Sounds like they just need to take a page from Spotify's playbook and start just shoving fully autoplayed best matching shows down people's throats. They'll be happier being force fed with no options.
You're comment feels like it has a negative ton (shoving down throats) but if the content recommendation is really good and isn't gamed it works really well IMO.
My experience has been spotify is great at recommending songs I like, even unpopular songs - I've quickly fallen into the rabbit hole of making a playlist - checking out the playlist recommendations, seeing their artist's other tracks, etc.
Given that there's hardly anything to watch and customers are leaving because of it, I expect the prices to go down. They need to focus, produce at least something GoT/Breaking Bad-grade, and sustain it for a few years.
Subjective, I find lots of things to watch and enjoy.
>produce at least something GoT/Breaking Bad-grade
Again, subjective. I enjoyed Breaking Bad, but did not enjoy GoT. Other people liked the vice-versa. Other people liked neither.
It sounds like you want Netflix to cater specifically to your tastes.
I imagine pricing restructure might happen if the exodus is extreme, but it doesn't seem like it is very extreme. After all, they gained subscribers didn't they? Just not as many as they had thought.
>second-quarter earnings report Wednesday revealed fewer _new_ subscribers than expected
>The company said it _added_ 2.7 million subscribers across the globe in the second quarter
Does HBO have good shows and a large auidence? Absolutely.
However, that does not mean that the catalogue of Netflix is "99% unwatchable garbage" which was the point I was refuting. Nor does it mean Netflix isn't allowed to raise their pricing as they see fit.
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
> It sounds like you want Netflix to cater specifically to your tastes.
Given that they have the technology to stream any movie ever made to my house, and given the availability of more data about each of us than we probably even know about, is catering specifically to each of our tastes unreasonable? I mean, why do you have the things in your house that you have, if not to cater to your tastes?
> If video streaming subscribers don’t know what they want to watch, they’re almost twice as likely to tune into their favorite broadcast television channel (58%) rather than browse through the menus of their streaming services (33%), according to the research from Nielsen.
> Research by behavioral psychologists has shown that too many choices can overwhelm consumers, create the unpleasant feeling known as “decision fatigue” and sometimes leading them to shut down and walk away from a potential purchase.
> Television viewers also need to choose what channel to watch. Yet part of the allure might be how television just beams whatever’s on the channel instead presenting viewers with even more options on what to watch.
Maybe Netflix hasn't missed this at all. Maybe this is the functionality they're after with the auto-start/preview of any show you hover over.
Does this 58% statistic come from a sample of people who actually have broadcast TV access and streaming access? I, for one, have never had broadcast TV access as an adult, and the most recent "TV" I purchased was actually a 48" Vizio display that has no coax input.
I was surprised by this number and assume they were only looking at people who actually have access to both. If that's the case, what is the number among the total universe of streaming video users?
I think Netflix has lost touch with their consumer base, with most changes such as removal of the rating system being universally criticized. I cancelled my subscription recently as I realized that while Netflix has a lot of shows, there is a dearth of quality content and the search function is not useful. With shows like Friends and Office leaving, there is not much to draw people who like leaving it on in the background. Also, the auto-playing of trailers at full volume is super-annoying.
>the auto-playing of trailers at full volume is super-annoying.
This was baffling to me. I've rarely had such a stressful user experience as a trailer playing every single time I stop pressing the arrow buttons for a few seconds. Just because I stopped pressing buttons doesn't mean I want to see a trailer for whatever I happened to stop on - it means I'm thinking about something, or reading something, or looking at some other part of the screen, or am not even looking at my TV any more. It's hard to imagine a more malicious UX than one that plays video and audio at you every time you are not giving input. And because it's difficult to even find a state in that UI where you don't have something selected, I found it impossible to "escape" the trailers. It made me feel like I was in an advertising dystopia.
My theory is that it increases the likelihood that you'll stop browsing and just watch something. This would reduce the variety of shows that people watch and ease the requirements on their servers.
I think more than server strain it could be meant to avoid the "mah, I looked for 20 minutes and found nothing, maybe I should just delete the subscription"
It is definitely advertising. Back when streaming services were new, the lack of advertising was a major selling point of streaming services vs cable but now they're stuffed full of ads and for some reason the ads are for content you've already paid for.
This is exactly what happened with cable. People were told to pay a subscription fee to avoid all the commercials of broadcast television. They got enough subscribers, and began the commercials. Years later and losing 1/3 of a show is the norm.
This is why all 30 min shows only have a 20-22 min runtime. We have all simply come full circle.
Hulu is going the same way with their commercials on my commercial free sub, and the commercials are always on content I'm paying extra for (HBO, Showtime, Starz).
I'm already setting up my Plex server. I'd rather not this be the case, but it's back to setting up scripts to grab from usenets and torrents.
Which, ironically, is precisely what Cable TV first promised in the 1970s -- an "ad-free" experience! They could offer this unique experience because you were paying the cable company for the costs of carrying the content. Then they realized they could double-dip by charging you for the content, and sell ads too.
It shouldn't be surprising to see the same behavior patterns repeated with this new crop of wireless cable companies. I'm sure the irony is lost on them though. We become the thing we try to escape. Stare long enough into the abyss...
The constant jumping and zooming of preview tiles is similarly stressful, especially with the auto-preview... with all the chaos of things moving around and making noise at you, it's really difficult to think clearly about what you might want to watch.
I consider this a serious accessibility problem. Rather than complain to customer service, maybe we should be going straight to their corporate counsel. Frame it as a potential ADA violation. It's actively hostile to anyone who suffers from heightened anxiety, ADHD, etc.
If there's anyone who can push back against the marketing department, it's the legal department.
Fandango put that on their movie theater web site. It's so annoying that I never buy tickets online any more. I just find out the time and buy at the theater.
Their dark patterns have definitely pushed me to use Hulu more often, but I don't think anything could convince me that traditional networks will have better offerings
I’ve tried providing specific and constructive feedback to Netflix but it turns out their senior executive team only understand thumbs up or down as a primary form of communication.
Instead I asked their customer frontline to pass on an appropriately oriented finger.
I hate the auto-playing trailers too, but in the spirit of the kind of analysis HN is actually good at: auto-playing trailers seems like an extraordinarily straightforward feature to collect and analyze metrics on, and Netflix does not strike me as the kind of company that is utterly ambivalent about metrics, so "hating the auto-playing trailers" might not be the strong indication of loss-of-touch that it seems; like, it seems more likely that for the majority of Netflix's user-base, the trailers increase engagement.
This kind of thinking is the problem though. Like YouTube they don't care about the quality of the experience you're having. Where Netflix might see a very satisfied customer others might see a depressed individual binging a show for the 10th time as a way to escape reality.
That's exactly the problem? Auto-playing trailers are a trivially obvious way to explode your minutes played metrics into the sky. Also utterly meaningless unless you have hooked into the camera to show the users eyes focusing on that content, instead of, as is overwhelmingly likely, playing into the void.
It's a little bizarre to throw shade on HN analysis while simultaneously using metric collection as a counterargument to an accusation of having lost touch with a userbase.
If there's one collective blind spot on this site, it's treating humanity as though it's a mathematical equation.
I bet it had to do with losing content. If you review something and Netflix removes it you either lose that data or Netflix has to display shows they don't carry anymore.
This is THE reason I stopped using Netflix. Besides being bombarded with sound, I was actually halfway reading the description when it is replaced with a running video.
When my CC was stolen (and blocked), Netflix was the only company who put my service on hold instead of a small grace period which fits the non-customer centric direction they take nowadays, but also my opportunity to see if I could live without Netflix.
After 2 months, I do not miss Netflix at all. I deleted the apps and I am now on Hulu and Amazon Video.
I've also started a small collection of DVD/Blu-rays with my favorite shows which I lost. You can pick up complete series on eBay for affordable prices.
I think Netflix is the perfect example of where being data driven completely fails. If you listen to podcasts with important Netflix people everything you hear is about how they experiment and use data to decide what to do. Every decision is based on some data point.
At the end of the day, they just continue to add features that create short term payoffs and long term failures. Pennywise and pound foolish.
My wife and I recently cancelled Netflix. Partly because we felt content was disappearing and partly because it felt hostile to actually use Netflix. We got absolutely fed up with all of the autoplay crap, UI restrictions, and other BS that clearly drives "some" stat for them.
I couldn't agree more. Additionally it feels that for each content that disappears Netflix is replacing it with yet another generic series whose formula has been repeated time and time again.
The auto-playing trailers truly baffle me. I can't think of any more user-hostile move they could make. What are they hoping to gain from this? Are there people who wanted this? Why isn't there at the very least a setting to turn it off?
If this is the actual reason subscriptions are dropping, then the obvious solution would be to ACTUALLY allow searching and filtering of the catalog, along with nuanced rating of shows and accurate prediction.
I remember that netflix sponsored a contest to accurately predict what people wanted to watch, then ignored the winning algorithm.
If people are always engaged in videos like TV and movies, they are generally less engaged in their own life - which is generally pretty unhealthy. I think people have come to realize that they don't need to watch stuff streaming all the time. They can read a book, or go outside, and even interact with real people.
Several online offerings offer zilch in the way of true health benefits.
Agree with you that constant screen time doesn't make for a healthy lifestyle. Seems pretty speculative and prob too optimistic to assume people are coming to this realization and acting on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix comes out with a "TV Mode" soon, that allows you to pick from personal channels similar to how music streaming services have weekly mixes.
Actually a random play actually sounds interesting to me. They know what I like already. I don't want it on by default. Just a link to play a random show/movie and let me skip/hide if it sucks.
Imagine flipping through the Netflix "channels", Die Hard is playing, and it's playing right at the scene where Bruce Willis is jumping out of the window of the building.
And there's an option in the right corner to "play from the beginning".
Flip to the next movie, and it's positioned right at its most popular scene.
I've been pondering a feature like this for a while to replicate my youthful viewing habits.
When I was younger, I would get home from school and watch a few hours of TV. The channel I watched would syndicate sitcoms in blocks, same show at a given time, played in episode order (but a few different shows over the afternoon).
What I'd love from netflix is to be able to put together a list of shows I'm watching right now and have it run a playlist in random order by show, but with the episodes in the correct order per show.
To me there is a reason why twitch is popular and I believe it is exactly this feeling. I remember watching some more dodgy streaming services that just effectively were streamed playlists of shows, but you didn't have any control over the playlist. You watched (or watched part of) a series start to finish and then a new series would start and you'd watch that instead. It was a small enough total catalog that you often could pick up where you left off a week or two later and watch another chunk, and that was it.
The pendulum has seemingly reached the limits of self-programmed content and has started to swing the other way, and people are starting to realize the value of having a content producer putting on a good show across several programs.
Netflix also feels (by the way they are developing their internal IP) that they are becoming a niche (in genre) service rather than a generic appeal service and losing subscribers feels like an outcome of the catalog they have tried to pursue. The subscribers they retain are likely going to have a higher level of permanence compared to people who are a more general audience.
There's nothing worth watching in Netflix now. I find myself spending more time on Prime Video where I can find richer content through Prime movies and subscription channels like HBO, Starz and PBS (for British murder mystery shows). Moreover, Netflix is getting its recommendations for me completely wrong. Without user reviews, I've no idea if the content is good. I'm not going to waste my time watching some random show if I find that it's crappy 2 episodes in. Prime on the other hand shows me IMDB ratings (which are good enough) along with user ratings.
Amazon has the interesting idea of making it as easy as possible to buy a subscription (to Starz, HBO) and then cancel it later when you are no longer interested. I think this is very important in the future, where every content producer wants to have their own Netflix.
The advantage that Amazon offers, is that you only have to learn how to cancel a channel on Amazon, and not on 10 different websites..
What you're describing is a "streaming service aggregator" which would be great but I doubt many streaming services will want to be apart of (Talking netflix, hulu, etc).
You may consider a meta-streaming service like ReelGood (not affiliated just a happy user). You tell it which streaming services you have, what shows you've liked, etc and it gives you recommendations from across all your services.
I go through cycles of using it and not but every time I'm feeling too much choice-fatigue I pull up my reelgood recs and pick something from there.
> Netflix is getting its recommendations for me completely wrong
As far as I can tell Netflix has no "recommendation engine". I have never noticed any correlation between the kind of show/movie I like and what it displays; it seems completely random, well, with a bias towards self-made content which presumably costs them less in licensing - almost all of which is made-for-TV level garbage of no interest to me in any format. I genuinely think I could write a better recommendation engine. I think sorting by basically anything - budget, popularity in my demographic, most watched until completion, would be better than whatever they have now.
Basically my only use for Netflix now is the occasional standup comedy special (which I have to search for by name), the rare occasion I suddenly think of a movie I want to watch and is actually there (also search by name), or to put other people in front of. I'd try HBO Go but for some idiotic reason it's not available in my area.
Frankly, if they can actually execute, I think Disney is going to clean Netflix's clock.
They started going downhill with every original show losing logical consistency after the 1st or 2nd season, political pandering instead of offering good quality entertainment. And the removal of the user reviews was a degrade, as they want to push bad shows to users and waste their time, instead of letting them make an informed choice. I hope they get disrupted because of their arrogance.
>political pandering instead of offering good quality entertainment
This, unfortunately, is the ultimate double-edged sword. It would be a very safe and content-less world indeed if fictional media did not in some what appear to address or include something political in nature. Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or do not find offensive.
It just bothers me that they try to include a few tropes in every movie or show without it fitting in the story properly. As I said, if they maintain the logical consistency and in the context of a good story I don't mind some political push. But if it is in every show/movie, it just becomes repulsive.
I'm curious to understand what you're describing. Can you give an example of a Netflix show, the season and political trope, and how it detracted from the show's quality? And I'm definitely curious what you're imagining as you write out "repulsive".
Good Example: Black Mirror episode where man has sex with his friend in Mortal Kombat. Is this really an interesting addition to the Black Mirror world? Accept gay people, alright, whatever; I still don't want to watch 2 people having VR chat sex.
If you're only objecting to gratuitous gay sex, that's just homophobia. And come on, gratuitous straight sexual content has been on TV for a long time.
It's hard to explain otherwise why the poster would (i) choose that example, (ii) explicitly mention that it's a gay sex scene, and (iii) include a dismissive statement that's kind-of-but-not-quite in support of gay rights. A generic complaint about gratuitous sex scenes would make no sense in the context of this discussion. People are complaining about shows being overly woke, not overly sexual. The poster gives the relevant scene as an example of a "political trope".
I don't have any objections to gay sex scenes. But that chapter was kind of... meh? I didn't feel it pushed the edge in terms of futuristic issues that much.
You could be in a relationship over IRC in the 90's with a person of the same sex and not know that until you're too deep into it. The VR thing didn't add much to that narrative. The same way 3D movies don't add much (more often than not, they make the experience worse).
And yet, I would (will?) likely be derided if I complained about every forced show of heterosexuality, in virtually every piece of media produced in the last many decades. I immediately think of the scene in the second Matrix movie, but that stuff is absolutely everywhere.
Stranger Things is set in the eighties. It's not that much of a stretch to have a local newspaper run by men who don't take a 19 year old female intern very seriously. It also has an obvious function as a plot device, since it would be kinda boring if Nancy instantly figured it all out and succeeded in getting her story published.
I don't see that at all. The sexist component, while definitely there, is quite subtle. Nancy is an intern, and most likely would not have been taken seriously if she were a man either. After all, she's young, has no reporting experience, is not employed as a journalist, and is telling an extremely implausible story.
Stranger Things is not a realistic show. Why should its depictions of the men at the newspaper have to be realistic in any case?
Netflix has gone 'woke' in a lot of their (new) shows. A lot of shows feel very activist now. Entertainment shouldn't be stuffed with identity politics and other progressive nonsense which only caters to a small minority.[1]
Examples: The new show 'Mr Iglesias' where the main character is a history teacher. In one of the first scenes the history of the US is summed up as 'oppression and slavery'. Many jokes about white people that would be considered racist had they been about any other race. And a whole episode about how the word latino is offensive and it should be changed to latinx.
In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
There are many more examples. I'm getting tired of it and leaning towards canceling netflix. I'm European, I want entertainment, not crazy US politics.
>Examples: The new show 'Mr Iglesias' where the main character is a history teacher. In one of the first scenes the history of the US is summed up as 'oppression and slavery'. Many jokes about white people that would be considered racist had they been about any other race. And a whole episode about how the word latino is offensive and it should be changed to latinx.
>In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
These are great examples why I don't watch Netflix. Netflix especially is just TV by the political left and for the political left.
> And a whole episode about how the word latino is offensive and it should be changed to latinx.
which is absolutely... absurd. latino comes from latin american languages, which are gendered by default. that's basically colonialism -- americans trying to apply their culture into other people's culture.
(sorry for the rant but i find infuriating that americans are trying to change MY language because of their sensitivities wrt gender)
>Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or do not find offensive.
I'd be interested to see a show that has nationalistic/right-wing assumptions. Any good examples?
Every military show or show about terrorists? The Six is a Seal Team 6 show. Anne Heche just had a show called The Brave that got cancelled. The Last Ship is military science fiction.
I admit that it's going to be very difficult to find an explicit white nationalist show, but military/terrorist paranoid-style shows are a dime a dozen.
SEAL Team Six is best known for a raid during the Obama administration. Modern progressives seem to have less of a problem with the military than old school leftists (and less of a focus, politically, on foreign policy) hence simple glorification of the military seem pretty centrist.
True, I have spoken to a lot of people and there seems to have been a lot of political propaganda in every Netflix / Hollywood movie / show / even music videos. I am so tired of the ideology shoved down the throat that I stopped watching anything these days. I just want a good story.
I fear it will get worse because of the vertical integration and monopoly of the entertainment business, they can keep making bad movies and people will keep watching them because there's no other choice, in turn increasing the monopoly.
Uhh... yeah... I would never consider cable networks "trusted sources".
I do experience decision fatigue sometimes when streaming, but my solution is just to have a couple of comfort-sitcoms always on-hand, not to subject myself to an endless pipeline of advertisements and low-budget reality TV.
There is a lot of what I'd consider "noise" popping up on Netflix that they won't let me filter out. I don't care for most dubbed shows, and I haven't had any luck with any of the foreign imports. No way to filter them out that I'm aware of, so half of the "New shows" don't appeal to me
I wouldn't give up Netflix for cable, it's more likely to be Prime only, or something with quality content that I wouldn't watch as often because they don't have as much variety (HBO, Showtime, AMC, CBS)
Stranger things was released and we watched that but I haven't been on Netflix in weeks since; another price hike and the values no longer likely there for me.
Signal-noise ratio is how I'd put it, too. There's a lot of stuff it recommends to me over and over that I have no interest in watching, like generic mockbusters and Korean soap operas.
It could really use a YouTube-style "not interested" button. It's so stubborn that it feels like it's trying to force shows on me instead of helping me find what I want to watch.
One thing that frustrates me about Netflix is how I'll watch an item X but after a few minutes decide I don't like it and watch something else. My home screen will be clouded for quite some time with recommendations based on X. How are they missing such an obvious signal that I didn't like X?
Netflix is blatantly user-hostile. The UX is designed to get you to spend more time with Netflix, not to make you like it more.
Many of the shows it suggests to me are not in english, yet the UX rarely discloses this in the description or (infuriatingly auto-playing) preview. Some people don't mind reading subtitles but I detest it - they could at least tell me the show is in German before wasting my time.
Yes! They've optimized for the wrong metric. Users should feel like it's time well spent.
After their $1MM prize years ago, they didn't even bother implementing the winning algorithm.
Then again, nobody really recommends media well. You can't mine the media directly, and people have very different preferences. It's just too many factors that you can't infer from the usage.
I've recently started using ReelGood more often. (Not affiliated just a happy user.) You tell it which streaming services you have, what shows you've liked, etc and it gives you decent-ish recommendations from across all your services. More importantly it also shows the IMDB score, the Rotten Tomatoes score, and usually provides a trailer, and then they deep-link to the actual content so you can avoid all the Netflix dark-patterns.
Just tried this out for the first time. Am I missing something? I linked services, marked some movies as watched, but don't see any way to _rate_ movies I've watched. So it doesn't have any kind of (useful) signal from me for recommendations?
You just mark movies/shows as seen it or want to see it and it gives you recommendations based on that. There's no "I've seen it and I hated it" option...I wish it would take a star-rating into account but it does not. Despite this the recommendations are still pretty good. It's a much better content-discovery experience than any content provider's native experience, especially that of Netflix.
> Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?
Because it's an additional barrier to enjoyment.
Dubs are irritating and often lose cultural context. From your post I think we're in agreement there.
Subs mean I have to watch intently, I can't cook dinner/play a video game/clean the house/fold laundry while I'm listening and glance over at the screen every few seconds. And I don't spend much time doing nothing but watch TV, unless it's a show I really care about. Stranger Things 3 got my uninterrupted attention this last week.
I'm not against watching foreign media, but it's a negative modifier to my chances to watch it. If I get a recommendation from someone I trust, I'm much more likely, but then I have to set aside time to do nothing but watch it.
As a side note, if I get a recommendation from someone with an anime avatar, I'm much less likely to watch it. I don't care that "it's not a 12 year old girl, it's a 500 year old dragon that looks like a 12 year old girl." It's still creepy.
Movie recommendations are either deeply generic (other movies in the same genre) or deeply personal (recommendations on myriad things apart from genre). Netflix has tried (and imho failed) at the deeply personal style.
So I agree with your comment except for the anime avatar aside. I personally don't trust 90% of movie recommendations, even from friends. It has to be somebody who I know has good (for me) taste. I don't think avatar-selection would correlate one way or another with movie-selection :)
I personally cannot stand dubbed shows, but YMMV. It just comes across as way too fake. Also I attribute at least half of my ability to speak English well to the fact that NRK - and cinemas - in Norway never bothered to dub everything, unlike in Germany, France, etc.
I just wish for dialogue only English subtitles of English language content: I'm not deaf, I just can't always hear the mumbling if I haven't turned my good old Rotel 5.1 system to 11. I have no issues hearing (clears throat), (coughs), (rain falls) and (engine rumbling) .. yet I'm forced to see these using the SDH subs as none other are available. It's great that they are there, but we also need non-SDH subs.
Netflix should make its API more widely available. 20 Instantwatcher/Flickmetrix type sites, all of which would likely window into the NF dataset differently according to their creators' preferences, would seem to more adequately address users' needs than a single UI.
Exactly. Sorry if this comes off as a rant, but contrary to the article, I've never been overwhelmed with any choice on Netflix myself, just frustrated by poor discoverability, their teasing shows they didn't even have the rights to anymore (e.g., The Expanse), and to top it off, being full of filler content that's just unwatchable for me with no obvious way to remove it or create a custom bookshelf.
I had cable growing up, but ditched it in my adult life and never looked back so far. Netflix's recommender is some blackbox that I don't ever find useful. If they added some way to channel surf like broadcast television, I assume I'd just be wasting my time wading through that.
Then there are some older shows in their catalogue that I wouldn't even have known existed unless I'd searched for them - I'd even go so far as to say purposely hidden from navigation.
Another personal pet peeve is the lack of subtitles or CCs. I suppose it's some licensing issue, but I can buy a Blu-ray or DVD here that will come with lots of languages, but on Netflix, they started adding a lot of local movies with no subtitles, and "foreign" shows or movies without any English subtitles, which are preferable for me.
Maybe it's because I've never had the pleasure of the US version, but I've only ever sporadically kept a subscription for over almost a decade now, quickly exhausting what I did find interesting. Back when brick n' mortar video stores were still a thing, I didn't feel overwhelmed by having too much decent choice there.
P.S., what's the annoying "are you still watching" prompt interrupting the current show instead of just being in between them? As if the UX wasn't annoying enough already.
There was a time where every login was followed by auto-playing trailers for a show about suicide, during a time that I really just didn't need to be seeing that. With no way to prevent it... other than canceling and ceasing usage.
I don't understand the dark patterns and general user hostility. I don't need to watch Netflix 20 hours a day to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Do they somehow benefit from me utilizing more of their bandwidth, if I'm already paying?
I don't know of any show on Netflix that I've watched that has an audio dub but doesn't also have the original language available as an alternative audio track. What are you watching?
Surprisingly, I find myself using Hulu more than all the others combined, including Prime. Hulu's app is so horrendously bad though I consider cancelling as more than 50% of the time it won't load on the first try, and probably 20% of the time it won't load at all on my TV.
I'm back to a send-CD service like Netflix started with. I love this mode: I maintain a list of movies I'd like to watch. I have two of them available to watch in the evening. No Ads. No continue seduction.
I recently rewatched the Mission Impossible movies. The interface groups them together, so you only rate them as one. They get sent in the correct order.
I agree as an immigrant i noticed stories told in country I came from and in USA are limited to certain types and different from each other. They follow cultural norms so rigorously that no matter the topic overall it looks like it was another event in the same city/country/culture. Even historical reanimations are very influenced by current culture to point they are simply false depictions. So yes, no matter how much writers try they have lived a life very similar to each other. Maybe I should write stories.
There is something to be said about the Nielsen hypothesis given -- finding something to watch takes effort, and starts taking more time the more one has already seen. My wife and I can spend upwards of 30+ minutes trying to find something we want to see and haven't already watched. Especially for just some casual 'background' watching, just putting on a channel on TV with some acceptable type of programming focus is alot easier than digging for it.
Btw, for Netflix I usually just do a trial when a new Stranger Things season comes out, watch it all and maybe a few of their new movies, then cancel.
I just don't feel like Netflix is made to make my video viewing experience better anymore. They don't take customer feedback seriously, they're removing features that people obviously love, and becoming victims of the ever-growing race to "increase engagement."
1. Autoplaying trailers: Netflix straight-up says that's not going away (https://twitter.com/Netflixhelps/status/947587245086859265), and I haven't met a single person who actually likes it. When stopping to talk about a show, my wife just mutes the television on the main screen, and I navigate to the Search screen, which is the only one that doesn't autoplay something. It's almost hostile amount of "HERE LOOK AT THIS SHOW" going on, and I despise it.
2. Removing reviews: If you've been on Netflix long enough, chances are you remember the pages-long reviews left by extremely passionate users on all kinds of films. Netflix just decided one day to throw all that away, probably because negative reviews decreased engagement or some other silly reason. The users added value to your service, and you actively threw it out. This also had the side-effect of tossing aside the count of films I've watched or rated, which I found to be an interesting bit of data.
3. Shuffling algorithms: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I have a difficult time navigating to anything that's not a specific title. Genres, their weird made-up categories ("Comic Book Superhero Movies" or "Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy"), or even foreign films. There's no way to browse this stuff unless the category happens to pop-up on screen. In addition, the "Continue Watching" category moves around randomly. Sometimes it's right at the top, sometimes 3 pages down. Similarly, why is "My List" not always at the top? It used to be a top-level navigation element.
4. Already seen: There's no way to hide anything in the UI. Not things I watched, not things I'm uninterested in, and certainly not things I dislike. I used to be able to signal disinterest in shows; now I can't.
I could go on at length despite having already done so, but I think there's more at play here than Netflix's catalog. They're showing that all they're chasing is more money and bigger deals, and damn what the users think. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe it really is their "content slate drove less growth in paid net adds" this quarter, but I'm willing to bet that (at least in part) it's because even Hulu, owned by a bunch of traditional television media corporations, gives more consideration to its users.
I share the same thoughts. That's why I even wonder how data scientists and UX/UI folks, who work at Netflix, feel like when their recommendations to the management are not heeded by the latter. Maybe Netflix data scientists have a hard time finding useful insights out of the trove of data they have.
Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming platforms that I refuse to pay for - I'll probably eventually just cancel Netflix as well going back to the tried and true method of just buying bluray box-sets of the content I want to watch.
Or piracy.
I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's the reason we cut the cord in the first place. People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.
Netflix was worth it because it made accessing so much content easier than piracy, but with everything getting pushed into a walled garden "package" approach again...piracy will be easier again.
I get HD over the air with less than a dozen chanels, and that's often enough to keep me distracted if I'm not feeling up to playing a videogame or watching a movie.
>People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.
At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.
It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to not have to think about where to find your favorites. And once it's downloaded there are (almost) never any playback issues.
It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want.
I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.
I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original
except if you publish it properly yourself, a company that would embrace torrents as distribution method and took care of putting it on the relevant site would effectively solve the trust problem that is inherent in choosing a torrent between many.
Why not just edit the video codecs to support calling out to advertisements? Maybe offer people the option to watch the ads at start, end, or usual positioning, too. There would be abuse, but if it were done correctly the abuse wouldn’t be more than current.
My first reaction would be video player support. You would almost need to force a plugin for that.
Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement.
But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots
Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie?
That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.
Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.
Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.
I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.
Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?
The fact that 15+ year old tech developed by some hobbyists (over asymmetrical networks not optimized for it mind you) provides a better service than anything modern corporations can deliver really is amazing to me.
It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer, they're interested in providing a better service to their advertisers. That said, the idea of embedding the advertising freely is an interesting one, and I wonder if it's been seriously considered by the networks. Probably harder to convince the cheque-writers of the value they're getting, though.
> It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer
I sold all of my Netflix stock (which wasn't a huge number anyway) the moment I saw that you could no longer see reviews of content on Netflix. It was a clear cut sign that they no longer "get it".
I hate to say it, but I miss the reviews+DVD days, where I discovered a huge wealth of foreign directors and their films. And there was even something exciting about DVD envelopes arriving in the mail aftet a short wait, building out the queue that would last a few months, and mailing it back wasn't a nightmare.
The loss of ratings was a telltale sign it'd gone mainstream and impersonal, but another one was the autoplay, which cannot be turned off. That's incredibly obnoxious, and loud, as previews somehow always seem to be.
Is this all an inevitable consequence of growth and the evolution of mass content or a set of bad decisions?
I'd be surprised if it rivaled subscription revenue, though. My point is indeed questionable in the context of original content. HBO's kinda proves my point - their original content is much higher quality IMO. There's some old quote about how Netflix needed to become HBO faster than HBO could become Netflix, and I think they're close to losing that one.
sure, but how much of what you think is product placement actually is, and how much of it is just things being used in their natural context because it would be weird put something fake there.
Free is always going to be more attractive and excuses made by folks who don't want to pay for services.
Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.
Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.
Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made
This is absolutely not accurate.
These streaming services lock you into a specific catalogue of their curated material. There is absolutely no way the statement you made about having access to everything is true. It's also especially less true if you're not living in the US. For example if you're a foreigner in a or regoin country, you're access to certain content is often limited.
With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.
Then there are other strange developments, let's take the fact that nearly every good album on Spotify now has only the "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
Who knows, maybe in 40 years will be thanking people who preserved Terrabytes of original content for the world to access?
Of course it isn't, because it is illegal and free.
> "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
This has nothing to do with Spotify, it is for example when the entire Led Zeppelin original master tapes get remastered in the studio by the label, and they re-release old mono albums or older albums in a better fidelity format then when they were recorded years ago thanks to technological progress.
i thought that as well, but there are still some hoops. or in the case of most of the apps for the Fire TV sticks, a new hurdle - unstoppable full screen video advertisements. i've noticed that releases of things like Popcorn Time have slowed down tremendously but Terrarium/cinema/etc for the fire sticks has picked up a lot. and they all have built-in ads now.
If you don't have private tracker access, usenet is probably best for speed and content availability since usenet providers have insane amounts of bandwidth to spare and there are publicly available nzb sites for searching usenet.
But there is a difference in that you aren't locked into things the same way you were locked into cable, where it was all or nothing. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to different services at different times as you wish. Given you get all the content available during your subscription why would you stay subscribed to all of them all the time. Just subscribe to the ones that have the shows you want to watch at that time and cancel all the rest.
Sure. So I subscribe to Amazon for The Grand Tour, the girlfriend subscribes to Netflix for Marie Kondo, the kids subscribe to NBC for THe Office and Disney for Disney stuff, and Mom subscribes to CBS for Star Trek and now I’m back to basically paying for cable for the five shows we want to watch right now, with the added convenience of worrying about dropping and adding subscriptions for as long as it takes these services to figure out a mechanism to prevent this behavior.
People hate it but it obviously works, otherwise they would not be doing it. What you need is a religion (or some other sort of huge corporation or union of people) around consuming content that everyone religiously follows that forces the corporations hands. Individually all you can do is pirate or buy.
What’s most interesting to me is the rise of YouTube. Increasingly for movies I just rent one, for TV shows again I just rent or buy a whole season unless it’s a show I’m really into, and for “open the app and try to find something randomly” moments I go to YouTube, not Netflix anymore.
Whatever the resale price is, if you buy and sell used then you shouldn’t care, right?
I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”
I own The Sporanos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad in box set. I have The X-Files somewhere on DVD, too.
For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it.
But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.
Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.
I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?
If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.
>> The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win.
Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in.
Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.
It kind of sounds like you're getting your history backwards here.
Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.
It would be nice if this problem could be solved through cooperation rather than just hoping a unicorn will appear.
A flat subscription fee, perhaps with tiered pricing in terms of content resolution and number of concurrent users in a household.
Figure out some fair distribution key for the viewer's contributions. Newer content gets a higher slice of the pie to encourage investing in new content, but older content under copyright (like a 40 year old film) will still bring in some money, and it makes sense to make a back catalogue available.
Allow users to use their own clients if they wish (technically possible if you forget about DRM), and let enthusiasts create a user experience no platform has ever seen that can rival the ease of use of piracy (e.g., Popcorn Time, and similar services).
Start out as a conglomerate of big studios with a clear short to midterm business model, but aim to set up a non-profit custodian in the long term to handle the maintenance and development of the platform, and make it possible to represent any content owner in a fair way — because if you don't, you'll end up the target of anti-trust lawsuits.
This won't happen because of greed of course. Ah well, there is always piracy to supplement a Netflix/Disney/Whatever subscription and just pretend it does exist.
> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution.
Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
> Now we finally have that
We don't. We still have the one or two things we want packaged in with a ton of stuff we don't.
It's actually worse. Each package (subscription platform) has one or two things we want distributed accross all of them, which a bunch of stuff we don't want packaged in.
>> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution.
>Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
Why would it be a case for publicly funded infrastructure? We’re talking about entertainment, not highways or clean water.
As a consumer, yes, I would prefer an option to pay only for the shows I want to watch, but I don’t see why your tax dollars should fund my preferred method of entertainment.
> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?
Well, that's only half of it. The other half is that people became fed up with their bills, not realizing that everyone has a unique subset of channels they liked, and paying for the full bundle was a way to subsidize all the other channels.
Sadly it's rather difficult to balance these two issues.
People aren't asking for a single distribution channel in the sense of a single monolithic company owning all the IP. They do want (1) convenient apps that aggregate, such as Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, and (2) a way to get all the content without having to pay lots of individual companies (I'm subscribing to around 5 streaming services myself).
Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now. You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music. There are stragglers, of course, but they're getting fewer. If this model works for Spotify et al, why can't it work for movies and TV?
Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system. It's what allows music to be played on the radio and so on. I know very little about how it works technically, but it seems to work just fine.
This is a good point, though Spotify hasn't been without its bumps. It has lost money almost every year and substantially reduced the total amount of money artists receive from people listening to their music. Artists have been forced to find alternative revenue streams to remain solvent, and it has taken a hammer to the "middle class" of musicians.
All of this has been great for the consumer since we get cheap music, but if we want to port the same system over to shows/movies then we need to think through the implications of reducing the total amount of revenue that content creators get from people watching their content. Where are the alternative revenue streams? You can't take a TV show on tour.
It's definitely possible, theoretically, but I'm not sure it's possible at a price point that people actually want to pay. Making video content is orders of magnitude more expensive than making music.
It's funny; I think that Spotify is an insanely good deal. I would absolutely pay more for the service, a lot more. I'd probably use it more if I were paying more, too, so maybe it wouldn't work out for them. But in my opinion, they're underpriced.
> Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now.
There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now.
> You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music.
Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up.
> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.
No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners.
But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that.
Radio probably prevents exclusives to some extent. If you can't get your song onto general radio you're going nowhere. Can't have exclusive online when radio isn't.
>> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.
> No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses
At least in Germany we have a single agency (GEMA) that acts on behalf of virtually all artists worldwide. They are responsible for a range of licenses, be it for bands that want to cover a song on their new album, a bar that wants to play music or a music streaming service that wants to get started.
In my experience it is a tremendous help to have a single entity for licensing that even has ready-made rates for most things.
I don't see a reason why this could not exist for movies as well. Cost-intensive productions can easily be reflected by tiered pricing so that it costs more to stream/show Jurassic Park than some independent movie.
Because Music isn't TV or film. The vast majority of revenue for most artists come from live performances.
It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.
Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.
This was absolutely true... before the Star Wars franchise in 70’s. And I’d bet that "stranger things" derived products are massively more cash producing than any artists live performance.
The real question is about independents, not blockbusters.
> People aren't asking for a single distribution channel in the sense of a single monolithic company owning all the IP. They do want (1) convenient apps that aggregate
I generally agree with that. I don't care about one platform at all. I'll pay up to ~$30 total per month for nearly everything (TV + movies), whether that's on one site or spread across four.
With the way things are going, it looks more likely that I'll just frequently turn subscriptions on and off. That's the routine I've found myself in the last year or so. I might watch some shows on HBO or Showtime, then when they end for the season I kill the subscription. I might maintain one central subscription, such as Prime (which makes it easy to add and remove other 'channel' subscriptions). This seems to be how a lot of consumers are behaving now.
Not the parent, but because that's all I'm willing to pay for Hollywood's mostly recycled content.
Push the price to more than $30, and I'll just use my antenna and find other things to do. I cut the cable cord years ago, and I lived.
Only when when reasonably priced subscriptions like Prime, Netflix, and maybe HBO or Showtime, often rotated, could be had for $30 / month did I come back to Hollywood.
Exact same for music. I'm old enough to remember making $6 / hour at the grocery store and then taking my paycheck straight to BestBuy to purchase $17 CDs. But ever since I got my first DSL connection about 20 years ago, the music industry hasn't earned a cent off me.
Only recently did Spotify at $10 / month bring me back as a customer. I guarantee you if I start finding songs I want to play are premium priced or missing, or they start raising prices like Netflix, well I guess the music companies won't be getting my $10 anymore either.
The $100 / month for commercial TV that Cox, Comcast, and friends have enjoyed, same as the $17 / CD that the music industry once took for granted, isn't going to work with the next generation like it did with the Boomers. We don't have as much disposable income, and there are too many other options out there.
I saw a chart a while ago that showed how much of your subscription your cable company forwarded to the content networks. Most channels were cents per month. ESPN was highest by far and was still only 5 dollars iirc. It seems like if your ISP is already providing connectivity, you should be paying closer to these prices.
> Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now
Compulsory licensing in general, and specifically for radio style plays makes a big difference in the rights landscape. Movies and TV don't have anything like that, so you have to get agreement with content owners to do anything.
> a way to get all the content without having to pay lots of individual companies
Ironic, as a decade ago the complaint was that we need a la cart pricing. Now that it's happening everyone is complaining about it being too expensive. What it seems people really want is the cable all you can eat buffet model, but at a 90% discount.
I'm not sure it is happening though. Can I just say... pay 10$ a month for access to 10 TV shows of my chosing?
Or even better would be to pay by the minute at a rate where it ends up that 1h of TV every month is around 10$. But where the selection of shows is the entire catalogue of all shows ever.
It sounds great, but as the content is already created, this business model doesn't reflect the real cost of business either. The more people watch the same shows, the better the synergy between content creators and viewers.
Well, a big company can work to make money on all their productions, like when they make a ton of money with a few big shows like say friends. I have a vision that a lot of money goes to the endless division of licensing to all those middlemen negotiating small different broadcast allowances, that have to be implemented, enforced, checked, have lawyers on both sides, produced etc. That's overhead must waste a lot of money. What if every programmer had a middleman negotiate your wage and take 15%? That wouldn't make it more productive, but would pay for a lot of useless businesspeople in the middle.
Right, but I think you're conflating two things. How a business will successfully offer what consumers want in a sustainable manner and what consumers would want. Saying, that wouldn't be a viable business model doesn't mean that if someone could make it viable it wouldn't allow them to take over the market and shake the industry, since it would deliver on what customers might want most.
And that's kinda what Netflix had set out to do at first, and I'm hoping are still trying to do.
A la carte paid to a single provider. Not five different monthly payments, logins, and likely five different apps with slightly different ux and controls.
The way I understand it, the aggregators don’t pay at all well. Bands and producers make their money playing gigs these days and try to make it big where there is mega money in everything including the aggregator exclusives. Generally the aggregators pay badly, but do mean exposure. TV shows can’t work like that, they have much higher overhead and actually need to be paid.
And yet you can get a wealth of TVs and movies from various streaming services today at around $10/mo each.
If studios all pooled their IP in a single marketplace under a compulsory, fair licensing scheme, the calculation would be about the same, because currently most streaming services don't overlap much (though in some cases you can find movies on both iTunes and Google Play, for example).
What would change is that the current aggregators' revenue would shrink and their ability to have exclusive content would disappear. A company like Netflix would become just another content provider competing for views in a single marketplace.
Perhaps a better analogy is the movie theater business. Movie theaters generally show movies from all rights holders (though I'm sure studios also compete for the best screens for tentpole launches). Theaters share revenue with studios. In principle, anyone can go to any theater to see a movie of their choice, and theaters can show the movies they want as long as they license them. It's not on-demand, but that's pretty irrelevant. Also, I can start a movie theater and start showing movies, as long as I abide by the licensing rules.
I basically have this with Hulu. I pay for the live tv package and cloud dvr. It lets me access a back catalogue of streamable content for each “channel” in my package.
I have hbo/starz/and the big name cable channels for about $140/month with 200gb of cloud dvr.
My only real complaint is that I can’t download content to my phone for flights.
It’s not $12.99/month but when I’m traveling in Asia I can VPN back to my house and watch whatever I want off the cloud DVR.
With "effectively TV" you had to sit down at a certain time and watch it at that time. You had a selection of shows you could watch on a number of channels.
What the person here is talking about is $140 for something that is not "effectively TV." They can watch it pretty much where ever they want. They can watch it without commercials. They aren't limited to the shows or channels available on their provider. They get instant access to movies they want to watch, when they want to watch it, without need of special, single use hardware.
> All of these values are insane to me.
It's a special kind of hubris to to assume that everyone else is insane and you are not when you admittedly don't understand the topic at hand.
Because with music I literally don't care what I'm listening to. If famous artists left Spotify I couldn't care any less - I just want a playlist with "music" and that's good enough for me. With video, I don't want random TV shows - I want specific ones that interest me, and either they are available on Netflix or they aren't, the fact that there is 10k other shows does nothing to justify the subscription.
But just because you don't care what you are listening to, doesn't mean that nobody does, most people I know are rather picky with their music.
Just like you apparently care about what you are watching on VoD services, even tho there are also plenty people out there who use VoD as "background noise" and often couldn't care less about the actual shows.
Most people care about what music they listen to; Spotify's main mode of function isn't "random" like live TV. Moreover, while you might consider music to be a "random" experience by design, streaming movies/TV doesn't have to be. I was talking about the licensing model, not the consumption model.
Or check out DVD.com (old-school Netflix) if you’re looking for selection. It’s way better for movies and TV shows if you’re willing to wait a few days.
> They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.
I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.
Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.
As just an example, I was a huge fan of Arrested Development - but continuing that show where it left off after ~10 years of not being on air... it just didn't "have it" anymore...
And... when I search for a movie, it seems about 90% of the time they don't have it. Instead, they recommend a bunch of Netflix Original's that totally aren't what I'm looking for.
And a lot of 'Netflix originals' over in the EU are essentially localised variations of a theme.
The theme is usually the end of the world, zombies, or the dead coming back to life. Or some horrible phenomena at the edge of a forest, and the once peaceful town is under attack from the supernatural.
What makes it worse is that Netflix now dubs foreign content by default to make it all look English. And they do their best to trick you.
what's frustrated me about Netflix originals is the same thing that drove me away from a lot of traditional TV - some awesome shows being cancelled after 2-3 seasons. I had hoped that Netflix would at least give their own shows a good story arc, but nope. they're doing the same thing Fox/CBS/NBC do.
i still much prefer shows without commercials, though.
Somebody wrote about this during the last week (can't remember where): Netflix purposely only produces two seasons of shows, because that's the right amount to convert new subscribers without alienating old ones enough to quit.
They’re already here. I even pay Hulu extra for no ads only to be greeted occasionally by a statement that due to licensing agreements a video has to have ads. And even the things that “don’t have ads” have ads for their other streaming videos, or try to cram ads in between auto plays.
If I'm going to search through a bunch of listings, and select a show that's part of a series, all just to have something on while eating a 20 minute meal, I feel like I need to have something good on that I'm committing too.
On the other hand, if I turn on my cable box and Dog the Bounty Hunter happens to be on and halfway through an episode, I'll watch it until I'm done eating and be done with it. I don't actually care what going on in the episode, and I'm only half paying attention. It's mostly just noise and moving pictures in the background.
That's "disposable" television, and it's only something that you can get from an always on network.
Netflix requires more effort, and with that effort I feel I should get something good out of that time. Instead I spend 30 minutes looking for something to watch only to give up, switch back to network television, and eat my now cold meal.
A 'random offering' button or channels based on a theme that mimic traditional tv channels would be trivial to add to Netflix, and something they should seriously consider :)
I get that people do this and the mental path that leads there. I don’t get people who are self aware of doing it and still complain. If you’d be comfortable randomly watching garbage so long as you don’t expend effort to choose it, then pick randomly. Alternatively if there’s nothing on it you want to watch, don’t watch it.
I think this comes across as condescending but I really don’t get it.
Everyone thinks the overwhelming majority of all content is garbage and totally uninteresting. You might be surprised to learn that 31 million accounts watched Adam Sandler's most recent Netflix movie within the first three days, rivaling Stranger Things numbers. I remember the Internet laughing at Netflix for investing so much into Adam Sandler.
And Netflix (correctly) abandoned being a movie library service a long time ago. They're pretty much just HBO with a more broad appeal now.
"I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?"
I don't know about anyone else but I'm interested in shows, not channels. I'm not going to sign up to 10 channels - that'd cost too much and some months I'd probably watch nothing on some of them. If I could pick and choose which shows I watched I'd have no problem with a low-friction "sign up via email and pay for what you watch" but that's not the offer. Your suggestion is fine for people who are rich and have loads of time to watch hours of tv every day. That's not the target for these companies though - they recognize it's a zero-sum game and want it to be them you pick over Netflix (or vice versa).
>They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.
because content companies started holding their content hostage for higher fees or outright refusing to allow netflix to license it. Netflix creating their own content was a matter of survival.
> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?
1) I don't want to pay for content I won't watch.
2) I don't want to be required to pay for content I won't watch in order to watch content I want to watch.
3) I want to easily watch the content I want without needing to have dozens of different separate accounts or services. I mean similar to "press button, get bacon" style of easy.
4) I want to pay in money and nothing else. I don't want to pay with my data; I don't want to pay with my viewing history.
5) I want to watch whenever and wherever I choose, no take-backs.
DRM, high cost, and ironically, poor availability (I bought all the seasons of ER in 1080p off iTunes, there exists no Blu-Ray sets for the show and the DVDs are often more expensive than what I paid Apple for digital copies that I promptly stripped the DRM from)
That's right! It would be interesting to see how torrented series statistics correlate with online streaming prices. My feeling is that as Netflix-like services become more expensive and/or fragmented, piracy picks up. Don't have any numbers to back this up with though.
Yeah if you have tons of free time and want to watch the same DVDs over and over.
Some of us don't have that much time anymore (I did run Plex when I was younger, though). I'm either willing to pay about $$25-$30 / month for a few services like HBO and Prime without commercials*, and available in demand, with plenty of quality series to keep my 1 hour / day TV habit satiated, or I'll just take my ball and go home. Cable TV and $100 / month for 30% commercials is something I can and will live without.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all offer paid rentals of nearly anything, on a per movie, episode, or season basis. So what you are asking for definitely exists. It’s just priced disproportionately high compared to the streaming packages that are popular these days.
$4/movie when i could get a month of X service for $8-12/month is kind of too high. Pay per episode for the TV shows I want to watch is too high almost whatever the price (who would pay anything to watch the logan's run tv series??)
Maybe we can get a frequent renter's club. $20/month for 8 movies (two a week) and 20 episodes?
However, I’m very okay with iTunes’s <$3 per episode. Sure it’s more than most vod subscriptions, but the shows are mine forever, and I can buy just about whatever I want.
If I watched more TV overall, it might get too expensive, but I don’t, so quality over quantity.
And the silent 6) I want DVDs, but without the physical disc management and without the high cost and without the DRM that makes publishers feel safe distributing digital content.
Content creation? Unjustifiably huge budgets on stars, sets and effects with pocket change relatively speaking for the scripts and stories, especially after the first season. $100m to buy a minor series about comedians in cars that cost $100k an episode to make. $100m! No wonder their financials look ropy.
> Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for
Erm, no? Don't know about the US but the UK experience of cable and satellite was a basic package with dire content, then every interesting thing was £££ extra. By the time you had a reasonable selection you were at £50-£100 a month. more if you wanted the sport channels. So we didn't cable cut, we never signed up in the first place. Compared to the licence fee it was always appalling value. Netflix want nearly a whole BBC yearly licence fee, and deliver a tiny fraction of the content. Not that I like all the Beeb do. :)
When we cancel Netflix (very soon going on current programmes), it'll be back to terrestrial only as none of the streaming services now have "enough". So whatever comes to the BBC and Channel 4 then. I'd start torrenting again before subscribing to Amazon, Disney or whoever just to watch one interesting series, then hope I remember to cancel timely enough.
You’re making the alluring mistake of thinking of a monolithic “we” who all want the same thing.
In reality people have many preferences and desires, and they pay for streaming services or not for a variety of reasons.
Some people are maybe sick of being stuck with a giant cable company and are happy to pay for many streaming services. Other people likely still have cable and use streaming to supplement that for specific shows. Others have different reasons.
Maybe they can have different subscription levels for different audiences, either resolution or content library or freshness. Although seeing that it’s artificial and only the resolution could have justification I’m not sure enough of their subscribers would identify of find value in that differentiation.
>> If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead.
This isn't the alternative reality Netflix and others are fighting. People are just going to pirate it if they can't offer it easily and at a price that the market will accept. There is no escaping that. It is on them to adjust, not the consumers.
Why is it not sustainable? Because of content licensing fees. If video content was treated (i.e. regulated) like radio with a fixed price per minute then there would be competition for one stop streaming services instead of walled gardens.
The too common refrain is people arguing talking themselves in circles trying to prove that they should get more content for a lower price due to some incoherent ad hoc theory of economics. Paying a la cart is "ripping us off by nickel and dime", and bundling is "cable packages, ugh".
You can only watch so much content. Streaming platforms should pay the content creators based on what is actually watched. The fact that they chose to also produce content is irrelevant. That's a completely separate business and if they mixed their books that's their mistake and they have to deal with it.
I think streaming is incredibly worth it. if you watch anything with advertisements, that's typically 1/3 of your time watching commercials, thus if you make 50 an hour, you pay for your streaming service in just 1 hour. 10 hours if you make a 10th that, which its still paid for in a week for most people. its a fair argument that I spent about a year of my childhood watching commercials. thats 3240$ in netflix subscriptions to get that back.
I think streaming has incredible value, and broadcast television's value proposition is extremely poor. I hope once people start doing the math, tv commercials is a thing of the past, or at least there is 1 commercial per break.
that being said, netflix does have some deep concerns for me if I were to invest in it. its still never made a profit, subscribers are maxing out, and competition is just getting started.
Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.
> Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.
I'd say it divides by more than half. I don't want any politics with my entertainment as many other people do. Even if the politics are aligned to my own. It becomes annoying as "preaching to the choir".
How much did Netflix pay for the Rock and Chappelle specials? I read it was over $100M, for both men's specials, and that was what, less than 10 hours of programming? No wonder they are deep in debt.
> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable?
No. We hated cable for the high prices and bad service which were enabled by physical monopolies.
If the backend was based on open protocols, you could buy an aggregating frontend from Netflix, Hulu, TiVo, etc and then buy whatever content you like from whatever content owner you like.
What we do need is something like the music industry has. Subscribe to Spotify, Deezer, Tidal. They all pretty much have the same stuff, with slight differences in UI and the odd exclusive to differentiate them.
That’s what they need to do - cross license. They can even have a delay before they do so for their own content or whatever.
Just the admin of subscribing to 20 different services is enough to make me subscribe to none.
It's not a reasonable argument. If things are not super convenient many will just go back to piracy. The content house brands are just too weak to be able to demand a subscription.
People don't like the proliferation of streaming services because of the cost. Buying "just NBC" or "just CBS" is still preferable to the old model of "if you want ESPN you have to get dozens of other channels at the same time". But buying just a single network's content only works if the price is such that you can subscribe to all of your networks and not end up paying more than the old cable model cost you.
The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).
The issue with "buy NBC" or "buy CBS" is that I don't care at all about networks. I care about particular shows. If I could pay $1/mo each for 20 different shows, I'd be fine with that.
If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).
Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?
I am fine paying everyone is whatever convoluted ways, but I'm not OK with this translating to a miserable UI experience. At least TV had a single interface. I don't want to manage apps for shows, and have to search within apps or learn different menu trees for each different app, etc.
I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.
I just went to download a movie - legally. I have streaming access, but apparently I can't download it for offline viewing (not even within Netflix's DRM'd app).
To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now!
That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.
> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services.
I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that.
And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay.
Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.
My problem with Netflix isn't the slate of shows and movies it has in its catalog. It's definitely not as nice as it used to be, but there are a jillion and a half shows and movies out there.
My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch it Again Anime, Anime Where Characters Wear Hats, Anime Where Characters Float in Hats, and Anime About Hat Making.
For the love of all let me get some other options in the fucking list before I lose my mind. I like comedies, action movies, sci-fi, documentaries, and historical dramatizations or historical fictions too, you know. Not everything has to have a talking cat in it.
I have this problem with ML and recommendation systems in general. I hope this fad goes away soon and people go back to making simple, understandable, show-me-the-newest-stuff feeds.
Right - I just feel like it takes things entirely too far. Not every signal deserves a boost that takes a certain genre of suggestions up to 11.
These recommendation systems need to be a bit less zealous; I like black pepper, too, but that doesn't mean I want a huge bowl of black peppercorns in cream sauce for dinner.
That blows my mind; I never would have considered people would focus on the actors or the director. Until you said it I don't once thing I ever even considered the possibility! I'm kinda floored right now.
One reason I appreciate broadcast TV is the curation aspect of their limited playlists. The streaming recommendation systems are very lonely - I know they are algorithmic and personalized, and that nobody else will see the same outcome. With broadcast, a human does that work and it is shared among viewers; e.g. some show always airs on Thursdays at 8. Then there is the seasonal cadence, i.e. summer shows, fall/spring shows.
With algorithmic systems it sometimes feels like reading books written by a Markov chain toy.
Better than Hulu that now shows us every commercial in Spanish. No one in my household speaks Spanish. The only thing I can guess is that I know ONE TIME my daughter accidentally selected the Spanish translation of one of her cartoons.
Once upon a time, Netflix gave away $1 million to contest winners in an attempt to get the best recommendation algorithm they could ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ).
Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position.
I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once.
Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful.
Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on.
And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on.
The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.
Next to the thumbs up rating (they only have two possible ratings). It might be confusing as you sometimes (at least on iOS) have to click a thumbs up icon to be shown the actual options with the thumbs down?
I suspect they don't have it at all on their Roku channel :( I'll look again tonight, but if I can start downvoting these things, I can at least feel like I'm screaming "no" into the void, which is better than screaming "no" internally. Nobody wants to live through an "I have no mouth and I must scream" nightmare, after all.
Perhaps their recommendation engine is working as designed, but it's tuned for some other metric besides maximum viewer enjoyment. For instance, rankings might be influenced by the royalties they pay, or the likelihood that you'll recommend a Netflix-only show to a non-Netflix-subscribing friend.
Content satisfaction was more important when they ran a service where you spent several days waiting for and returning a disc.
The metrics shifted. Subscriber retention just isn't that tightly correlated with them identifying hidden gems for you, that may be an externality we've just lost.
There used to be a lot of competition in this space, for a few years you could go on free sites designed only to give you targeted recommendations. I think Jinni was one.
They were just training their engines and became ad networks.
One other factor, not really anyone's fault -- the massive increase in high quality scripted content has made search less critical. If you fail to find hidden gems in 2003, you get Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and miss out on Oldboy or Goodbye Lenin. Today if you pull up any random streaming service you'll probably find something that's good enough, even if not great.
It's a little disappointing, maybe there's room for a p2p ML recommendation engine in this space for people who really want to optimize what they're consuming. I'd be into it.
It seems like there is some pitfall in making a recommendation algorithm that more and more people are falling in to.
I don't watch TV or have Netflix, but I listen to streaming music, and I noticed something weird. I used to listen to Pandora, and it recommended a lot of different artists that I liked on hearing them for the first time. It single-handedly gave me a taste for 21st century music. But there wasn't enough music in their catalog, so I switched to Spotify. Now Spotify will play more of the songs by people I already like, but very nearly everything it plays that I didn't find on Pandora I hate and it keep playing the same things over and over no matter how quickly and frequently I skip past them.
It's hard for me to believe that they could be this bad and unresponsive unwittingly, but I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of naive algorithm that is failing.
...you may say, why don't I explicitly mark songs "like" or "dislike", but I mostly listen in my car where I can't do that.
One alternative hypothesis is that different people use Pandora vs. Spotify and the ones on Pandora have better taste, but I can't believe that's all of it.
Its less risky to give you things you already like than to try and guess if something new will be appreciated. Its the same reason hollywood keeps doing remakes.
If you only go by statistics and don’t think through the “what if everyone did this” question then giving you the same old content on repeat will have better metrics.
Right, it feels like things are optimising purely for “next click”, i.e, what will keep you mindlessly in flow, forgetting the time and consuming more content.
So if I’m watching a video about TIG welding say, to optimise “next click” I suppose I should be recommended mostly more welding videos, with a smattering of engineering and finally a bit of clickbait mixed in case I’m starting to get distracted.
If services are optimising for “keep going right now”, they might be modelling as something like a markov chain of “clicked on next” and that’s how we get stuck in this kind of short-sighted local optimum.
Youtube does this too, and its really killing the recommendations for me. Same thing with Quora, I used to browse Quaora all the time, until the content ended up just being the same. I think in the aggregate these algorithms are driving more engagement, and pissing off some people, but not enough for them to change the product.
Pandora has almost no variety at all. Even a playlist like "90s Alternative" which should have thousands of potential top songs plays the same songs every time I listen
Google Play Music has been the best for me in terms of variety, but it's buggy as hell. It freezes up if it can't play an ad for some reason, won't automatically play when bluetooth is connected (like Pandora does), and other annoying things. (I ride a motorcycle so I can't mess with my phone if something goes wrong)
Pandora has almost no variety at all. Even a playlist like "90s Alternative" which should have thousands of potential top songs plays the same songs every time I listen
If a streaming service didn't order automatically generated genre playlists by popularity (with a little randomness) people would stop listening to them and start saying the playlists are full of rubbish songs they've never heard of.
I don't think I started with a playlist like that. It's been a while, but I think I started with specific artists/music (albeit from the 90s) that I liked. I don't think you can expect individually satisfying suggestions if you request generic music in the first place.
To be fair to them, everyone is failing at this. Recommendation algorithms, once held up as a crowning achievement of machine learning, have turned out to be terrible at their jobs. Amazon, Youtube, Netflix. None of them have it figured out.
Spotifys algorithm is amazing, I'm constantly finding new indie bands that I love on it. YouTube is also really good. Netflix is terrible for me, I don't think it's ever recommended a show I've loved.
Huh. My experience is the opposite. Somehow my Discover Weekly was mostly mariachi bands for a month. Finally told it I didn’t like enough of them that it got the hint. Now it’s overloaded with Scandinavian adult contemporary or something. It’s like all the other algorithms from one I’ve seen: listen to something accidentally that’s in a niche and it just loads up on recommendations from that niche.
It become more or less just a catalog, often times spent close to an hour just trying to find something might be interesting (not totally shitty), and that's pretty much it: couldn't find anything, just browsing their catalog, with time wasted.
That article was a wild ride back to 2002. From the phrase "techno-profiling" to Amazon recommending "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity" to Bezos during a public demonstration to WSJ writing "Netflix.com (netflix.com)" so the url was clear to anyone whose browser didn't convert case before making a request. In some ways technology has made a lot of progress and in some ways it really hasn't changed a bit.
Yes! That has driven me away from YouTube and Netflix recently. I know there is an ocean of content out there but when I sign in all I see is the same dozen shitty recommendations that I have no interest in! I watched one comedy special a year ago and my feed is half stand-up comedy now.
This happened to my friend too. I shared a link with him of a Youtube guy who analyzes classic rock songs, and my friend's entire recommended feed was overtaken by this guy for weeks. My feed isn't nearly that sensitive. I think you and him are in the same experimentation bucket or something.
For me it's comedy specials. I don't even like them that much, but they have been plastered all over my home screen for nearly a year. Since they took away ratings and reviews I have to use other sites to try to find good stuff to watch.
I've been watching a lot more Youtube recently oddly enough. Youtube does a better job of giving me a mix of videos for my interests, and there are a number of great vloggers out there across a lot of my interests posting weekly+ content.
If Netflix was recommending something that you didn't care about, you could use "Not Interested" to make it not show up in your list anymore.
Now, it just keeps recommending these same content over and over again. There's no way to say "I don't want to watch that". There's also no variety to the suggestions.
I agree that "decision fatigue" is a big deal for me.
Recommendations used to seem to be affected by your ratings. That may still be the case to some extent, but Netflix's preferences seem to be way, way more important now.
That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.
Is it that people don't know what they want to watch? Or is it that what they want to watch isn't in the netflix catalog. 9/10 times I have a specific movie or show in mind that I want to watch and I search for it on netflix it tells me it is only available to be shipped via DVD or bluray and its not available in their online catalog.
Maybe if they spent less money on trying to develop their own content and more money licensing the best content to come out over the past 30 years then there would be more engagement. The percentage of the top 1000 or so movies as rated on IMDB or Rotten tomatoes that is NOT on netflix is staggering.
When we all bought into the concept of netflix a decade or so back it was on the premise of all-you-can-eat on demand access to the largest/most inclusive catalog of movies and shows anywhere. They long ago ditched that model and they are suffering as a result.
It's not even that you can't get the latest blockbusters, its that you can't get most highly rated movies from ANY of the last 3-4 decades. But movies rated 5/10 or lower? Seems like they've managed to license just about every one of those. Bleh.
I suspect that isn't netflix's decision to make. Everyone is trying to get into the streaming market these days, and the only way to capture subscribers is to offer up content that other services don't have, which means they're willing to burn huge piles of investor money to lock up exclusive rights.
Yes, it defeats the whole point of streaming subscriptions. Yes, it'll drive a large segment of the subscriber base back to piracy. But it's a classic prisoner's dilemma.
As long as I'm speculating about shit i know nothing about, I'll follow up by predicting that the next wave - after things get bad enough - is cross-licensing deals between the bigger surviving players. That'll improve the value proposition to subscribers (great for us!) and also raise barriers to entry, so next will be the price gouging. Oh, and somewhere in there will be the contracts that prevent content creators/distributors from licensing new stuff to anyone else (unless they are one of the surviving streaming services.)
Anecdotally, I don't think it is choice fatigue that is causing a subscriber drop. I think it reflects a drop in the quality of their original content.
Compare early black mirror to what it is now. It's become far less of a "thinking" show, and much more of a "You should accept this, you shouldn't accept this" show.
I used to like Netflix content because it felt like they were telling me a story which they had thought through and I would get to see to its end... or I'd even finally get an ending to some shows other networks/services killed too soon. To me, Netflix content strategy was saying "storytelling is what is important," and "we want to make sure we find and tell the best stories." New ones, old ones, great stories just the same...
Anymore, I do not believe this to be true, and feel sort of silly for thinking it ever was true. It's become quite obvious their strategy is create new shows to lure people in, and then cancel them (because they'd have to pay the stars more), rinse repeat, hoping more people stay than leave. They do not care about finishing the stories they're telling, or the stories at all, they don't care about content, they care about growth.
Honestly, anymore, I don't even want to watch Netflix shows because they'll probably get canceled before they end.
Netflix to me is not much more than a pretty bland version of Huxley's "Feelies". Actually most modern TV show stories would fit nicely into one or two well edited movies. I find all of this very comparable to the food in our super markets - lots of nutritionally empty calories and cheap canola oil. Time badly wasted and truly dystopian - all this zombie-like "binging" is way worse than "bread and games".
Yes, this is what I'm finding with many Netflix shows, they are extended movies. The problem is that each episode isn't really an episode, it has no "arc". Like when you watch NCIS for example, there's resolution after an hour or so. There's sometimes a bigger plot line if you watch all the episodes in a series but you don't have to.
..and because its better for them once they've hooked you to keep you there, the series usually provides a cliff hanger, but many times the series isn't renewed so the risk/investment in time is high. If it is renewed then they really have no new idea so they just rehash the first series and do it again (e.g. the OA, I guess, I stopped after the beginning of the second series). So you never get the closure you get from watching an old school tv series or movie, there's no high's or low's of a good story, there's just time used up.
We seem to be reaching peak streaming, the point at which the addition of more streaming services may result in a net loss of streaming consumption because the interesting content is too spread out and it's too expensive or inconvenient to subscribe to them all.
It's rather like each streaming service is turning into its own version of a TV channel. It's almost the vision of a'la cart cable pricing, only each channel is too expensive and the UX too cumbersome to subscribe to more than a small handful.
Perhaps in a few years, streaming aggregators will appear and bundle a bunch of services together, and the internet will have reinvented Cable TV.
Cable subscriptions are a single subscription that gives you access to everyone's content. Netflix's digital innovation is that they did it at a tenth the price.
Now that all the content creators have realized the digital value of their content, it doesn't matter for Netflix whether those networks splinter it out into 20 different subscriptions or hide it behind 1 expensive cable subscription again. Netflix doesn't have that content so they lose either way.
Their only way forward is to become just another content network, OR a cable provider with the same elevated subscription cost. Whichever way they lean, the stock will tumble until they're in line with all their competitors. The gap has been closed.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadweird but plausible.
edit: btw I'm a huge fan of your work with keydb.
P.s. Thanks for your kind words. I’m always open to feedback/suggestions for KeyDB. Feel free to open a GitHub issue at any time.
My experience has been spotify is great at recommending songs I like, even unpopular songs - I've quickly fallen into the rabbit hole of making a playlist - checking out the playlist recommendations, seeing their artist's other tracks, etc.
Regarding pricing, yeah rising prices suck but do you really expect prices to remain stable indefinitely?
Subjective, I find lots of things to watch and enjoy.
>produce at least something GoT/Breaking Bad-grade
Again, subjective. I enjoyed Breaking Bad, but did not enjoy GoT. Other people liked the vice-versa. Other people liked neither.
It sounds like you want Netflix to cater specifically to your tastes.
I imagine pricing restructure might happen if the exodus is extreme, but it doesn't seem like it is very extreme. After all, they gained subscribers didn't they? Just not as many as they had thought.
>second-quarter earnings report Wednesday revealed fewer _new_ subscribers than expected
>The company said it _added_ 2.7 million subscribers across the globe in the second quarter
Maybe only House of Cards. HBO just has Netflix beat in terms of content over the last couple years especially.
However, that does not mean that the catalogue of Netflix is "99% unwatchable garbage" which was the point I was refuting. Nor does it mean Netflix isn't allowed to raise their pricing as they see fit.
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
Given that they have the technology to stream any movie ever made to my house, and given the availability of more data about each of us than we probably even know about, is catering specifically to each of our tastes unreasonable? I mean, why do you have the things in your house that you have, if not to cater to your tastes?
> Research by behavioral psychologists has shown that too many choices can overwhelm consumers, create the unpleasant feeling known as “decision fatigue” and sometimes leading them to shut down and walk away from a potential purchase.
> Television viewers also need to choose what channel to watch. Yet part of the allure might be how television just beams whatever’s on the channel instead presenting viewers with even more options on what to watch.
Maybe Netflix hasn't missed this at all. Maybe this is the functionality they're after with the auto-start/preview of any show you hover over.
I was surprised by this number and assume they were only looking at people who actually have access to both. If that's the case, what is the number among the total universe of streaming video users?
Nielsen drops families who don't watch any broadcast TV. Which is now most households.
Their stats are useless.
No thanks, I don't use Netflix.
https://paste.ee/p/8xg54
This was baffling to me. I've rarely had such a stressful user experience as a trailer playing every single time I stop pressing the arrow buttons for a few seconds. Just because I stopped pressing buttons doesn't mean I want to see a trailer for whatever I happened to stop on - it means I'm thinking about something, or reading something, or looking at some other part of the screen, or am not even looking at my TV any more. It's hard to imagine a more malicious UX than one that plays video and audio at you every time you are not giving input. And because it's difficult to even find a state in that UI where you don't have something selected, I found it impossible to "escape" the trailers. It made me feel like I was in an advertising dystopia.
There's a case to be made that this is advertising (for shows on netflix)
This is why all 30 min shows only have a 20-22 min runtime. We have all simply come full circle.
Hulu is going the same way with their commercials on my commercial free sub, and the commercials are always on content I'm paying extra for (HBO, Showtime, Starz).
I'm already setting up my Plex server. I'd rather not this be the case, but it's back to setting up scripts to grab from usenets and torrents.
It shouldn't be surprising to see the same behavior patterns repeated with this new crop of wireless cable companies. I'm sure the irony is lost on them though. We become the thing we try to escape. Stare long enough into the abyss...
If there's anyone who can push back against the marketing department, it's the legal department.
Instead I asked their customer frontline to pass on an appropriately oriented finger.
If there's one collective blind spot on this site, it's treating humanity as though it's a mathematical equation.
Being a dinosaur, I remember when Netflix would let users write reviews for shows/movies they'd seen.
Does anybody know why they discontinued their review system? Did they not want to deal with all the sticky content moderation issues?
When my CC was stolen (and blocked), Netflix was the only company who put my service on hold instead of a small grace period which fits the non-customer centric direction they take nowadays, but also my opportunity to see if I could live without Netflix.
After 2 months, I do not miss Netflix at all. I deleted the apps and I am now on Hulu and Amazon Video.
I've also started a small collection of DVD/Blu-rays with my favorite shows which I lost. You can pick up complete series on eBay for affordable prices.
At the end of the day, they just continue to add features that create short term payoffs and long term failures. Pennywise and pound foolish.
My wife and I recently cancelled Netflix. Partly because we felt content was disappearing and partly because it felt hostile to actually use Netflix. We got absolutely fed up with all of the autoplay crap, UI restrictions, and other BS that clearly drives "some" stat for them.
I mute the TV when browsing.
I remember that netflix sponsored a contest to accurately predict what people wanted to watch, then ignored the winning algorithm.
Several online offerings offer zilch in the way of true health benefits.
And there's an option in the right corner to "play from the beginning".
Flip to the next movie, and it's positioned right at its most popular scene.
When I was younger, I would get home from school and watch a few hours of TV. The channel I watched would syndicate sitcoms in blocks, same show at a given time, played in episode order (but a few different shows over the afternoon).
What I'd love from netflix is to be able to put together a list of shows I'm watching right now and have it run a playlist in random order by show, but with the episodes in the correct order per show.
The pendulum has seemingly reached the limits of self-programmed content and has started to swing the other way, and people are starting to realize the value of having a content producer putting on a good show across several programs.
Netflix also feels (by the way they are developing their internal IP) that they are becoming a niche (in genre) service rather than a generic appeal service and losing subscribers feels like an outcome of the catalog they have tried to pursue. The subscribers they retain are likely going to have a higher level of permanence compared to people who are a more general audience.
The advantage that Amazon offers, is that you only have to learn how to cancel a channel on Amazon, and not on 10 different websites..
I go through cycles of using it and not but every time I'm feeling too much choice-fatigue I pull up my reelgood recs and pick something from there.
As far as I can tell Netflix has no "recommendation engine". I have never noticed any correlation between the kind of show/movie I like and what it displays; it seems completely random, well, with a bias towards self-made content which presumably costs them less in licensing - almost all of which is made-for-TV level garbage of no interest to me in any format. I genuinely think I could write a better recommendation engine. I think sorting by basically anything - budget, popularity in my demographic, most watched until completion, would be better than whatever they have now.
Basically my only use for Netflix now is the occasional standup comedy special (which I have to search for by name), the rare occasion I suddenly think of a movie I want to watch and is actually there (also search by name), or to put other people in front of. I'd try HBO Go but for some idiotic reason it's not available in my area.
Frankly, if they can actually execute, I think Disney is going to clean Netflix's clock.
They'd have paid you for it back in the day :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
This, unfortunately, is the ultimate double-edged sword. It would be a very safe and content-less world indeed if fictional media did not in some what appear to address or include something political in nature. Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or do not find offensive.
>you're only objecting to gratuitous gay sex
from
>I still don't want to watch 2 people having VR chat sex
?
You could be in a relationship over IRC in the 90's with a person of the same sex and not know that until you're too deep into it. The VR thing didn't add much to that narrative. The same way 3D movies don't add much (more often than not, they make the experience worse).
That completely misses the point. The episode is about men not being able to connect with each other except through gaming.
Bad- stranger things overly sexist men and the constant putting men down. Detracted from the show, annoying me.
Unbearable- Sabrina
Is this new to the third series? I haven't noticed it in the first two series after binging them over the last two days.
Stranger Things is not a realistic show. Why should its depictions of the men at the newspaper have to be realistic in any case?
Examples: The new show 'Mr Iglesias' where the main character is a history teacher. In one of the first scenes the history of the US is summed up as 'oppression and slavery'. Many jokes about white people that would be considered racist had they been about any other race. And a whole episode about how the word latino is offensive and it should be changed to latinx.
In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
There are many more examples. I'm getting tired of it and leaning towards canceling netflix. I'm European, I want entertainment, not crazy US politics.
[1] https://twitter.com/yascha_mounk/status/1050033177077665795
>In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
These are great examples why I don't watch Netflix. Netflix especially is just TV by the political left and for the political left.
which is absolutely... absurd. latino comes from latin american languages, which are gendered by default. that's basically colonialism -- americans trying to apply their culture into other people's culture.
(sorry for the rant but i find infuriating that americans are trying to change MY language because of their sensitivities wrt gender)
I'd be interested to see a show that has nationalistic/right-wing assumptions. Any good examples?
I admit that it's going to be very difficult to find an explicit white nationalist show, but military/terrorist paranoid-style shows are a dime a dozen.
Is this any different than network shows?
I fear it will get worse because of the vertical integration and monopoly of the entertainment business, they can keep making bad movies and people will keep watching them because there's no other choice, in turn increasing the monopoly.
I do experience decision fatigue sometimes when streaming, but my solution is just to have a couple of comfort-sitcoms always on-hand, not to subject myself to an endless pipeline of advertisements and low-budget reality TV.
I wouldn't give up Netflix for cable, it's more likely to be Prime only, or something with quality content that I wouldn't watch as often because they don't have as much variety (HBO, Showtime, AMC, CBS)
Stranger things was released and we watched that but I haven't been on Netflix in weeks since; another price hike and the values no longer likely there for me.
Many of the shows it suggests to me are not in english, yet the UX rarely discloses this in the description or (infuriatingly auto-playing) preview. Some people don't mind reading subtitles but I detest it - they could at least tell me the show is in German before wasting my time.
After their $1MM prize years ago, they didn't even bother implementing the winning algorithm.
Then again, nobody really recommends media well. You can't mine the media directly, and people have very different preferences. It's just too many factors that you can't infer from the usage.
Or just dubbed? If so, how do you bear it?
> Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?
Because it's an additional barrier to enjoyment.
Dubs are irritating and often lose cultural context. From your post I think we're in agreement there.
Subs mean I have to watch intently, I can't cook dinner/play a video game/clean the house/fold laundry while I'm listening and glance over at the screen every few seconds. And I don't spend much time doing nothing but watch TV, unless it's a show I really care about. Stranger Things 3 got my uninterrupted attention this last week.
I'm not against watching foreign media, but it's a negative modifier to my chances to watch it. If I get a recommendation from someone I trust, I'm much more likely, but then I have to set aside time to do nothing but watch it.
As a side note, if I get a recommendation from someone with an anime avatar, I'm much less likely to watch it. I don't care that "it's not a 12 year old girl, it's a 500 year old dragon that looks like a 12 year old girl." It's still creepy.
So I agree with your comment except for the anime avatar aside. I personally don't trust 90% of movie recommendations, even from friends. It has to be somebody who I know has good (for me) taste. I don't think avatar-selection would correlate one way or another with movie-selection :)
It's a terrible UX and just wastes everyone's time to not disclose the dubbing/subtitles in any way in the front-matter.
I just wish for dialogue only English subtitles of English language content: I'm not deaf, I just can't always hear the mumbling if I haven't turned my good old Rotel 5.1 system to 11. I have no issues hearing (clears throat), (coughs), (rain falls) and (engine rumbling) .. yet I'm forced to see these using the SDH subs as none other are available. It's great that they are there, but we also need non-SDH subs.
I had cable growing up, but ditched it in my adult life and never looked back so far. Netflix's recommender is some blackbox that I don't ever find useful. If they added some way to channel surf like broadcast television, I assume I'd just be wasting my time wading through that.
Then there are some older shows in their catalogue that I wouldn't even have known existed unless I'd searched for them - I'd even go so far as to say purposely hidden from navigation.
Another personal pet peeve is the lack of subtitles or CCs. I suppose it's some licensing issue, but I can buy a Blu-ray or DVD here that will come with lots of languages, but on Netflix, they started adding a lot of local movies with no subtitles, and "foreign" shows or movies without any English subtitles, which are preferable for me.
Maybe it's because I've never had the pleasure of the US version, but I've only ever sporadically kept a subscription for over almost a decade now, quickly exhausting what I did find interesting. Back when brick n' mortar video stores were still a thing, I didn't feel overwhelmed by having too much decent choice there.
P.S., what's the annoying "are you still watching" prompt interrupting the current show instead of just being in between them? As if the UX wasn't annoying enough already.
I don't understand the dark patterns and general user hostility. I don't need to watch Netflix 20 hours a day to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Do they somehow benefit from me utilizing more of their bandwidth, if I'm already paying?
I don't know of any show on Netflix that I've watched that has an audio dub but doesn't also have the original language available as an alternative audio track. What are you watching?
If they had 1/3 as many shows but those shows were 3 times better. I am sure I would have no problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/at...
Surprisingly, I find myself using Hulu more than all the others combined, including Prime. Hulu's app is so horrendously bad though I consider cancelling as more than 50% of the time it won't load on the first try, and probably 20% of the time it won't load at all on my TV.
I have not tried a "TV series" yet.
It's a relatively small clique of writers, producers, directors and actors that they keep throwing money at despite failure after failure.
What they need to do is stop with the incestuous industry patronage and get fresh blood!
Perhaps we need an "America's Got Talent" equivalent for writers/producers to pitch their show ideas and let people have a crack at it.
Btw, for Netflix I usually just do a trial when a new Stranger Things season comes out, watch it all and maybe a few of their new movies, then cancel.
1. Autoplaying trailers: Netflix straight-up says that's not going away (https://twitter.com/Netflixhelps/status/947587245086859265), and I haven't met a single person who actually likes it. When stopping to talk about a show, my wife just mutes the television on the main screen, and I navigate to the Search screen, which is the only one that doesn't autoplay something. It's almost hostile amount of "HERE LOOK AT THIS SHOW" going on, and I despise it.
2. Removing reviews: If you've been on Netflix long enough, chances are you remember the pages-long reviews left by extremely passionate users on all kinds of films. Netflix just decided one day to throw all that away, probably because negative reviews decreased engagement or some other silly reason. The users added value to your service, and you actively threw it out. This also had the side-effect of tossing aside the count of films I've watched or rated, which I found to be an interesting bit of data.
3. Shuffling algorithms: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I have a difficult time navigating to anything that's not a specific title. Genres, their weird made-up categories ("Comic Book Superhero Movies" or "Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy"), or even foreign films. There's no way to browse this stuff unless the category happens to pop-up on screen. In addition, the "Continue Watching" category moves around randomly. Sometimes it's right at the top, sometimes 3 pages down. Similarly, why is "My List" not always at the top? It used to be a top-level navigation element.
4. Already seen: There's no way to hide anything in the UI. Not things I watched, not things I'm uninterested in, and certainly not things I dislike. I used to be able to signal disinterest in shows; now I can't.
I could go on at length despite having already done so, but I think there's more at play here than Netflix's catalog. They're showing that all they're chasing is more money and bigger deals, and damn what the users think. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe it really is their "content slate drove less growth in paid net adds" this quarter, but I'm willing to bet that (at least in part) it's because even Hulu, owned by a bunch of traditional television media corporations, gives more consideration to its users.
Or piracy.
I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's the reason we cut the cord in the first place. People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.
Netflix was worth it because it made accessing so much content easier than piracy, but with everything getting pushed into a walled garden "package" approach again...piracy will be easier again.
I get HD over the air with less than a dozen chanels, and that's often enough to keep me distracted if I'm not feeling up to playing a videogame or watching a movie.
At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.
I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.
Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement.
But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots
Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.
Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.
I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.
Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?
I sold all of my Netflix stock (which wasn't a huge number anyway) the moment I saw that you could no longer see reviews of content on Netflix. It was a clear cut sign that they no longer "get it".
The loss of ratings was a telltale sign it'd gone mainstream and impersonal, but another one was the autoplay, which cannot be turned off. That's incredibly obnoxious, and loud, as previews somehow always seem to be.
Is this all an inevitable consequence of growth and the evolution of mass content or a set of bad decisions?
Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.
Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.
This is absolutely not accurate.
These streaming services lock you into a specific catalogue of their curated material. There is absolutely no way the statement you made about having access to everything is true. It's also especially less true if you're not living in the US. For example if you're a foreigner in a or regoin country, you're access to certain content is often limited.
With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.
Then there are other strange developments, let's take the fact that nearly every good album on Spotify now has only the "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
Who knows, maybe in 40 years will be thanking people who preserved Terrabytes of original content for the world to access?
Of course it isn't, because it is illegal and free.
> "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
This has nothing to do with Spotify, it is for example when the entire Led Zeppelin original master tapes get remastered in the studio by the label, and they re-release old mono albums or older albums in a better fidelity format then when they were recorded years ago thanks to technological progress.
just interesting to me how the scene has changed.
I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”
For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it.
But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.
I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?
If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.
The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win.
These are the things they MUST do:
Honestly, that's it for most people. For me they also need to...Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in.
Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.
Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.
A flat subscription fee, perhaps with tiered pricing in terms of content resolution and number of concurrent users in a household.
Figure out some fair distribution key for the viewer's contributions. Newer content gets a higher slice of the pie to encourage investing in new content, but older content under copyright (like a 40 year old film) will still bring in some money, and it makes sense to make a back catalogue available.
Allow users to use their own clients if they wish (technically possible if you forget about DRM), and let enthusiasts create a user experience no platform has ever seen that can rival the ease of use of piracy (e.g., Popcorn Time, and similar services).
Start out as a conglomerate of big studios with a clear short to midterm business model, but aim to set up a non-profit custodian in the long term to handle the maintenance and development of the platform, and make it possible to represent any content owner in a fair way — because if you don't, you'll end up the target of anti-trust lawsuits.
This won't happen because of greed of course. Ah well, there is always piracy to supplement a Netflix/Disney/Whatever subscription and just pretend it does exist.
Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
> Now we finally have that
We don't. We still have the one or two things we want packaged in with a ton of stuff we don't.
It's actually worse. Each package (subscription platform) has one or two things we want distributed accross all of them, which a bunch of stuff we don't want packaged in.
Not seeing how this is a good system.
>Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
Why would it be a case for publicly funded infrastructure? We’re talking about entertainment, not highways or clean water.
As a consumer, yes, I would prefer an option to pay only for the shows I want to watch, but I don’t see why your tax dollars should fund my preferred method of entertainment.
No thanks. My paychecks, after state and fed taxes, fica, retirement, insurance, etc are down to literally half of my actual salary.
I don't want another few percent pilfered so I can subsidize my fellow Americans' NCIS and Dog the Bounty Hunter habits.
Well, that's only half of it. The other half is that people became fed up with their bills, not realizing that everyone has a unique subset of channels they liked, and paying for the full bundle was a way to subsidize all the other channels.
Sadly it's rather difficult to balance these two issues.
Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now. You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music. There are stragglers, of course, but they're getting fewer. If this model works for Spotify et al, why can't it work for movies and TV?
Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system. It's what allows music to be played on the radio and so on. I know very little about how it works technically, but it seems to work just fine.
All of this has been great for the consumer since we get cheap music, but if we want to port the same system over to shows/movies then we need to think through the implications of reducing the total amount of revenue that content creators get from people watching their content. Where are the alternative revenue streams? You can't take a TV show on tour.
It's definitely possible, theoretically, but I'm not sure it's possible at a price point that people actually want to pay. Making video content is orders of magnitude more expensive than making music.
Music is still fighting being “like music”.
> Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now.
There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now.
> You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music.
Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up.
> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.
No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners.
But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that.
(generally, obviously there will be exceptions.)
> No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses
At least in Germany we have a single agency (GEMA) that acts on behalf of virtually all artists worldwide. They are responsible for a range of licenses, be it for bands that want to cover a song on their new album, a bar that wants to play music or a music streaming service that wants to get started.
In my experience it is a tremendous help to have a single entity for licensing that even has ready-made rates for most things.
I don't see a reason why this could not exist for movies as well. Cost-intensive productions can easily be reflected by tiered pricing so that it costs more to stream/show Jurassic Park than some independent movie.
It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.
Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.
They're not at all even remotely the same beast.
I for one would totally pay to see that.
The real question is about independents, not blockbusters.
It is quite profitable if you are among the very few popular services. But now it's just a tragedy of the commons situation.
Yet again there is no practical way to watch a given serie/movie. Which is the whole premise of streaming services.
So yet again piracy gives you better quality with less fuss.
I generally agree with that. I don't care about one platform at all. I'll pay up to ~$30 total per month for nearly everything (TV + movies), whether that's on one site or spread across four.
With the way things are going, it looks more likely that I'll just frequently turn subscriptions on and off. That's the routine I've found myself in the last year or so. I might watch some shows on HBO or Showtime, then when they end for the season I kill the subscription. I might maintain one central subscription, such as Prime (which makes it easy to add and remove other 'channel' subscriptions). This seems to be how a lot of consumers are behaving now.
Push the price to more than $30, and I'll just use my antenna and find other things to do. I cut the cable cord years ago, and I lived.
Only when when reasonably priced subscriptions like Prime, Netflix, and maybe HBO or Showtime, often rotated, could be had for $30 / month did I come back to Hollywood.
Exact same for music. I'm old enough to remember making $6 / hour at the grocery store and then taking my paycheck straight to BestBuy to purchase $17 CDs. But ever since I got my first DSL connection about 20 years ago, the music industry hasn't earned a cent off me.
Only recently did Spotify at $10 / month bring me back as a customer. I guarantee you if I start finding songs I want to play are premium priced or missing, or they start raising prices like Netflix, well I guess the music companies won't be getting my $10 anymore either.
The $100 / month for commercial TV that Cox, Comcast, and friends have enjoyed, same as the $17 / CD that the music industry once took for granted, isn't going to work with the next generation like it did with the Boomers. We don't have as much disposable income, and there are too many other options out there.
Compulsory licensing in general, and specifically for radio style plays makes a big difference in the rights landscape. Movies and TV don't have anything like that, so you have to get agreement with content owners to do anything.
Ironic, as a decade ago the complaint was that we need a la cart pricing. Now that it's happening everyone is complaining about it being too expensive. What it seems people really want is the cable all you can eat buffet model, but at a 90% discount.
Or even better would be to pay by the minute at a rate where it ends up that 1h of TV every month is around 10$. But where the selection of shows is the entire catalogue of all shows ever.
And that's kinda what Netflix had set out to do at first, and I'm hoping are still trying to do.
If studios all pooled their IP in a single marketplace under a compulsory, fair licensing scheme, the calculation would be about the same, because currently most streaming services don't overlap much (though in some cases you can find movies on both iTunes and Google Play, for example).
What would change is that the current aggregators' revenue would shrink and their ability to have exclusive content would disappear. A company like Netflix would become just another content provider competing for views in a single marketplace.
Perhaps a better analogy is the movie theater business. Movie theaters generally show movies from all rights holders (though I'm sure studios also compete for the best screens for tentpole launches). Theaters share revenue with studios. In principle, anyone can go to any theater to see a movie of their choice, and theaters can show the movies they want as long as they license them. It's not on-demand, but that's pretty irrelevant. Also, I can start a movie theater and start showing movies, as long as I abide by the licensing rules.
I have hbo/starz/and the big name cable channels for about $140/month with 200gb of cloud dvr.
My only real complaint is that I can’t download content to my phone for flights.
It’s not $12.99/month but when I’m traveling in Asia I can VPN back to my house and watch whatever I want off the cloud DVR.
Bring it down to $60-$80 and I'd consider it.
With "effectively TV" you had to sit down at a certain time and watch it at that time. You had a selection of shows you could watch on a number of channels.
What the person here is talking about is $140 for something that is not "effectively TV." They can watch it pretty much where ever they want. They can watch it without commercials. They aren't limited to the shows or channels available on their provider. They get instant access to movies they want to watch, when they want to watch it, without need of special, single use hardware.
> All of these values are insane to me.
It's a special kind of hubris to to assume that everyone else is insane and you are not when you admittedly don't understand the topic at hand.
Because with music I literally don't care what I'm listening to. If famous artists left Spotify I couldn't care any less - I just want a playlist with "music" and that's good enough for me. With video, I don't want random TV shows - I want specific ones that interest me, and either they are available on Netflix or they aren't, the fact that there is 10k other shows does nothing to justify the subscription.
Just like you apparently care about what you are watching on VoD services, even tho there are also plenty people out there who use VoD as "background noise" and often couldn't care less about the actual shows.
I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.
Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.
As just an example, I was a huge fan of Arrested Development - but continuing that show where it left off after ~10 years of not being on air... it just didn't "have it" anymore...
And... when I search for a movie, it seems about 90% of the time they don't have it. Instead, they recommend a bunch of Netflix Original's that totally aren't what I'm looking for.
The actual Netflix created ones have largely missed the mark for me.
The theme is usually the end of the world, zombies, or the dead coming back to life. Or some horrible phenomena at the edge of a forest, and the once peaceful town is under attack from the supernatural.
What makes it worse is that Netflix now dubs foreign content by default to make it all look English. And they do their best to trick you.
i still much prefer shows without commercials, though.
But yeah, why is everything about "horror forests" nowadays? It's been done to death.
Maybe because so many people nowadays have never seen a tree?
Case in point: I expect ads to arrive (within a decade) to streaming videos, much like they did for cable.
(Cable's main advantage in the early days was the lack of ads - or so I'm led to believe)
Now cable seems like mostly ads with a little bit of ghost hunting sprinkled in.
This is true of pretty much all tv. Because most people want that.
On the other hand, if I turn on my cable box and Dog the Bounty Hunter happens to be on and halfway through an episode, I'll watch it until I'm done eating and be done with it. I don't actually care what going on in the episode, and I'm only half paying attention. It's mostly just noise and moving pictures in the background.
That's "disposable" television, and it's only something that you can get from an always on network.
Netflix requires more effort, and with that effort I feel I should get something good out of that time. Instead I spend 30 minutes looking for something to watch only to give up, switch back to network television, and eat my now cold meal.
I think this comes across as condescending but I really don’t get it.
And Netflix (correctly) abandoned being a movie library service a long time ago. They're pretty much just HBO with a more broad appeal now.
I don't know about anyone else but I'm interested in shows, not channels. I'm not going to sign up to 10 channels - that'd cost too much and some months I'd probably watch nothing on some of them. If I could pick and choose which shows I watched I'd have no problem with a low-friction "sign up via email and pay for what you watch" but that's not the offer. Your suggestion is fine for people who are rich and have loads of time to watch hours of tv every day. That's not the target for these companies though - they recognize it's a zero-sum game and want it to be them you pick over Netflix (or vice versa).
because content companies started holding their content hostage for higher fees or outright refusing to allow netflix to license it. Netflix creating their own content was a matter of survival.
1) I don't want to pay for content I won't watch.
2) I don't want to be required to pay for content I won't watch in order to watch content I want to watch.
3) I want to easily watch the content I want without needing to have dozens of different separate accounts or services. I mean similar to "press button, get bacon" style of easy.
4) I want to pay in money and nothing else. I don't want to pay with my data; I don't want to pay with my viewing history.
5) I want to watch whenever and wherever I choose, no take-backs.
1) No charge, so you're not paying for content you won't watch
2) Same as 1
3) A torrent client speaking RSS + a private torrent site that serves RSS covers this
4) You pay with nothing - no money, no data, and no viewing history
5) Files without DRM can be played on any device and cannot be retroactively deleted by the service provider
Piracy really is most often a services problem.
Some of us don't have that much time anymore (I did run Plex when I was younger, though). I'm either willing to pay about $$25-$30 / month for a few services like HBO and Prime without commercials*, and available in demand, with plenty of quality series to keep my 1 hour / day TV habit satiated, or I'll just take my ball and go home. Cable TV and $100 / month for 30% commercials is something I can and will live without.
Maybe we can get a frequent renter's club. $20/month for 8 movies (two a week) and 20 episodes?
Was trying to find John Wick 3 this weekend and no joy. I would have paid a premium for that.
However, I’m very okay with iTunes’s <$3 per episode. Sure it’s more than most vod subscriptions, but the shows are mine forever, and I can buy just about whatever I want.
If I watched more TV overall, it might get too expensive, but I don’t, so quality over quantity.
> Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for
Erm, no? Don't know about the US but the UK experience of cable and satellite was a basic package with dire content, then every interesting thing was £££ extra. By the time you had a reasonable selection you were at £50-£100 a month. more if you wanted the sport channels. So we didn't cable cut, we never signed up in the first place. Compared to the licence fee it was always appalling value. Netflix want nearly a whole BBC yearly licence fee, and deliver a tiny fraction of the content. Not that I like all the Beeb do. :)
When we cancel Netflix (very soon going on current programmes), it'll be back to terrestrial only as none of the streaming services now have "enough". So whatever comes to the BBC and Channel 4 then. I'd start torrenting again before subscribing to Amazon, Disney or whoever just to watch one interesting series, then hope I remember to cancel timely enough.
In reality people have many preferences and desires, and they pay for streaming services or not for a variety of reasons.
Some people are maybe sick of being stuck with a giant cable company and are happy to pay for many streaming services. Other people likely still have cable and use streaming to supplement that for specific shows. Others have different reasons.
This isn't the alternative reality Netflix and others are fighting. People are just going to pirate it if they can't offer it easily and at a price that the market will accept. There is no escaping that. It is on them to adjust, not the consumers.
I think streaming has incredible value, and broadcast television's value proposition is extremely poor. I hope once people start doing the math, tv commercials is a thing of the past, or at least there is 1 commercial per break.
that being said, netflix does have some deep concerns for me if I were to invest in it. its still never made a profit, subscribers are maxing out, and competition is just getting started.
Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.
I'd say it divides by more than half. I don't want any politics with my entertainment as many other people do. Even if the politics are aligned to my own. It becomes annoying as "preaching to the choir".
Yes, and that is slowly disappearing, as everything is becoming isolated again and bundled with extra crap I don't care about.
Ricky Gervais: $40M
Chappelle: $60M
Eddie Murphy: $70M
$210M for less than 20 hours of programming. Wow.
No. We hated cable for the high prices and bad service which were enabled by physical monopolies.
If the backend was based on open protocols, you could buy an aggregating frontend from Netflix, Hulu, TiVo, etc and then buy whatever content you like from whatever content owner you like.
What we do need is something like the music industry has. Subscribe to Spotify, Deezer, Tidal. They all pretty much have the same stuff, with slight differences in UI and the odd exclusive to differentiate them.
That’s what they need to do - cross license. They can even have a delay before they do so for their own content or whatever.
Just the admin of subscribing to 20 different services is enough to make me subscribe to none.
That's not a mistake they are making; they are all aware of that. They just want the other guys to be the ones that die first.
The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).
If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).
Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?
I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.
To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now!
That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.
I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that.
And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay.
Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.
My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch it Again Anime, Anime Where Characters Wear Hats, Anime Where Characters Float in Hats, and Anime About Hat Making.
For the love of all let me get some other options in the fucking list before I lose my mind. I like comedies, action movies, sci-fi, documentaries, and historical dramatizations or historical fictions too, you know. Not everything has to have a talking cat in it.
These recommendation systems need to be a bit less zealous; I like black pepper, too, but that doesn't mean I want a huge bowl of black peppercorns in cream sauce for dinner.
Recently I’ve found that old actors in mid-budget productions have the best overall quality.
With algorithmic systems it sometimes feels like reading books written by a Markov chain toy.
When life gives you lemons…
Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position.
I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once.
Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful.
Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on.
And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on.
The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.
edit: i could be mistaken though
The metrics shifted. Subscriber retention just isn't that tightly correlated with them identifying hidden gems for you, that may be an externality we've just lost.
There used to be a lot of competition in this space, for a few years you could go on free sites designed only to give you targeted recommendations. I think Jinni was one.
They were just training their engines and became ad networks.
One other factor, not really anyone's fault -- the massive increase in high quality scripted content has made search less critical. If you fail to find hidden gems in 2003, you get Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and miss out on Oldboy or Goodbye Lenin. Today if you pull up any random streaming service you'll probably find something that's good enough, even if not great.
It's a little disappointing, maybe there's room for a p2p ML recommendation engine in this space for people who really want to optimize what they're consuming. I'd be into it.
I don't watch TV or have Netflix, but I listen to streaming music, and I noticed something weird. I used to listen to Pandora, and it recommended a lot of different artists that I liked on hearing them for the first time. It single-handedly gave me a taste for 21st century music. But there wasn't enough music in their catalog, so I switched to Spotify. Now Spotify will play more of the songs by people I already like, but very nearly everything it plays that I didn't find on Pandora I hate and it keep playing the same things over and over no matter how quickly and frequently I skip past them.
It's hard for me to believe that they could be this bad and unresponsive unwittingly, but I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of naive algorithm that is failing.
...you may say, why don't I explicitly mark songs "like" or "dislike", but I mostly listen in my car where I can't do that.
One alternative hypothesis is that different people use Pandora vs. Spotify and the ones on Pandora have better taste, but I can't believe that's all of it.
If you only go by statistics and don’t think through the “what if everyone did this” question then giving you the same old content on repeat will have better metrics.
So if I’m watching a video about TIG welding say, to optimise “next click” I suppose I should be recommended mostly more welding videos, with a smattering of engineering and finally a bit of clickbait mixed in case I’m starting to get distracted.
If services are optimising for “keep going right now”, they might be modelling as something like a markov chain of “clicked on next” and that’s how we get stuck in this kind of short-sighted local optimum.
Google Play Music has been the best for me in terms of variety, but it's buggy as hell. It freezes up if it can't play an ad for some reason, won't automatically play when bluetooth is connected (like Pandora does), and other annoying things. (I ride a motorcycle so I can't mess with my phone if something goes wrong)
If a streaming service didn't order automatically generated genre playlists by popularity (with a little randomness) people would stop listening to them and start saying the playlists are full of rubbish songs they've never heard of.
My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908
Now my feed is full of those. I wish Netflix would stop buying those movies.
I've been watching a lot more Youtube recently oddly enough. Youtube does a better job of giving me a mix of videos for my interests, and there are a number of great vloggers out there across a lot of my interests posting weekly+ content.
If Netflix was recommending something that you didn't care about, you could use "Not Interested" to make it not show up in your list anymore.
Now, it just keeps recommending these same content over and over again. There's no way to say "I don't want to watch that". There's also no variety to the suggestions.
I agree that "decision fatigue" is a big deal for me.
That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.
Maybe if they spent less money on trying to develop their own content and more money licensing the best content to come out over the past 30 years then there would be more engagement. The percentage of the top 1000 or so movies as rated on IMDB or Rotten tomatoes that is NOT on netflix is staggering.
When we all bought into the concept of netflix a decade or so back it was on the premise of all-you-can-eat on demand access to the largest/most inclusive catalog of movies and shows anywhere. They long ago ditched that model and they are suffering as a result.
It's not even that you can't get the latest blockbusters, its that you can't get most highly rated movies from ANY of the last 3-4 decades. But movies rated 5/10 or lower? Seems like they've managed to license just about every one of those. Bleh.
Yes, it defeats the whole point of streaming subscriptions. Yes, it'll drive a large segment of the subscriber base back to piracy. But it's a classic prisoner's dilemma.
As long as I'm speculating about shit i know nothing about, I'll follow up by predicting that the next wave - after things get bad enough - is cross-licensing deals between the bigger surviving players. That'll improve the value proposition to subscribers (great for us!) and also raise barriers to entry, so next will be the price gouging. Oh, and somewhere in there will be the contracts that prevent content creators/distributors from licensing new stuff to anyone else (unless they are one of the surviving streaming services.)
Compare early black mirror to what it is now. It's become far less of a "thinking" show, and much more of a "You should accept this, you shouldn't accept this" show.
Anymore, I do not believe this to be true, and feel sort of silly for thinking it ever was true. It's become quite obvious their strategy is create new shows to lure people in, and then cancel them (because they'd have to pay the stars more), rinse repeat, hoping more people stay than leave. They do not care about finishing the stories they're telling, or the stories at all, they don't care about content, they care about growth.
Honestly, anymore, I don't even want to watch Netflix shows because they'll probably get canceled before they end.
Edit: small grammar fix
..and because its better for them once they've hooked you to keep you there, the series usually provides a cliff hanger, but many times the series isn't renewed so the risk/investment in time is high. If it is renewed then they really have no new idea so they just rehash the first series and do it again (e.g. the OA, I guess, I stopped after the beginning of the second series). So you never get the closure you get from watching an old school tv series or movie, there's no high's or low's of a good story, there's just time used up.
It's rather like each streaming service is turning into its own version of a TV channel. It's almost the vision of a'la cart cable pricing, only each channel is too expensive and the UX too cumbersome to subscribe to more than a small handful.
Perhaps in a few years, streaming aggregators will appear and bundle a bunch of services together, and the internet will have reinvented Cable TV.
Now that all the content creators have realized the digital value of their content, it doesn't matter for Netflix whether those networks splinter it out into 20 different subscriptions or hide it behind 1 expensive cable subscription again. Netflix doesn't have that content so they lose either way.
Their only way forward is to become just another content network, OR a cable provider with the same elevated subscription cost. Whichever way they lean, the stock will tumble until they're in line with all their competitors. The gap has been closed.