Yeah, that's why we subscribe. Digitally renting a movie is crazy stupid for busy parents of young children. It takes us 2-3 days to watch a movie (in the ~40 minute chunks we have each night). Digital rentals force you to finish watching a movie within 24-48 hours...
Or even non-mainstream films. Or anything more than a few years old. Or a fair number of cable TV series.
Basically, if it is available on disk, Netlfix can mail it to you. And their mailing service is pretty efficient. It's rare to have to wait long to get something.
The only annoyance is that occasionally you get a 'rental only' disk that doesn't have the extras.
>Basically, if it is available on disk, Netflix can mail it to you.
Unfortunately, they're really letting their back catalog rot. An awful lot of things I saved in my DVD queue at some point are no longer available. In many cases, they're still available to buy but Netflix doesn't have them.
Yeah, I've noticed this, too. It's quite sad—they used to have practically everything ever printed on disc. Now my "Saved" list is bigger than my Queue. I just noticed a couple things on it I ended up finding the discs on Amazon, so it's not like they're out of print. Just not worth stocking I guess.
They basically drove most of the local rental places out of business and now are slowly dismantling their own operation for physical media. Torrents aren't really an option for most obscure stuff. So you pretty much now have to just buy media for a lot of things out of the mainstream.
It's essentially a cable channel. Big-name movies come and go, and there's no way of telling then it happens. E.g. the Shining has been on there, and the Incredibles 2 is on there now.
The basis of Netflix’s U.S.-only disc business is that in the U.S. for physical-medium movies, there is no distinct rental right, but the first-sale doctrine allows Netflix to rent movies that have been offered for sale on disc and that Netflix has bought on disc.
Yeah I got that part. I just thought there were separate rights you had to buy in order to rent them out for money, based on comments I'd read from previous discussions. I just did some googling and found out there doesn't seem to be such a restriction.
The first sale doctrine allows any individual/company to buy retail discs and rent those physical copies out. No need of an agreement from the copyright holder for that.
However, in practice, large rental companies (like Netflix) likely DO have contracts that make it easier and cheaper for them to get large numbers of discs without buying them on the retail market. But at least the first sale doctrine provides a fallback if contracts fail. I think I read somewhere that in the past Netflix has had to refer to the retail market for certain titles.
Ah, okay, that's what I must have heard and misinterpreted. Kind of makes sense, as it could allow for arrangements that reduce the losses from unused copies and thus the risk of buying too many.
Edit: I also wonder if the unit price difference will ever be big enough that Netflix has to charge a premium for those who want the excluded titles?
I'm seeing more discs from my subscription that are marked "Rental" ... with monochrome labeling (no graphics), fewer subtitle & foreign language options, and lower bit-rate.
So they definitely have agreements with the studios/distributors to get discs for the rental market, and it looks like that agreement is covering more and more titles. For the Marvel titles - it's about 50:50 (in perfect balance..)
AIUI you have Fair Use rights to format shift content, has there been a test case for that wrt to streaming services, can they buy physical copies and "rent them out" digitally as long as viewers never exceeds the copies held it seems kosher?
> The defendants, Zediva, self-described as a DVD "rental" service, served its customers with access to DVDs played from their data center where each DVD was streamed through its individual DVD player for up to four hours. Zediva customers did not have access to the digital file.
> The court held that the "public interest is served by issuance of a preliminary injunction" in order to uphold copyright protections.
Thanks for linking that, it's often hard to find this sort of thing unless you know exactly what you're looking for.
Wow, was that ever a stitch up though; I have to vent(!):
>"The non-public nature of the place of the performance has no bearing on whether or not those who enjoy the performance constitute 'the public' under the transmit clause", stated the court. It did not matter whether Zediva's customers were using the service at different times and in different places. //
Paraphrasing that "the clause requires the transmission to be to the public, the fact that here they're not transmitting to the public [but to paying customers only, in private] is not material". Way to take an explicit requirement and hand-wave it away there judge.
What I'd love to know is how the motivations work in this sort of thing in USA, like do the politicians get paid by the media corps, and the politicians choose the judges, or is there a way the media corps pay off the judges direct [perhaps "consulting" jobs when they retire?].
>The court also refused to adopt the Second Circuit's volitional requirement //
What a surprise!
>Last, even though the plaintiffs required their licensees to provide a high quality movie-watching experience to the VOD customers, the defendants being non-licensed, were not obligated to meet such standards and provided sub-optimal customer experience that tarnished customers' perception of VOD as an attractive option for viewing the Copyrighted Works. //
Except that's, again, exactly backwards if the VOD providers were better then they'd get the business. The defendant is paying full price for the DVD; the DVD is the quality the complainant made it - likelihood of irreparable injury is close to zero.
I'll bet the court did a quick survey "would you like cheaper, easier access to dvd rentals at home?" and all the public said "no way, stop that shit ASAP!".
Not sure about Netflix, but studios have tried to squeeze Redbox before by telling their distributors not to sell to them until X days after release, though.
The first sale doctrine protects this business model so even if all studios stop all rental contracts with you, you can still legally purchase retail discs and rent those out. Unfortunately there is no such thing for streaming.
Redbox is convenient for newly released mainstream movies plus an odd assortment of older movies that is usually related to upcoming releases (eg, if there is a sequel coming out soon). It doesn't help as much for older and longer-tail movies and TV shows.
I still pay for Netflix DVD's, have since around 2000. The reason that I still do is that a bunch of older TV series that my wife watches aren't available on streaming anywhere, and the dvd's are out of print, so the only way to watch these things is via archive DVD's, like at Netflix.
My library (Santa Clara County) actually has more than Netflix, this led to me cancelling Netflix DVD's. The main downside is new releases take much longer to become available with the library if one does not sign up as soon as possible for rental. One thing is that out of print DVD's disappear from Netflix quicker than the library - I think people just steal them or they get lost in mail and there's no charge up to a certain point for this loss.
Same! I've been wanting to work through the catalog of Miyazaki films but the stuff is streaming unobtainium. Quite a wait at the library too. This seems like the only way to go haha.
I just went back to Netflix Blu-Rays after being frustrated with seeing tons of imperfections in streaming quality. The artifacts are so annoying to me in 4K streaming that I mostly prefer just watching 1080p blu-rays.
Their web player has also started to have stuttering and frame dropping issues for me. It only works smoothly on Microsoft Edge, so hopefully they get it figured out before Microsoft swaps out the rendering engine for Chromium.
I've noticed Netflix stuttering on Edge too. I think there is a combination of web player and compression issues happening.
The quality is really good on some titles, like the latest F1 docu-series. Others have terrible quality, like the original planet earth. Lots of stuttering and compression artifacts.
Like another commenter somewhere, I'd be happy with smooth, artifact free 1080p over 4k any day.
Most people use 60Hz monitors, which means you'll always get uneven frame-timing with 24fps content (3:2 pulldown). Modern TVs support 24Hz for 24fps Blurays so the motion looks better.
> you'll always get uneven frame-timing with 24fps content (3:2 pulldown)
Uneven frame-timing, fo sure, but does it really use 3:2 pulldown?
IIRC the monitor, at least when using most of players on PC to playback, will just display/repeat each video frame uneven times, but no 3:2 pulldown, i.e. interlacing two frames together to generate 1 more frame every 4 frames, is involved.
I'm definitely not an expert on this topic though so please feel free to correct me!
I can't speak to everyone else, but I also still have a Netflix subscription because I use it as a place to dump movies or TV shows I'm interested in but don't have the time (movies in theater) or inclination (lack of TV cable) to see right away. A couple months later they show up without any extra work or hassle on my part.
Assuming the title is even provided in 4k/HD. For example, I checked right now and Bram Stoker's Dracula is 540p at a reported 838 kb/s, and picture quality is worse than the DVD, with horrible aliasing indicating poor encoding, so it's even below that of SD. This film has a true 4K Blu-ray remaster, so you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice streaming it in the quality Netflix serves.
To really put this in perspective, the picture quality that Netflix provides is worse than pre-digital analog film projection. Dracula originally screened in cinemas in 1992 looked (far) better than what you stream on Netflix right now in 2019. Now I know the consumer has always traded convenience for picture quality, hence the popularity of early home media such as VHS, but that was bound by the limitation of the technology back then. Right now, there's zero technical reason for why quality can't be better, ignoring bandwidth. It's a digression and the fact it's so tolerated makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm not even a film buff, it's just that it's apparent like night and day, like a re-compressed jpg is.
I really should get a Blu-Ray drive and start getting doing Redbox or Netflix delivery for movies.. I'm pretty unsatisfied with the quality of almost every streaming service. They are basically optimizing the bitrate and encoding for the worst they can while keeping people from screaming about it. I'm frequently shocked how terrible the quality of Youtube movie trailers are..
Used VUDU when it first came out and recall being super impressed with its quality though. They have an HDX subscription that uses double+ the bitrate as their HD apparently..
Likewise. There are many titles available through Netflix DVD that are not available through Netflix streaming. Just off the top of my head you have Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7), The Wire, True Detective, Fargo and The Expanse.
Blu-Ray audio and video quality is significantly better than streaming which is why I still subscribe. Streaming is certainly more convenient for stuff that doesn't really need very high quality though.
Remember when Netflix tried to be proactive by splitting off the DVD business from the streaming service, and the entire internet flipped out?
In hindsight, this would have been an excellent move. Each org could have focused better on their respective service. But now the media-by-mail half is just crashing in the space of the streaming service. They have no incentive to market it, and will pull the plug the moment it is unprofitable.
I can't really say from experience since I live in Europe but I've seen people from the US complain about data caps on regular internet for a while and I guess netflix will eat up that quite fast especially if you watch 4k movies.
Ah, yeah as I said I've not had experience with this myself. The complaining has mostly been on various games forums in relation to physical vs digital games discussions and day 1 patches. It seems to be primarily comcast customers though which is why I thought it was in the US.
Yes it is. Comcast has a 1TB a month soft limit. You get 2 months of free overages within a certain period of time (12-18 months IIRC), after that they charge you extra. You can argue that 1TB is a lot and not really a limit, but it does exist.
What would be considered enough? I don’t know how I’d use 3TB a month. 2 TB is a lot too to me and everyone I know. I’m sure it’s not a lot to some people especially people on here. But I would guess for the vast majority of people, at least 95%, 1 TB is sufficient. And 2 TB is sufficient for 99%+ of people.
I feel like I should state that I’m against all data caps. Where I live we don’t have data caps on home connections and it’s somewhat affordable to get unlimited LTE SIM’s (about €80/US$90).
I don’t see why there should be a limit. Connections are usually sold in different tiers which are advertised with a bandwidth speed. If something is advertised as having 100Mbps then I should be able to use that connection continuously 24/7 with that speed or a close approximation at least. So it depends on the advertised speed. For 100Mbps that would come out to roughly 60TB/month.
But in no way should it be 1TB in my opinion. It’s trivial to reach that especially because many connections aren’t used by a single person. 4k content is available and should be able to be consumed without having to worry about hitting caps. A family of four can easily hit 3-5TB whereas a single person might need less.
I agree that you should be able to use more than 1 TB. But in practice right now, what, 1% at most of households use more than 1 TB a month? I think reddit and HN are against this, but at that point I’d think charging a reasonable price for more than 1 TB of bandwidth would make sense. At least right now without 4K being widely available and consumed.
Actually I'm fairly sure that Charter, due to an agreement with the FCC that expires in the early 2020s, is the only major provider in the US without at least a soft cap. Comcast in particular is infamous for their low caps.
Verizon does not have an official limit on Fios. There is a story about them warning someone a few years ago who was using 7TB / month (which really is a massive amount of data). I can't really think of legal consumer usage that would get up that high. A redditor posted about keeping up 20TB/month usage without getting a warning a year ago.
There was a window of time when this was a bigger issue. And the "offenders" were mostly those torrenting a lot of big, umm, Linux distributions. With fully legit streaming video now consuming most of the bandwidth, the ISPs are mostly less inclined to try to clamp down on families who watch a lot of Netflix or YouTube.
They’re still a thing if you’re served by a fixed wireless connection (or using a semi-decent mobile phone plan for most of your browsing in lieu of a wired connection).
I read the comments here before reading the article...and I was pleasantly surprised by the article. It wasn't a "haha, look at how unsophisticated some people are", it was a pretty on-target list of reasons why online subscriptions services aren't currently meeting all needs. I'm actually surprised it's "only" 2.7M Americans - the DVD service didn't match the convenience of online services, but was still a great experience.
I myself am lucky enough to have great broadband, but I've been getting annoyed with how series will move on/off the service (I see monthly "What's leaving Netflix this month" articles in some places), I'm annoyed with how Netflix has made their system "pushier" (such as constantly looping ads), how they gave me an ability to build a personal want-to-watch list and then hide that away making it hard to benefit from, and in particular, how I now have to balance multiple subscription services if I want to see the shows I want to see.
Side Note: As annoyed as I am with Netflix from time to time, they beat the pants off of Hulu when it comes to interface, and remain nicer than Amazon.
The greatest con that copyright holders pulled is to convince the public that service providers are to blame. (Netflix, Hulu, Apple for movies; Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Deezer for music; ebooks, audiobooks etc.)
Meanwhile dipshits like Warner, Sony, Disney hold everyone hostage.
Life of creator seems reasonable to me. Something approaching that for something created by a company also seems reasonable to me.
There's a big difference between something which is copyrighted and, say, something which is patented. A patent is a discovery, which implies that it could have been discovered by somebody else, so I think it's pretty reasonable that patents don't last as long as copyright. Copyrighted works, on the other hand, literally could not exist without the specific people who created them. Their existence it tied, intrinsically, to the creator. If Prince never existed, Purple Rain would have never come to exist. So I think something approaching the life of the creator is reasonable and reflects this special existential relationship between the creator and the work.
Why? If the creator actually makes things that people want, you should incentivise them to make more things. Giving them lifetime copyright disincentivises that. A limited (say 5-, 10-year) copyright allows them to profit from successes, but prevents them from resting on their laurels from a single success - not because they do or don't 'deserve' to, but because we want them to create more things during their lifetime.
Because economic productivity is not the only (or even the primary) concern that we should have when considering property rights. I mean, do you also believe that ownership of tangible assets (like your house) should be limited to 5 years? By your reasoning, it would be bad if people were able to accumulate assets, because then they would haven no motivation to keep working and creating value.
Copyright is different in many respects from ownership of tangible assets. You and I can both read the works of Shakespeare at the same time (with millions of other people) with no conflicts, but only so many people can 'use' a house at the same time.
The original point of copyright was to encourage creators to create (if their creations could be immediately 'used' for free by others, they would have much less reason to create in the first place). It has little public value otherwise.
What I'm saying is that property rights (tangible or intangible) are not strictly about public value, regardless of the arguments used to originally justify copyright laws.
Try applying your reasoning to a trademark. If you have two companies using the same trademark to create identical products, there is no affect on the value to the public. But there is a huge change to the value of the person or company that originally started using that trademark. And the reason we restrict the use of that trademark is because the originator put a bunch of effort into making it valuable and we recognize that this effort should result in some kind of ownership because that is what's fair.
But I'm not making any argument about trademarks, or physical property ownership. My arguments are about copyright, and I'm not very interested in conflating copyright with trademarks and patents and ownership of land &c.
> because that is what's fair
This is where it gets tricky of course. What's fair, exactly, and to whom? (Again, though, I'm not interested in talking about trademarks.)
I think flat out refusing to accept arguments by analogy is not arguing in good faith (I mean, you didn't even provide a reason for why trademarks are not a good analogy, you just refuse to even consider the line of argument).
But whatever.
Why do others have the right to derive enjoyment or economic benefit from the works of creators?
Because trademarks are not governed by the same set of laws, and are pretty different in purpose. You not being able sell sweet fizzy drinks using Coca-Cola branding is at least as much for the benefit of consumers (so they don't buy non-Coca-Cola drink when they want Coca-Cola) as it is for the Coca-Cola company. A trademark is really a very different thing than say a novel or a film or a piece of music or even a piece of software. The only way in which copyright and trademarks are really relatable is under the vague, squishy and not-very-useful umbrella of 'intellectual property'.
I think it's fair for me to say that when I am talking about creators of novels and films etc. and copyright limits w.r.t. encouraging/discouraging creators from creating I shouldn't have to talk about trademarks, which have very little to do with the sort of creation I'm talking about.
Thank you for pointing out the consumer protection aspect of trademark, I did not have that in mind when I made that comparison (I had in mind the aspect of trademark that benefits the holder, which I think actually has a lot in common with copyright, but I’ll not belabor an irrelevancy).
So if I am understanding you correctly, your stance is that the creator of some copyrightable work has no inherent right to control the use of that work? And you think that the only reason they should be allowed to control the use of their work is to incentivize creation of new works, not because they deserve a share of the value created by the use of their work (a song used in an advertisement, for example)?
To be clear, I’m asking for your opinion as a judge of moral issues,
not for the legal theory behind copyright.
I suppose I don't think that copyright law is the right place to legislate morality.
> your stance is that the creator of some copyrightable work has no inherent right to control the use of that work? And you think that the only reason they should be allowed to control the use of their work is to incentivize creation of new works, not because they deserve a share of the value created by the use of their work (a song used in an advertisement, for example)?
No, in general I think that people have a right to a share of the value created by their work (copyrightable and otherwise). But in practice this is often not what happens, even with copyright. Your example of a song used in an ad: generally the advertiser would just purchase the rights to the song outright, and so the creator wouldn't necessarily really get anything like a 'share' of the value created by use of their work, but just a flat fee.
> Your example of a song used in an ad: generally the advertiser would just purchase the rights to the song outright, and so the creator wouldn't necessarily really get anything like a 'share' of the value created by use of their work, but just a flat fee.
Sure, they don't literally get a percentage of the value created with their work, but the basis for thinking they deserve to be paid at all is that they created a thing that is being used to create value for someone else.
Furthermore, I think that if you drill down into the justification for why creators should be paid at all (despite the fact that someone else using their work does not deprive the creator of it's use for themself), you'll find that it is ultimately tied to the fact that a given creative work simply could not exist without it's creator. Literally no other person in existence is capable of making that exact work. And when that is the justification for why a creator deserves to have some control over the use of their work, I think life of the creator is a reasonable timeframe for the creator to maintain legal control over the use of their work (accepting that it may not be justified for this control to be absolute). I think reasonable people could argue that such a timeframe is too long by pointing to issues of public benefit, but I don't think life of the creator is completely unjustified or unreasonable on its face.
That that is the particular legal basis for copyright does not preclude copyright having a moral element as well. I think people would widely agree that it is only fair for the creator of a work to have some exclusive claim to its use for some amount of time. My original comment did get some upvotes, for whatever that’s worth.
I suspect you're thinking of big creators with those numbers, which is understandable, but copyright isn't only about "protecting" Disney and major record labels. Indie authors, musicians, comic creators, and so on are out there, too, and building up a "library" of works for sale is virtually the only way indies are going to be able to make the bulk of their living wage from their works. Five years just seems too short in light of that.
Personally, I think the original US Copyright Act of 1790 -- based on an even earlier British statute -- had a pretty good approach: a 14-year term granted upon publication, renewable for a second (but only a second) 14-year term by a living author.
I think 7 years, or 14 if renewed would be better. The early copyright systems came into being in the 1700s; present-day distribution chains are much faster.
I'm not sure the speed of distribution is the relevant consideration. I can distribute a book I publish much more easily now, but the book isn't written and edited any faster.
That would be my assumption, too, although it'd be interesting to try to find data to confirm that. Books (picking the field I know the most about) could still sell really well and really quickly back in the "old days"; reviews often came out in advance of the book, bookstores could take pre-orders, and so on. I don't have any real data about how the "old way" balances out against the "new way."
We primarily still have the paid for DVD service because there's a whole bunch of movies and TV shows that just aren't available via streaming services. For example we were just using it for the final series of True Blood, because all the previous series are on Amazon Prime, but not the last one.
There's a lot of classic movies missing from online services, as well, particularly MGM ones.
I've been using Netflix DVD since it started and I'm still using it happily, mainly for the selection. I think there are a lot of movie buffs like me that use it just for that reason.
For a while I did this because I wanted movies to watch while donating platelets at the local Red Cross and they had DVD players in the donation room with a small library but eventually I watched all the movies they had that I wanted to see. Eventually they upgraded to having Netflix streaming and I stopped.
In the US, lots of people have 55" TV's and bigger and at that size the streaming artifacts are really noticeable. A Netflix streaming 4k video looks terrible when the screen has a lot of black/gray gradients. It makes people wonder why they even bothered with a 4k. But, throw a blu-ray on there and you see how great the TV looks. Even better, throw a 4k Ultra Blu-Ray on and you see the brilliance of the TV and the amazing picture. This was my case - I got a 4k UHD from Redbox and now will never watch a blockbuster movie any other way.
Their 4k's also almost exclusively for their own content. So it's low quality and you can pretty much only use it for content that doesn't much benefit from it, assuming it's worth watching at all.
People are using the low bandwidth used for streaming as an argument to not invest in a fiber connection. 100 mbit is not even enough to stream 1080p with surround hd audio. And they're like but you only need 2 mbit to watch Netflix.
> 100 mbit is not even enough to stream 1080p with surround hd audio
This doesn't seem right.
A 50GB blu-ray that is 2 hours long can have a maximum bitrate of 55mbit. So if your claim is correct, you'd need a 100GB blu-ray (which exists) for a 2 hour movie, which doesn't match my experience, especially for 1080p.
I bought a lot of Blu-rays (obsessed with "owning" the good movies which I then rip - I extract the original streams without reencoding and then I put the files on my mediaserver) and the biggest 1080p-file I have is the one of "Interstellar" being 39GB (original video and original 3 audio tracks and some subtitles), followed by "the dark knight rises" of 35GBs and otherwise all the rest is between 10-30GBs depending on the movie.
Usually when I play a movie in the living room I see spikes of 2.5MB/s transferred data on the mediaservers, and this is original content ripped 1:1.
thanks. There have probably been thousands of man hours spent on video compression. I used to have a 100 Mbit home network and play HD video via a OpenWrt home router with a usb disk attached to it. The HQ videos lagged when there was a lot of sound and things happening on the screen at the same time. It probably was the HDD/router capacity that was the limit though, not the network.
If you however measure the bit-rate between the computer and the monitor, it's significantly higher ... But imagine if we could stream via the Internet directly to the monitor. I'm thinking a VR headset that you just plug-in to the Ethernet socket, eg. no need to have a high end gfx computer. This would both mean cheaper/less hardware at home, and a easier business model for game developers as they wouldn't have to worry that much about people copying games.
Yup. It really makes it hard to test out your TV too... eg:
LG OLED Tvs are pretty nice, but they have color banding issues. Also have really good contrast.
Fire up an average Netflix show, and the banding is absolutely insane, causing one to immediately blame the TV (since it DOES have documented banding issues). But...it has nothing to do with the TV: it just makes the low quality of the stream very obvious. Watch some 4k HDR stuff on Youtube and it looks fine (there is some banding, but it's much, MUCH harder to see).
I don't pay the upcharge for Netflix 4K, but the streaming 4K content I have found (YouTube, mostly) has no such problems, so it's certainly not inherent to streaming.
Do you have examples? I have a 75" LCD/LED and I haven't noticed such problems. Altered Carbon and Lost in Space look spectacular. The Marvel shows look pretty good as well. I wish Netflix had more stuff in 4k, let alone HDR10/Dolby Vision because the nearby Redbox still doesn't carry UHD Blu-rays.
Yeah, this drives me nuts. As encoding gets more informationally efficient, it becomes more and more vector-like. The resolution of a stream matters much less than the bitrate. And the bitrate of 4k streaming is absolutely pathetic. Get me 1080p Blu-Ray any day.
I would actually like to go back to subscribing to discs-by-mail, but have been put off from doing so via Netflix for two reasons: first, because they reputedly haven't been keeping up their inventory, leading to lots of titles being more or less permanently unavailable; and second, because it's clear that Netflix views this line of business as an embarrassing burden they'll be thrilled to dump the second they feel they can do so without going through another "Qwikster" debacle.
Are there any alternative discs-by-mail services out there that actually care about and want to be providing such a service?
>Are there any alternative discs-by-mail services out there that actually care about and want to be providing such a service?
It's not by mail, but most libraries have DVDs and Blurays. They often have countywide agreements so you can get a title shipped from across the city to your local library for free.
There are several library systems in my area and to my knowledge none of them carry Blu-rays. I think the added expense and likelihood of patrons mistakenly borrowing a Blu-ray when they have a DVD player is enough to keep many libraries on DVD.
The implicit promise -- actually, occasionally made EXPLICITLY in marketing -- of high-speed broadband was that everything would be available, but the reverse has proven true. A person living in an urban area had a larger selection of movies available for rent in 1999 than they do today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business, but streaming is governed by different agreements -- which leads to ridiculous "availability windows."
We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix, but you still get the availability shifts. Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit, and it didn't (and couldn't) happen when movies were tied to a physical object.
If you want a deep library of rentals, DVD/BR by mail is still better. If you want better quality, DVD/BR by mail is the best option. And obviously if you live somewhere with shitty connectivity (basically the entire rural US), then by-mail might be your ONLY real option.
I'm mostly surprised because for free you can request the same titles (including Blu ray) from the local library. In my county you can search for a title and have it shipped from any library to the one closest to you (and conversely return it at any county library location).
Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?
I can hope that one day libraries will stop siloing themselves from each other and implement an efficient inter-library loan system that sends direct to customer.
ILL exists, but as far as I can tell, it's limited to books.
I've ordered books from libraries thousands of miles away. It takes a few weeks for the books to arrive, possibly because they go 4th Class mail. But they get there eventually.
Assuming you're talking public libraries, it depends on the state. Some states do ILL much better than others, including lending through multistate compacts.
Having both a family member and a couple friends who are/have been librarians, I seriously doubt it is a competitive instinct. I'm sure there are exceptions, but most librarians are genuinely dedicated to information freedom. (They certainly aren't getting MLS degrees for the money...)
I doubt they'll ever mail it direct to your home, though.
There's also Kanopy, which is a free limited-views-per-month streaming service you can sign up for with some library cards. My boring Midwestern city's main library has it—the library network in the outer 'burbs didn't, but most people in the area can get a free card in the main system anyway—so I assume it's pretty widely available. Signing up was kinda clunky but now I can watch 12 things a month on it. Selection skews "art" and documentary but there are quite a few mainstream movies on there. Lots of Criterion Collection, too, if you're into that. No idea if you can inflate your views-per-month by having others in your house sign up for it too, and juggling logins.
Criterion also is launching it's own platform next week. I've been missing having the full collection absolute since filmstruck died because it was too good for this world.
I loved FilmStruck and am glad criterion grabbed it.
They are small, so super responsive. I had gotten halfway through a film and was interrupted, came back the next day and it was off catalog, so I gave some feedback about wishing for more transparency.
They sent out a schedule of movies leaving to all subscribes like the next day.
If you liked filmstruck you might want to take a look at mubi as well. They have 30 movies at a time and ever day one movie gets added and another one leaves. It's very well curated and you get introduced to some real gems that you otherwise might never hear of or end up on your watchlist forever. About half the time I watch a movie there because I'm interested and it's leaving soon. It's a great forcing function. Many of the most memorable movies I've seen the last years were through mubi.
In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries. Might be less true now that everyone streams most things, but this is how it was when I was in college.
I used to go to the college library and get videos pretty often. I'd usually rip them to my laptop and return them in the same day, letting me get way more movies than I could watch.
Earlier this week I returned a new release that my wife ordered from the library. She waited several months for it to become available.
Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep. The other problem is that the library system holds back a number of copies for people who walk in, which I totally understand. Doesn't help my wife, though.
>Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep.
Also IIRC there's no limit on DVD preorders. Conversely the Overdrive kindle lending service maxes you out at 20 and usually has reasonable (well, sometimes 3-6 week) wait times.
>In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries.
True, but libraries are more my goto for things that aren't on streaming. For example I wanted to watch "Reanimator" and none of my steaming services had it but the local library had a DVD.
For new stuff I'm willing to pay a dollar or two on Amazon. (Especially since you can earn that easily by picking a slowing shipping speed on nonessential items... so order a dvd the library doesn't have, get a credit for a current release, and rent an old favorite to tide you over.)
It's not perfect, but in my experience you're often paying for convenience, and being willing to be slightly inconvenienced pays dividends.
FYI, Shudder has "Re-animator" for streaming. No, I'd never heard of Shudder either. It's a streaming service specializing in "Horror. Thrillers. Suspense". $3.99/month on an annual subscription, $4.99 month to month.
$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.
I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.
If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.
I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.
I think once you've paid for Netflix, Prime video, and your taxes to a public library and can't get content, creators are running the risk people will get fed up and buy a fast VPN instead.
I loved Netflix DVD, but this is the primary reason I canceled. I wasn't watching them as often, and I told myself that once I exhaust the library's selection of all the movies I want to see, I would resume the Netflix subscription.
Libraries vary tremendously in their selections of DVDs. Some libraries have pretty good selections (though still not nearly as extensive as Netflix). Other libraries have absolutely awful selections.
Also, from my experience, many library DVDs tend to be scratched up (especially popular DVDs), while Netflix DVDs tend to be better (though some still don't play on my DVD player, for some reason).
What is there to trust the government with? And I'm sure anything they could get from the library they could get from Netflix, if they found it interesting/useful.
Are you in Bergen county, NJ? Because I'll be honest, BCCLS is probably one of the best library consortia in the world - 70+ libraries and massive collections. PALSPlus, the Passaic county system, is comparatively pretty awful - in part because of the priorities of the library boards and directors.
There is certainly the case to be made that physical DVD/Blu-Ray rental is still a viable business due to the stagnation of internet improvement in the US.
With that said, I'd think that Redbox basically does Netflix-by-mail more efficiently, no? It seems like the speed of the mail service guarantees that it will take at least a few days between you sending your finished movies back before new ones arrive, as opposed to driving to your nearest grocery store or gas station to pick something else.
History has shown that this isn't the case... otherwise people would've kept Blockbuster in business in the face of Netflix DVD rentals. People value the convenience, it's only recently that people wax nostalgic over the whole "going to the video store to rent on a Friday night". They generally forget the long lines, employees who were rude and didn't care because it was a minimum wage job, often messy as hell store where the availability was mixed... the list goes on.
Blockbuster wasn't good at video rental. They were the big, inefficient bully, and the last choice of anyone with any sense.
The selection was tiny compared to the independents they mostly priced out of existence, then became the most expensive place to rent once that was done. They had major films sooner for about as much as going to the cinema. That's it. Their only selling point. They got shot of old stuff far too soon so you could never actually find old stuff in Blockbuster unless it was 2001 or Wizard of Oz.
The corner shop near us that rented, and next door but 2 to Blockbuster, kept going years after Blockbuster closed. Having experienced Blockbuster in 3 or 4 places I've lived, I gave a little cheer when they went.
There's still a thriving video chain in the area where I live: Family Video. Family Video focused on owning their real estate instead of renting.
I can get a BluRay from Family Video and a pizza from Marcos delivered to my door in under an hour with a $10 or more purchase from Marcos. It ends up being a cheap date night with my fiancee.
Does the Marcos deliver the video too? I know some Family Videos have Marcos attached to them.
I rented a lot of movies from Family Video in high school. There was a location about halfway between my house and my girlfriends. It closed at Midnight, and my curfew was midnight, so I stopped by right before closing almost every night one summer. They had a deal where you got an old release for free with every new release and it was like 3 dollars.
...and then we have basically come full circle to cable v2.0.
I am curious about how streaming will develop over the next few years as more services come online. I doubt the average person is going to want to maintain that many (expensive) subscription services. I already dislike the juggle between Netflix, Prime, and Hulu.
I'm at capacity with content platforms... I've dropped CBS, and once DC Universe expires, I'm out there too. It's worse that they're both the same damned company. Hulu and Amazon are all I'm keeping for now. May return to Netflix if anything really interesting to me hits. Or have it a couple months, binge watch and cancel again.
People value the convenience, it's only recently that people wax nostalgic over the whole "going to the video store to rent on a Friday night".
First, we got the convenience. Only when most everything went online and the alternatives had faded to irrelevance did the availability start to go away. Now we consumers have less than we did before.
I used to rent a ton of movies, and never once ran in to a rude employee.
Long lines were annoying, but the worst was having to drive to and from the store. The independent video stores in my area were much further away than the nearest Blockbuster, so Blockbuster was more convenient but their crappy video selection made going to the independents instead worth it for me, and Blockbuster was the store of last resort.
Once I started using Netflix's DVD service, I never set foot a brick and mortar video rental store again. Why would I drive somewhere when I had an excellent DVD selection at my fingertips that would mail the DVD to me?
Are you sure it isn’t the other way around? Wasn’t video store clerk a sought after job among young people with little work experience, because it was related to something that’s fun? Wouldn’t the staff usually be at least somewhat helpful because they’re passionate about movies?
This misconception that people who worked at those stores were all movie buffs is very much nostalgia poking through.
Context: I was one of those employees, and I worked in multiple regions of the USA and have conferred with friends who worked at Blockbuster UK as well.
Anecdotally, every video chain store I have ever visited, from Blockbuster to Video Ezy, Civic Video, Channel X, United Video (here in New Zealand) has had at least one movie buff employee.
I've also never experienced a long line at a video store, despite it being a regular Friday night thing for me to do for many years...
Gotta say, the thing I miss most is the ease of browsing through a curated back catalogue. Netflix and co are terribly awful by comparison. Several hundred square metres vs a 55" television screen...
for some it is purely impulse renting. do not confuse the immediacy of the experience with the ability to find something to stream, it is a whole different experience
Netflix's DVD catalog is very, very deep. There are likely 6 digits of titles. A Redbox machine probably has under 1000 DVDs in it, so your selection is about 100x-1000x better with Netflix.
I am very confused trying to check on these movies. They show up in search results. I click on them. They redirect me to dvd.netflix.com and suggest that I get a subscription. I don't want to sign up. I want to know if your service offers them or not. Nonetheless, maybe they'll help you?
Thank you. The first two links are to different versions of the films I had in my queue (c'mon, no one needs a remake of "Walking Tall"). The last three indeed go to the titles that are in my "Saved" queue (which means they are not available to rent but are in their database nonetheless).
I went ahead and added the different version of Gaslight to my queue though. Thanks, stranger.
I have chosen to rent both Blu-ray or DVD and in the case of both the titles (Ran and Giant) they still show "Saved" — meaning "not available but maybe someday".
4 out of 6 of those movies are available for free on a popular streaming site.
I've read that Netflix is simply not interested in offering movies, preferring tv series. When I subscribed (in Europe) the selection was very limited.
Netflix might have a deep catalog of movies they once rented but they don't seem to be refreshing their catalog when a DVD goes missing. I suspect they are winding down their DVD service.
We gave up on Netflix DVD when about half of our saved for later queue flipped over to queue of DVDs they no longer have.
It used to be that Netflix competed with Blockbuster by carrying movies Blockbuster did not rent. Netflix was originally the movie service for movie lovers and Blockbuster was the service for new releases. This was before Netflix also started carrying new releases. Now if I want to see a movie that was made more than 5 years ago, it is no longer available.
Redbox is good if you want one of the top 100 or so new releases that fit in the box, but a big point of the OP is that Netflix has 100K+ titles, obviously Redbox can't match that.
> a big point of the OP is that Netflix has 100K+ titles, obviously Redbox can't match that.
It would be tough to get studio buy-in, but it would be amazing to have a version or Redbox that burned DVDs in place.
From a logistics perspective it would be ideal if they could use disks that degraded after 5 plays, but they could also just accept disks back, read them, and destroy them.
If your situation is seriously rural, it might be a few days
between trips into town (or to your P.O. box), so while you
could get different media at Redbox on every trip, you
would have to plan to overlap returns and requests on Netflix
(perhaps with multiple accounts?) to get new content on every trip.
I am extrapolating from seeing a number of battered rancher
pickup trucks whose occupants are clustered around Redbox kiosks in small towns in the western US.
Netflix has done some work with their algos such that if you always watch your movie on the weekend and send it back Monday, they'll just start shipping your next movie out on Monday morning on the assumption that they old one will be back Tuesday.
They also have a deal with the post office that in some areas the post office will notify Netflix when they pick up your disk so that Netflix can send a new out before they get your old one back.
What's the selection of Redbox DVD's at grocery stores like? I have a hard time believing it's anywhere close to Netflix's extensive DVD selection.
Also, Netflix has various plans: you could rent one DVD at a time, two DVDs at a time, three DVDs at a time (and maybe more). If you have three DVDs out at a time, and watch one DVD per day and mail it DVDs back as you watch them, you won't have to wait long before your next DVD arrives in the mail, possibly while you're still watching the rest.
In my own experience, watching a DVD per day is pretty ambitious. Odds are you'll be watching way less than that, and there'll be multiple days between watching DVDs, in which case waiting for your next DVD to arrive in the mail won't realy make any difference.
The latency for Netflix is longer but it means there's a DVD right there with zero effort that you can watch more or less whenever you get around to it. Even if the nearest Redbox is just 5 or 10 minutes away, that's one or two possibly unique trips you have to make. That's actually a fairly big barrier for me unless there's a new release I really want to see tonight.
>>> today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business.
First sale only applies if the video rental business purchases physical copies. It is/was not unusual for a large rental business to, rather than buy copies, to license the work for distribution during a particular time/area. That allowed them to burn/build DVDs to meet demand and replaced broken disks as needed. When the license was over, the DVDs were destroyed per the licensing contract.
The threat of first sale was still enough to protect the video stores during negotiations so the threat mattered. As an example, I recall hearing Netflix had some early negotiations fail and went to buy disks in stores as an end run.
Sure, but they only needed that surge in inventory when the rental was in high demand. But a few copies could be purchased outright to remain on the shelves, available to rent for market rates, loyalty discounts, etc, for the lifetime of the media itself. The status quo today is far worse.
Absolutely! In NYC I miss the great video stores of yesteryear like Kims. The streaming services don’t have depth and the problem is getting worse as they devote more spend towards building internal proprietary content and less towards renewing older third party content.
I agree. The wake-up call for me that the streaming promise was hollow was when PBS Video went on line. I imagined it steadily growing to cover the entire back catalog of PBS. What a fabulous public resource that would be. Alas, no, it's a tiny slice of stuff with limited availability windows.
We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.
Ugh, the catalog of Frontline is insanely huge. What, am I supposed to pay $24.99 per DVD of previous episodes? uh, no, I will not. Please PBS, give us real access to your catalog.
It costs lots of money to digitize and host the old stuff. And the non-profit organization doesn't lend itself well to selling access - it takes time and effort (read "money") to research with the lawyers whether "selling" or "membership fees" or whatever other business model is legally acceptable under the organization's structure.
But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.
It’s a bit annoying though when people complain about cutting federal funding for PBS under the guise of “saving Big Bird,” yet the taxpayer doesn’t have access to the fruits of those tax dollars. Similar to publicly funded research being hidden behind paywalls. If PBS has the money (some from taxes) to make the programming, they should have enough to provide the content for free either via their own streaming services or via commercial services.
So maybe we should require it to be public domain? We complain about the government using proprietary software like Microsoft Windows so why not complain about royalties and copyright licensing agreements?
The whole industry makes no sense to me.
It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).
They do have a free streaming service and they do stream stuff through YouTube. The availability of a show will depend on the licensing restrictions they have from the content producers though. It's the member stations that are the ones who are producing all of the content (or licensing it from other broadcasters (e.g. BBC) and production houses (e.g. Ken Burns).
If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.
If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.
I think hosting could be solved somewhat easily depending on how much control PBS actually has of their programming. They could go peer to peer, which makes total sense for a public good.
Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)
Torrent sites seem to manage it. I don't think it's about cost of digitizing but it certainly has to do with old business model having trouble to adapt.
FWIW a lot of work DOES go into making high-quality releases, running infra, writing tracker code and maintaining high quality, even on torrent sites. Sure, a dedicated small team of passionate individuals can do it in their free time, but it's still work. Also, hosting a torrent file is pretty different from running a streaming service, even if there are more or less turn-key video streaming pipelines out there these days (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ / https://www.ooyala.com/ / https://www.anvato.com/ / https://streamspot.com/ depending on what you're trying to do , live vs hosted content vs subscription vs something more custom )
In Germany it was even worse. The public broadcasters launched a huge portal where you could watch pretty much everything in their catalog. The private broadcasters sued and won and now content is only available for two weeks after it was shown on TV. We paid for it to be produced by tax money, yet private companies were allowed to lock it up!
In Norway the public broadcaster have everything available for streaming. Well, as long as it's produced by the broadcaster at least. When it's produced by external studios things can get a bit complicated, but it seems like they've achieved agreements with most studios that produce content for the broadcaster the last couple of years. Even content the broadcaster have bought is usually available for at least two weeks, but I imagine it depends on the contract with the rights holder.
Pretty much the same with SVT in Sweden. They also have a site called ”öppet arkiv” (open archive) claiming to be one of the world’s largest TV archives.
As the other commentator has stated, the vast majority revenue for PBS is by member contributions, donations of broadcast rights, and distribution fees. In 2018, members gave $197,552,000 while public grants and contributions were $105,336,000. A quick look at their revenues suggests that public grants and contributions only make up ~16% of revenues for PBS. Without asking for $60/year for Passport (which you also get if you're a member) they wouldn't be able to do most of what they do.
>Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit
Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of rent-seeking? They explicitly don't want rent.
(Yes, I know the economic definition, I'm just punning)
I guess it really depends whether you consider a DRM-protected digital asset to be something which is possible to own vs rent. The button might say "purchase", but it's really still a rental.
(Yes, I say this from the point of view of someone who has "purchased" dozens of videogames on PSN and Steam, fully aware that any of them could have the plug pulled on them at any time...)
That depends on who the "they" is. Movie distribution companies want to maximize the value of their product, and that means marketing and advertising, exclusivity periods, product tie-ins and collaborations with different streaming providers. They know that they can get the audience numbers from anywhere, but the question is how much a particular streaming provider will pay over a competitor.
So movie distribution companies are certainly engaging in rent-seeking behavior–only you're not the customer. The streaming providers are.
What should an equivalent of the first sale doctrine for digital content look like?
It seems like we need something new here to cover things like streaming content, ebooks, digital delivery, drm, etc.
I'm sure I'm not the only one annoyed by how the world has moved from selling to renting, especially when services and the companies providing them seem more ephemeral than ever.
Cross-platform compatibility hurts exclusivity and revenue protection. Its why Disney et al are trying to claw back ground against the Internet with their own subscription based viewing platforms. Trying to get media companies to agree to almost anything that hurts their bottom line is antithetical to their corporate charters, they know lock in, exclusivity, and rent seeking done right is the maximal revenue model they can manage under modern cultural constraints, and they are optimizing for it - some will fail to implement it successfully, but those that do will probably reap the most possible revenue for their given library of IP.
The implicit promise -- actually, occasionally made EXPLICITLY in marketing -- of high-speed broadband was that everything would be available, but the reverse has proven true. A person living in an urban area had a larger selection of movies available for rent in 1999 than they do today
The last DVD I rented from Netflix was "Iron Monkey." This movie is very hard to get your hands on otherwise. (If you search for the torrent, there's a good chance you won't get any viable results!)
My Netflix DVD queue was 100% movies I couldn't torrent / find available to buy. They would be at the top of my list for years, presumably one copy getting slowly making it's way around the country.
Netflix even had a production company called Red Envelope Entertainment that did some really great alt comedy movies (an early Zach Galifianakis special with the Netflix exec sitting front row with his Netflix hat on like a nerd, for example).
Most people don't actually care all that much what they watch. If one thing isn't available they watch something else. The (urban) people I know who have Netflix DVD subscriptions are movie buffs (ADDED: like myself). Others I know who have good Internet consider renting DVDs as something a bit weird.
This rings true to me. I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't care. But there is so much more content than I actually have time to watch that I can easily fill my watching time with something I enjoy even out of the fairly limited streaming catalogs available.
The limitations absolutely do bother me in principle, and on occasion I get frustrated about not being able to find something specific (then I have to decide if I care enough to go try to find it from another source). But in general I do not find myself suffering from a shortage of video content to watch at any given time.
It's true to me to a degree as well. There are streaming TV shows I'd like to take a look at but there is also a limit to how many services I'll subscribe to. At some point, I just say I can do without.
Most of the video rental business for new releases wasn't carried out under the first sale doctrine, because video stores worked out a deal where they could purchase videos before they were available for sale, at inflated prices.
I complain about how long it takes my guests to pick a movie on Netflix + Hulu + Apple + whatever else I have this week, but if I'm being perfectly honest we used to spend more time at Blockbuster. Especially if you included transit time.
Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.
Really? Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases. The old pop and mom video store usually had way more options (because they didn't throw anything away most of the time).
There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.
"Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases."
This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.
They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).
For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.
Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.
The store itself was big enough, but their use of space was not very efficient.
I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.
My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.
Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock.
> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.
"Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock."
I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.
Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.
Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.
> Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on
But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.
At a certain point, Blockbuster had some sort of "guaranteed to be in stock" kind of thing, which meant they would just have walls and walls of one single movie.
It could very much be a function of town size, and year. There was always a prominent and large section dedicated to recent releases but once you wandered off into Sci Fi or Action or Horror, there were a lot of classics and quite a few B movies available.
It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.
Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.
The interface is slow (though I think the actual design is decently usable but nothing great).
Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).
Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.
Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.
Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.
You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.
So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.
As I tried to articulate this I realized that Hulu and Netflix now have the same problem. In netflix, right arrow, up and down always mean the same thing, but left changes meaning in an unpredictable way. In Hulu it’s the up button.
To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.
They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.
Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.
I miss actual 1-5 star ratings. I want to know if a movie is rated by a majority of people to be more than 4 stars. If its not I don't want to waste my time watching it. I don't care if the movie is rated to be a 95% match for my wife.
The star rating was never the value of everyone's opinion, it's always been based on what Netflix thought you would rate the film[1]. So the % match hasn't really changed. Being able to give an honest opinion though, has. Now it's just a binary "yes" or "no", which is super annoying.
I miss it too, but I expect that the vast majority of people only rated films they watched as 5 stars, 1 stars, or no rating (meh, or the same as 3 stars). Most things I watch still don’t get a rating, so it’s really a reduction of 5 levels to 3, not a binary.
At one point they had the star ratings where you could see two different star ratings. The primary one was of users like you and then in smaller print could see average of all users. Going back even further you could see see you friends' ratings of a title.
Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.
Bullshit. They change it within a single session and if I’m ever on a room with a netflix employee they’re not leaving until the understand on a very profound level how infuriating this is.
If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.
My family moved around a lot, and I saw many types in the US, including Blockbusters with almost nothing but newest releases, Blockbusters with almost every movie & video game I could imagine, and several in between.
I remember Blockbuster seeming to have lots of selection in the 90s and then they beat out a bunch of smaller stores and chains, then seemed to have less incentive not to suck and by the mid 2000s was as you say, limited, mostly new releases.
I cancelled my netflix account because I realized I was spending more time looking for things to watch than actually watching things. I was spending more time with netflix in a bored/annoyed state than an entertained state.
I'm finding myself in HBO way more than Netflix these days. I think part of it is the library science side of it. When I go into the HBO app, it's one swipe and one click to continue watching the last thing I was watching. Everything else is well organized too, with good separation between the list of all content in categories vs the content they're promoting.
In Netflix, not only is it hard to find the last thing I was watching, but everything else is mixed together and worse: it moves around nearly every time I open the app. An endless amount of categories and lists seem to be invented all the time and are at the top of the interface where my "continue watching" category should be every single time. I get it, you're creative Netflix, and you want to promote stuff but that's not as helpful as consistency... and the proof is that you're losing me.
Let me finish what I'm in the middle of and promote your stuff afterwards, or at least have a consistent shortcut to get to the continue watching category much more easily.
Me too. I distinctly remember sitting for 30 minutes trying to pick something and then just browsing the web and not finding anything. There were movies I'd want to watch, it's just that Netflix didn't have them.
I plan on joining again for a bit, watch a few shows they made in the years since I left, then probably dropping them again.
I spend A LOT of time downloading and organizing my movie collection, but somehow I enjoy even that time, alongside the occasions I can watch a whole movie (between job and family obligations)
I can't recall going to Blockbuster to rent something I had already seen. Usually more time was spent when they introduced the walls of empty boxes. Sometimes you found a case which served as representing a physical copy behind the counter, while most of the time was waiting for employees to check their return slot to see if what you wanted was there without being scanned back into inventory yet.
There are many, many parts of the USA where the 'high speed' internet service is somewhere between 1mbps to 3mbps maximum, or slower, assuming there's any broadband at all.
Internet speeds plummet when you're in most rural areas, often even semi-rural smaller towns that are 30-45 minutes outside of major cities have comically slow internet.
Blockbuster had exclusive rental agreements where they could rent movies for weeks before Redbox. I'm not sure where the first-sale doctrine came into play there, but this was a reality of the time when Redbox began to make a big splash in the physical rental scene.
I think the fact that renters had more choices in 1999 is because Blockbuster was a near monopoly and nobody was really challenging their status quo outside of some regional shops. All of the price changes happened as Redbox entered the scene, not Netflix streaming (though Netflix mailers were a challenge as well). So even without these streaming services you'd be seeing the same BS with only being able to buy a film for several weeks before it would be available to rent.
> Blockbuster had exclusive rental agreements where they could rent movies for weeks before Redbox. I'm not sure where the first-sale doctrine came into play there, but this was a reality of the time when Redbox began to make a big splash in the physical rental scene.
First sale only works effectively once the studio starts selling copies at retail. After that, when anyone could go down to Target, or Walmart, or Best Buy and buy retail copies, then so could Redbox, and there was nothing the studios could do to stop them.
I believe that the way things like the Blockbuster exclusive deals worked is that the studios would make a deal with Blockbuster to sell copies to Blockbuster weeks before they released them for purchase at retail.
As usual publishers make everything they can to make experience shitty.
Before streaming became a thing, you could download movies and music through P2P networks. Streaming became a huge success, piracy became less of an issue, because many people didn't have problem with throwing $7 a month to use Netflix.
Now once again you get much better experience if you pirate. That's the only real competitor, can you imagine how bad it would be if there was no piracy?
It is getting bad though. Less piracy means it’s much harder to find long tail films. The number of seedless torrents on private trackers is much higher now than it used to be.
Long tail is a failure point of the torrent system. And it feels it's possible to solve, by someone with good programming skills , and some cooperation from a popular bittorent software.
How is it a programming issue? The content needs to be hosted (in a decentralized way). And, as a given title becomes less less popular--because it's older or people are just generally not torrenting as much--the odds that someone will have it available for downloading decreases. Essentially torrenting depends on people randomly making content available as sort of a quid pro quo and and streaming makes using torrents generally less interesting for a lot of people.
Well, in addition to using your bandwidth, it's exposing you to potential copyright claims through your ISP if the sharing is discovered. So there are good reasons why people don't necessarily want share files willy-nilly. I'd very leery of a torrent client that defaulted to potentially unsafe--for me--behavior.
Re Copyright claims: it's a good point. Some countries have tough ISP's and laws.
But in other places, this isn't a big issue.
But to share a file, usually you have to keep it in your file list - and that takes up visual space, attention, and bandwidth/storage, so you just delete it.
But what if the software limited bandwidth/storage for such files to 5% of your total, and managed that in a way that wouldn't clutter or take any attention ?
Maybe in a different tab - so you'd still have full control, if needed ?
To my understanding, some torrent sites have methods to incentivize downloading (and seeding) torrents whose seed-count is getting low.
For example, one offers a multiplier on seed credit for low seed-count torrents, and another does the same but also prominently features a small selection of them in the front page (programmatically) to motivate users to preserve them.
The underlying issue persists, but there are some methods to address it, and perhaps more could be devised.
One factor may be people making space for UHD discs, but unless you try requesting reseeds on the unseeded files I'm not sure you can read that much into it.
I would pay for a service where a company gives me a PO Box-like address, and I can have other DVD/BR-by-mail services target that address, and anything that gets sent to that address gets ripped to a server for private one-time streaming. ("one time" meaning you start a watch-session and can pause/rewind at will, but once you've passed through all the frames once and hit the-credits-minus-a-minute-or-so, you can't rewind any more—so you can't start watching from the beginning any more—and the movie will get deleted a few days later.)
Would that be legal? It's a lot closer to Pay Per View than to traditional streaming.
Presuming this company existed in many countries instead of just my own, and that I could get something sent to any of their receiving centers in order to stream it... this would enable me to watch stuff that Netflix only has available (on DVD) in countries that are not my own. It's a physical-media VPN.
If such a service also provided a more general permanent digitization service for media you actually own (where you would send them your own discs, or forward them any random CD/DVD/BR you buy off the Internet, and they would rip the disc out of the packaging it comes in, digitize it, put it on a server for you, and then destroy the original), then—in combination with the multiple-countries thing—I could use this to consume content that doesn't have a streaming version, only a physical edition; and where that physical edition isn't sold for export, but only in its country of origin. (Think: limited-release pressings of albums from indie bands; movies from film festivals that never ended up seeing general release; etc.)
Essentially, it's like getting some physical media sent to Archive.org for expert digitization+preservation, but without distribution to the general public, just to the person who paid to do the preservation.
(Though, they could certainly sit on their own copy of the digitized work indefinitely, never giving it to anyone or acknowledging that they have it, waiting for the day it either enters the public domain, or they acquire distribution rights to it, whereupon they can put it into a public catalogue.)
>We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix
You might want to look into this again. If you can get Netflix's highest quality 1080p streams they have much higher bitrates than what you can rent or buy on itunes.
But you are 100% right about availability. Streaming is almost a myth if you're like me and want to watch a bunch of unpopular titles.
Yup. I live in Canada and I was quite sad when RedBox left us because of the Target collapse. It was on my way home and was quarter of the price of a streaming rental, and full of new releases.
A person using the Pirate Bay 10 years ago had access to a larger selection than someone subscribing to Netflix today.
The copyright industry just has a different agenda than we do. We think when technology improves we'll get more selection, faster at higher quality. The copyright industry thinks when technology improves about what new ways they can restrict the public so that lawyers can continue to make money from the hard work of long dead authors and artists.
I'm afraid a similar thing will happen with video games in the next 20 years, mark my words. I remember when you could buy a video game for 60 dollars and keep it forever. You still can, but I would not be surprised if this eventually stopped being the case.
With mobile games, developers are starting to realize that they can get far more money from the addicts who need to play 4 hours a day by throttling gameplay to 20 minutes a day, and forcing them to buy gems in order to bypass the throttle. This could get worse with things like Google Stadia if they decide to monetize their platform in a "pay as you play" sort of model, where you can pay, say, $4.50 for 5 hours of playtime.
With some games you can not or at least will not soon. The first few waves of games with online features now have their online parts shut down. A lot of games are online only now so when those games shut their servers it will be all over.
I watched the google stadia announcement video and I was amazed by what they accomplished, but your comment cuts through all of that and points to a future where google sets the artistic priorities via financial incentive... the way they currently do on YouTube.
Yes. I regularly see failures and weird issues that are technically "impossible" according to the spec in things like TCP/IP, HTTP, as well as higher application layers.
And trying to convince someone like Google or Microsoft that their site or service is not very robust when things start getting lossy is a complete waste of time, even if you have a massive following on social media people who dare to complain about not having megabits of data are completely ignored.
> "People assume that our customers must either be super seniors or folks that live in the boonies with no internet access," she says. "Actually, our biggest hot spots are the coasts, like the Bay Area and New York."
Not surprising. Netflix, Comcast, Amazon Prime and other video streaming service charge you the same as the DVD rental, but force you to watch the entire video within 48 hours from 1st starting it.
Personally I find this very annoying (why do the do this? What does it cost them to let me watch it within a week or so and not 48 hours?).
Esp long movies like "Wolf of Wall Street" are not practical to watch in a single sitting.
I have a Samsung DVD player that I got for 40$ and depending on the movie, I find it's cheaper or same price to actually BUY the DVD from Amazon.com (with prime). Ex: Wolf of Wall Street was $4.99 to stream and view within 48 hours, or keep paying $4.99 until you finish it. The same DVD ( NEW ) was selling for $5.49 on Amazon, Free shipping so I ended up buying the DVD.
Oh, I took OPs comments to mean several sittings per movie. While Lawrence of Arabia is an outlier imo, most Indian movies have an intermission (and make up the majority of what I watch)
Yeah, most movies hit almost 2.5 hours. For me, many movies build up really well to the intermission and then take some time to get back to that intensity and setting up for the climax. Then how well the climax is done determines where it ends up, rating wise.
It's also standard to spend money on snacks during the intermission.
I assume he or she has a child. I know for us, with a two year old, it's very rare to have 3 hours of uninterrupted free time. We used to be big movie watchers, but no longer.
> Netflix, Comcast, Amazon Prime and other video streaming service charge you the same as the DVD rental, but force you to watch the entire video within 48 hours from 1st starting it.
I haven't encountered this behavior in Netflix; under what circumstances are you experiencing it?
EDIT: A cursory search informed me that this seems to apply to viewing streaming movies which have been downloaded to a device and watched while offline. The expiration timer is reset when the viewing device has a WAN connection. I guess this is a mechanism to discourage hoarding a large number of movies, then cancelling your subscription? Not sure.
> "People assume that our customers must either be super seniors or folks that live in the boonies with no internet access," she says. "Actually, our biggest hot spots are the coasts, like the Bay Area and New York."
"Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps"
I still subscribe to the 1 DVD at a time plan because the selection is so much wider than instant watch (in the US at least).
After 10 years of subscribing to Netflix I can only think of a handful of movies that weren't available on DVD. I don't have any hard numbers in front of me but it feels like there's maybe 20% of Netflix's catalog on instant watch vs what they have on DVD -- at least in popular genres like sci-fi, comedy, action and adventure.
For those in the US, something I have found pleasantly surprising is that the local library (this is a "small" library with only two branches) feels this niche quite well. I have been able to get recent releases as well as it having a pretty healthy supply of general interest and some specialize interest movies. They have an online catalog so I can search and set a hold on a movie, book, or other physical media so I can go in, grab it, and go. Many of them allow you to rent an obscene amount of movies at once (the limit at mine is 20 movies check out at a time), and it's free! On top of that, they partner with a digital service that also allows you to "rent" a set amount of movies/shows/ebooks per month (for free!).
Something I have not tried is to see what happens if they don't have a movie/book/show that I want. I imagine they have a process to request them buying it if there's enough interest.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadBasically, if it is available on disk, Netlfix can mail it to you. And their mailing service is pretty efficient. It's rare to have to wait long to get something.
The only annoyance is that occasionally you get a 'rental only' disk that doesn't have the extras.
Unfortunately, they're really letting their back catalog rot. An awful lot of things I saved in my DVD queue at some point are no longer available. In many cases, they're still available to buy but Netflix doesn't have them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcIocprvoA
Edit: because it looks like it will turn into a wasteland after disney leaves
However, in practice, large rental companies (like Netflix) likely DO have contracts that make it easier and cheaper for them to get large numbers of discs without buying them on the retail market. But at least the first sale doctrine provides a fallback if contracts fail. I think I read somewhere that in the past Netflix has had to refer to the retail market for certain titles.
Edit: I also wonder if the unit price difference will ever be big enough that Netflix has to charge a premium for those who want the excluded titles?
So they definitely have agreements with the studios/distributors to get discs for the rental market, and it looks like that agreement is covering more and more titles. For the Marvel titles - it's about 50:50 (in perfect balance..)
> The defendants, Zediva, self-described as a DVD "rental" service, served its customers with access to DVDs played from their data center where each DVD was streamed through its individual DVD player for up to four hours. Zediva customers did not have access to the digital file.
> The court held that the "public interest is served by issuance of a preliminary injunction" in order to uphold copyright protections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
Wow, was that ever a stitch up though; I have to vent(!):
>"The non-public nature of the place of the performance has no bearing on whether or not those who enjoy the performance constitute 'the public' under the transmit clause", stated the court. It did not matter whether Zediva's customers were using the service at different times and in different places. //
Paraphrasing that "the clause requires the transmission to be to the public, the fact that here they're not transmitting to the public [but to paying customers only, in private] is not material". Way to take an explicit requirement and hand-wave it away there judge.
What I'd love to know is how the motivations work in this sort of thing in USA, like do the politicians get paid by the media corps, and the politicians choose the judges, or is there a way the media corps pay off the judges direct [perhaps "consulting" jobs when they retire?].
>The court also refused to adopt the Second Circuit's volitional requirement //
What a surprise!
>Last, even though the plaintiffs required their licensees to provide a high quality movie-watching experience to the VOD customers, the defendants being non-licensed, were not obligated to meet such standards and provided sub-optimal customer experience that tarnished customers' perception of VOD as an attractive option for viewing the Copyrighted Works. //
Except that's, again, exactly backwards if the VOD providers were better then they'd get the business. The defendant is paying full price for the DVD; the DVD is the quality the complainant made it - likelihood of irreparable injury is close to zero.
I'll bet the court did a quick survey "would you like cheaper, easier access to dvd rentals at home?" and all the public said "no way, stop that shit ASAP!".
Not sure about Netflix, but studios have tried to squeeze Redbox before by telling their distributors not to sell to them until X days after release, though.
A few years back, they used to have a button to check for DVDs and I did, and a lot of stuff that isn't up for streaming is not an issue for DVDs.
The quality is really good on some titles, like the latest F1 docu-series. Others have terrible quality, like the original planet earth. Lots of stuttering and compression artifacts.
Like another commenter somewhere, I'd be happy with smooth, artifact free 1080p over 4k any day.
Uneven frame-timing, fo sure, but does it really use 3:2 pulldown?
IIRC the monitor, at least when using most of players on PC to playback, will just display/repeat each video frame uneven times, but no 3:2 pulldown, i.e. interlacing two frames together to generate 1 more frame every 4 frames, is involved.
I'm definitely not an expert on this topic though so please feel free to correct me!
I never understood the appeal of watching Netflix in a browser?
Why let DRM infect your browser? Why not use closed media services in dedicated, closed-source apps for such things and keep your browser clean?
To date I’ve honestly never seen anyone access Netflix through a browser. It’s all native apps.
What’s the appeal?
To really put this in perspective, the picture quality that Netflix provides is worse than pre-digital analog film projection. Dracula originally screened in cinemas in 1992 looked (far) better than what you stream on Netflix right now in 2019. Now I know the consumer has always traded convenience for picture quality, hence the popularity of early home media such as VHS, but that was bound by the limitation of the technology back then. Right now, there's zero technical reason for why quality can't be better, ignoring bandwidth. It's a digression and the fact it's so tolerated makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm not even a film buff, it's just that it's apparent like night and day, like a re-compressed jpg is.
Used VUDU when it first came out and recall being super impressed with its quality though. They have an HDX subscription that uses double+ the bitrate as their HD apparently..
Likewise. There are many titles available through Netflix DVD that are not available through Netflix streaming. Just off the top of my head you have Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7), The Wire, True Detective, Fargo and The Expanse.
In hindsight, this would have been an excellent move. Each org could have focused better on their respective service. But now the media-by-mail half is just crashing in the space of the streaming service. They have no incentive to market it, and will pull the plug the moment it is unprofitable.
I love streaming TV shows, but for movies I just don't like it. I don't even know why.
I can't really say from experience since I live in Europe but I've seen people from the US complain about data caps on regular internet for a while and I guess netflix will eat up that quite fast especially if you watch 4k movies.
How large is the average cap on US ISPs?
This isn't a thing in the US. You've seen Canadians complain.
That’s only around 34GB per day..
I feel like I should state that I’m against all data caps. Where I live we don’t have data caps on home connections and it’s somewhat affordable to get unlimited LTE SIM’s (about €80/US$90).
I don’t see why there should be a limit. Connections are usually sold in different tiers which are advertised with a bandwidth speed. If something is advertised as having 100Mbps then I should be able to use that connection continuously 24/7 with that speed or a close approximation at least. So it depends on the advertised speed. For 100Mbps that would come out to roughly 60TB/month.
But in no way should it be 1TB in my opinion. It’s trivial to reach that especially because many connections aren’t used by a single person. 4k content is available and should be able to be consumed without having to worry about hitting caps. A family of four can easily hit 3-5TB whereas a single person might need less.
I have Comcast in NJ and there’s no cap as far as I can tell. I have been above 2 TB almost every month for a while.
I myself am lucky enough to have great broadband, but I've been getting annoyed with how series will move on/off the service (I see monthly "What's leaving Netflix this month" articles in some places), I'm annoyed with how Netflix has made their system "pushier" (such as constantly looping ads), how they gave me an ability to build a personal want-to-watch list and then hide that away making it hard to benefit from, and in particular, how I now have to balance multiple subscription services if I want to see the shows I want to see.
Side Note: As annoyed as I am with Netflix from time to time, they beat the pants off of Hulu when it comes to interface, and remain nicer than Amazon.
Meanwhile dipshits like Warner, Sony, Disney hold everyone hostage.
There's a big difference between something which is copyrighted and, say, something which is patented. A patent is a discovery, which implies that it could have been discovered by somebody else, so I think it's pretty reasonable that patents don't last as long as copyright. Copyrighted works, on the other hand, literally could not exist without the specific people who created them. Their existence it tied, intrinsically, to the creator. If Prince never existed, Purple Rain would have never come to exist. So I think something approaching the life of the creator is reasonable and reflects this special existential relationship between the creator and the work.
Just my opinion. FWIW.
Why? If the creator actually makes things that people want, you should incentivise them to make more things. Giving them lifetime copyright disincentivises that. A limited (say 5-, 10-year) copyright allows them to profit from successes, but prevents them from resting on their laurels from a single success - not because they do or don't 'deserve' to, but because we want them to create more things during their lifetime.
The original point of copyright was to encourage creators to create (if their creations could be immediately 'used' for free by others, they would have much less reason to create in the first place). It has little public value otherwise.
Try applying your reasoning to a trademark. If you have two companies using the same trademark to create identical products, there is no affect on the value to the public. But there is a huge change to the value of the person or company that originally started using that trademark. And the reason we restrict the use of that trademark is because the originator put a bunch of effort into making it valuable and we recognize that this effort should result in some kind of ownership because that is what's fair.
But I'm not making any argument about trademarks, or physical property ownership. My arguments are about copyright, and I'm not very interested in conflating copyright with trademarks and patents and ownership of land &c.
> because that is what's fair
This is where it gets tricky of course. What's fair, exactly, and to whom? (Again, though, I'm not interested in talking about trademarks.)
But whatever.
Why do others have the right to derive enjoyment or economic benefit from the works of creators?
I think it's fair for me to say that when I am talking about creators of novels and films etc. and copyright limits w.r.t. encouraging/discouraging creators from creating I shouldn't have to talk about trademarks, which have very little to do with the sort of creation I'm talking about.
So if I am understanding you correctly, your stance is that the creator of some copyrightable work has no inherent right to control the use of that work? And you think that the only reason they should be allowed to control the use of their work is to incentivize creation of new works, not because they deserve a share of the value created by the use of their work (a song used in an advertisement, for example)?
To be clear, I’m asking for your opinion as a judge of moral issues, not for the legal theory behind copyright.
> your stance is that the creator of some copyrightable work has no inherent right to control the use of that work? And you think that the only reason they should be allowed to control the use of their work is to incentivize creation of new works, not because they deserve a share of the value created by the use of their work (a song used in an advertisement, for example)?
No, in general I think that people have a right to a share of the value created by their work (copyrightable and otherwise). But in practice this is often not what happens, even with copyright. Your example of a song used in an ad: generally the advertiser would just purchase the rights to the song outright, and so the creator wouldn't necessarily really get anything like a 'share' of the value created by use of their work, but just a flat fee.
Sure, they don't literally get a percentage of the value created with their work, but the basis for thinking they deserve to be paid at all is that they created a thing that is being used to create value for someone else.
Furthermore, I think that if you drill down into the justification for why creators should be paid at all (despite the fact that someone else using their work does not deprive the creator of it's use for themself), you'll find that it is ultimately tied to the fact that a given creative work simply could not exist without it's creator. Literally no other person in existence is capable of making that exact work. And when that is the justification for why a creator deserves to have some control over the use of their work, I think life of the creator is a reasonable timeframe for the creator to maintain legal control over the use of their work (accepting that it may not be justified for this control to be absolute). I think reasonable people could argue that such a timeframe is too long by pointing to issues of public benefit, but I don't think life of the creator is completely unjustified or unreasonable on its face.
Personally, I think the original US Copyright Act of 1790 -- based on an even earlier British statute -- had a pretty good approach: a 14-year term granted upon publication, renewable for a second (but only a second) 14-year term by a living author.
We primarily still have the paid for DVD service because there's a whole bunch of movies and TV shows that just aren't available via streaming services. For example we were just using it for the final series of True Blood, because all the previous series are on Amazon Prime, but not the last one.
There's a lot of classic movies missing from online services, as well, particularly MGM ones.
I would bet that the majority of those 2.7M subscribers joined before Netflix streaming began and never saw a reason to cancel.
This doesn't seem right.
A 50GB blu-ray that is 2 hours long can have a maximum bitrate of 55mbit. So if your claim is correct, you'd need a 100GB blu-ray (which exists) for a 2 hour movie, which doesn't match my experience, especially for 1080p.
I bought a lot of Blu-rays (obsessed with "owning" the good movies which I then rip - I extract the original streams without reencoding and then I put the files on my mediaserver) and the biggest 1080p-file I have is the one of "Interstellar" being 39GB (original video and original 3 audio tracks and some subtitles), followed by "the dark knight rises" of 35GBs and otherwise all the rest is between 10-30GBs depending on the movie.
Usually when I play a movie in the living room I see spikes of 2.5MB/s transferred data on the mediaservers, and this is original content ripped 1:1.
I've streamed 4K content from Youtube on my TV that has looked utterly stunning.
LG OLED Tvs are pretty nice, but they have color banding issues. Also have really good contrast.
Fire up an average Netflix show, and the banding is absolutely insane, causing one to immediately blame the TV (since it DOES have documented banding issues). But...it has nothing to do with the TV: it just makes the low quality of the stream very obvious. Watch some 4k HDR stuff on Youtube and it looks fine (there is some banding, but it's much, MUCH harder to see).
Oh shit didn't know Redbox did this. Wish Netflix did 4k Blu rays
Are there any alternative discs-by-mail services out there that actually care about and want to be providing such a service?
It's not by mail, but most libraries have DVDs and Blurays. They often have countywide agreements so you can get a title shipped from across the city to your local library for free.
The implicit promise -- actually, occasionally made EXPLICITLY in marketing -- of high-speed broadband was that everything would be available, but the reverse has proven true. A person living in an urban area had a larger selection of movies available for rent in 1999 than they do today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business, but streaming is governed by different agreements -- which leads to ridiculous "availability windows."
We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix, but you still get the availability shifts. Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit, and it didn't (and couldn't) happen when movies were tied to a physical object.
If you want a deep library of rentals, DVD/BR by mail is still better. If you want better quality, DVD/BR by mail is the best option. And obviously if you live somewhere with shitty connectivity (basically the entire rural US), then by-mail might be your ONLY real option.
Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?
It’s like they see themselves as competitors.
I've ordered books from libraries thousands of miles away. It takes a few weeks for the books to arrive, possibly because they go 4th Class mail. But they get there eventually.
In my area, about 40 regional libraries are linked and will ship most stuff to the library of your choice. They also accept returns anywhere.
It’s fabulous except for new bestsellers.
Having both a family member and a couple friends who are/have been librarians, I seriously doubt it is a competitive instinct. I'm sure there are exceptions, but most librarians are genuinely dedicated to information freedom. (They certainly aren't getting MLS degrees for the money...)
I doubt they'll ever mail it direct to your home, though.
They are small, so super responsive. I had gotten halfway through a film and was interrupted, came back the next day and it was off catalog, so I gave some feedback about wishing for more transparency.
They sent out a schedule of movies leaving to all subscribes like the next day.
I used to go to the college library and get videos pretty often. I'd usually rip them to my laptop and return them in the same day, letting me get way more movies than I could watch.
Earlier this week I returned a new release that my wife ordered from the library. She waited several months for it to become available.
Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep. The other problem is that the library system holds back a number of copies for people who walk in, which I totally understand. Doesn't help my wife, though.
Also IIRC there's no limit on DVD preorders. Conversely the Overdrive kindle lending service maxes you out at 20 and usually has reasonable (well, sometimes 3-6 week) wait times.
True, but libraries are more my goto for things that aren't on streaming. For example I wanted to watch "Reanimator" and none of my steaming services had it but the local library had a DVD.
For new stuff I'm willing to pay a dollar or two on Amazon. (Especially since you can earn that easily by picking a slowing shipping speed on nonessential items... so order a dvd the library doesn't have, get a credit for a current release, and rent an old favorite to tide you over.)
It's not perfect, but in my experience you're often paying for convenience, and being willing to be slightly inconvenienced pays dividends.
$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.
I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.
If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.
I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.
Also, from my experience, many library DVDs tend to be scratched up (especially popular DVDs), while Netflix DVDs tend to be better (though some still don't play on my DVD player, for some reason).
Possibly because you don’t trust the government.
With that said, I'd think that Redbox basically does Netflix-by-mail more efficiently, no? It seems like the speed of the mail service guarantees that it will take at least a few days between you sending your finished movies back before new ones arrive, as opposed to driving to your nearest grocery store or gas station to pick something else.
Not much there at any given time though.
The selection was tiny compared to the independents they mostly priced out of existence, then became the most expensive place to rent once that was done. They had major films sooner for about as much as going to the cinema. That's it. Their only selling point. They got shot of old stuff far too soon so you could never actually find old stuff in Blockbuster unless it was 2001 or Wizard of Oz.
The corner shop near us that rented, and next door but 2 to Blockbuster, kept going years after Blockbuster closed. Having experienced Blockbuster in 3 or 4 places I've lived, I gave a little cheer when they went.
I can get a BluRay from Family Video and a pizza from Marcos delivered to my door in under an hour with a $10 or more purchase from Marcos. It ends up being a cheap date night with my fiancee.
I rented a lot of movies from Family Video in high school. There was a location about halfway between my house and my girlfriends. It closed at Midnight, and my curfew was midnight, so I stopped by right before closing almost every night one summer. They had a deal where you got an old release for free with every new release and it was like 3 dollars.
That was a fun summer.
My comment just worked better with Blockbuster since Blockbuster is/was the poster child of that era of video rental. :)
Netflix is a Trojan horse. The whole business model is moving to in-house stuff, and each of the big content owners will stand up their own platforms.
I am curious about how streaming will develop over the next few years as more services come online. I doubt the average person is going to want to maintain that many (expensive) subscription services. I already dislike the juggle between Netflix, Prime, and Hulu.
First, we got the convenience. Only when most everything went online and the alternatives had faded to irrelevance did the availability start to go away. Now we consumers have less than we did before.
Long lines were annoying, but the worst was having to drive to and from the store. The independent video stores in my area were much further away than the nearest Blockbuster, so Blockbuster was more convenient but their crappy video selection made going to the independents instead worth it for me, and Blockbuster was the store of last resort.
Once I started using Netflix's DVD service, I never set foot a brick and mortar video rental store again. Why would I drive somewhere when I had an excellent DVD selection at my fingertips that would mail the DVD to me?
My guy, the rest of your comment is great. You've gotta realize how wildly useless this line is, though.
Bad service exists and video store employees were known for being in this stereotype, as were theater employees. You just got lucky.
Context: I was one of those employees, and I worked in multiple regions of the USA and have conferred with friends who worked at Blockbuster UK as well.
I've also never experienced a long line at a video store, despite it being a regular Friday night thing for me to do for many years...
Gotta say, the thing I miss most is the ease of browsing through a curated back catalogue. Netflix and co are terribly awful by comparison. Several hundred square metres vs a 55" television screen...
for some it is purely impulse renting. do not confuse the immediacy of the experience with the ability to find something to stream, it is a whole different experience
Walking Tall? Giant? Gaslight? Beach Blanket Bingo anyone? Return of the Dragon? Ran?
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Walking-Tall/60034554
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Gaslight/70074384
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Beach-Blanket-Bingo-How-to-Stu...
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Return-of-the-Dragon/60020726
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Ran/60027429
I went ahead and added the different version of Gaslight to my queue though. Thanks, stranger.
Oh well, I guess I can check the local library.
I've read that Netflix is simply not interested in offering movies, preferring tv series. When I subscribed (in Europe) the selection was very limited.
We gave up on Netflix DVD when about half of our saved for later queue flipped over to queue of DVDs they no longer have.
It used to be that Netflix competed with Blockbuster by carrying movies Blockbuster did not rent. Netflix was originally the movie service for movie lovers and Blockbuster was the service for new releases. This was before Netflix also started carrying new releases. Now if I want to see a movie that was made more than 5 years ago, it is no longer available.
It would be tough to get studio buy-in, but it would be amazing to have a version or Redbox that burned DVDs in place.
From a logistics perspective it would be ideal if they could use disks that degraded after 5 plays, but they could also just accept disks back, read them, and destroy them.
I am extrapolating from seeing a number of battered rancher pickup trucks whose occupants are clustered around Redbox kiosks in small towns in the western US.
They also have a deal with the post office that in some areas the post office will notify Netflix when they pick up your disk so that Netflix can send a new out before they get your old one back.
Also, Netflix has various plans: you could rent one DVD at a time, two DVDs at a time, three DVDs at a time (and maybe more). If you have three DVDs out at a time, and watch one DVD per day and mail it DVDs back as you watch them, you won't have to wait long before your next DVD arrives in the mail, possibly while you're still watching the rest.
In my own experience, watching a DVD per day is pretty ambitious. Odds are you'll be watching way less than that, and there'll be multiple days between watching DVDs, in which case waiting for your next DVD to arrive in the mail won't realy make any difference.
;-)
No, actually, because the killer aspect of DVD-by-mail is the depth of selection. Redbox machines are even MORE limited.
First sale only applies if the video rental business purchases physical copies. It is/was not unusual for a large rental business to, rather than buy copies, to license the work for distribution during a particular time/area. That allowed them to burn/build DVDs to meet demand and replaced broken disks as needed. When the license was over, the DVDs were destroyed per the licensing contract.
So infuriating. We were surcharged and paid billions into fixing this. The universal service fund went into CEO compensation and not much else.
We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.
WTF does public television think its doing with this strategy? Makes me want to pull funding.
But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.
The whole industry makes no sense to me.
It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).
If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.
If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.
Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)
The content (and associated bandwidth demands) comes from those seeding the torrent.
Like it was already mentioned, this was about unfair business advantage, not about the actual copyright.
[1] https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000043556-...
https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/PBS_...
Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of rent-seeking? They explicitly don't want rent.
(Yes, I know the economic definition, I'm just punning)
(Yes, I say this from the point of view of someone who has "purchased" dozens of videogames on PSN and Steam, fully aware that any of them could have the plug pulled on them at any time...)
So movie distribution companies are certainly engaging in rent-seeking behavior–only you're not the customer. The streaming providers are.
(Reasonably good pun though)
It seems like we need something new here to cover things like streaming content, ebooks, digital delivery, drm, etc.
I'm sure I'm not the only one annoyed by how the world has moved from selling to renting, especially when services and the companies providing them seem more ephemeral than ever.
There is no reason why a license should be locked to a platform. IMO it’s a great area to regulate.
IMO making Amazon, Netflix, etc even more of a commodity is in the interests of the producers and consumers of content.
The last DVD I rented from Netflix was "Iron Monkey." This movie is very hard to get your hands on otherwise. (If you search for the torrent, there's a good chance you won't get any viable results!)
Netflix even had a production company called Red Envelope Entertainment that did some really great alt comedy movies (an early Zach Galifianakis special with the Netflix exec sitting front row with his Netflix hat on like a nerd, for example).
The limitations absolutely do bother me in principle, and on occasion I get frustrated about not being able to find something specific (then I have to decide if I care enough to go try to find it from another source). But in general I do not find myself suffering from a shortage of video content to watch at any given time.
Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.
There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.
This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.
They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).
For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.
Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.
I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.
My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.
Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.
I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.
Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.
Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.
But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.
It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.
Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.
Would you be willing to elaborate on what you find frustrating? We're doing work in a similar area.
Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).
Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.
Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.
Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.
You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.
So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.
To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.
They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.
Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-ratings-really-mean-1...
How? That's because they pretty much own all the content that is on cable. Titles are gradually disappearing from Netflix and appearing on Hulu.
Netflix was smart to start creating their own content early on, without it they would be dead right now.
Artwork Personalization at Netflix.. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork-personalization-...
Excerpt:
Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.
If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.
In Netflix, not only is it hard to find the last thing I was watching, but everything else is mixed together and worse: it moves around nearly every time I open the app. An endless amount of categories and lists seem to be invented all the time and are at the top of the interface where my "continue watching" category should be every single time. I get it, you're creative Netflix, and you want to promote stuff but that's not as helpful as consistency... and the proof is that you're losing me.
Let me finish what I'm in the middle of and promote your stuff afterwards, or at least have a consistent shortcut to get to the continue watching category much more easily.
I plan on joining again for a bit, watch a few shows they made in the years since I left, then probably dropping them again.
There are many, many parts of the USA where the 'high speed' internet service is somewhere between 1mbps to 3mbps maximum, or slower, assuming there's any broadband at all.
Internet speeds plummet when you're in most rural areas, often even semi-rural smaller towns that are 30-45 minutes outside of major cities have comically slow internet.
I think the fact that renters had more choices in 1999 is because Blockbuster was a near monopoly and nobody was really challenging their status quo outside of some regional shops. All of the price changes happened as Redbox entered the scene, not Netflix streaming (though Netflix mailers were a challenge as well). So even without these streaming services you'd be seeing the same BS with only being able to buy a film for several weeks before it would be available to rent.
First sale only works effectively once the studio starts selling copies at retail. After that, when anyone could go down to Target, or Walmart, or Best Buy and buy retail copies, then so could Redbox, and there was nothing the studios could do to stop them.
I believe that the way things like the Blockbuster exclusive deals worked is that the studios would make a deal with Blockbuster to sell copies to Blockbuster weeks before they released them for purchase at retail.
Before streaming became a thing, you could download movies and music through P2P networks. Streaming became a huge success, piracy became less of an issue, because many people didn't have problem with throwing $7 a month to use Netflix.
Now once again you get much better experience if you pirate. That's the only real competitor, can you imagine how bad it would be if there was no piracy?
The basic idea is this: Let's say i once downloaded long-tail file X. Me sharing it for years and years isn't the default.
But what if it was ? what if this was built into one of the popular torrent clients , and i would have to opt-out to change it ?
But in other places, this isn't a big issue.
But to share a file, usually you have to keep it in your file list - and that takes up visual space, attention, and bandwidth/storage, so you just delete it.
But what if the software limited bandwidth/storage for such files to 5% of your total, and managed that in a way that wouldn't clutter or take any attention ?
Maybe in a different tab - so you'd still have full control, if needed ?
For example, one offers a multiplier on seed credit for low seed-count torrents, and another does the same but also prominently features a small selection of them in the front page (programmatically) to motivate users to preserve them.
The underlying issue persists, but there are some methods to address it, and perhaps more could be devised.
Would that be legal? It's a lot closer to Pay Per View than to traditional streaming.
If such a service also provided a more general permanent digitization service for media you actually own (where you would send them your own discs, or forward them any random CD/DVD/BR you buy off the Internet, and they would rip the disc out of the packaging it comes in, digitize it, put it on a server for you, and then destroy the original), then—in combination with the multiple-countries thing—I could use this to consume content that doesn't have a streaming version, only a physical edition; and where that physical edition isn't sold for export, but only in its country of origin. (Think: limited-release pressings of albums from indie bands; movies from film festivals that never ended up seeing general release; etc.)
Essentially, it's like getting some physical media sent to Archive.org for expert digitization+preservation, but without distribution to the general public, just to the person who paid to do the preservation.
(Though, they could certainly sit on their own copy of the digitized work indefinitely, never giving it to anyone or acknowledging that they have it, waiting for the day it either enters the public domain, or they acquire distribution rights to it, whereupon they can put it into a public catalogue.)
You might want to look into this again. If you can get Netflix's highest quality 1080p streams they have much higher bitrates than what you can rent or buy on itunes.
But you are 100% right about availability. Streaming is almost a myth if you're like me and want to watch a bunch of unpopular titles.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2345839/population-dens...
https://geoisp.com/us/ has some data about availability by population, but not a great map.
The copyright industry just has a different agenda than we do. We think when technology improves we'll get more selection, faster at higher quality. The copyright industry thinks when technology improves about what new ways they can restrict the public so that lawyers can continue to make money from the hard work of long dead authors and artists.
With mobile games, developers are starting to realize that they can get far more money from the addicts who need to play 4 hours a day by throttling gameplay to 20 minutes a day, and forcing them to buy gems in order to bypass the throttle. This could get worse with things like Google Stadia if they decide to monetize their platform in a "pay as you play" sort of model, where you can pay, say, $4.50 for 5 hours of playtime.
And trying to convince someone like Google or Microsoft that their site or service is not very robust when things start getting lossy is a complete waste of time, even if you have a massive following on social media people who dare to complain about not having megabits of data are completely ignored.
Not surprising. Netflix, Comcast, Amazon Prime and other video streaming service charge you the same as the DVD rental, but force you to watch the entire video within 48 hours from 1st starting it.
Personally I find this very annoying (why do the do this? What does it cost them to let me watch it within a week or so and not 48 hours?).
Esp long movies like "Wolf of Wall Street" are not practical to watch in a single sitting.
I have a Samsung DVD player that I got for 40$ and depending on the movie, I find it's cheaper or same price to actually BUY the DVD from Amazon.com (with prime). Ex: Wolf of Wall Street was $4.99 to stream and view within 48 hours, or keep paying $4.99 until you finish it. The same DVD ( NEW ) was selling for $5.49 on Amazon, Free shipping so I ended up buying the DVD.
Ha ha, some moviebuffs will skewer you for saying that (about any movie). I feel your pain on the 48h limit though.
It's also standard to spend money on snacks during the intermission.
I love deep story telling and will gladly sit through a 3-4 hour movie
LOL. I have cats.
I haven't encountered this behavior in Netflix; under what circumstances are you experiencing it?
EDIT: A cursory search informed me that this seems to apply to viewing streaming movies which have been downloaded to a device and watched while offline. The expiration timer is reset when the viewing device has a WAN connection. I guess this is a mechanism to discourage hoarding a large number of movies, then cancelling your subscription? Not sure.
"Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps"
https://xkcd.com/1138/
After 10 years of subscribing to Netflix I can only think of a handful of movies that weren't available on DVD. I don't have any hard numbers in front of me but it feels like there's maybe 20% of Netflix's catalog on instant watch vs what they have on DVD -- at least in popular genres like sci-fi, comedy, action and adventure.
For those in the US, something I have found pleasantly surprising is that the local library (this is a "small" library with only two branches) feels this niche quite well. I have been able to get recent releases as well as it having a pretty healthy supply of general interest and some specialize interest movies. They have an online catalog so I can search and set a hold on a movie, book, or other physical media so I can go in, grab it, and go. Many of them allow you to rent an obscene amount of movies at once (the limit at mine is 20 movies check out at a time), and it's free! On top of that, they partner with a digital service that also allows you to "rent" a set amount of movies/shows/ebooks per month (for free!).
Something I have not tried is to see what happens if they don't have a movie/book/show that I want. I imagine they have a process to request them buying it if there's enough interest.