logging to the Netflix website and selecting Portuguese as your main language), then lo and behold Portuguese appears as a choice for subtitles and audio for many shows where it wasn't offered before.
Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match. They are both correct translations, but it's as if they were translated by entirely different people. Maybe Netflix gets the subtitling done by one agency, and then later, if there's enough demand for the show, they get dubbing done by another agency (but don't update the subtitles to match the new translation).
Yet another oddity is that, on rare occasion, they will take away a language choice they offered for a show. A show might have, say, Polish as a audio option, but the next day it's gone. Completely puzzling.
>Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match.
This is industry standard, not specific to Netflix:
- subs are generally direct translations of the script/transcript
- dubs are often done by mouth-movement matching to make it look right
I would agree that the language tools on Netflix are unnecessarily bad.
English subtitles often don’t match the spoken dialogue for shows in English either. They are often simplified, probably for space and time constraints. I assume that the primary intended audience is the hearing impaired, not language learners.
> I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them.
They wouldn't be doing what they're doing if it didn't help them in the short term.
Data is great but you never have a perfect picture. What boosts your numbers in the short term could be the thing that makes your customers resent you and move on in the long term.
Also, some things are not easy to track. How would they track "there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows"? They see an user watching a show. The data does not show that this user is slightly pissed because they can't turn off captions, but they still care about the show so much that they watch anyway.
Data is only part of the equation. The other part is what you look at, and yet another is what you aim for. The data might tell them that bilingual users are not being properly accommodated by the service (or may not tell that - after all, in what way are you giving this feedback that would also show up on Netflix's surveillance panels?) - but then the business people will say that already subscribed users are less important than getting new subscriptions, and this problem will have to wait.
EDIT:
> Their UX has been on a steady decline for me
Agreed. It's less clear, and it seems to be optimized for Internet equivalent of channel hopping. For people who know exactly what they're searching for, Netflix becomes more and more difficult to use.
Also - and this really annoys me - their UI changes tend to make the interface heavier each iteration. It's not a problem when I use it on my desktop, but then sometimes I'd like to watch a movie on a tablet (e.g. when in a hotel), and then I have to face the absolutely ridiculous situation, in which a full-HD movie seems to cause smaller load on my device than the interface to select what to watch.
I cancelled Netflix a while ago, I hadn't been watching it for a while but assumed the rest of my family was. Eventually got around to asking them and it turned out they hadn't used it in a while either. Turns out we all just kinda lost interest. I remember when streaming first came out I was excited to "see what's on streaming," it felt like so much content to explore. Then it gradually became: "let's see if I can find something tolerable on Netflix before I go to bed." So many nights I started 5 different things, giving up on each to start something new, before I eventually just gave up on Netflix all together and went to sleep.
Part of the problem, was that their content came to all feel bland in the same way to me. But I also think they slowly broke my media consumption habits. I remember the days of Blockbuster when you had to pick one movie, and then you were committed. Which meant I almost always finished the movies. Many times I'd watch them twice. Netflix creates this persistent FOMO over what you could be watching. Eventually, I just stopped watching anything.
There is a paradox of choice, for sure. I remember when my first car had a 6cd changer in the trunk... I could listen to the same couple of albums for weeks. Now ten million songs at my fingertips and sometimes you just don’t feel like dealing with it
1. Continue licensing content and be subject to the whims of the content creators who can destroy their margin by increasing fees. The content creators can also start their own streaming services like disney is planning on doing eating into that market of streaming.
2. Create their own content eliminating the 2 main risks in option 1.
Option 2 is really the only viable option even if competition for content will likely result in content providers (HBO,Showtime,Netflix,Amazon...) not making much profit as the industry goes towards more perfect competition.
Creating good content is harder than leasing it. Option 2 has it's risks, and honestly they seem higher.
Why would Disney or Comcast want Netflix to fail when it's a boon for them currently? Sure, they'll aggressively negotiate the best deals for themselves, sure they'll plan for a backup in the event Netflix would ever stop leasing their content, but why kick a cash cow in the teeth? It's bad business.
If anything, Netflix jumped the shark cutting their cheques to the providers and creating their own content.
> Why would Disney or Comcast want Netflix to fail when it's a boon for them currently?
See Pandora for a lesson in what happens when a content distribution company has no pricing power with their suppliers (content producers). Note that Spotify has been paying attention. [1]
Disney is already working on their streaming service. Disney only wants Netflix around for as long as it takes for Disney to build a competing service made up of only Disney content that you have to pay a premium for. Even from Netflix's stratified perspective, Disney is a juggernaut, and Netflix's bargaining power goes away as soon as Disney has its own service running.
Netflix needs to give subscribers a reason to keep their subscriptions going and if licensed content goes away they're going to need compelling original content to keep their subs interested.
No one really wants a middle man to be making a lot of money off of them. They might tolerate it for some time, but if they ever have an option to do so they are either going to cut out the middle man (sell directly to consumers) or commoditize the middle man (lots of places to get the same content all making only a very small markup). A company with the potential investment capital of Disney or Comcast will almost certainly be able to manage one of those sooner or later. There is no path to long term profitability for Netflix just through reselling content from a few huge media conglomerates.
The moment they announced the price hike, it's like something cracked in my rationalization to maintain the service, and every adverse complaint I've ever queued up in my mind against the service floated right to the top.
I'm on the verge of the same with Netflix. If I see a price hike, I'll quit just the same. They've been losing far more content than they've been adding.
...which I'd be happy to do. The production shops behind the prestige and niche films these streamers are lapping up for fixed fees (something like n% of budget paid to the production house, where n is a value over 100) are utterly crippling the production of quality titles that aren't things like event pieces or sequels.
As the good production houses dip because of the rates the streamers are paying, you're more frequently being left with new or inexperienced production houses filling the void, producers with less experience IDing the creatives (writing/acting/etc), finding directors who can cast successfully, doing accurate budgeting, etc.
I'll stop short of turning this into too much of a rant. Basically: the Netflixes and Amazons of the world have crippled the business case for an entire class of motion picture and subverted the quality of output in this class as a result.
I had prime through subscribing for the shopping service. I never found one show I wanted to watch on there apart from old stuff I'd already seen elsewhere.
At least in my area, most of my orders still arrive in 2 days after cancelling. I just have to order a little less frequently to get that $35 free ship threshold.
I was noticing I was ordering far less recently (mostly settled in the new house now), and the fact they still refuse to support Chromecast meant Prime Video was useless for me. The price hike was the final nail.
I cancelled my Netflix account around a year ago because of issues that kept accumulating. Removal of shows, deteriorating UX, price hikes, etc. I haven't missed it.
I stopped renewing Prime when they announced the most recent price hike. It runs out in a week and I already don't miss it. If I need something in two days I'll pay for two day shipping. In all likelihood I'll save money this way.
Similar to you. All the shows I used to watch on it were gone or I'd already seen everything I could find worth watching. I canceled netflix about 2 years ago after being with them long before they ever did their streaming beta. I thought I'd just not subscribe for about a year and come back when they had made a bunch of new content. The bits and pieces I've seen or what I overhear about that content hasn't been very enticing.
Agreed. Recently, Netflix reminded me why ultimately, torrents are simply superior.
You see, I initially subscribed to Netflix because it had most of Star Trek on it - all the TV shows + many (I think most) of the movies. The ability to watch an episode every now and then was what kept me subscribed even through the periods I couldn't find anything else interesting there. Now, recently came a time I actually wanted to watch a Star Trek movie I loved ("Generations"). I looked for it, but it was nowhere to be found. Just gone. So was "First Contact". So were all the others (except the bastardizations of JJ Abrams). This prompted me to ask, what other (non-Trek) movies and series I loved and even watched on Netflix are still available? Turns out, the list of movies and series has been gradually decreasing behind my back. A lot of the interesting things I watched on Netflix, that I used as an argument to recommend Netflix to friends, are simply gone.
Torrents cause a PITA with storage management, but have this one lovely feature - once a file is on your hard drive, it stays there. And this generalizes to SaaS vs. local software and files, too.
> Torrents cause a PITA with storage management, but have this one lovely feature - once a file is on your hard drive, it stays there.
Same reason why I still buy my music on actual CDs. Sure, I rip them once and only use the files afterwards, but I can be assured that no matter what happens to my backup, I'll still have a large chunk of my music collection available in 30 years.
I've used Prime and Hulu before but they seem to have the same issue from time to time. The obvious alternative for me is to rent the content from Prime or iTunes (I have an Apple TV so my options are somewhat limited), but at $3-$5 per rental that's 3-4 movies on Netflix before I get my money back. I think I watch that many but I'm not sure. I watch a lot of crap I wouldn't otherwise that I feel like I'm settling for, but on the other hand Netflix is just my ticket to zone out and stop thinking about other stuff, so it does the trick.
Netflix is in a weird position. Early on I loved it, but over time it seems down to a few good originals and a lot of bad ones, and third rate third party content. I haven't cancelled yet but probably will, as I rarely use it. I don't blame Netflix for this necessarily, but it has made it's consumer value much weaker. Internationally, there are much cheaper options typically.
As an aside, their taking of a political stance has led to a small but visible American chunk leaving, or at least claiming to.
Yes, I’ve also noticed that generally their original content isn’t very great. I can see how this happens when you optimize for binge-watching, but it feels like they just throw a lot of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
I’ve recently got an HBO subscription and the difference in quality is staggering.
I don't like how they mark exclusive right properties as "Originals" when they may not have made them. A lot of the quality of those exclusives is not great compared to their actual originals.
Nowadays every media company wants their own streaming service. That means Netflix has to scramble for content. And when starting out they were careful in selecting projects. But once they got a taste for success they have been green-lighting projects left and right. But, they are not going to select winners every time. Stuff like Bright, the Will Smith movie, relied solely on the star power.
It will be interesting to see if Netflix imposes some kind quality bar to ensure things don't go even worse.
> Nowadays every media company wants their own streaming service.
I wonder how this will evolve. Short-term, it looks like self-destructing greed to me. People are not going to subscribe to shit ton of services because each of them has a small slice of movies they might want to watch.
It's easier to create a streaming service than a content house, apparently. So it's clear that this is the way things will go. Ultimately video streaming is a commodity technology and there are lots of engineers who can build such things. It's not like web search or AI.
The too-many-subscriptions problem could be solved in a variety of commercial ways, like simply offering charging for how much you watch rather than a flat rate.
People are spending just as much time watching TV as they ever did. If they've always paid $70/month for it, why would the entertainment companies settle for people paying less now?
In Germany, the basic HD TV package costs €60/year (not per month) if you want it. And also you have to pay €18/month for the public broadcasts (that part is non-negotiable). So that comes out to €23/month if you're watching over satellite. Cable TV sometimes imposes additional fees (€8/month in my apartment building).
There is also Sky, a pay-TV provider, but I don't know any subscribers except for soccer fans and sports bars.
Some people pay even more! I had relatives paying well over 120 dollars per month!
The general pricing scheme for both phone and cable, well really most private subscription companies, is to hook people in with a deal with an absurd price after a set time is over, and tack on tons of little gotchas. It's borderline theft IMO. Those who know better then have to decide whether it's worth the hassle of threatening to cancel each year...
Sky has five million subscribers in Germany. That looks like about 12% of your households.
Basic TV in the US is free. Basic cable is about $30/mo. Case bundled with Internet is $50-100. There are some premium equivalents to Sky that top out around $200/mo. About 75% of US households pay for TV in some way. I’d say our mean and median household spending on TV is higher but there is a greater range of pricing, with $0 being quite viable if your tastes are simple.
> If they've always paid $70/month for it, why would the entertainment companies settle for people paying less now?
The usual reason in a normal product market would be efficiencies developed over time reducing costs and competition driving prices down to marginally over cost.
It was the same way in games for a long time. A platform becomes dominant (because it is the best), then others want to emulate it (poorly). Eventually competitors do pop up, but the ones that don't fill a specific niche generally don't become incredibly popular.
The difference with movies/series is that the licensing situation is significantly more retarded. This will probably end up meaning we will end up with a million different streaming services (with different catalogues for different countries, or more accurately a good catalog in the US and a poor one everywhere else). This will drive more people to pirating, with predictable results.
I hardly ever watched TV, but found myself binge watching Netflix. The on-demand model is so much cleaner than regular TV where you have advertisements being shown for almost 1/3 of the time.
In fact, I liked Netflix so much that I cancelled it because it was becoming a distraction. If I have kids they definitely will not have access to any such thing, and I feel sorry for the kids growing up with it today.
I get where you’re coming from but self control is an important thing to teach children.
If your version of self control is fully disconnecting, I understand that but it doesn’t mean you should feel sorry for kids that have access to Netflix.
(Speaking as a 21 year old who spent a number of years of my childhood watching Netflix with my family)
I think children are by nature more impulsive, and if they have access to Netflix at a young age without enough parental restrictions they might start down a bad path. When they're older it's easier to contain.
That's part of the reason for age restrictions on drugs/alcohol. Some drugs aren't all that different from dopamine inducing digital stimuli. The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for self control, isn't fully developed until age 25.
The age restrictions on drugs (alcohol is also a drug) are because of researched and profound effects on developing brains. It has very little to do with undeveloped self-control (although that is definitely a thing). The difference in effects on dopamine between drugs and anything that isn't a drug is also profound, mainly because drugs will make things happen that simply cannot happen normally.
I don't at all agree with your "children should not be exposed to things they might want" premise, but that is a discussion for another day.
When Disney will launch their streaming service in late 2019, Netflix will be in deep trouble. If Disney is allowed to aquire Fox, they will have such a massive (and exclusive) catalogue, that Netflix will simply be too expensive. Netflix Originals are not too bad but also not exceedingly good and I personally wouldn't pay 11€/mo for them.
I'm betting Disney messes it up. They will be too married to legacy revenue streams in DVD + Cable TV to really make their service worthwhile and eat into Netflix's market share with an incredible deal for consumers.
They're also too obsessed with control and exclusivity. See their practice of "vaulting" movies so they can re-release them every 10 years. It's basically the opposite market strategy of streaming services that live on the long tail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
They will have the technology side covered [1] but they have to nail the pricing/catalogue/UI mix to succeed. However Disney has the resources (time/$/talent) to go at it until they take down Netflix.
That’s what HBO thought. Their streaming service was a streaming pile of crap technologically. They ended up using BAMTech to redo it. Disney bought BAMTech.
HBO Now is so weird. I subscribed for a couple of months to watch Game of Thrones and Westworld. I figured I might as well check out the rest of the service too. HBO has many decades of original content right? There should be tons of stuff to watch on there, but I could find barely anything. It was just a light crust of the most current shows, whatever movies they were currently licensing, and a few crumbs from the back catalog.
I ended up dropping the subscription because I'd watched everything interesting on the service in no time flat. I could have been watching Tales from the Crypt for months, but it wasn't available at all. Where is the Rey Bradbury theater? Shows I'd heard about growing up but only got to see briefly in a hotel room on a trip. For a service nearly twice as expensive as Netflix they made seemingly no effort to keep me engaged.
What happened is streaming tech isn't niche to Netflix anymore. It became good enough for HBO and Showtime etc etc of course Amazon so now you have a plethora of stuff to watch and Netflix isn't the only game in town but they will always be the original innovator. I hope they can innovate more and do something fantastic.
Game is only going to get tighter too. Now you have sports moving into the streaming era, Disney launching something soon, etc.
The time of even more fragmented streaming offerings (and more selection) is soon.
Comcast is an interesting study here too. They are pushing ip based linear TV hard right now. I don't like the company, but they seem to know what they are doing.
What's the lower bound for their share price before they have to change how they operate the business or suffer a penalty to net revenue? Or, if the stock market goes offline for 365 days, would any particular harm come to them at all?
With Netflix, there doesn’t seem to be any amount of seeing something and not clicking on it that ever gets the system to stop showing it to me.
Every time I log in, there’s a big wall of 20 posters I’ve seen a thousand times and never clicked on once and have zero interest in.
And the whole user experience seems about finding my way around that wall.
I can find stuff I’m interested in, but the platform never surfaces it for me. I always have to dig.
I always use the feedback system, too.
Netflix always brags about paying mid-six in pure salary and hiring top of market. Their internal presentations on content discovery and demography are something people tell stories of like they glimpsed a magical relic or something.
As a user I honestly cannot fathom where all that money and research could possibly be going.
Heh ... same here. I'm baffled after all their supposed AI with competitions and all, it actually sends me emails pitching me to watch shows that I already watched end-to-end and finished. I couldn't think of a clearer or simpler signal to an algorithm than "they already watched it" but apparently Netflix isn't able to pull that off.
My girlfriend and I use Netflix to watch Star Trek, Chinese movies, and Indian/Bollywood films. That's it. Honestly the UX has been steadily getting better from my perspective and the film selection now is way beyond where it was ~3 years ago. Maybe I'm an outlier? It didn't occur to me that it might be an unpopular opinion to say that Netflix is actually good
I'm trying out HBO/Movie network. Once you get through 15 mostly goid series the content gets very thin. For half the price netflix has more original and unique content and provides more value at half the codt. I like the variety I wish the UI promoted it a little better
But did you notice Star Trek movies suddenly disappearing? Check back the movies and series you've watched and meant to watch again at some point. Chances are, you won't find them anymore.
That's the thing with Netflix - objectively, it's the best streaming service available. The complaints are mostly relative to what they could be, and about the direction in which they evolve.
I'm finding significantly more to watch on (U.S.) Prime than Netflix streaming, these days.
Even Netflix' premium original content is getting monotonous. Where it -- or, more broadly, "Netflix" branded content -- is not simply getting stuffed full of "quantity over quality".
I've been feeling like I should have pulled the plug, a while back.
And yes, per other comments here, someone needs to... "have a talk with" their UI people. Not helpful, recent changes.
I don't know if anyone else does this, but I subscribe to netflix for a while, then I hit a wall of "nothing to watch" and new content that I'm interested in dribbles out too slowly. So I unsubscribe and subscribe with a different streaming service, and watch their content for a bit, then go to another, and then eventually come back to netflix. If it's been long enough I also get free trials for another month also :)
Yeah I keep opening Netflix nowadays and I click around for a while and have not much interesting to watch. There is a lot of STUFF, but it's not worth my time.
You've basically described the streaming business these days. Listening to talks from Netflix, they optimize for this kind of behavior. While they're interested in retention, they have a pretty optimized winback funnel.
There's a large percentage of users who won't go through all that trouble just to find new content. Anecdotally I can tell you that there's a large percentage of users who can re-watch the same series over and over (I'm one of those people).
Netflix knows this so that's why they go great lengths to keep series like The Office and Friends, btw, both owned by Comcast...so you can guess why Netflix is cheering for Comcast to win that Fox bid...
Maybe because they keep adding stuff like autoplay trailers, intro skips, and outro skips. Just play the damn TV show, stop trying to manipulate me into watching more, just play it as made.
One thing no one notices is DRM and lack of content on Netflix overseas... It is nearly impossible to have Netflix on Chinese Android devices (thanks to Widevine), which is a huge loss due to rapidly growing smart projector market... who needs 480p on a 150'' screen??
As for lack of content: my family is trilingual, and we constantly moving between countries. It's almost impossible to get content we like outside of US (even Australia sucks), these unbelievably stupid and shortsighted ideas of distribution regions (for DVD/BD) and DRM (for streaming) keeps me on torrents for 20+ years already, and I see no end to this ordeal. I tried to "go legal" on so many occasions, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I stumble upon some ludicrous "new tech" that prevents me as a consumer to watch content I like.
When will the studios realize that ALL content is out there already? And literally NONE of their effort since DVD css stopped anyone from "stealing" anything.
I can get any movie/show from torrents in max quality, but I would like to just pay $15 to someone and stream FullHD/4K content in any language to any device, and finally stop pirating stuff. Too much to ask, Netflix?
Music industry learned this lesson hard way 10 years ago, unleashed unlimited HQ streaming, and now look -- music piracy is nearly extinct, and both listeners and industry are happy.
In the meantime, I'm filling my 4TB hdd with BD remuxes and enjoying 4k videos w/o paying any cent to anyone. No other way around it for consumer, it seems.
I'm curious about their decision to push original content as hard as they have. In some cases, like comedy specials, it's a clear win. But their original dramas are really hit or miss, and for every Altered Carbon you have a half dozen utterly forgettable shows. It makes the "Netflix Original" badge pretty meaningless as an indicator of quality, so I still have to wait for a buzz to develop to commit to trying a show. I don't end up watching Netflix nearly as much as I'd like to.
Also, the diminishment of the back catalogue (and the fact that so much of it is SD--not their fault) is negating one of their biggest selling points.
> for every Altered Carbon you have a half dozen utterly forgettable shows
That's no different from regular TV. We were spoiled in the early years of Netflix streaming because they could cherry-pick license all the good stuff from earlier for cheap. Now they have to go on the same "fund a bunch of stuff, discover some hits" journey that all the other content producers have gone through.
On the plus side you can watch anything you want on demand, there are no ads, and the website and apps are fast. And you don't have to pay $100/month for a cable bundle with shitty customer service.
If there's some show or movie I'm really missing, my local public library does a great job of filling that need.
An interesting question for me is whether Netflix will also experience a wave of talent departures as an additional result of this stock plunge.
Netflix is competing for talent as a FAANG outfit, and as such much of the value they provide to their employees depends on their RSUs. This works great as long as stock price is on a steep rise, as has generally been the case for FAANG over the past several years.
Now that the price is on a downslope, though, we should expect their compensation package to be less competitive than other tech companies, and especially FAANG.
Will they be able to deal with it somehow? Or will their top talent migrate to more successful tech companies that can pay as well as Netflix did while its stock was rising?
Netflix doesn't force employees to take RSUs. Every employee has the option to take anywhere from 0-100% of their compensation in cash. [1] This was also my experience.
It's nice that employees have a choice, but presumably some of them did choose to take stock (it would be pretty bad if none of them did), and they will see a reduction in their comp as a result of this plunge.
Furthermore, the link you provided also states that since 2015, there's a compensation factor that is non-voluntary and pegged to the price of the stock, so everyone will see a reduction, though some more than others.
Factor into your calculation that the stock is now cheaper for new hires, and that Netflix can adjust compensation to retain employees. I personally don’t think it’s an interesting question yet.
> I personally don’t think it’s an interesting question yet.
You're probably right. I think it will become interesting once a FAANG starts losing enough stock value and cash that compensation is no longer competitive and cannot be adjusted.
My sense is that retention relying on constant and substantial stock appreciation is inherently dangerous for the employer, because it means that if their stock value plunges, their woes will be compounded by almost immediate talent exodus.
This is not yet the case for Netflix, which can still pay well.
I think the growth stall in this quarter is the lull before the storm.
Netflix has enough India specific content in the pipeline, and only one of these “made by Netflix” series has been released yet.
If there is one thing Netflix does good, it is the focus on content that is relevant to the region, without compromising on the language and characters.
Another recent thing in India, is the plunging broadband prices in India, especially wireless (4G LTE, 2 GB per day, for 89 days costs less than $10 <head explode?>).
Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming video options are going to get more signups soon, especially from the younger population that may not have a TV at home, but will certainly have a smartphone and/or a laptop. For them, Netflix is certainly a cheaper option, especially if you divide monthly cost of the top tier plan ₹800 by 4 = ₹200 which is certainly bang for the buck compared to cable tv, that you can watch only at home.
The only disadvantage for Netflix is for those who prioritize watching sports, which is still a major reason for people to subscribe for cable.
Until the recent price war on 4G/LTE/5G pricing (in early 2018) that has led to dirt cheap wireless internet access, I thought Netflix in India was a wrong move. With such cheap internet access, Netflix and other streaming video platforms certainly have a huge growth phase from the next quarter onwards.
Watch out for Netflix growth numbers over the next few quarters in India. I'm extremely bullish of Netflix in India and I'll be shocked if Netflix fails to grow from here onwards.
I think the market overreacted a bit. They have been growing for so many years, there is bound to be a quarter here and there where growth stalls.
Having said that, I feel Netflix's biggest problem is content discovery. They have the best multilingual content that can be consumed globally like Narcos and Sacred Games. Yet they make it really hard to find such content. Their categorization is weird and not easily understandable. But what really bothers me is that their content preview is just a short paragraph. So you are asking viewer to watch 10hrs of content based on a short paragraph ? I would prefer a lot more info about a particular show before I commit to it. Info such as critics reviews, rotten tomato and IMDB rating, popularity in native country, more detailed description of the show, similar shows, etc etc. Basically I have to go ask r/television about a particular series or movie on Netflix before I start watching. I am pretty sure this leads to a lot of user frustration and ultimately cancellation
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] threadAlso, anecdotally, I only have so much time for 'prestige' TV. They cover Delhi and Youtube in ads everytime they have something to announce--Altered Carbon, which I watched, but then they had Lost in Space, Wild Wild Country, and now a show set in Mumbai called "Sacred Games"--while it's great for subscribers to have a wealth of new material to watch all the time, there may be an inflection point beyond which producing/acquiring more content doesn't grow their audience...
irrelevant when that equates to 10% of the population.
And about that not making sense, I meant that it would be cheaper than paying for cable TV
Is the Netflix catalog the same worldwide? I was under the impression it varied based on the country your subscription was based in, due to licensing (different companies own the distribution rights for the same content in different countries).
If that's true, the problem you describe may not exist. An American trying to save money by subscribing to an Indian plan priced cheaper for the local market may just get Indian content, which may not be at all want he wants.
[0]http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/carriers/wireless-carriers-high...
Right now I’m down several thousands of dollars on NFLX, which could have easily been a few international vacations. It’s not the first time or last time stuff like this happens, but everything was rallying so nicely the past few days it’s a shame to see that get back tracked. And of course, other tech stocks are down with it which also adds to the pain.
Just stick your money in Vanguard index funds and forget about it apart from rebalancing once a year.
"Netflix stock plunges to only +24% in 90 days"
Kinda sucks when shows leave Netflix and don't get replaced; half the appeal of Netflix is the ability to quickly switch between Futurama and Always Sunny, and more importantly to be able to watch those shows on a platform that doesn't completely suck (FX's app has got to be one of the worst apps I've ever used). When "Parts Unknown" was about to leave Netflix, I really questioned whether it was worth keeping my subscription. It feels like it's happening at an accelerated pace in the last couple of years.
The original content is good, and I realize that those shows leaving Netflix is probably more about Fox/CNN than it is about Netflix, but still makes me less interested in Netflix nonetheless.
I'm on the verge of canceling it, since most of what I want is on Prime anyway.
I actually think they’re going to be in a lot of trouble a few years down the line as their catalog is going to be a handful of great originals, tons of garbage originals, and a bottomless pit of Z-grade studio films.
Netflix is producing all of their own shows precisely so that they will no longer be held hostage by other license holders. Of course, now everyone doing the same thing, and consumers are left having to subscribe to a ton of providers (even when said providers currently are in a "drought" between seasons of your favourite shows) and jump between apps to get what they want.
(As an aside, Hulu stands out here in providing a "pause" button on your subscription. But it's month-based, and you still have to manage that yourself; it doesn't automatically credit you for those months when you didn't use the service.)
- Audio previews make it so I never want to browse for what to watch next. I hate having to fumble with my tv/home theatre remote because of this.
- If you leave it hanging, the previews count towards a watch! Wow. God help you if you wanna make some popcorn.
- Their sorts are always shuffled around, pushing whatever content is on their agenda.
- Im bilingual, and I can’t belive there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows. I can’t watch a show like Narcos without having subs for either English or Spanish. This might sound nit picky, but bilinguals aren’t exactly edge cases, either (SV is full of bilinguals!)
I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them. But damn it is infuriating. Crazy that my favorite netflix client is the one Apple designed for them in the older Apple TVs
There are so few configurable items in their Netflix menu.
On the Apple TV app, at least, the "Are you still watching" message is still there.
I also find it infuriating that when we watch a kids film, your immediately shown a preview for another film during the credits.
I get it, but I wish there was an option to turn them off.
Wild conjecture: A paucity of things to recommend, combined with a desire to not concede that there are only like 3 things left I haven't watched yet but would be likely to give 5 stars, prompted them to first tweak the recommender's calibration, then eventually to wholesale switch to a metric that blurs the distinction between, "Yeah, I'll watch it", and "That was great!"
Such a strategy would get you more addicted, but also allow them to stretch their supply of subjectively-five-star-rated shows at the same time. It’s win-win ...for them.
They're building it back up with their private content, but, quite understandably, only in some very focused areas - presumably, the stuff that they expect to have the widest appeal. They originally built their business on basically owning the long tail, but now they've been forced to forsake it.
I think that's where a lot of the discontent is coming from. Folks are realizing that Netflix has turned into something very akin to the Blockbuster outlets that everyone had once cheered them for running out of town.
My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
My favorite example is Zootopia, which got changed into Zoomania for the German market.
Same. In Spanish that title was translated as "La Jungla de Cristal" (The Glass Jungle). There seems to be some common agreement here :D
Autoplay is another pet peeve, I like the feature but if I fall asleep then netflix considers the show watched and removes it from my continue list.
The worse it get's the more I'm tempted to go back to less legal means of acquiring content, then I can watch it in any player without an arbitrarily gimped resolution.
The complaint here is different though. Netflix-made shows seem to be deliberately designed so that all plot subpoints get dragged through the entire season. Each episode will introduce something, later episodes will occasionally remind you of it, but you have to wait 'till the very end for everything to be simultaneously resolved. Basically, what would be a classical story arc gets stretched in a way that 90% of its mass falls into the last episode.
(And then the resolution turns out to be meh, and you end up wondering why did you just waste 10 hours of your life on this show. It's quite like modern journalism - a bit of clickbait at the beginning, then a long article giving exactly zero useful information, and then a meaningless conclusion at the end.)
Discovery is impossible — imo they overoptimize for engagement and make it hard to explore the catalog. I find out about many new shows via PR placements in newspapers.
I'd just like a big table of everything available with meta-data in columns and the ability to hide rows
On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well.
If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.
I don't know how many good titles I discovered browsing random titles in video stores back in the day.
There is this hypothesis that I've seen floating on HN at times, that Netflix does this to hide the fact that their selection is very small. I'm not totally convinced, but a lot of their UI choices feel like good evidence in favour of this hypothesis.
https://www.coollector.com/index.html#netflix
You could hide episodes you've seen or entire seasons up to entire shows. Would fix a lot of the issues I'm having.
I want outstanding content regardless of topic and these days Netflix seems to be delivering less of that or at the very least makes it incredibly hard to find in a sea of mediocre content.
Trying to find actual hidden gems on Steam or iOS is a nightmare, to the point where I waste the time I set aside to play games because I'm looking for one instead. Same with Amazon, the best it can do is "people who bought this product also bought this other sort of related product."
I also agree that UI like Netflix currently has -- big giant vaguely descriptive rectangles that only fit a handful on screen at once -- make discovery super discouraging, since it becomes tedious to scroll through everything and find more info about it.
There are all sorts of inconsistencies with subtitles and dubbing. For example, suppose a show has options for 5 languages, but not Portuguese. If you switch your profile to Portuguese (i.e., by logging to the Netflix website and selecting Portuguese as your main language), then lo and behold Portuguese appears as a choice for subtitles and audio for many shows where it wasn't offered before.
Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match. They are both correct translations, but it's as if they were translated by entirely different people. Maybe Netflix gets the subtitling done by one agency, and then later, if there's enough demand for the show, they get dubbing done by another agency (but don't update the subtitles to match the new translation).
Yet another oddity is that, on rare occasion, they will take away a language choice they offered for a show. A show might have, say, Polish as a audio option, but the next day it's gone. Completely puzzling.
This is industry standard, not specific to Netflix: - subs are generally direct translations of the script/transcript - dubs are often done by mouth-movement matching to make it look right
I would agree that the language tools on Netflix are unnecessarily bad.
They wouldn't be doing what they're doing if it didn't help them in the short term.
Data is great but you never have a perfect picture. What boosts your numbers in the short term could be the thing that makes your customers resent you and move on in the long term.
"You make what you measure" cuts both ways.
Data is only part of the equation. The other part is what you look at, and yet another is what you aim for. The data might tell them that bilingual users are not being properly accommodated by the service (or may not tell that - after all, in what way are you giving this feedback that would also show up on Netflix's surveillance panels?) - but then the business people will say that already subscribed users are less important than getting new subscriptions, and this problem will have to wait.
EDIT:
> Their UX has been on a steady decline for me
Agreed. It's less clear, and it seems to be optimized for Internet equivalent of channel hopping. For people who know exactly what they're searching for, Netflix becomes more and more difficult to use.
Also - and this really annoys me - their UI changes tend to make the interface heavier each iteration. It's not a problem when I use it on my desktop, but then sometimes I'd like to watch a movie on a tablet (e.g. when in a hotel), and then I have to face the absolutely ridiculous situation, in which a full-HD movie seems to cause smaller load on my device than the interface to select what to watch.
I cancelled Netflix a while ago, I hadn't been watching it for a while but assumed the rest of my family was. Eventually got around to asking them and it turned out they hadn't used it in a while either. Turns out we all just kinda lost interest. I remember when streaming first came out I was excited to "see what's on streaming," it felt like so much content to explore. Then it gradually became: "let's see if I can find something tolerable on Netflix before I go to bed." So many nights I started 5 different things, giving up on each to start something new, before I eventually just gave up on Netflix all together and went to sleep.
Part of the problem, was that their content came to all feel bland in the same way to me. But I also think they slowly broke my media consumption habits. I remember the days of Blockbuster when you had to pick one movie, and then you were committed. Which meant I almost always finished the movies. Many times I'd watch them twice. Netflix creates this persistent FOMO over what you could be watching. Eventually, I just stopped watching anything.
1. Continue licensing content and be subject to the whims of the content creators who can destroy their margin by increasing fees. The content creators can also start their own streaming services like disney is planning on doing eating into that market of streaming.
2. Create their own content eliminating the 2 main risks in option 1.
Option 2 is really the only viable option even if competition for content will likely result in content providers (HBO,Showtime,Netflix,Amazon...) not making much profit as the industry goes towards more perfect competition.
Why would Disney or Comcast want Netflix to fail when it's a boon for them currently? Sure, they'll aggressively negotiate the best deals for themselves, sure they'll plan for a backup in the event Netflix would ever stop leasing their content, but why kick a cash cow in the teeth? It's bad business.
If anything, Netflix jumped the shark cutting their cheques to the providers and creating their own content.
See Pandora for a lesson in what happens when a content distribution company has no pricing power with their suppliers (content producers). Note that Spotify has been paying attention. [1]
1. https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/spotify-expands-its-push-i...
Netflix needs to give subscribers a reason to keep their subscriptions going and if licensed content goes away they're going to need compelling original content to keep their subs interested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16937290
The moment they announced the price hike, it's like something cracked in my rationalization to maintain the service, and every adverse complaint I've ever queued up in my mind against the service floated right to the top.
I'm on the verge of the same with Netflix. If I see a price hike, I'll quit just the same. They've been losing far more content than they've been adding.
...which I'd be happy to do. The production shops behind the prestige and niche films these streamers are lapping up for fixed fees (something like n% of budget paid to the production house, where n is a value over 100) are utterly crippling the production of quality titles that aren't things like event pieces or sequels.
As the good production houses dip because of the rates the streamers are paying, you're more frequently being left with new or inexperienced production houses filling the void, producers with less experience IDing the creatives (writing/acting/etc), finding directors who can cast successfully, doing accurate budgeting, etc.
I'll stop short of turning this into too much of a rant. Basically: the Netflixes and Amazons of the world have crippled the business case for an entire class of motion picture and subverted the quality of output in this class as a result.
I was noticing I was ordering far less recently (mostly settled in the new house now), and the fact they still refuse to support Chromecast meant Prime Video was useless for me. The price hike was the final nail.
I stopped renewing Prime when they announced the most recent price hike. It runs out in a week and I already don't miss it. If I need something in two days I'll pay for two day shipping. In all likelihood I'll save money this way.
You see, I initially subscribed to Netflix because it had most of Star Trek on it - all the TV shows + many (I think most) of the movies. The ability to watch an episode every now and then was what kept me subscribed even through the periods I couldn't find anything else interesting there. Now, recently came a time I actually wanted to watch a Star Trek movie I loved ("Generations"). I looked for it, but it was nowhere to be found. Just gone. So was "First Contact". So were all the others (except the bastardizations of JJ Abrams). This prompted me to ask, what other (non-Trek) movies and series I loved and even watched on Netflix are still available? Turns out, the list of movies and series has been gradually decreasing behind my back. A lot of the interesting things I watched on Netflix, that I used as an argument to recommend Netflix to friends, are simply gone.
Torrents cause a PITA with storage management, but have this one lovely feature - once a file is on your hard drive, it stays there. And this generalizes to SaaS vs. local software and files, too.
Same reason why I still buy my music on actual CDs. Sure, I rip them once and only use the files afterwards, but I can be assured that no matter what happens to my backup, I'll still have a large chunk of my music collection available in 30 years.
I've used Prime and Hulu before but they seem to have the same issue from time to time. The obvious alternative for me is to rent the content from Prime or iTunes (I have an Apple TV so my options are somewhat limited), but at $3-$5 per rental that's 3-4 movies on Netflix before I get my money back. I think I watch that many but I'm not sure. I watch a lot of crap I wouldn't otherwise that I feel like I'm settling for, but on the other hand Netflix is just my ticket to zone out and stop thinking about other stuff, so it does the trick.
As an aside, their taking of a political stance has led to a small but visible American chunk leaving, or at least claiming to.
I’ve recently got an HBO subscription and the difference in quality is staggering.
It will be interesting to see if Netflix imposes some kind quality bar to ensure things don't go even worse.
I wonder how this will evolve. Short-term, it looks like self-destructing greed to me. People are not going to subscribe to shit ton of services because each of them has a small slice of movies they might want to watch.
The too-many-subscriptions problem could be solved in a variety of commercial ways, like simply offering charging for how much you watch rather than a flat rate.
In Germany, the basic HD TV package costs €60/year (not per month) if you want it. And also you have to pay €18/month for the public broadcasts (that part is non-negotiable). So that comes out to €23/month if you're watching over satellite. Cable TV sometimes imposes additional fees (€8/month in my apartment building).
There is also Sky, a pay-TV provider, but I don't know any subscribers except for soccer fans and sports bars.
Basic TV in the US is free. Basic cable is about $30/mo. Case bundled with Internet is $50-100. There are some premium equivalents to Sky that top out around $200/mo. About 75% of US households pay for TV in some way. I’d say our mean and median household spending on TV is higher but there is a greater range of pricing, with $0 being quite viable if your tastes are simple.
The usual reason in a normal product market would be efficiencies developed over time reducing costs and competition driving prices down to marginally over cost.
The difference with movies/series is that the licensing situation is significantly more retarded. This will probably end up meaning we will end up with a million different streaming services (with different catalogues for different countries, or more accurately a good catalog in the US and a poor one everywhere else). This will drive more people to pirating, with predictable results.
In fact, I liked Netflix so much that I cancelled it because it was becoming a distraction. If I have kids they definitely will not have access to any such thing, and I feel sorry for the kids growing up with it today.
If your version of self control is fully disconnecting, I understand that but it doesn’t mean you should feel sorry for kids that have access to Netflix.
(Speaking as a 21 year old who spent a number of years of my childhood watching Netflix with my family)
I think children are by nature more impulsive, and if they have access to Netflix at a young age without enough parental restrictions they might start down a bad path. When they're older it's easier to contain.
That's part of the reason for age restrictions on drugs/alcohol. Some drugs aren't all that different from dopamine inducing digital stimuli. The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for self control, isn't fully developed until age 25.
I don't at all agree with your "children should not be exposed to things they might want" premise, but that is a discussion for another day.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16118694/disney-bamtech-es...
Hulu has The Handmaid's Tale and HBO has Westworld but that's about it.
But I often don't use HBO for months at a time. That's pretty rare with Netflix these days - my watch list there is a huge backlog.
I ended up dropping the subscription because I'd watched everything interesting on the service in no time flat. I could have been watching Tales from the Crypt for months, but it wasn't available at all. Where is the Rey Bradbury theater? Shows I'd heard about growing up but only got to see briefly in a hotel room on a trip. For a service nearly twice as expensive as Netflix they made seemingly no effort to keep me engaged.
The time of even more fragmented streaming offerings (and more selection) is soon.
Comcast is an interesting study here too. They are pushing ip based linear TV hard right now. I don't like the company, but they seem to know what they are doing.
In general, they'd have to lose shareholder/board confidence in company direction, which won't happen anytime soon.
Every time I log in, there’s a big wall of 20 posters I’ve seen a thousand times and never clicked on once and have zero interest in.
And the whole user experience seems about finding my way around that wall.
I can find stuff I’m interested in, but the platform never surfaces it for me. I always have to dig.
I always use the feedback system, too.
Netflix always brags about paying mid-six in pure salary and hiring top of market. Their internal presentations on content discovery and demography are something people tell stories of like they glimpsed a magical relic or something.
As a user I honestly cannot fathom where all that money and research could possibly be going.
Maybe my account is broken or something.
That's the thing with Netflix - objectively, it's the best streaming service available. The complaints are mostly relative to what they could be, and about the direction in which they evolve.
Even Netflix' premium original content is getting monotonous. Where it -- or, more broadly, "Netflix" branded content -- is not simply getting stuffed full of "quantity over quality".
I've been feeling like I should have pulled the plug, a while back.
And yes, per other comments here, someone needs to... "have a talk with" their UI people. Not helpful, recent changes.
Netflix knows this so that's why they go great lengths to keep series like The Office and Friends, btw, both owned by Comcast...so you can guess why Netflix is cheering for Comcast to win that Fox bid...
As for lack of content: my family is trilingual, and we constantly moving between countries. It's almost impossible to get content we like outside of US (even Australia sucks), these unbelievably stupid and shortsighted ideas of distribution regions (for DVD/BD) and DRM (for streaming) keeps me on torrents for 20+ years already, and I see no end to this ordeal. I tried to "go legal" on so many occasions, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I stumble upon some ludicrous "new tech" that prevents me as a consumer to watch content I like.
When will the studios realize that ALL content is out there already? And literally NONE of their effort since DVD css stopped anyone from "stealing" anything.
I can get any movie/show from torrents in max quality, but I would like to just pay $15 to someone and stream FullHD/4K content in any language to any device, and finally stop pirating stuff. Too much to ask, Netflix?
Music industry learned this lesson hard way 10 years ago, unleashed unlimited HQ streaming, and now look -- music piracy is nearly extinct, and both listeners and industry are happy.
In the meantime, I'm filling my 4TB hdd with BD remuxes and enjoying 4k videos w/o paying any cent to anyone. No other way around it for consumer, it seems.
Also, the diminishment of the back catalogue (and the fact that so much of it is SD--not their fault) is negating one of their biggest selling points.
That's no different from regular TV. We were spoiled in the early years of Netflix streaming because they could cherry-pick license all the good stuff from earlier for cheap. Now they have to go on the same "fund a bunch of stuff, discover some hits" journey that all the other content producers have gone through.
On the plus side you can watch anything you want on demand, there are no ads, and the website and apps are fast. And you don't have to pay $100/month for a cable bundle with shitty customer service.
If there's some show or movie I'm really missing, my local public library does a great job of filling that need.
Netflix is competing for talent as a FAANG outfit, and as such much of the value they provide to their employees depends on their RSUs. This works great as long as stock price is on a steep rise, as has generally been the case for FAANG over the past several years.
Now that the price is on a downslope, though, we should expect their compensation package to be less competitive than other tech companies, and especially FAANG.
Will they be able to deal with it somehow? Or will their top talent migrate to more successful tech companies that can pay as well as Netflix did while its stock was rising?
1. https://www.quora.com/How-does-Netflix-compensate-its-employ...
Furthermore, the link you provided also states that since 2015, there's a compensation factor that is non-voluntary and pegged to the price of the stock, so everyone will see a reduction, though some more than others.
You're probably right. I think it will become interesting once a FAANG starts losing enough stock value and cash that compensation is no longer competitive and cannot be adjusted.
My sense is that retention relying on constant and substantial stock appreciation is inherently dangerous for the employer, because it means that if their stock value plunges, their woes will be compounded by almost immediate talent exodus.
This is not yet the case for Netflix, which can still pay well.
Netflix has enough India specific content in the pipeline, and only one of these “made by Netflix” series has been released yet.
If there is one thing Netflix does good, it is the focus on content that is relevant to the region, without compromising on the language and characters.
Another recent thing in India, is the plunging broadband prices in India, especially wireless (4G LTE, 2 GB per day, for 89 days costs less than $10 <head explode?>).
Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming video options are going to get more signups soon, especially from the younger population that may not have a TV at home, but will certainly have a smartphone and/or a laptop. For them, Netflix is certainly a cheaper option, especially if you divide monthly cost of the top tier plan ₹800 by 4 = ₹200 which is certainly bang for the buck compared to cable tv, that you can watch only at home.
The only disadvantage for Netflix is for those who prioritize watching sports, which is still a major reason for people to subscribe for cable.
Until the recent price war on 4G/LTE/5G pricing (in early 2018) that has led to dirt cheap wireless internet access, I thought Netflix in India was a wrong move. With such cheap internet access, Netflix and other streaming video platforms certainly have a huge growth phase from the next quarter onwards.
Watch out for Netflix growth numbers over the next few quarters in India. I'm extremely bullish of Netflix in India and I'll be shocked if Netflix fails to grow from here onwards.
Having said that, I feel Netflix's biggest problem is content discovery. They have the best multilingual content that can be consumed globally like Narcos and Sacred Games. Yet they make it really hard to find such content. Their categorization is weird and not easily understandable. But what really bothers me is that their content preview is just a short paragraph. So you are asking viewer to watch 10hrs of content based on a short paragraph ? I would prefer a lot more info about a particular show before I commit to it. Info such as critics reviews, rotten tomato and IMDB rating, popularity in native country, more detailed description of the show, similar shows, etc etc. Basically I have to go ask r/television about a particular series or movie on Netflix before I start watching. I am pretty sure this leads to a lot of user frustration and ultimately cancellation
Netflix has so many Indian language movies, and yet it is so difficult to search content just by the language or sub-region (South Indian)