Autoplay video that takes up almost my whole screen with full sound blasting, the video itself contains the cliff note of an article that has less than 500 words.
Yes, this is what I meant (and I have it switched on) although reading my comment back I can see how it could be interpreted as me wishing for this capability.
Netflix used to have decent content. Now, it's mostly Netflix originals and an occasional surprise and lots of not great content. Most of the services for their "subscriber level" are the same -- hulu and prime being others. Now instead of "Prime" you need "Prime + StarZ" or some other BS. Basically, the online services have devolved back to the 80s HBO/Cinemax/etc era where everything with real content is extra.
I think that's fine at a certain price point (it's the a la cart system we clamored for) but at $9-$20 a service it ends up costing more than cable because there's no comprehensive aggregator platforms anymore.
The Netflix model became "get or create everything we can," which means a lot of cruft. Prime gets scraps. Hulu and Sling are just putting lipstick on a pig. It's a mess. What consumers want is to select and pay for what they want. That was the major complaint against cable and it's no different with streaming services today.
I'snt Hulu owned by Disney and Fox? Not in the US and don't use it but I'd imagine they could really make it pretty amazing with back catalogue etc if they wanted to.
Not sure if edited, but if nkozyra had said "dyke" then it's a perfectly valid (non-derogatory) noun for describing a levee or earthwork to prevent the ingress of water.
I too wish there were a central aggregator platform, but I think the price:value calculation still favors streaming if you don't care about live events. My mother's "expanded basic" cable package costs more than my subscription to 4 streaming services[1]. It may be different if you negotiate aggressively with your cable provider every time the introductory prices expire.
[1] Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, FilmStruck + Criterion (annual plan).
I would love and pay for a service that would let me subscribe to all the episodes of a show for one month at a low price, directly from the content producer.
I would much prefer to pay, say, $.99 or $1.99 for an unlimited month of The Expanse, and if I don’t watch it all in a month and I want more, then I pay for another month. Maybe keep some shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on retainer for whenever. That would kick the crap out of having to pay twice as much for the 2-3 aggregator subscriptions just to get all the shows I want to watch.
> What consumers want is to select and pay for what they want.
iTunes offers that to an extent. You can buy or rent individual movies. If you only rent movies occasionally then it's a cheaper option than a subscription service.
Yep, The content companies want to have their own streaming services. But what they risk is that they will fragment the market and consumers wont want to pay for 5 different monthly recurring bills to get the content they want and will just go back to torrenting.
I was just thinking that they recently got some good content added.
These were all added this month: Batman Begins, Clerks, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, No Reservations, Stripes, The Aviator, and The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire Comedians in Cars series is a lot of fun. Heat, The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Casino, and Seven.
Maybe you're bored of all that, but it's not like the films on Netflix are universally terrible.
I think there are a few issues at hand when it comes to streaming services.
1. choice paralysis. There are simply too many options provided to you. One of the reasons I like watching TV over streaming is that whatever on is on. I don't have to "choose" a specific show, just a channel that will play things I generally like.
2. We've seen most of the content we want to see. There is plenty of great stuff on Netflix, but I have watched everything I am familiar with. The Office is great, and I watch it all the time. But I have seen that entire series at least 30 times. I'll flip through Netflix for about 20 minutes just to end up putting on the Office.
3. Content wasn't good before, and it's not great now. If you go watch cable, even with HBO/Starz/Sho during the day it's just movies that have been in theaters. Later in the day they might play their shows like Shameless, GoT, etc. But a bulk of the day is just the same "new" movie on repeat for a month. Netflix has all the same movies for the most part. You watch the movie once, and you're done. Every channel has more bad shows than good ones. Netflix has plenty of great original content, and plenty of bad content. So, it's just the same thing, we just get bored of it because it's on demand and we can have that bad content whenever we want, and we burn out the good content because it's on repeat for a while.
So, I agree. I don't think content is any better or worse than what we got before streaming. Instead we just get a lot more of it, with a wide range of quality, and we can choose when and how often we watch it. So content simply doesn't last us as long as it used to.
>One of the reasons I like watching TV over streaming is that whatever on is on. I don't have to "choose" a specific show, just a channel that will play things I generally like.
I've thought for years that YouTube and Netflix could trivially produce channels of lightly-curated content drawing on their existing catalogs. The only solid reason I could come up with for why they haven't is in some kind of attempt to break away from the paradigm of broadcast TV. Maybe there's a separate argument that it would somehow pollute their metric-gathering efforts.
But the utility of channels like that is still there for the reason you mentioned - The (very real, very strong) barrier of choice paralysis is overcome. I hypothesize that having those channels would improve the subscriber retention rates for a variety of reasons.
Some YouTube channels (e.g. funhaus) are already solving this themselves by establishing live streams that just cycle their back-catalog of content.
I cancelled my subscription when they raised prices, though I was already on the fence with the whole Billy Nye thing and the Dear White People thing. Netflix had stopped offering a lot of content that I wanted, even as they promoted content I found morally objectionable and charged me more for it.
Agreed! The content in Australia is already pretty poor, and its been getting worse lately. Mostly dominated by Netflix's releases which wildly varies in quality.
I kind of miss having a good cable subscription where you could watch everything. The way things are moving, one has to subscribe to 3-4 services and even then might not cover all content.
With the number of Adam Sandler movies Netflix produced points to you and people that complain about lack of content on Netflix being in a minority. The market for high brow content is very small which you can tell by the kind of tvshows that keep getting renewed and cancelled each season.
Torrents are dead, they said. Well at least it disappeared from the mainstream when it got easy and relatively cheap to legally access movies and TV shows.
With the increasing fragmentation of commercial content networks, I can easily see a resurrection of public interest in non-legit ways of consuming content.
It's funny, in a way, this is what we all wanted. We eventually started to reject cable TV and cut cords in droves because we decided we didn't want to pay for unwanted bundled content.
Pretty much how I see it. I'm happy to pay if you make it easy for me to get what I want.
I reckon that all the streaming services should agree on a standard for distribution via their API's so that third parties can write better front ends that can connect to and search all of the services you are subscribed to.
So I would:
- Subscribe to Netflix
- Subscribe to Disney
- Install my streaming frontend of choice
- Connect both services either using an API key or PIN or SSO, etc
Now I can give them my money every month and have one interface to access all the services.
Sure, they may want to offer different features to differentiate their brand but that can be accounted for to some degree in the agreed standard.
Or something. I dunno what's going to fix this miss.
So an online cable company? I was wondering if I'd see the day where the "buy from one get access to all" content consumption model came back, but applied to streaming services.
Well....guess what, they're very much alive again. As a European I don't have access to Hulu, HBO etc. The Netflix catalogue range here is still a fraction of Netflix US. I doubt we'll see Disney for years to come, if at all.
So I'm back to the torrents again, despite wanting to pay for content. Maybe I sound like an entitled brat (I'm kinda not at 51), but I have the money burning in my pocket to pay for content (one-off rentals - I'm fine with that) and the studios still just don't seem to get it.
Chiming in as a 28 year old who was having a generally great time with iTunes, buying music and having it backed up in the cloud on by behalf was definitely something I enjoyed until Apple changed directions and kept pushing Apple Music. Now iTunes and my Music app are nerfed enough that I don’t buy music through my phone anymore.
I’m happy to pay if it’s easy. But I would like to own access to my music/movies/tv. Even if it costs a bit more.
Looks like every content producer wants their own streaming service these days, and for good reason too. Good video content is expensive to produce. Why give Netflix all that extra margin?
My only concern is whether consumers will opt for a bunch of different streaming subscriptions instead of the old duo, Netflix and Hulu, with a side of HBO? At some point it’s just going to be too much to pay for, and there’s only so much television one can watch in a month.
A subscription service for a solid niche will do fine - Disney is all but assured to have a permanent subscription from their dedicated fans and the parents of young children, and Marvel pretty much owns the superhero entertainment space - but what is Netflix’s niche? A browse through their original content is a spray-and-pray of categories that seeks to grab ahold of everyone. Some of it is pretty good, a fair amount is mediocre, and the vast majority I will never watch or probably even know exists. At what point is a subscriber going to shrug their shoulders and cancel all-for-all Netflix in favor of a subscription to a smaller selection of the stuff they love the most?
I really do believe that Netflix has some hard times ahead. Disney has been slowly but surely getting all of its ducks in a row, and with the Fox buyout, it seems like it's set to setup a very compelling streaming service — to the detriment of competitors.
Disney will own 39% of the theatrical marketshare once the fox acquisition closes [1]. They'll be able to make all of those movies available to their own streaming service and lock everyone else out if it makes business sense for them to do so.
The problem for Netflix is that they'll effectively be middlemen unless they start competing like their competitors do: A vertically integrated media business where they own and distribute their own content. Yes, they've been pouring billions into their library, but it looks like it could be too little too late, much of it is too low quality, imho.
> They'll be able to make all of those movies available to their own streaming service and lock everyone else out if it makes business sense for them to do so.
They have to make that streaming service first. Disney has a long history of acquiring internet and game companies only to shut them down a year or two later when they prove unsuccessful. Their own endeavors in the web and game space have been wildly unsuccessful. They fundamentally do not understand the internet and I see no indication that has changed.
Netflix won't see another cent of my money until they stop promoting teen suicide and pay restitution to the families of the girls who killed themselves after binge-watching 13 Reasons Why.
42 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 46.3 ms ] threadThis is beyond awful.
For firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1150702
Not sure for chrome.
Yes, this is what I meant (and I have it switched on) although reading my comment back I can see how it could be interpreted as me wishing for this capability.
On Android: Settings > site settings > media > autoplay > toggle blocked.
Desktop browser option too.
https://9to5google.com/2018/02/15/how-to-disable-autoplay-vi...
The Netflix model became "get or create everything we can," which means a lot of cruft. Prime gets scraps. Hulu and Sling are just putting lipstick on a pig. It's a mess. What consumers want is to select and pay for what they want. That was the major complaint against cable and it's no different with streaming services today.
It's not an end game. It's the proverbial finger in the dike, a way to buy time until figuring out the next great way to screw consumers.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyke
[1] Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, FilmStruck + Criterion (annual plan).
I would much prefer to pay, say, $.99 or $1.99 for an unlimited month of The Expanse, and if I don’t watch it all in a month and I want more, then I pay for another month. Maybe keep some shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on retainer for whenever. That would kick the crap out of having to pay twice as much for the 2-3 aggregator subscriptions just to get all the shows I want to watch.
iTunes offers that to an extent. You can buy or rent individual movies. If you only rent movies occasionally then it's a cheaper option than a subscription service.
These were all added this month: Batman Begins, Clerks, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, No Reservations, Stripes, The Aviator, and The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire Comedians in Cars series is a lot of fun. Heat, The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Casino, and Seven.
Maybe you're bored of all that, but it's not like the films on Netflix are universally terrible.
1. choice paralysis. There are simply too many options provided to you. One of the reasons I like watching TV over streaming is that whatever on is on. I don't have to "choose" a specific show, just a channel that will play things I generally like.
2. We've seen most of the content we want to see. There is plenty of great stuff on Netflix, but I have watched everything I am familiar with. The Office is great, and I watch it all the time. But I have seen that entire series at least 30 times. I'll flip through Netflix for about 20 minutes just to end up putting on the Office.
3. Content wasn't good before, and it's not great now. If you go watch cable, even with HBO/Starz/Sho during the day it's just movies that have been in theaters. Later in the day they might play their shows like Shameless, GoT, etc. But a bulk of the day is just the same "new" movie on repeat for a month. Netflix has all the same movies for the most part. You watch the movie once, and you're done. Every channel has more bad shows than good ones. Netflix has plenty of great original content, and plenty of bad content. So, it's just the same thing, we just get bored of it because it's on demand and we can have that bad content whenever we want, and we burn out the good content because it's on repeat for a while.
So, I agree. I don't think content is any better or worse than what we got before streaming. Instead we just get a lot more of it, with a wide range of quality, and we can choose when and how often we watch it. So content simply doesn't last us as long as it used to.
I've thought for years that YouTube and Netflix could trivially produce channels of lightly-curated content drawing on their existing catalogs. The only solid reason I could come up with for why they haven't is in some kind of attempt to break away from the paradigm of broadcast TV. Maybe there's a separate argument that it would somehow pollute their metric-gathering efforts.
But the utility of channels like that is still there for the reason you mentioned - The (very real, very strong) barrier of choice paralysis is overcome. I hypothesize that having those channels would improve the subscriber retention rates for a variety of reasons.
Some YouTube channels (e.g. funhaus) are already solving this themselves by establishing live streams that just cycle their back-catalog of content.
I kind of miss having a good cable subscription where you could watch everything. The way things are moving, one has to subscribe to 3-4 services and even then might not cover all content.
With the increasing fragmentation of commercial content networks, I can easily see a resurrection of public interest in non-legit ways of consuming content.
I reckon that all the streaming services should agree on a standard for distribution via their API's so that third parties can write better front ends that can connect to and search all of the services you are subscribed to.
So I would: - Subscribe to Netflix - Subscribe to Disney - Install my streaming frontend of choice - Connect both services either using an API key or PIN or SSO, etc
Now I can give them my money every month and have one interface to access all the services.
Sure, they may want to offer different features to differentiate their brand but that can be accounted for to some degree in the agreed standard.
Or something. I dunno what's going to fix this miss.
Well....guess what, they're very much alive again. As a European I don't have access to Hulu, HBO etc. The Netflix catalogue range here is still a fraction of Netflix US. I doubt we'll see Disney for years to come, if at all.
So I'm back to the torrents again, despite wanting to pay for content. Maybe I sound like an entitled brat (I'm kinda not at 51), but I have the money burning in my pocket to pay for content (one-off rentals - I'm fine with that) and the studios still just don't seem to get it.
I’m happy to pay if it’s easy. But I would like to own access to my music/movies/tv. Even if it costs a bit more.
My only concern is whether consumers will opt for a bunch of different streaming subscriptions instead of the old duo, Netflix and Hulu, with a side of HBO? At some point it’s just going to be too much to pay for, and there’s only so much television one can watch in a month.
A subscription service for a solid niche will do fine - Disney is all but assured to have a permanent subscription from their dedicated fans and the parents of young children, and Marvel pretty much owns the superhero entertainment space - but what is Netflix’s niche? A browse through their original content is a spray-and-pray of categories that seeks to grab ahold of everyone. Some of it is pretty good, a fair amount is mediocre, and the vast majority I will never watch or probably even know exists. At what point is a subscriber going to shrug their shoulders and cancel all-for-all Netflix in favor of a subscription to a smaller selection of the stuff they love the most?
Disney will own 39% of the theatrical marketshare once the fox acquisition closes [1]. They'll be able to make all of those movies available to their own streaming service and lock everyone else out if it makes business sense for them to do so.
The problem for Netflix is that they'll effectively be middlemen unless they start competing like their competitors do: A vertically integrated media business where they own and distribute their own content. Yes, they've been pouring billions into their library, but it looks like it could be too little too late, much of it is too low quality, imho.
[1] https://variety.com/2017/politics/news/disney-fox-deal-antit...
They have to make that streaming service first. Disney has a long history of acquiring internet and game companies only to shut them down a year or two later when they prove unsuccessful. Their own endeavors in the web and game space have been wildly unsuccessful. They fundamentally do not understand the internet and I see no indication that has changed.