Every action this company takes seems to have one goal, above and beyond all others: to make sure their customers never catch even a fleeting glimpse of just how few titles they have in their streaming catalog.
And the titles they do have are incomplete. A number of shows i've gotten into only have a few seasons on netflix despite being several years old already - and more frustrating is it's not always season 1.
Well, I'm not a Netflix user, but IMO a proper binge includes muscle memory for the shortcuts to exclude openings, endings, teasers and in previous episodes intros...
Thinking about autoplaying, unskippable ads/trailers/promos makes me giggle. I can't imagine paying users reacting well to this.
I'm already annoyed lately by the stuff Netflix tries to push me to watch, by automatically playing stuff... like the intros when i open the netflix app on my Tv or when I've finished watching the last episode of a show.
"Thou shall consume more."
I only need a little bit more of that crap to cancel my subscription...
In a statement given to Ars Technica, Netflix described the change as follows: "We are testing whether surfacing recommendations between episodes helps members discover stories they will enjoy faster." The reasoning, Netflix's statement says, comes from its last controversial decision: to add auto-playing videos, complete with unmuteable audio, while browsing through Netflix content.
Netflix offered a major rebuttal to at least one Reddit claim, pointing out that the ads for Netflix content are entirely skippable.
I'm guessing they aren't getting views they want, especially with a lot of their shows being duds.
The obvious response would be to increase the quality of their programming. The easy response is to jam their current programming down our throats.
I quit Netflix, and even a single ad about anything is enough to keep me from ever returning.
Trust me, this is just a start. They know people hate autoplay videos, yet they added them anyway. They know people hate ads, but they are going to be using them anyway.
I think you're being harsh on Netflix. They have great stuff people have never heard of; advertising doesn't automatically mean it's crap.
When they first started, people came for The Office or Scrubs. Then they started creating their own, and every new show huge press. House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, etc. But as they add tons more content, they need more traditional ways to get people interested.
People have a "no ads!" stance and forget the way they got into most shows they like are ads. As they make more content themselves (as opposed to The Office or Arrested Development), they need more steady ways to get people interested.
I think this comment is attempting to gaslight the issues the parent comment raises, which are valid and will take more than a trip down memory lane to resolve.
I'm not gaslighting anything, I'm simply disagreeing. I dislike ads too, but the answer isn't that "Netflix should spend a ton of money on content, and then hide it away unless someone explicitly looks for it." There's gotta be a happy medium, and for better or for worse, ads work.
If Netflix makes bad content, then I'll be mad they're forcing it on me. But if they make good content, in the long run I'll be happy they're experimenting with as-non-evasive-as-possible ways to get me interested.
To put it another way: it's better if they get more people hooked on more shows and that leads to more subscriptions, rather than them having to resort to crappy third party ads to afford new content.
I'm not gaslighting anything, I'm simply disagreeing. I dislike ads too, but the answer isn't that "Netflix should spend a ton of money on content, and then hide it away unless someone explicitly looks for it." There's gotta be a happy medium.
Here’s a thought... they could let users rate shows, maybe on some 1-5 based scale, then use that information to power recommendations targeted at those users instead of just randomly promoting their disgusting flavors of the day? Then instead of shows dying in obscurity people who would most enjoy them could see them! As a bonus a guy who likes documentaries and dramas wouldn’t have to scroll through children’s cartoons being recommended to him?
What they're doing is literally what you're saying: targeted recommendations of their shows. They're just doing it in the format of a video rather than, say, a still image.
This is just my experience but I found the previous system far better. I discovered a surprising number of new shows that I liked under that one, shows that I might not have found through other means. In contrast, the new system has been utterly useless and I have learned to completely ignore the percentage scores. The scores are really out of whack with what I like and leaving feedback hasn't improved the matching in any noticeable way.
Unless "ratings weren't working" means "ratings caused customers to decline to watch content they knew in advance they wouldn't like". Which, from the customer's point of view, means "worked very well."
They already "suggest" series and movies prominently in their apps. Now, they're going to shove fucking ads down your throat like a damn TV blairing CNN at the laundromat.
Calling it gaslighting is uncharitable and dismissive. The Overton Window here seems to be generally around "big companies" and "ads" always being bad.
In this case advertising other Netflix shows seems reasonable. It's common practice on most content platforms. I agree it's annoying and I'd rather not have it.
If they always maintain a switch to turn it off, then this is neutral at its worst. I flipped the switch to not have tests conducted on my account, but if this stops being a test then I want to flip this crap off too.
That said, I like it when services play the next episode immediately after the one I just watched. I can just let it continue to progress and stop it anytime I want. I certainly don't want that interrupted by advertisements, whether for in-house Netflix shows or some other crap, it is still just advertisements and part of the reason I pay Netflix at all is because it doesn't have ads, and am willing and able to cancel my account if they turn into Hulu.
Pretty much guaranteed Netflix will start going the Hulu route when they start to run out of user growth and Wall Street wants more and more. What they should be doing is focusing on pure quality, instead of burning so much cash on vast original content (their cash burn is insane.) The current model is nothing but throwing everything against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
So many of their flops are so obviously going to be massive flops. If they would just focus on putting out new shows like Dark, Stranger Things, their murder docs with a seasonal release calendar, etc they would maintain customers. That and inking deals with non-Disney entities to get solid third party content. HBO has maintained customers and grown with just 3-4 shows keeping people hooked in any given time period.
If they think they can compete with cash rich behemoths like Amazon and Disney they are going to get destroyed. Amazon is going to blow no telling how much on this new Lord of the Rings series...but they don't care, they can afford it. Netflix should go the Apple model, go with quality. Let the others burn cash to get into the space.
Amazon's main issue is just poor discovery when I open up amazon, I want to see what I was last watching, but instead it almost never shows me that, instead it shows me what product I was looking at last, which I probably wasn't going to buy.
I also find their player misses little things that Hulu and Netflix understand, like that whether I want subtitles can depend on what language the content I'm watching is in.
Product advertising has been happening for years, even in their flagship House of Cards series: http://adage.com/article/media/netflix-s-house-cards-tout-an... . But we use the euphemism "product placement" to obscure the fact that it is really advertising.
The thing with Netflix is that it can disappear as quickly as it arrived. Given their lack of a large catalogue of movies, the only thing keeping subscribers is a stream of new interesting shows. I don’t think people will keep a subscription just to watch old House of Cards episodes. There is zero lockin. So if they indeed start deteriorating the user experience, they should see the p&l impact immediately.
I wonder, why Netflix doesn't buy some legacy entertainment companies to build up more of a back-catalog? If they've got so much cash to spend on new content, why not spend some of it to own old content too? Part of the strength of the existing media conglomerates is their rights to the accumulation of decades of output. Not everyone is so interested in new stuff (myself, on average I'd rather watch 80s films than new ones).
>why Netflix doesn't buy some legacy entertainment companies
Now that you say that I wish they would have grabbed FOX away from Disney. That would have given them something better to compete with and not allowed Disney to be even larger than it already is.
The auto play and gutted recommendation engine pushed me to the brink, but this? If they roll this out, I’m gone and never looking back. To be honest piracy is looking better every day, between splintering services, weak catalogues, shitty practices and nickel & diming. I’m not getting suckered into the cable bundle model again, and maybe it’s time to remind these media “giants” that the only reason most people don’t pirate is convenience.
The solution is simple. Stop spending large sums to produce crap. Spend small sums to produce crap and admit it is crap (Kevin Hart), and there is an audience for that. Spend large sums on good prior art - eg. rebuild things that were popular elsewhere and inadvertently died - Arrested Development, Futurama, Longmire etc. Pay big sums for the artists - Matt Groening (Disenchanted), Chris Rock, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle (not Kevin Hart).
I think you've been eating memberberries. Futurama should stay dead, it should not be brought back as a zombie. It should be allowed to rest in peace as the fantastic show it was.
We need to move forward, but most of the content I've seen on netflix is crap.
remember seeing these types of ads on Amazon Prime video and that certainly factored into my decision to cancel Prime. If Netflix does the same I'm pretty sure I'll cancel that as well.
I assume product placement in their own produced shows is already occuring. Etheir that, or they are leaving money on the table with what looks to me like unsubtle brand visibility.
Another response would be to have a better sorted and navigable catalog. It boggles my mind that as a French viewer, all the French content is just stuffed together in "European".
If you don't pay for it you are the product, if you pay for it you are still the product. If you don't pay for it you get ads. If you pay for it you still get ads.
It's like some people are making up things as situations arise to shield corporate interests and diffuse blame to the individual to evade accountability and cover up greed.
Our house used to have netflix. Then came the different tiers, like pay more and you can have 4k video or more then one person at a time streaming. I didn't like the change but I was still able to keep the lower tier and it was still convenient at that time.
Then we had a huge reorganization at work and though I didn't lose my job my hours were temporarily tanked and I was desperately running lower and lower on funds to the point where at one point I had $23 on my prepaid credit card. The same card had just expired and I was sent a new one with new numbers.
Well after a month netflix tries to take a payment and can't since it is a new card. Then start the emails about needing a payment or I will lose service. Shortly after they did cut service. I was all too stressed to even deal with them and just figured, oh well I will be back once things are better at work and I can afford it.
But before that could happen, I guess they can find out the new card numbers from the bank or whatever, so after cutting off my service for a month, while I am literally broke to the point I am unsure about future meals and $23 to my name a netflix payment came off my card. That was the last straw. I canceled immediately and will never go back.
That's absolutely insane. I have separate cards for different bills, and had Netflix done something like this to me, it would have severely messed up some careful planning.
I'm sorry to hear that it happened to you while you were in a vulnerable position.
I don’t blame OP for being in a bad situation but Netflix can’t add another card on their own. That’s preposterous, sorry.
I’m guessing that OP tried to start another free trial and inadvertently paid because they weren’t eligible. Last I checked, Netflix makes the trial-ineligible payment screen similar enough to the trial-activation-with-valid-card screen that this is possible. It’s a bit of a dark pattern. But it would be national news if they worked with banks to steal new credit card numbers.
I did not try and start a free trial and the story is accurate. I take the blame, fool me once as they say, as apparently netflix is part of the Visa Updater program [1] which allowed them to get my new details without me giving it to them. A learning experience for sure. It is meant to prevent lose of service when you get a new card. I had never heard of it before so had to learn of it in a difficult way.
Ah, I did not know about that “feature.” Sorry; I was wrong. I think an email letting you manually agree to each institution to receive the update would be much better than silent and automatic here!
IMHO I don’t see Disney pulling this off. It’s more likely they’ll go the HBO way where after multiple failures to spin their service they will end up selling their content as an add-on subscription.
I really hope piracy has another burst of interest. Steam and Spotify completely fulfill my needs for games and music, though with some regrets (I don't really own anything I use) but there's still zero reasonable ways to get quality access to 95% of the movies and television I want
I've recently noticed a lot less enthusiasm for Netflix than I used to see. I suspect that they've run into the problem where it's possible to subtly degrade your product without immediate consequences. People stop being devoted to you, but that doesn't show up in numbers. It's a bit like a marriage where star eyed lovers learn to fall out of love with each other many years before the divorce. What caused the divorce? A long campaign of subtle harms.
salient point, spot on. However, iirc they were/are spending buttloads on creating new content. But the content itself isn't very good. Maybe too many data science experiments on what users will be receptive to.
It’s not just that the quality of their homegrown content is deteriorating, its that they are flushing out any competition to said content- they are punishing their users
That's true for almost any streaming service. I tried both Netflix and Amazon's offers, both had very little content I wanted or if it had then only a few seasons (in one case starting at season 5 and then not having the rest of them either).
And I totally blame Hollywood and the Media Industry, esp. Disney, for making hostile exlusive licensing deals.
In many cases, I cannot even watch a movie until it's dubbed in my language, even if I don't want to watch it dubbed but in OAT. It's frustrating. And then it's also likely on the streaming service I currently use, but on another one.
I used to feel that Netflix was an amazingly good deal at $10/month. Now I feel like it's just barely worth that much and if there are many more user hostile UX changes I might just bail out entirely. So much of their current interface seems designed mainly to hide the fact that they don't actually have that much good content.
I canceled my Netflix account about a year ago. Terrible UI changes, steady removal of great shows and movies (yes, I know this isn't technically their fault), and price increases made it no longer worth it to me.
I cancelled and share with family. Their catalog is shit, their apps are anti-viewer, some of their content is okay but they're turning the customer experience into repugnant, corporate shit.
Not just hostile UX changes, but also less attention to getting things right.
For example, we sometimes watch a show/movie with subtitles. But netflix frequently gets confused about whether subtitles should be on or off and with which language they should be in, even with simply stopping viewing and coming back later. We sometimes use English subtitles, but then they get turned on automatically in various languages for other shows/movies.
I think it's still a great deal. A series or a couple good movies/month makes it worth it. And it's easy to find at least that (granted I don't consume a lot and have a huge watchlist backlog that never seems to shrink).
Well, in 2007, my roommate and I split the 4 DVD at a time plan for about $20 a month, so my share was about $10 a month.
For $10 a month at that time I gained access to basically every DVD ever released. There were a few art house type movies that were out of print that took forever to get copies of due to being in others' ques, but for the most part, I had access to all commercially released video for the past 100 years for $10. Adjusted for inflation, that's $12.45 today.
> designed mainly to hide the fact that they don't actually have that much good content.
I noticed this, they removed the categories browser for me, it still shows up occasionally but it's hidden very deep in recommendations I can't find a way to directly go to it other than pressing down for a few minutes till it crops up.
Guess it makes sense for them, I used to boot it up and go straight in there and devour everything new in categories I cared about while still ignoring everything I passed over previously.
These moves to try and remove the choice from what I watch in the hopes of getting me to watch things I wouldn't watch out of choice seems so bizarre when the initial pitch of Netflix vs cable/terrestrial was being in control of what you watch.
I only recently got Netflix, but I was quite surprised to see how many films they don't have. If a random film pops into my head, it seems like there's only a 10 or 20 percent chance it's going to be on there. Even stuff that I would think would be cheap to license, like movies 20+ years old. Amazon Prime Video is just as bad, probably worse.
Compare that to Spotify, which will have a song I want 95% of the time or more.
The value of Netflix is not that high for me right now. With ads it will be even lower.
Why not? Does the average person earn the total movie industry more money in any other way?
Having 100 million subs (Netflix has 120 million atm) would then give you 1 billion per month -- which sounds decent enough to support a comprehensive movie archive, especially since most of it would be a long tail of movies that make tiny or no profit today and that would cost next to nothing to store for the occasional user.
And for the popular titles, you could even opt for a distributed (e.g. bittorrent like) serving, to further lower your costs.
They announced a year or two ago they were changing their budget to be less film and more their own content. Which makes sense given they have to license things in each region vs making something and being able to use it globally.
> I've recently noticed a lot less enthusiasm for Netflix than I used to see. I suspect that they've run into the problem where it's possible to subtly degrade your product without immediate consequences.
No, they ran into the problem where once a distribution pioneer proves a market, the content owners they rely on no longer license cheaply in that market, in part because they want to capture the proven profit opportunity and in part because distribution competitors spring up a bid up the prices.
Lots of folks here are very negative on what seems to be a clear-cut example of an A/B test. If Netflix sees improvement of their objectives, they will roll it out. Maybe they will even use predictive modeling based on your usage as to whether or not they show interstitial ads to you or not.
You’re showing a lot of faith that they will interpret the results fairly and act on them. The auto play video while browsing is pretty universally reviled and they haven’t turned that off.
Nor provided any means by preference to disable. Which means they aren't even willing to acknowledge a significant portion of users don't like the behavior and allowing them any recourse. Which means the autoplay is more for them than for us.
Yes, I am. I like the auto playing feature. I like the idea of interstitial promotional ads. I am Netflix’s target user and I consider myself a fairly nuanced consumer of their media.
Not to sound obtuse, but I subscribed to their service to watch shows/movies and not be A/B-tested. I know I agreed to it in the skimmed ToS, but the main appeal was to not have ads of any kind. Oh well ->cancel();
Sounds right. If you don’t want ads on Netflix do this. The first time you see an ad, stop watching Netflix immediately. Then cancel your subscription, destroy your television, drop out of society, go live in a cabin in the woods.
How does a short-term A/B test measure long-term negative sentiment?
Measuring minutes played or cancellations over a few months is pretty easy. Measuring contribution to a gradual loss of trust, fewer or weaker recommendations to others, and perhaps cancellations months or years later is all but impossible.
It's really hard to construct a split test that's deep enough to fully measure negative reactions. Usually that's not an issue because the thing being tested either has a positive or neutral impact; other than by accident, it's not downright offensive. Fully measuring something that a meaningful percentage of users consider offensive would be really tough.
It's even possible for a decrease in trust that doesn't manifest in user behavior for years. Maybe they stay customers and continue playing media, but start treating Netflix's future decisions with skepticism. The closest to an indicator is probably NPS, but NPS has its own issues.
(The fact that Netflix isn't testing a user-facing "Show a preroll trailer from Netflix's best recommendation" setting says a lot about their willingness to ignore long-term, hard-to-measure impacts…)
Most of the complaints I'm reading are about how this is the sort of thing that harms user experience while improving the kinds of metrics that are measured in an A/B test. Maybe they'll put in a lot of effort to undo it for me, but chances are this is just a way my life will be slightly worse from now on. Should I be positive about that?
Netflix's response to poor quality of content is to remove user reviews and introduce unskippable ads. Looks like netflix jumped the shark. They used to be a cool place people wanted to work at, but looks like they love is leaving/gone. A shame! the alternatives aren't nearly as appealing.
Wow, thank you for this. I complained to Netlfix support about the auto-playing videos and asked how to disable them. They never mentioned this option, just said that it was a test I couldn't opt out of.
I wish they gave you the ability to opt out of specific tests rather than all tests across the board. That might actually be a good way for them to get feedback on which specific tests are upsetting their customers.
This is great! When I called support they were testing out the rotating show cover art/cards like a screen saver. I want my TV to shut off and this feature stops that. In speaking with them they said, yes I was in a test group and they would fix it. They never did fix this, but hey now it is turned off. Thanks!
They are only testing it. If it leads to cancellations or drop in viewing or not a successful project then they will yank it. And the guy who proposed it will likely get fired too. They are humans, sometimes stupid choices will be made, but their data should help correct its course eventually.
But this is where A/B testing is fuzzy. Let's say it increases views but erodes brand sentiment to where the next thing they do starts getting people to cancel their subscription. Data is not everything in all cases.
I haven't seen it so no idea if I like it or not. Seems like people don't like it but who knows? Personally, I think they need to focus on the UI and slow down on all the mediocre content. It's choice paralysis and I'm finding it hard to want to even take a chance on many of their originals as there is too much.
The tides are turning on Netflix. People just don’t love the product anymore. I wonder if they’re pivoting for a sale to Disney or they’re just starting to be too big for their own good.
Their UI/UX is /awful/. Probably purposefully bad, to hide how shallow their back catalog has become, but regardless.... It’s so bad it makes amazon UX seem tolerable in comparison!
The worst part is the VPN blocks even for their own content. But their UI/UX is incredibly boring and does make it hard to search for items. They seem to want to feed you their own choices instead of helping you find what you want.
Netflix used to be a neutral pipe, just like Comcast. The trouble with pipes is that they hate being pipes and they always aspire to being a content creator. Whenever that happens, they instantly have a conflict of interest and cease being a decent pipe.
So far my house's plumbing system hasn't tried to get into the beverage business, but I expect it's only a matter of time.
Netflix has never been a "neutral pipe". Their business model is to curate/acquire/create content that people will pay a monthly fee to watch. How does that in any way resemble an ISP?
Netflix started business lending you dvds by mail. They were providing all content they could get their hands on, not curating (except if you call Blockbuster or any other videoclub a "curator of content", based on the fact that they did not have any film on existence). So yeah, they were a "neutral pipe" until they started creating content.
> They were providing all content they could get their hands on
No, they weren't. Even Wwith DVDs, they had selection criteria. Though, sure, until streaming—and until streaming got competitive—breadth was a bigger selling point than it is now.
Sorry perhaps I was not completely clear. (Part of) my point is that just having a selection done does not automatically turn your business into "curation". Early Netflix users used Netflix for the film availability, not for the film curation. In other words they valued the "positive existence"/access of the offering much more than the "negative existence" / curtailing of bad movies (users chose the films, so not so interested in curation when users also did it).
Nope, you're drawing a nonsense analogy about a business you don't understand. Netflix needs content in order to acquire subscribers, the content all has to be licensed and paid for, producers and rights holders of good content are good negotiators and have many channels for distribution. Therefore as soon as Netflix was proven to be a real business the rights holders ratcheted up the price. This is a completely different scenario from ISPs, and the only escape from it is to produce your own content.
Netflix was more or less forced to start developing their own content because their suppliers (the studios) started realizing how much money Netflix was making, and they started developing their own streaming services.
That's why their in-house content grows percentage wise each year. Each year the library of content they can license gets smaller.
Loud swearing doesn't show up on metrics. This drives me insane about Amazon. My behavior won't change, even though my perception of the brand is going down the tubes.
Netflix is also horrible about autoplaying trailers with sound. Maybe I went to netflix.com to check whether something was in the catalog while my spouse sleeps next to me. You do not have the right to pump sounds through my speakers until I hit play.
It at least remembers the 'mute' icon on auto play videos now. That was broken for a while. Still, it's infuriating.
It opens with a huge header image with a brief sentence or two about the thing it's showing you. You're three words in reading and the intro text disappears into a minute-long preview that spoils the show. What the hell?
Or worse, you've loaded your dashboard and are about to click into starting the show you left off on, only for the hero image/preview to load and shove the page down three inches. Your click now opens a new, unrelated show. You frantically click 'back', only to end up on the page prior to netflix.com. When you re-load Netflix, the show you accidentally clicked is now in the 'continue watching' section — right where your desired show is. !@#^*!)#
Netflix used to have anything the the world practically, on DVD. So much of that didn't move to streaming. My dad has never used streaming, because they don't have the old movies he likes.
The dvd service is still around and actually the catalog looks far better than what is streaming. the issue of course is that instant gratification and convenience vs waiting for something to come in the mail.
Not sure if anyone covered it here yet, but Netflix doesn't take user feedback. They've stated that they base their decisions on whether or not to include new features based on how many users click on it. People complained to hell and back about them putting in auto play videos, but it was included because so many people clicked on that feature. Same is going for these ads, they know people don't want them, but they hide behind their click metrics as an excuse for going forward with it. Many, many people will quit Netflix over this, I wonder if it will noticeably hurt their profits.
The simpler explanation is that their data show that people end up liking new things they complained about. It’s not an uncommon story with software customers. I would be surprised if a feature passes their tests by showing more usage of Netflix only to lead to cancellations. I am interested in understanding the potential path to this, though.
yep. I have bad relationships with laws. There used to be laws which prescribed certain people to wear a yellow star. Or when a black person could not use the same water fontain as white person. So yeah, modern copyright laws are flawed on basic philosophycal level so I have no respect for them.
The second I see one of these ads I will unsubscribe. No ads, and being able to watch things on demand are the two features I pay Netflix for. It's unthinkable to me that they think this is a good idea.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread(actually, I think it started prior to that... maybe when they started to push people away from DVDs by almost doubling the cost)
Every action this company takes seems to have one goal, above and beyond all others: to make sure their customers never catch even a fleeting glimpse of just how few titles they have in their streaming catalog.
A strange model, but it seems to work for them.
Thinking about autoplaying, unskippable ads/trailers/promos makes me giggle. I can't imagine paying users reacting well to this.
I'm already annoyed lately by the stuff Netflix tries to push me to watch, by automatically playing stuff... like the intros when i open the netflix app on my Tv or when I've finished watching the last episode of a show.
"Thou shall consume more."
I only need a little bit more of that crap to cancel my subscription...
Netflix offered a major rebuttal to at least one Reddit claim, pointing out that the ads for Netflix content are entirely skippable.
I'm guessing they aren't getting views they want, especially with a lot of their shows being duds.
The obvious response would be to increase the quality of their programming. The easy response is to jam their current programming down our throats.
I quit Netflix, and even a single ad about anything is enough to keep me from ever returning.
Trust me, this is just a start. They know people hate autoplay videos, yet they added them anyway. They know people hate ads, but they are going to be using them anyway.
What's next? Product advertising? I don't doubt this. Ad/ad free streaming packages?
When they first started, people came for The Office or Scrubs. Then they started creating their own, and every new show huge press. House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, etc. But as they add tons more content, they need more traditional ways to get people interested.
People have a "no ads!" stance and forget the way they got into most shows they like are ads. As they make more content themselves (as opposed to The Office or Arrested Development), they need more steady ways to get people interested.
If Netflix makes bad content, then I'll be mad they're forcing it on me. But if they make good content, in the long run I'll be happy they're experimenting with as-non-evasive-as-possible ways to get me interested.
To put it another way: it's better if they get more people hooked on more shows and that leads to more subscriptions, rather than them having to resort to crappy third party ads to afford new content.
Here’s a thought... they could let users rate shows, maybe on some 1-5 based scale, then use that information to power recommendations targeted at those users instead of just randomly promoting their disgusting flavors of the day? Then instead of shows dying in obscurity people who would most enjoy them could see them! As a bonus a guy who likes documentaries and dramas wouldn’t have to scroll through children’s cartoons being recommended to him?
Nah, that would never work...
What they're doing is literally what you're saying: targeted recommendations of their shows. They're just doing it in the format of a video rather than, say, a still image.
In this case advertising other Netflix shows seems reasonable. It's common practice on most content platforms. I agree it's annoying and I'd rather not have it.
That said, I like it when services play the next episode immediately after the one I just watched. I can just let it continue to progress and stop it anytime I want. I certainly don't want that interrupted by advertisements, whether for in-house Netflix shows or some other crap, it is still just advertisements and part of the reason I pay Netflix at all is because it doesn't have ads, and am willing and able to cancel my account if they turn into Hulu.
There was a time when there were no ads on cable too, seens almost incomprehensible now:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
So many of their flops are so obviously going to be massive flops. If they would just focus on putting out new shows like Dark, Stranger Things, their murder docs with a seasonal release calendar, etc they would maintain customers. That and inking deals with non-Disney entities to get solid third party content. HBO has maintained customers and grown with just 3-4 shows keeping people hooked in any given time period.
If they think they can compete with cash rich behemoths like Amazon and Disney they are going to get destroyed. Amazon is going to blow no telling how much on this new Lord of the Rings series...but they don't care, they can afford it. Netflix should go the Apple model, go with quality. Let the others burn cash to get into the space.
then it'd fix the issue you're having with them at the moment. It's a really simple fix.
Now that you say that I wish they would have grabbed FOX away from Disney. That would have given them something better to compete with and not allowed Disney to be even larger than it already is.
We need to move forward, but most of the content I've seen on netflix is crap.
Maybe not zombies, but premature deaths because they catered to niches that were too small successfully.
And get the artists to make new works.
Imagine the PR they would attract if they were able to bring back Firefly. Especially given Nathan Fillion is a big-name actor now.
http://m.ign.com/articles/2015/03/02/netflixs-product-placem...
They’ve been double dipping for a while.
Gilmore girls new season was obnoxious because of this.
It's like some people are making up things as situations arise to shield corporate interests and diffuse blame to the individual to evade accountability and cover up greed.
I'm sorry to hear that it happened to you while you were in a vulnerable position.
I’m guessing that OP tried to start another free trial and inadvertently paid because they weren’t eligible. Last I checked, Netflix makes the trial-ineligible payment screen similar enough to the trial-activation-with-valid-card screen that this is possible. It’s a bit of a dark pattern. But it would be national news if they worked with banks to steal new credit card numbers.
[1]-https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-accoun...
The content in Europe is woeful compared to the US.
And I totally blame Hollywood and the Media Industry, esp. Disney, for making hostile exlusive licensing deals.
In many cases, I cannot even watch a movie until it's dubbed in my language, even if I don't want to watch it dubbed but in OAT. It's frustrating. And then it's also likely on the streaming service I currently use, but on another one.
For example, we sometimes watch a show/movie with subtitles. But netflix frequently gets confused about whether subtitles should be on or off and with which language they should be in, even with simply stopping viewing and coming back later. We sometimes use English subtitles, but then they get turned on automatically in various languages for other shows/movies.
How much content are people expecting for $10?
For $10 a month at that time I gained access to basically every DVD ever released. There were a few art house type movies that were out of print that took forever to get copies of due to being in others' ques, but for the most part, I had access to all commercially released video for the past 100 years for $10. Adjusted for inflation, that's $12.45 today.
I noticed this, they removed the categories browser for me, it still shows up occasionally but it's hidden very deep in recommendations I can't find a way to directly go to it other than pressing down for a few minutes till it crops up.
Guess it makes sense for them, I used to boot it up and go straight in there and devour everything new in categories I cared about while still ignoring everything I passed over previously.
These moves to try and remove the choice from what I watch in the hopes of getting me to watch things I wouldn't watch out of choice seems so bizarre when the initial pitch of Netflix vs cable/terrestrial was being in control of what you watch.
Compare that to Spotify, which will have a song I want 95% of the time or more.
The value of Netflix is not that high for me right now. With ads it will be even lower.
Having 100 million subs (Netflix has 120 million atm) would then give you 1 billion per month -- which sounds decent enough to support a comprehensive movie archive, especially since most of it would be a long tail of movies that make tiny or no profit today and that would cost next to nothing to store for the occasional user.
And for the popular titles, you could even opt for a distributed (e.g. bittorrent like) serving, to further lower your costs.
No, they ran into the problem where once a distribution pioneer proves a market, the content owners they rely on no longer license cheaply in that market, in part because they want to capture the proven profit opportunity and in part because distribution competitors spring up a bid up the prices.
Measuring minutes played or cancellations over a few months is pretty easy. Measuring contribution to a gradual loss of trust, fewer or weaker recommendations to others, and perhaps cancellations months or years later is all but impossible.
It's really hard to construct a split test that's deep enough to fully measure negative reactions. Usually that's not an issue because the thing being tested either has a positive or neutral impact; other than by accident, it's not downright offensive. Fully measuring something that a meaningful percentage of users consider offensive would be really tough.
It's even possible for a decrease in trust that doesn't manifest in user behavior for years. Maybe they stay customers and continue playing media, but start treating Netflix's future decisions with skepticism. The closest to an indicator is probably NPS, but NPS has its own issues.
(The fact that Netflix isn't testing a user-facing "Show a preroll trailer from Netflix's best recommendation" setting says a lot about their willingness to ignore long-term, hard-to-measure impacts…)
https://www.netflix.com/DoNotTest
Haven't binged anything on Netflix for a while (due to autoplay videos, in part...), so I can't say what it does with the original topic of the link.
Also talked to support, they said it can't be turned off.
I haven't seen it so no idea if I like it or not. Seems like people don't like it but who knows? Personally, I think they need to focus on the UI and slow down on all the mediocre content. It's choice paralysis and I'm finding it hard to want to even take a chance on many of their originals as there is too much.
Either way. I wonder what will replace it.
So far my house's plumbing system hasn't tried to get into the beverage business, but I expect it's only a matter of time.
Netflix has never been a "neutral pipe". Their business model is to curate/acquire/create content that people will pay a monthly fee to watch. How does that in any way resemble an ISP?
No, they weren't. Even Wwith DVDs, they had selection criteria. Though, sure, until streaming—and until streaming got competitive—breadth was a bigger selling point than it is now.
That's why their in-house content grows percentage wise each year. Each year the library of content they can license gets smaller.
Netflix is also horrible about autoplaying trailers with sound. Maybe I went to netflix.com to check whether something was in the catalog while my spouse sleeps next to me. You do not have the right to pump sounds through my speakers until I hit play.
It opens with a huge header image with a brief sentence or two about the thing it's showing you. You're three words in reading and the intro text disappears into a minute-long preview that spoils the show. What the hell?
Or worse, you've loaded your dashboard and are about to click into starting the show you left off on, only for the hero image/preview to load and shove the page down three inches. Your click now opens a new, unrelated show. You frantically click 'back', only to end up on the page prior to netflix.com. When you re-load Netflix, the show you accidentally clicked is now in the 'continue watching' section — right where your desired show is. !@#^*!)#