They basically blame it on all the woke messaging In The content, and say they’re one hit away from explosive growth if they make another house of cards type hit
> They basically blame it on all the woke messaging In The content
...I'm sorry, what? Give the Gervais, Burr, Chapelle bits a watch. Even after the backlash they remain on Netflix. The guys in the youtube clip couldn't be further off the mark.
We don't really the term "woke" but the above is basically why my wife and I decided to cancel after 6 years. It seems that every show has elements to "poke/tease/provoke" some other party, or to generate controversy. Plus the fact that every show seem to go through an obligatory theme/character "checklist", leaving little space to the authors to manouver through a good story.
Being not americans, we were really tired about this, up to the point we say "ok, let's give this series a chance, but we stop at the first evident 'yankeeland move' (that how we say it)".
Speaking of weird messaging, this seems as good a place as any to bring up the bizarreness of Apple producing Severance.
For anyone who hasn't watched it yet, it has something to do with the lengths big corporations go to to prevent internal knowledge getting out. The premise of the show (all in the trailer) is that people get an implant so they have two separate lives at work and outside, where one is completely unaware of the other.
It's an excellent show, just surprising to see Apple putting it out, since their R&D team is basically the closest real-world equivalent we have.
Netflix needs to nail development of their own tv shows but unfortunately very large quantity of their releases contain such a bad storytelling that it is almost unwatchable.
Is it really that hard for a billion dollar company to find good storytellers and content producers?
A translation of this that works for more people is that what you're calling "woke" casting is the process of turning all characters into "multi-colored Californians". Every character on screen is of different ethnic background, but they all speak and act like second-year acting students from an NYU improv class that are in LA for the summer.
"woke" used to have a specific meaning, and it's been around for decades, originating in the African American activist community[0]. Like a lot of leftist and progressive vernacular, it's been co-opted by the right and degenerated into a nonspecific anti-progressive slur.
This is a platitude. Look at some of the projects funded in the last two years and you'll find some of the most esteemed actors, writers and directors of Hollywood.
What, specifically, "woke" attributes has Netflix tripped on?
The issues with Netflix and content creation are systemic, but it isn't an issue with "wokeness," which has become a lazy kneejerk reaction to any media entity.
Watch Black Mirror, you can pinpoint the exact moment that some suit at netflix gained creative control of that show and ran it into the gutter. It wasn't enough to have a show critiquing the existing techno dystopian world we live in, they actually had to make it real by throwing in some techno dystopian propaganda in there too.
There was also this terrible show that got instantly cancelled called Sense 8. The first scene of that show was this absurd sex scene where a woman was having sex with a trans-woman using a dildo and the dildo flops onto the ground and is soaked in some disgusting fluid.
Sense8 came out in 2015. We're doing some real revisionist history if we're going to start claiming that a near decade-old show is attributable for Netflix's decline.
Netflix's decline has been a decade in the making. They've been constantly shoveling out shit. I'm throwing out a number here but I'm guessing 90% of their original programming has been cancelled. They've been lighting the money on fire from the start and it was never sustainable.
EDIT: Speaking of 2015, funny thing, Netflix's valuation is practically at its 2015 valuation
I don't disagree with anything you've said there I just don't think it has absolutely anything to do with "wokeness". That's just the latest meme everyone loves to throw around.
I wont blame wokeness for Netflix's shows being terrible. I will say that for some reason a ton of terribly written shows were greenlit by Netflix and they happened to be woke. I'm guessing that writing that appeals to everyone in your political bubble is easier to get greenlit than actually good writing that might actually make you question your beliefs in some manner.
Yeah sure. The company pushing Chapelle and Gervais transphobic standup comedy and continuing to pay them more money is the woke company. People need to lay off buzz words
the majority of all original programming gets cancelled.
Who is the media company so great that isn’t shoveling out shit? Disney with marvel and Star Wars? HBO where most of the creative staff left recently because of HBO Max strategy? CBS with the 50th CSI, FBI, or Law and Order show?
> There was also this terrible show that got instantly cancelled called Sense 8. The first scene of that show was this absurd sex scene where a woman was having sex with a trans-woman using a dildo and the dildo flops onto the ground and is soaked in some disgusting fluid.
Ok, but they also have a very heteronormative show Sex/Life that's equally trashy and lowbrow, maybe the issue isn't the "wokeness?"
What was disgusting about the fluid? I’m not sure what it is. However I’m going to venture you don’t find the fluids of heteronormative sex disgusting. More than that. Who cares. I watched the show and don’t remember that scene. I can’t imagine caring about sex scenes in media. They are so unimportant.
Sense8 didn’t get instantly cancelled either. It literally got a second season.
Particularly considering the recent Dave Chapelle controversy (and similar), would you really consider Netflix "woke"? They're capitalistic - they'll make whatever sells
I don't know if wokeness is really applicable. Having watched a variety of netflix originals over the years I don't really find correlation or causation between wokeness and quality. I really liked Arcane, and Arcane has a bunch of races and sexualities and poverty levels and even pink/blue/etc hair. I also really liked Stranger Things and it's pretty much an all-white cast in suburbia middle class americana.
> “Arcane has a bunch of races and sexualities and poverty levels and even pink/blue/etc hair”
It’s genuinely funny if hair color is the sure mark of devious wokeness.
The fiber of what’s currently known as the anti-woke moral panic is unchanged since 1965: “There are men with long hair on television now! Somebody needs to protect the children”
Cancel Gervais? It’s a small tiny amt of people. I can link you to different far far left online personalities who do not want to cancel Gervais. Just have critiques.
Wildly over exaggerating the fake moral panic of cancel culture. Yet others are marshmallows as compared to you?
>Is it really that hard for a billion dollar company to find good storytellers and content producers?
Yes. Ask pretty much any studio ever. The promise that data would be this magic ingredient for quality content [that connects with audiences] ended up being pretty much BS. The percentage of content I genuinely want to spend my time with across all services is very low.
Good storytellers are almost impossible to find. Especially ones with consistent output and quality. Yes. There's no way to train for this kind of creative output, no pipeline besides people falling into the profession and not getting washed out.
Eh I can't help but feel that Netflix trying to fight other streamers on content creation was a bad idea. Even if initially it seemed to work out well for them (with some people even claiming their recommendation engine told them what shows would be good, not sure if people are still claiming this now).
A streaming platform is pretty much a commodity at this point. It's not easy but it's not something you need to hire super-premium engineering talent to achieve (as was maybe the case ten years ago). Pretty much no one watches Netflix vs. Disney+ because they have a better software stack.
Netflix is a cautionary tale of Wall Street growth-at-all-costs mixed with Silicon Valley hyperoptimization. Their tendency to cancel popular shows because they become more expensive to produce doesn't bode well for their value proposition.
Compared to the other streaming services, Netflix will get dropped long before even Apple TV+ in my household. Adding ad-supported tiers is fine, they just better never add ads to the current paid tiers. Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying. They already limit the simultaneous streams and that seems fair. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort figuring out if logins are coming from different households.
If you ran a business and it cost $10 per month and I signed up. Then shared my password to all my friends and family. People who don’t live with me. Would you be ok because it shouldn’t matter what I do with my account as long as I pay?
They implicitly allowed it for well over a decade because it was good for their growth. We had a friends group with multiple Wiis using the same Netflix account when I was in college.
Microsoft implicitly allowed pirating Windows for over a decade, and for the same reason. Eventually they switched to an activation model when there was no growth left, just squeezing more out of the same userbase.
It really feels like you should be paying for streams, not where you are streaming to. Max out your 4-streams at a time? Well, then, pay more. Seems fair.
I think Netflix is coming out as the bad guy here, but it's the whole industry that is broken. They seem to expect every single household to subscribe to 10 different streaming services. This obviously creates a market for password sharing, and I suspect it will bring a resurgence to piracy.
Just as a personal anecdote: I have Netflix, Paramount, HBO Max, TV2 Play, Paramount, Viaplay, Discovery+ and Disney+. And probably some that I'm forgetting. I don't really watch that much TV, and the only way I could justify this was by sharing the accounts with close family. The problem is that we're not in the same household. The moment this stops being a viable option we're likely just going to cancel the subscriptions. You can rent a lot of movies for $150/month.
The amount of subscription services are getting out of hand. Even my car has one, and the only value proposition it provides me is not having to connect my phone as a hotspot (which is kind of pain with an iPhone) and real-time traffic data. For $15/month.
So do it. It takes seconds to cancel and subscribe. If you want access to everything all at once, then pay $150 per month. If you cannot afford $150 per month, then spend an extra minute or two per month canceling and subscribing.
I find it to be very convenient, and more convenient than it has ever been in my life.
> They seem to expect every single household to subscribe to 10 different streaming services.
Oh absolutely, it's frustrating. And whats even more frustrating is that some of those services refuse to have their content on other services but don't provide their service outside of the US.
I wanted to watch Dragon Ball Z last week. It's on Funamation and AnimeLab. Well neither of those services are available in Taiwan, so, only option is to pirate it.
I want to watch Star Trek - Strange New World. Not available on any service in Taiwan.
So I pay for Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, and PrimeVideo.
HBO is available in Taiwan but you need Taiwan credit card... so I can't register with my Singapore card. Paramount, Hulu, not available here.
Sometimes I dont mind paying for these services but they don't want my money.
But at the same time I'm paying for 4, I don't want to pay for 10.
I am waiting for cable companies to resurface. Brokers that package a bunch of services together selling a single bundle to the end consumer and negotiating upstream with the many content providers.
I sign up for 2 concurrent streams, then upgrade to 4 concurrent streams. My kids move out and now with the same account they tell me I can only use 1 stream in my 4 stream package...
I think a lot of people in this thread are too fixated on the idea of “streams” and they have lost the plot. Netflix is a content producer and licensor. The streams are just a means to deliver that content.
They advertise it in terms of streams. Whatever business arrangements they have with their providers is irrelavent to me as a consumer.
It'd be like if you went to an all you can eat buffet, and people started saying its not fair if you eat too much because the grocery store is charging the resturant per item not per person. It is totally irrelavent ti the person eating at the resturant.
Its a business arrangement. If either side is unhappy they are allowed to terminate it.
That said, very openly turning a blind eye to something and then suddenly not is essentially unilaterally altering the terms of the deal. If i ran a business and suddenly changed the pricing scheme, that's my right, but i would understand if x% decided the value proposition no longer made sense and left. I certainly wouldn't be offended - its just business.
> Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying
This summer, YC is funding a news service that only has 1 subscriber by design - the login is shared worldwide. Database architecture was dead simple and can scale easily to other planets. Cost of the subscription is pegged to the GDP of the Earth so profitability is not an issue.
> Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying.
This mindset is baffling. The contract was always that a subscription was for a single household. The fact that they were flexible about access for many years is irrelevant.
You’re not buying the right to share (or resell) your account to whoever you want. You’re buying the right to stream within a single household. It doesn’t make sense to get so upset when they simply hint at enforcing the agreed-upon terms of the contract more actively.
The OP did address that though, via the fact that you can only have X number of simultaneous streams. That's a sensible, easily enforced limit.
Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.
That's what I found irritating about youtubeTV. the media companies must be really giving youtube a hard time because I found it a pain in the ass to use while traveling and when I was subscribed at an earlier point it wasn't that bad.
> The OP did address that though, via the fact that you can only have X number of simultaneous streams.
I feel like everyone is forgetting that Netflix is licensing content, not just selling access to streaming bandwidth.
The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households, not the idea that a single login can be used infinitely by as many people as long as an arbitrary simultaneous stream limit is enforced.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
Several streaming services already have mechanisms to check account sharing. It’s not new. There’s no indication that Netflix plans to go full draconian and limit to a single IP with zero flexibility, despite what people here seem to be assuming. The account sharing detection logic used in other platforms is quite forgiving, and honestly it’s not terribly difficult to detect long-term patterns where two separate locations are constantly using the same account with users never returning “home”.
>The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households
Content licensing is based on whatever imaginary rules you want to make up. The OP is providing a plausible line of reasoning where you can marry this stupidity with something quantifiable (i.e., streams). That sounds quite reasonable. Ultimately, it's their service. They can do whatever they want. As for why the OP is bothering, I can only guess that netflix has built the reputation of being a tech company and the OP thinks that they may show some internal consistency. Otherwise, media companies make up rules all the time (for eg., no sports in your local area).
They introduced this idea that you're paying for a certain amount of concurrent streams, it's not that surprising that people see password sharing as a fair way of getting your money's worth rather than taking advantage.
The initial premise seems slightly manipulative to me I guess, if you paid by the hour or something, no password sharing problem but less profits
> If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.
They are likely to err on the side of caution. Spotify already does this, on the same restriction, and it is a complete non-issue.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms.
It really doesn't. Do you live in the same house? Then you're covered. And there's lots you can feed in to a ML model to catch out people who have devices that have literally never appeared together in the same household to spot suspicious activity and, for instance, for 2FA.
If that just stops people reselling accounts to strangers in different countries alone that's a significant win for Netflix.
Netflix ought to be delighted that people are paying and sharing their passwords with family. Because the alternative is not paying at all, which is what is going to happen!
Some of my friends went halfsies on an ad-free hulu account they share.
I don’t spend enough on amazon to have a prime account for myself, but am happy to pay for it since my close family members use it enough to make the subscription worthwhile. If they were to stop using it, or amazon limits the address they ship to, I would cancel.
I've been a Netflix customer for 20 years. I have two residences in separate states and occasionally someone else will stay at one and use my Netflix. If they ever flag my account for simultaneous streaming that will be the last straw.
I don't see how pissing off paying customers will increase revenue. Netflix needs to figure out how to make content to keep the current ones.
I have been a Netflix customer since the DVD-only days. My wife & me watch a show in the living room, while my son gets his weekend allowance to watch a cartoon in the bedroom. This used to work fine, until Netflix decided we can’t play two streams like this. There were other reasons to cancel, but this made the decision easier.
>Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying.
this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?
using your logic we might as well just have 1 account and share it with every single person on the planet.
the only reason that netflix is getting flack for it is because they were super lax with it for such a long time and now everyone feels entitled to it for some insane reason.
> this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?
Does any of those services have "multiple simultaneous streams" plans? I'm paying Netflix for 4 simultaneous streams (their naming: "Number of screens you can watch on at the same time") and they should not care where I utilize their offer.
I mean me personally I won’t pay as much anymore when they enforce it, I pay it for my parents that live in another state and I only watch their large tent pole shows a couple times a year.
Rather than paying for the whole year I’ll pay for a month or two like I do with paramount+ and Disney+.
I’m sure they did some financial calculus to see what’s better but it’s not like other companies haven’t made terrible decisions in the past killing their business. I’m sure blockbuster had bean counters justifying their choices too.
4 streams simultaneously could all be from different locations, even different countries and still be a household subscription.
One watches at work, another family member is on holidays abroad, the other watches at home and the other via mobile Internet on a train. Should this considered password sharing?
> Number of screens you can watch on at the same time
You. Not your neighbor. Not your friends.
Strictly by the sentence you quote to make your point, you would not even be allowed to share your "simultaneous streams" with members of your household. Which makes this quote rather useless to argue for your assumed right of sharing your streams with anyone you want.
I honestly don’t understand why so many people are up in arms about a company enforcing their contract.
If you bought a sort of “family pass” to a movie theater that allowed your family to watch unlimited movies, you wouldn’t expect to be able to pass the family pass around to other families.
Netflix is literally just the digital version of a family pass to a movie theater. Everything is priced according to models of single households using single accounts, down to the licensing costs and royalties.
I don't see anyone up in arms here, he just pointed it's enough reason to cancel Netflix and he is perfectly right, same as they have right to enforce their contract. You don't like them going strict on account sharing, cancel account, it's your right.
The value proposition doesn't make sense to a lot of people any more. Also, a lot of people are facing rising costs/losing jobs, etc. so it's one more thing threatening their way of life.
Not to mention some families are fairly distributed and any tech savvy person has many viable alternatives.
Using your logic, anyone loaning out a book they own should be criminally charged.
This line of thinking leads to the ludicrous existing patents that describe scanning the room to check how many people are in a room and once crossed a certain threshold, the movie or show automatically stops airing.
Isn't the difference very clear here: Subscription vs Ownership
If you are paid member of a library, and the library has ToS which does not allow you to lend your book to anyone else, then yes you are at fault when you share.
I agree with you and they have a right to do this; issue is; they will lose a lot of members because of this because they were so lax. That’s why it’s is common to think; it is easier to start high and discount than start low and increase your prices. People don’t like change and will just leave.
I also see how this is hard to make fair for edge cases; it should just be clear what it means. I think 1 geo location at a time for x screens is clear. One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work? Are they going to time the ‘remote’ watching for what a typical vacation or work outing might look like?
Anyway; instead of clamping down on password sharing, why not add tiers based on number of geo locations with those screens? 4 screens in 2 locations, 4 screens in 3 locations, 4 screens in 4 locations and that’s it. These locations are not fixed, but this is easy to measure and enforce for them, while, as my situation above, is less obvious.
I think making it clear what is allowed and what is not from the start in verifiable terms, is important or users will get angry as they seem to be now.
> I agree with you and they have a right to do this; issue is; they will lose a lot of members because of this because they were so lax. That’s why it’s is common to think; it is easier to start high and discount than start low and increase your prices. People don’t like change and will just leave.
I think they will gain a lot of members that way too, since people get used and attached to a service and now need their own accounts.
Eh, maybe a few years ago when they were still releasing critically acclaimed shows left and right and not canceling them after season 2 all while not having the streaming market be mobbed by multiple competitors who also happen to stop licensing content to Netflix at the same time.
Netflix's problem was to cut quality to control costs _before_ they raised prices. If they had raised these prices while they were still the ascendant service I'm sure you are right and people would have grumbled while ultimately signing up. Then they could have cut costs slowly and most of their customers would not have noticed the boiling of the frog. As it stands they are driving their customers away at the exact moment that their competitors have finally gotten their house in order and opened their arms to Netflix's client base.
Like look at just AppleTV and HBOMax. AppleTV is dumping a massive amount of money into the aesthetics. Even the screensaver on the machine is this beautiful 4k resolution photos of landscapes, all while they are obviously not skimping on writes. HBO has been in the quality tv space for longer than Netflix has produced content _and_ has paired with Adult Swim(a channel that is unique enough in content to drive people to pay for packages just to get it, much like sports in the past) to get all their content. Both of these are cheaper than what Netflix is proposing as their monthly costs.
I'm not sure why Netflix thinks people will accept a more expensive, and worse product in the face of this competition
I think you are correct. The one thing I would add is that the hyperoptimization is not really appreciated.
From my vantage point as a customer and observer, they are a company that really had first mover advantage with a quality client anywhere. But the experience stagnated and the focus of the company flipped to consuming/wasting as much time as possible. IMO they got fat and happy when the main competitor was Amazon Prime Video, which is a flawed service in many ways.
Now there are competitors who are really good. Disney+ is a superior experience (on Apple TV, anyway) with a better catalog and better features like search. Peacock is pretty good too.
They had first mover advantage when it came to streaming video on-demand. They did see the writing on the wall that they needed their own catalog, but I think they hyperoptimized for quantity over quality. Netflix has a deep bench of originals, but so few are actually really good. Compare and contrast that with a service like Apple TV+. They have a smaller catalog, but their content, to me, is typically higher quality (Ted Lasso is a standout, For All Mankind is spectacular, etc).
They lost the plot when they decided they couldn't just be a distributor but also a creator. They went too hard too fast and they don't have compelling content.
Agreed - and it's worse than that. The user-hostile environment makes it impossible to see the actual catalog. I routinely learn about potentially interesting shows from things that aren't Netflix.
The Disney+ model is so much better. They suggest stuff, but I can wander and discover in the library of thousands of Disney titles if I so desire.
Netflix is a cautionary tale of the “DropBox Problem”. Streaming is a feature not a product. All of Netflix’s competitors consider streaming video as one channel for their content along with over the air, video on demand, theaters, etc.
Apple and Amazon just want to make their bundle more attractive.
Netflix is not a cautionary tail for anything in the overall context.
Almost all companies over-expand the way they did, and almost all companies are feeling the shock of the economic downturn.
They have every right to crack down on password sharing. The fact that people think they are a bad actor for this is evidence of the total lack of moral compass in our society today.
It seems like there might be a periodic sine wave for media consumption, with price on the Y axis.
When we sit at the trough, DRM is heavy-handed and media is expensive to purchase or rent. Piracy is the best option for most consumers.
Then some enterprising people pitch the media companies on a way to implement some hurdle pricing to jumpstart their moribund sales. Presented with an easy cheap way to pay for legal access to entertainment, people jump on board.
As money starts to roll in, the business types start to eye vertical integration. The upstarts see the writing on the wall and try to find a way out. Prices rise, but the content is still easy to access.
Now the rightsholders start to rein in their former partners, and implement their own solutions. These are terrible and myriad. Costs spiral, while the consumers are spoiled for choice.
Decision fatigue sets in. People find their niches, cut coupons, and share esclusive releases between family and friends.
Eventually the fragmentation becomes exhausting, and only the most line-toeing consumers bother to jump through the hoops necessary to pay for many kinds of content. Back to square one.
You can rent nearly any movie in existence for less than 5$, is piracy really the best option. Also, most people don’t care about DRM if they even know what it is.
There are like 6 different places where you can rent just one movie to stream for a couple of days. Big streaming packages like Netflix aren't the only option.
Looks like another signal that the tech industry is going to be shedding its hyper-growth workforce.
On a side note, a few months ago, I was receiving many recruiter-supplied positions for building out streaming services. These positions seemed to pay well, require a deep understanding of video streaming, and a vigorous interview processs. I wonder if these newly created positions will be the first to go as big entertainment tech consolidates its workforce.
"BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color."
That's really the last thing I care about from VOD service. Also judging by cast there are hardly any BIPOC people in 13 reasons why, seems pretty white to me.
A lot of people found that focus on identity a turn off, since many shows seemed to be themed around this. There's already a focus on it in day to day life, at work, and in headlines, especially during 2020. People need a break. If I never expressed any interest, it's odd to me that the recommendation engine would put it front and center, every time.
I believe that is what people complaining about 'woke' Netflix shows are referring to. Not the existence of them, the feeling that they're being promoted to everyone. They're welcome to continue, and the subscription numbers can either go up or down.
Netflix's problem is that the people in charge have 0 taste. The best / most popular content on netflix is made by auteurs (Stranger things) or is created by other studios (Squid game, etc). You can't make television using these data scientists and ml models. You need to have actual taste. You need to understand what separates a good story from a bad one. You can't just throw money at the problem either.
Just go to HBO to see the antithesis of netflix's model. It's possible to consistently put out quality, you need the right people involved. You can expect that to die soon btw since the suits at Warner fired the head of that company.
There are a large number of good movies on Netflix. It may not turn over as quickly as HBO's content, but the number of them is probably comparable. Try scrolling through some of the major categories and keep count of the "good" movies. *
The place Netflix really shines for me is the acquisition of non-US content. I particularly like political dramas from other countries. Even if some smaller countries aren't producing content that is quite as polished as we might expect here in the US, that's some of the charm, seeing how they make shows.
* I can't defend the browsing of Netflix -- that's just ridiculous
I've ranted at length about Netflix and how insanely useless their data analytics are. I quit Netflix earlier this year. It was obvious to me Netflix would falter when they started using that "Top 10" leaderboard as their primary recommendation engine. It was a tacit admission that they, having all the money, talent, and 20+ years of detailed subscriber data (that every studio would kill for) couldn't figure out how to use that data. I would not be surprised if Netflix pops the data analytics/ML bubble. The curtain has been pulled back and the wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a simple list of the most watched shows.
> you need the right people involved
Even then it's tough. The Mandalorian was great. Then The Book of Boba Fett came out and was not only a disaster, but also made the entire two seasons of The Mandalorian pointless. Similar to season 8 of Game of Thrones killing the entire show, because who can recommend a show that sets up the central expectation in season one that is so horribly resolved in the very last season. It's now a show I'd recommend to my enemy rather than my friend. TV is tough. And I don't think streaming is kind to shows that don't nail every season. This is content that is part of a catalog. It's not something on NBC on a Thursday night. Syndication isn't just a nice windfall. It's the entire point now.
I have always found the vast majority of recommendation engines to be completely underwhelming. There is one exception: Spotify. It doesn't seem to work for everybody, but personally, I get insanely good recommendations from Spotify to the point that it has become my main way of discovering new music (and discovering new music is very important to me).
What is the difference? On the surface, it doesn't seem like music recommendation should be a very different problem from movie recommendation.
Unrelated to this: I find the comparison between Netflix and Spotify interesting in general. Why do I get (pretty much) all the music there is on Spotify, but I cannot subscribe to a movie / tv streaming service that lets me access all the content for a flat fee? As a consumer, I would much rather have the choice between three well polished streaming platforms that all offer the same content compared to the current situation where you have a fractured catalogue on platforms of wildly varying technical quality (looking at you, Amazon..).
Spotify’s recommendation engine is magical. I have discovered so many podcasts and music by it’s recommendation engine. I believe the difference between Spotify and Netflix is Spotify has access to “unlimited” quality content it doesn’t produce (music and podcasts).
Netflix is a studio at this point. While delivering a decent streaming service is an expected core competency, it's absolutely not a major differentiation. Sure people can argue over whether service A has a better user experience than service B but, to a first approximation, no one cares when it comes to deciding to subscribe or not. It's about what content they have. ADDED: Certainly no one cares that you have this fancy microservices based architecture all rnuning on AWS.
I just cancelled my Netflix account after being a subscriber since 2007. When Netflix started their streaming offering there was more content I wanted to watch than I could conceivably watch. Today there might be 4 hours of content released a month that I feel interested in. My only guess is that by chasing other audiences they lost me.
I haven't watched anything on Netflix in years. I only keep it because they have the best childrens shows, once my kids grow up I'll cancel too (if they don't improve by then).
Actually, don't think development of TV shows is their problem I think (just like every other streaming service) their recommendation system is pretty much useless. They have a lot of great content but you kind of have go out of your way to discover it yourself.
If they'd fire the people that invented Auto playing shows/movies and hired some curators to classify their content in the vein of Pandora's "Music Genome Project" they'd easily have the best service.
Their recommendation system is useless because they don’t have a lot of great content actually imo. Their home page design is built around hiding this fact from the user and not letting them see how thin their corpus is.
They need to merge with a traditional media company I think, paramount or Warner discovery would make sense.
Yes, video streaming is pretty fragmented. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people who complain about that also complained about the $100/month cable bundle. I probably pay half that now for more choice. (I only lose out on live TV but I could have that if I were willing to pay for it.)
Mostly because market consolidation is inevitable and has already started. It's going to be Disney and then everyone else, and merging with a traditional content creator will get them IP (for example star trek, south park, discovery shows, looney toons whatever) and content creation experts and partnerships. Netflix's last few years were a bet on being able to generate IP or business intelligence technologies to enable them to ensure people never cancel and always are satisfied and I think they are going to learn that content is king, and their off-brand versions of cable TV shows aren't sticky enough to keep people subscribed.
I don't disagree with respect to consolidation. And we're in violent agreement that content is king which almost certainly means some combination of new "must see" content and a back catalog.
Paramount is actually interesting because to my eye, unless you're a Star Trek fanatic, they don't have a super-compelling catalog that would lead me to subscribe. But Paramount+Netflix would be an interesting combination. No idea if the economics would work. I suspect Netflix subscription prices are about as high as they can go even if you add in Paramount's library.
> because they don’t have a lot of great content actually imo.
At the rate I watch new TV/Web series, there are enough in Netflix right now to last me 2-3 years.
The recsys is shit.
After I search and manually add shows to my watchlist, I see them as recced and with 98% match.
I never see shows I would really like recced to me by the recsys.
I always find shows by word-of-mouth and by searching You.com (prev Google). I just search what I want. I see many lists appear on the results.
I take a mental note of series appearing in multiple lists and synopsis liked by me. This is how I discovered Broadchurch, Bosch, and Mozart in the Jungle.
I used to browse Reddit a lot (had to cut it due to lack of time) and watched shows and movies that came up a lot during free discussion or viral askreddits or some weekly threads.
This is how I discovered Clue (1982), Superbad, etc.
What Netflix needs is pilot episodes instead of straight to series orders. Some of the shows that get greenlit and get minimum one season are so bad that if they had any kind of pilot/quality control process they'd never make it on beyond episode one (and thus release resources for multiple seasons of the shows they cancel or a good quality new shows). I watch some Netflix shows (eg Another Life/The I-Land) and wonder how they ever get made, it's like no one is paying attention.
They also need to give shows some kind of ending even if they are not part of their long term plans. Having a library of shows without ending is not attractive to customers.
AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality), what is the last critically acclaimed series on Netflix? I am not saying that your shows need to be critically acclaimed but you can't be in a state where your shows are getting panned criticlaly and on top of that not giving endings to your semi popular shows.
I didn’t know Apple TV was watched a lot. Anecdotally two tv addicted friends mention it. Besides Ted Lasso I don’t see it mentioned. And whatever Oscar bait they have.
I watch Mythic Quest. No one else I know does.
Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.
OTOH, overall. Netflix is still huge. Just when I’m on HN of Reddit this never appears to be the case.
> Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.
I never found For All Mankind or any other Apple TV+ show to be sterile (well, maybe apart from Severance, but that is deliberately done) - to me, they have an unparalleled production value. Nothing comes even close in the streaming landscape. I wonder if that is creating that feeling for you.
From where I see it Apple TV is trying to be to streaming services as HBO was to broadcast/cable network in the pre-streaming era. Back then, broadcast/cable networks would crank out shows like a lot of streaming services are doing to day but HBO would have a much more limited selection but what they did put out was aimed to be high quality (where quality here is defined by critical approval; and production values).
AppleTV like HBO is trying to follow a strategy of focusing on the quality of the product over quantity. It seems that most of their shows esp as of late get excellent reviews and look very expensive. It probably doesn't have the viewership of the bigger streaming services like Netflix/Max/Disney+ who have more populist content but they are managing to differentiate themselves from the other services.
Apple can also get away with a small library in the short term because their users can bundle in cloud services they were likely to buy anyway.
Once you want a music subscription and a family-size amount of cloud storage (the 2TB plan), you’ve basically got the whole Apple One bundle justified.
On top of that these services all further increase the friction of ever leaving the Apple platform.
Apple is the most valuable company in the world for a very good reason.
> AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality)
No it hasn't, Apple TV has been making shows for a narrow demographic of people who hang around on HN and nobody else.
That's fine and all, I hang around on Hacker News and I like that, and Apple can afford to dump two billion dollars a year in a furnace and set it on fire to make Tim feel like a Hollywood big shot, but it is not a successful service by any conventional metric.
Well AppleTV shows tend to get pretty good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, tv critics certainly aren't the "hacker news crowd". I do agree that AppleTV's content is targeted to be more niche than the much more broader content of Netflix which is trying to produce something for everyone. But that allows them to have good quality control over their product and there is nothing wrong with producing less content but content targeted at a niche. HBO found a lot of success in the pre-streaming era following a very similar model.
It's a smattering of different things, but ultimately too much of their content sucks and in the face of streaming competition, subscribers are going elsewhere. I think most households might subscribe to a couple things max. Disney for instance is growing while Netflix is contracting.
I remember reading once (maybe it was Freakonomics?) how using public funds to build stadiums didn’t stimulate the local economy like the arguments for using those funds said they would.
The reason boiled down to the fact that each family has so many entertainment dollars they’re willing to spend. All they do is shift those dollars around rather than spending a larger share of their disposable income overall on entertainment.
Beyond the issues netflix is facing and already being discussed, I question the multiple smaller layoffs they’re doing. Based on their hiring practices and their self-proclaimed comparison to sports leagues, this is sending exactly the wrong signals to their top talent.
Companies forget that this is a two way street, and employees may be doing their own “keeper test” now that $nflx isn’t a wallstreet darling and needing to downsize.
I really think the streaming services have collectively re-created pre-Internet cable television in many respects. If you add up the cost of subscribing to the top six or so streaming services, I believe it's similar to a single cable TV subscription in the old era. Similarly, each service has a handful of quality shows scattered amidst a vast sea of low-quality B-movie type material.
What's really odd is that they don't have what anyone would consider a normal searchable database of movies, they're very much into pushing recommendations using their biased AI learning models. Compared to IMDB their interfaces are all incredibly non-user-friendly.
You cannot spend your way into scaling an original content business. Period.
Every MBA wants to create predictable success with a recipe or a formula but it doesn't work that way. And if you do stumble into an an Ozark, it doesn't mean you can just create 100 Ozarks. Quibi tried to spend their way into original content. It failed spectacularly then.
Many shows were cut short. Without the direct feedback loop of ratings it can be extremely difficult to know what to renew and what not to renew. The wrong metrics can lead you astray. Some shows had too much money. Others not enough.
And the real big lesson in doing all this is that the economics of big budget movies completely fail without theatrical releases. You just cannot recoup production costs otherwise. There's a reason Top Gun: Maverick delayed release 2-3 years.
And if you overspend the only way to recover that is by raising prices. Do that too much and it becomes a vicious cycle just like cable TV of ever-increasing price hikes to balance out the inevitable subscriber losses.
Uncommonly known fact: the exact same issue is facing Hollywood. Ticket sales reached their peak 20 years ago [1] and have been in a steady decline since. "Record breaking [domestic] sales" refers to gross revenue and it's being driven exclusively by inflation and higher ticket prices. Ticket sales themselves are down 23% as of 2019 (to avoid the huge biases since COVID). And that's happened as the US population in the past 20 years has increased by nearly 50 million.
Kind of encouraging in one way, because the natural response to the observation that movies suck today is to claim that Hollywood is just making what the "masses" want. Nope!
Or there's just increased competition for screen time--including from the likes of TikTok and YouTube. And screen time is, if not zero sum, at least zeroish sum; there are only so many recreational hours in the day.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised theaters seem to have actually bounced back reasonably well from COVID. I guess that a lot of people find them, among other things, a relatively low cost/low friction option to get together with friends, go on a date, get out of the house, etc.
No. They also spend so much money with all that micro services nonsense. People will watch game of thrones on a potato. They should have had the content blog.
Netflix is now a feature compared with the likes of Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ etc and now you can see them struggling as their stock has crashed, increased prices, cancelled shows and films and are doing more layoffs.
Not only they are losing subscribers and money, their competitors are still gaining users and can afford to lose them; Netflix cannot.
At this point Netflix is a feature just like Dropbox, Box, DocuSign etc and cannot afford to lose a significant amount of customers for their services. It is a different story for Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+.
I just cancelled Netflix a few weeks ago. The only show left that I watched was Better call Saul. I was already annoyed when they changed their shows from releasing all at once to a weekly cycle but since I don't have that much time to watch TV it still worked for me.
However they also create artificial breaks now. When I realized that BCS is interrupted for many weeks before the show resumes I finally quit. I am not paying for watching nothing.
Ha thanks for telling me. Now that you say it I even remember that it was AMC. So I was blaming Netflix for the wrong thing.. my bad!
But then there is even less left that I really want from Netflix. This also explains why this show is so much better than the other stuff on Netflix.
BTW if you don't mind me asking.. why would you prefer a weekly model as a consumer? The only reason I can come up with is that people fear to read/hear spoilers from other who are "faster". Is there something else?
With streaming services so fragmented now, and everyone producing their own shows which is available only in thier platform, piracy/torrents will soon become a more convenient way of consuming content. The CX of steaming is reducing with fragmentation.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] thread...I'm sorry, what? Give the Gervais, Burr, Chapelle bits a watch. Even after the backlash they remain on Netflix. The guys in the youtube clip couldn't be further off the mark.
Being not americans, we were really tired about this, up to the point we say "ok, let's give this series a chance, but we stop at the first evident 'yankeeland move' (that how we say it)".
For anyone who hasn't watched it yet, it has something to do with the lengths big corporations go to to prevent internal knowledge getting out. The premise of the show (all in the trailer) is that people get an implant so they have two separate lives at work and outside, where one is completely unaware of the other.
It's an excellent show, just surprising to see Apple putting it out, since their R&D team is basically the closest real-world equivalent we have.
Is it really that hard for a billion dollar company to find good storytellers and content producers?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
Nah, it's just an outgroup shorthand/slur for overtly progressive messaging.
What, specifically, "woke" attributes has Netflix tripped on?
The issues with Netflix and content creation are systemic, but it isn't an issue with "wokeness," which has become a lazy kneejerk reaction to any media entity.
There was also this terrible show that got instantly cancelled called Sense 8. The first scene of that show was this absurd sex scene where a woman was having sex with a trans-woman using a dildo and the dildo flops onto the ground and is soaked in some disgusting fluid.
Netflix jumped the shark.
EDIT: Speaking of 2015, funny thing, Netflix's valuation is practically at its 2015 valuation
Who is the media company so great that isn’t shoveling out shit? Disney with marvel and Star Wars? HBO where most of the creative staff left recently because of HBO Max strategy? CBS with the 50th CSI, FBI, or Law and Order show?
Ok, but they also have a very heteronormative show Sex/Life that's equally trashy and lowbrow, maybe the issue isn't the "wokeness?"
Sense8 didn’t get instantly cancelled either. It literally got a second season.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america...
It’s genuinely funny if hair color is the sure mark of devious wokeness.
The fiber of what’s currently known as the anti-woke moral panic is unchanged since 1965: “There are men with long hair on television now! Somebody needs to protect the children”
> You are the other side of the coin of people trying to cancel Chapelle and Gervais.
No, he's not.
Wildly over exaggerating the fake moral panic of cancel culture. Yet others are marshmallows as compared to you?
Yes. Ask pretty much any studio ever. The promise that data would be this magic ingredient for quality content [that connects with audiences] ended up being pretty much BS. The percentage of content I genuinely want to spend my time with across all services is very low.
Sell Mortimer, SELL!
Compared to the other streaming services, Netflix will get dropped long before even Apple TV+ in my household. Adding ad-supported tiers is fine, they just better never add ads to the current paid tiers. Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying. They already limit the simultaneous streams and that seems fair. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort figuring out if logins are coming from different households.
This is not a new trick.
Also, they encouraged it, and not in a wink/wink way...explicitly: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_sr...
Just as a personal anecdote: I have Netflix, Paramount, HBO Max, TV2 Play, Paramount, Viaplay, Discovery+ and Disney+. And probably some that I'm forgetting. I don't really watch that much TV, and the only way I could justify this was by sharing the accounts with close family. The problem is that we're not in the same household. The moment this stops being a viable option we're likely just going to cancel the subscriptions. You can rent a lot of movies for $150/month.
The amount of subscription services are getting out of hand. Even my car has one, and the only value proposition it provides me is not having to connect my phone as a hotspot (which is kind of pain with an iPhone) and real-time traffic data. For $15/month.
So do it. It takes seconds to cancel and subscribe. If you want access to everything all at once, then pay $150 per month. If you cannot afford $150 per month, then spend an extra minute or two per month canceling and subscribing.
I find it to be very convenient, and more convenient than it has ever been in my life.
Oh absolutely, it's frustrating. And whats even more frustrating is that some of those services refuse to have their content on other services but don't provide their service outside of the US.
I wanted to watch Dragon Ball Z last week. It's on Funamation and AnimeLab. Well neither of those services are available in Taiwan, so, only option is to pirate it.
I want to watch Star Trek - Strange New World. Not available on any service in Taiwan.
So I pay for Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, and PrimeVideo.
HBO is available in Taiwan but you need Taiwan credit card... so I can't register with my Singapore card. Paramount, Hulu, not available here.
Sometimes I dont mind paying for these services but they don't want my money.
But at the same time I'm paying for 4, I don't want to pay for 10.
We are at the point of the priacy hat meme.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...
I think a lot of people in this thread are too fixated on the idea of “streams” and they have lost the plot. Netflix is a content producer and licensor. The streams are just a means to deliver that content.
They advertise it in terms of streams. Whatever business arrangements they have with their providers is irrelavent to me as a consumer.
It'd be like if you went to an all you can eat buffet, and people started saying its not fair if you eat too much because the grocery store is charging the resturant per item not per person. It is totally irrelavent ti the person eating at the resturant.
That said, very openly turning a blind eye to something and then suddenly not is essentially unilaterally altering the terms of the deal. If i ran a business and suddenly changed the pricing scheme, that's my right, but i would understand if x% decided the value proposition no longer made sense and left. I certainly wouldn't be offended - its just business.
This summer, YC is funding a news service that only has 1 subscriber by design - the login is shared worldwide. Database architecture was dead simple and can scale easily to other planets. Cost of the subscription is pegged to the GDP of the Earth so profitability is not an issue.
This mindset is baffling. The contract was always that a subscription was for a single household. The fact that they were flexible about access for many years is irrelevant.
You’re not buying the right to share (or resell) your account to whoever you want. You’re buying the right to stream within a single household. It doesn’t make sense to get so upset when they simply hint at enforcing the agreed-upon terms of the contract more actively.
Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.
I feel like everyone is forgetting that Netflix is licensing content, not just selling access to streaming bandwidth.
The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households, not the idea that a single login can be used infinitely by as many people as long as an arbitrary simultaneous stream limit is enforced.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?
Several streaming services already have mechanisms to check account sharing. It’s not new. There’s no indication that Netflix plans to go full draconian and limit to a single IP with zero flexibility, despite what people here seem to be assuming. The account sharing detection logic used in other platforms is quite forgiving, and honestly it’s not terribly difficult to detect long-term patterns where two separate locations are constantly using the same account with users never returning “home”.
Content licensing is based on whatever imaginary rules you want to make up. The OP is providing a plausible line of reasoning where you can marry this stupidity with something quantifiable (i.e., streams). That sounds quite reasonable. Ultimately, it's their service. They can do whatever they want. As for why the OP is bothering, I can only guess that netflix has built the reputation of being a tech company and the OP thinks that they may show some internal consistency. Otherwise, media companies make up rules all the time (for eg., no sports in your local area).
The initial premise seems slightly manipulative to me I guess, if you paid by the hour or something, no password sharing problem but less profits
They are likely to err on the side of caution. Spotify already does this, on the same restriction, and it is a complete non-issue.
> Single household opens up a whole can of worms.
It really doesn't. Do you live in the same house? Then you're covered. And there's lots you can feed in to a ML model to catch out people who have devices that have literally never appeared together in the same household to spot suspicious activity and, for instance, for 2FA.
If that just stops people reselling accounts to strangers in different countries alone that's a significant win for Netflix.
I don’t spend enough on amazon to have a prime account for myself, but am happy to pay for it since my close family members use it enough to make the subscription worthwhile. If they were to stop using it, or amazon limits the address they ship to, I would cancel.
I don't see how pissing off paying customers will increase revenue. Netflix needs to figure out how to make content to keep the current ones.
this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?
using your logic we might as well just have 1 account and share it with every single person on the planet.
the only reason that netflix is getting flack for it is because they were super lax with it for such a long time and now everyone feels entitled to it for some insane reason.
Does any of those services have "multiple simultaneous streams" plans? I'm paying Netflix for 4 simultaneous streams (their naming: "Number of screens you can watch on at the same time") and they should not care where I utilize their offer.
You’re too fixated on this stream limit. It’s not the only limit of the contract, even if you wish that was the case.
Rather than paying for the whole year I’ll pay for a month or two like I do with paramount+ and Disney+.
I’m sure they did some financial calculus to see what’s better but it’s not like other companies haven’t made terrible decisions in the past killing their business. I’m sure blockbuster had bean counters justifying their choices too.
Customers aren't reacting because it hasn't happened yet outside of a few tiny test countries.
Excluding no longer being able to do business in Russia for sanctions purposes, Netflix gained subscribers rather than losing them last quarter.
4 streams simultaneously could all be from different locations, even different countries and still be a household subscription.
One watches at work, another family member is on holidays abroad, the other watches at home and the other via mobile Internet on a train. Should this considered password sharing?
You. Not your neighbor. Not your friends.
Strictly by the sentence you quote to make your point, you would not even be allowed to share your "simultaneous streams" with members of your household. Which makes this quote rather useless to argue for your assumed right of sharing your streams with anyone you want.
[1] https://nitter.net/netflix/status/840276073040371712
If you bought a sort of “family pass” to a movie theater that allowed your family to watch unlimited movies, you wouldn’t expect to be able to pass the family pass around to other families.
Netflix is literally just the digital version of a family pass to a movie theater. Everything is priced according to models of single households using single accounts, down to the licensing costs and royalties.
Not to mention some families are fairly distributed and any tech savvy person has many viable alternatives.
This line of thinking leads to the ludicrous existing patents that describe scanning the room to check how many people are in a room and once crossed a certain threshold, the movie or show automatically stops airing.
If you are paid member of a library, and the library has ToS which does not allow you to lend your book to anyone else, then yes you are at fault when you share.
Oh you better believe that if this was possible to do with physical books, it would be done.
The only reason this isn't much of a thing with ebooks is that if you use the bigger ebook services you don't really own the books in the first place.
There are limits even there.
I also see how this is hard to make fair for edge cases; it should just be clear what it means. I think 1 geo location at a time for x screens is clear. One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work? Are they going to time the ‘remote’ watching for what a typical vacation or work outing might look like?
Anyway; instead of clamping down on password sharing, why not add tiers based on number of geo locations with those screens? 4 screens in 2 locations, 4 screens in 3 locations, 4 screens in 4 locations and that’s it. These locations are not fixed, but this is easy to measure and enforce for them, while, as my situation above, is less obvious.
I think making it clear what is allowed and what is not from the start in verifiable terms, is important or users will get angry as they seem to be now.
I think they will gain a lot of members that way too, since people get used and attached to a service and now need their own accounts.
Netflix's problem was to cut quality to control costs _before_ they raised prices. If they had raised these prices while they were still the ascendant service I'm sure you are right and people would have grumbled while ultimately signing up. Then they could have cut costs slowly and most of their customers would not have noticed the boiling of the frog. As it stands they are driving their customers away at the exact moment that their competitors have finally gotten their house in order and opened their arms to Netflix's client base.
Like look at just AppleTV and HBOMax. AppleTV is dumping a massive amount of money into the aesthetics. Even the screensaver on the machine is this beautiful 4k resolution photos of landscapes, all while they are obviously not skimping on writes. HBO has been in the quality tv space for longer than Netflix has produced content _and_ has paired with Adult Swim(a channel that is unique enough in content to drive people to pay for packages just to get it, much like sports in the past) to get all their content. Both of these are cheaper than what Netflix is proposing as their monthly costs.
I'm not sure why Netflix thinks people will accept a more expensive, and worse product in the face of this competition
Does nobody here pay tax? Household has a pretty clear meaning, people ordinarily resident overnight in the same household.
Spotify has the same restriction, and uses ML to enforce it to some extent, and nobody using the service legitimately has any issues.
From my vantage point as a customer and observer, they are a company that really had first mover advantage with a quality client anywhere. But the experience stagnated and the focus of the company flipped to consuming/wasting as much time as possible. IMO they got fat and happy when the main competitor was Amazon Prime Video, which is a flawed service in many ways.
Now there are competitors who are really good. Disney+ is a superior experience (on Apple TV, anyway) with a better catalog and better features like search. Peacock is pretty good too.
They lost the plot when they decided they couldn't just be a distributor but also a creator. They went too hard too fast and they don't have compelling content.
The Disney+ model is so much better. They suggest stuff, but I can wander and discover in the library of thousands of Disney titles if I so desire.
Apple and Amazon just want to make their bundle more attractive.
Almost all companies over-expand the way they did, and almost all companies are feeling the shock of the economic downturn.
They have every right to crack down on password sharing. The fact that people think they are a bad actor for this is evidence of the total lack of moral compass in our society today.
When we sit at the trough, DRM is heavy-handed and media is expensive to purchase or rent. Piracy is the best option for most consumers.
Then some enterprising people pitch the media companies on a way to implement some hurdle pricing to jumpstart their moribund sales. Presented with an easy cheap way to pay for legal access to entertainment, people jump on board.
As money starts to roll in, the business types start to eye vertical integration. The upstarts see the writing on the wall and try to find a way out. Prices rise, but the content is still easy to access.
Now the rightsholders start to rein in their former partners, and implement their own solutions. These are terrible and myriad. Costs spiral, while the consumers are spoiled for choice.
Decision fatigue sets in. People find their niches, cut coupons, and share esclusive releases between family and friends.
Eventually the fragmentation becomes exhausting, and only the most line-toeing consumers bother to jump through the hoops necessary to pay for many kinds of content. Back to square one.
On a side note, a few months ago, I was receiving many recruiter-supplied positions for building out streaming services. These positions seemed to pay well, require a deep understanding of video streaming, and a vigorous interview processs. I wonder if these newly created positions will be the first to go as big entertainment tech consolidates its workforce.
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2019/release-of-1...
That's really the last thing I care about from VOD service. Also judging by cast there are hardly any BIPOC people in 13 reasons why, seems pretty white to me.
I believe that is what people complaining about 'woke' Netflix shows are referring to. Not the existence of them, the feeling that they're being promoted to everyone. They're welcome to continue, and the subscription numbers can either go up or down.
Just go to HBO to see the antithesis of netflix's model. It's possible to consistently put out quality, you need the right people involved. You can expect that to die soon btw since the suits at Warner fired the head of that company.
The place Netflix really shines for me is the acquisition of non-US content. I particularly like political dramas from other countries. Even if some smaller countries aren't producing content that is quite as polished as we might expect here in the US, that's some of the charm, seeing how they make shows.
* I can't defend the browsing of Netflix -- that's just ridiculous
> you need the right people involved
Even then it's tough. The Mandalorian was great. Then The Book of Boba Fett came out and was not only a disaster, but also made the entire two seasons of The Mandalorian pointless. Similar to season 8 of Game of Thrones killing the entire show, because who can recommend a show that sets up the central expectation in season one that is so horribly resolved in the very last season. It's now a show I'd recommend to my enemy rather than my friend. TV is tough. And I don't think streaming is kind to shows that don't nail every season. This is content that is part of a catalog. It's not something on NBC on a Thursday night. Syndication isn't just a nice windfall. It's the entire point now.
What is the difference? On the surface, it doesn't seem like music recommendation should be a very different problem from movie recommendation.
Unrelated to this: I find the comparison between Netflix and Spotify interesting in general. Why do I get (pretty much) all the music there is on Spotify, but I cannot subscribe to a movie / tv streaming service that lets me access all the content for a flat fee? As a consumer, I would much rather have the choice between three well polished streaming platforms that all offer the same content compared to the current situation where you have a fractured catalogue on platforms of wildly varying technical quality (looking at you, Amazon..).
Browsing Netflix for 2 hours only to watch nothing is so common it's memed after all..
If they'd fire the people that invented Auto playing shows/movies and hired some curators to classify their content in the vein of Pandora's "Music Genome Project" they'd easily have the best service.
They need to merge with a traditional media company I think, paramount or Warner discovery would make sense.
Yes, video streaming is pretty fragmented. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people who complain about that also complained about the $100/month cable bundle. I probably pay half that now for more choice. (I only lose out on live TV but I could have that if I were willing to pay for it.)
Paramount is actually interesting because to my eye, unless you're a Star Trek fanatic, they don't have a super-compelling catalog that would lead me to subscribe. But Paramount+Netflix would be an interesting combination. No idea if the economics would work. I suspect Netflix subscription prices are about as high as they can go even if you add in Paramount's library.
At the rate I watch new TV/Web series, there are enough in Netflix right now to last me 2-3 years.
The recsys is shit.
After I search and manually add shows to my watchlist, I see them as recced and with 98% match.
I never see shows I would really like recced to me by the recsys.
I always find shows by word-of-mouth and by searching You.com (prev Google). I just search what I want. I see many lists appear on the results.
I take a mental note of series appearing in multiple lists and synopsis liked by me. This is how I discovered Broadchurch, Bosch, and Mozart in the Jungle.
I used to browse Reddit a lot (had to cut it due to lack of time) and watched shows and movies that came up a lot during free discussion or viral askreddits or some weekly threads.
This is how I discovered Clue (1982), Superbad, etc.
They also need to give shows some kind of ending even if they are not part of their long term plans. Having a library of shows without ending is not attractive to customers.
AppleTV has been running circles around Netflix (and other streaming services when it comes to quality), what is the last critically acclaimed series on Netflix? I am not saying that your shows need to be critically acclaimed but you can't be in a state where your shows are getting panned criticlaly and on top of that not giving endings to your semi popular shows.
I watch Mythic Quest. No one else I know does.
Apple TV otherwise feels superficial and fake in a way to me. Shows like For all Mankind and another one. They feel sterile.
OTOH, overall. Netflix is still huge. Just when I’m on HN of Reddit this never appears to be the case.
Once I saw those two ended for the season, I also ended my subscription.
I never found For All Mankind or any other Apple TV+ show to be sterile (well, maybe apart from Severance, but that is deliberately done) - to me, they have an unparalleled production value. Nothing comes even close in the streaming landscape. I wonder if that is creating that feeling for you.
AppleTV like HBO is trying to follow a strategy of focusing on the quality of the product over quantity. It seems that most of their shows esp as of late get excellent reviews and look very expensive. It probably doesn't have the viewership of the bigger streaming services like Netflix/Max/Disney+ who have more populist content but they are managing to differentiate themselves from the other services.
Once you want a music subscription and a family-size amount of cloud storage (the 2TB plan), you’ve basically got the whole Apple One bundle justified.
On top of that these services all further increase the friction of ever leaving the Apple platform.
Apple is the most valuable company in the world for a very good reason.
No it hasn't, Apple TV has been making shows for a narrow demographic of people who hang around on HN and nobody else.
That's fine and all, I hang around on Hacker News and I like that, and Apple can afford to dump two billion dollars a year in a furnace and set it on fire to make Tim feel like a Hollywood big shot, but it is not a successful service by any conventional metric.
The reason boiled down to the fact that each family has so many entertainment dollars they’re willing to spend. All they do is shift those dollars around rather than spending a larger share of their disposable income overall on entertainment.
Companies forget that this is a two way street, and employees may be doing their own “keeper test” now that $nflx isn’t a wallstreet darling and needing to downsize.
What's really odd is that they don't have what anyone would consider a normal searchable database of movies, they're very much into pushing recommendations using their biased AI learning models. Compared to IMDB their interfaces are all incredibly non-user-friendly.
Every MBA wants to create predictable success with a recipe or a formula but it doesn't work that way. And if you do stumble into an an Ozark, it doesn't mean you can just create 100 Ozarks. Quibi tried to spend their way into original content. It failed spectacularly then.
Many shows were cut short. Without the direct feedback loop of ratings it can be extremely difficult to know what to renew and what not to renew. The wrong metrics can lead you astray. Some shows had too much money. Others not enough.
And the real big lesson in doing all this is that the economics of big budget movies completely fail without theatrical releases. You just cannot recoup production costs otherwise. There's a reason Top Gun: Maverick delayed release 2-3 years.
And if you overspend the only way to recover that is by raising prices. Do that too much and it becomes a vicious cycle just like cable TV of ever-increasing price hikes to balance out the inevitable subscriber losses.
Kind of encouraging in one way, because the natural response to the observation that movies suck today is to claim that Hollywood is just making what the "masses" want. Nope!
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised theaters seem to have actually bounced back reasonably well from COVID. I guess that a lot of people find them, among other things, a relatively low cost/low friction option to get together with friends, go on a date, get out of the house, etc.
At one point in time Yahoo could not decide whether it was a media company or a technology one.
Netflix for all intent and purpose is a tech company (they have engg' blog but no 'content' one), but is that the path to success?
Pretty good comparison, i see it the same way, Netflix is a CDN, specialized on delivering Movies, but pretty bad a searching ;)
Not only they are losing subscribers and money, their competitors are still gaining users and can afford to lose them; Netflix cannot.
At this point Netflix is a feature just like Dropbox, Box, DocuSign etc and cannot afford to lose a significant amount of customers for their services. It is a different story for Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+.
However they also create artificial breaks now. When I realized that BCS is interrupted for many weeks before the show resumes I finally quit. I am not paying for watching nothing.
It releases weekly because Netflix get it outside the US at the same time AMC air it on television.
I think Netflix should move to a weekly model for their content but they haven't done this.
But then there is even less left that I really want from Netflix. This also explains why this show is so much better than the other stuff on Netflix.
BTW if you don't mind me asking.. why would you prefer a weekly model as a consumer? The only reason I can come up with is that people fear to read/hear spoilers from other who are "faster". Is there something else?
There have been so many other high budget flops on Netflix that are promoted, and then derided by critics (and customers).