They still expect more paying customers from this step.
> Last week Netflix missed expectations for new subscribers in the first quarter, but the company said that the password-policing plan and a cheaper streaming version with ads will accelerate growth in the second half of 2023.
They’ve ran test in a couple of countries. Maybe an initial drop in subscribers followed by an increase is in line with their expectations.
They are probably going back to torrenting and similar.
When disney was slow to rollout in some countries my friends did not want to wait for Mandalorian to drop with Disney plus over there in Europe. They just downloaded it for free and did not even need to sign up for disney when it came one year later.
If the streaming companies start to provide subpar and cumbersome service and charge hundreds of dollars for it per year I can see people going back to proven and free ways that were very popular 15-20 years ago
With energy prices shooting up, that scanned server cost is more significant now than it used to be, and per-user bandwidth costs don't drop forever due to economies of scale, so there may be more cost efficient promotion methods than 700,000 non-paying users.
There was a study a while back (can't find it ATM, I'll have another look later) that suggested those using other people's accounts were more likely to be heavy users in terms of bandwidth than average, so perhaps this sort of thing has been factored in to the plan.
Having said that, I can't imagine they expected 300k dropping their account now they can no longer share it. Perhaps there are a lot of friend groups clubbing together to share the cost of subscription services like Netflix.
Bandwidth isn't an infinite resource. It effectively is up to a certain scale and with a few caveats (the costs are not consistent globally) but I'm sure Netflix is beyond the scale where it can be assumed to be and at that point they will be bidding against other big users for peering priority.
With a dedicate server I have some stuff on I can upgrade to 10gbit unmetered for a lot less than 10x the cost the current 1gbit unmetered link (in my case neither dedicated, but 1-shared-to-10-shared will likely scale in cost similarly to 1-dedicated-to-10-dedicated). With another where I have a total bandwidth cap not a speed cap I could likely extend that cap relatively cheaply. At the scales required by a small company, even one running SaaS services, the same is usually true. But at Netflix's scale a small percent increase in any particular locality is still a huge amount of extra to ask for, and it might not really be available (it could be allowed to eat into slack for a short time, this is one of the reasons why networks are provisioned for more than 100% of expected use, but if the extra is needed permanently then infrastructure upgrades may be needed). They can get around lack of cheap bandwidth by instead temporarily increasing compression rates (this will in fact happen automatically, as dropping overall bit-rate is supported to deal with congestion at the level of a user's connection and that will kick in due to congestion elsewhere too) but this will be easily detectable by some users (particularly those with huge screens and great eyesight) who will compare the quality with other streaming content providers and talk about the difference which may affect future sales.
> on top of this their caching strategy becomes even more effective
Caching in terms of keeping data geographically spread will reduce international bandwidth needs, and ISP-level caching through their local boxes will help considerably again (and get more effective as more users join from the same ISP), but there will always be an amount of traffic that needs to travel costly routes (the ISP level caches will only be large enough to support the best caching candidates, like new high-profile shows, a small proportion of the whole catalogue, and many ISPs do not have that facility at all).
> ““Not only are we placing content on all of these servers around the world, but we are pre-placing them based on what is popular. Because we predict what is popular, we’re able to put it as close as possible under the correct server,” Haspilaire says. “This pre-placement of our films and shows allows us, based on prime time viewing hours, to store 100 percent of our catalog locally."
And they have 17,000 of these boxes. Extra users in these areas will have essentially zero marginal cost. And outside of that, I don't believe the bandwidth market we see - in terms of upgrading our small servers - has any resemblance to the deals they can do.
Energy prices in Europe are dropping significantly. Spain's pricing is down to 2021 levels again last month. No idea where they host their data in Europe but it's much the same in other European countries.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267552/spain-monthly-wh...
Arguably that $39 offers a lot more value by giving you access to valuable statistics than the $20 that gives you the opportunity to waste some time staring at the tele. And I'm not saying there's no value to entertainment, but there's plenty of more fulfilling things to do when it comes to entertainment.
I wonder how much this affects the public not talking about the shows and this leading to less engagement. And thus snowballing into even less users, as there is less people to promote shows etc.
That may very well be. But now, their engagement metric on hours viewed [1] is going to drop like a brick and the analysts who started tracking that for the past several quarters will be scratching their head.
But 1 User is (probably) a Premium user. If you remove 3 users, the Premium user could downgrade to Normal. Personally i share with 3. The 3 watch from time to time Netflix, they will not buy an account, only 1 oder 2 Month a year.
If these 3 go, i can downgrade my package to 13 Euro (in Germany) and i will only order it 3 - 4 Month a year. Currently i pay every month 18 Euro.
The time changes, Netflix is not the only player on the market, we can choose now from many.
My brother pay for a "multi-device" account. When they introduce this and the family get cut off he will most likely unsubscribe in time or downgrade to a personal account.
Yes, but the bigger picture is much more interesting IMO, as Spain has become a highly-competitive market for VoD, is overly saturated with suppliers and we're in a recession year with rising cost of living.
Put into context of the same source's (Kantar) report from end of last year on Spain's VoD consumption, it would be much more interesting to know
1.) how many paying subs each of the providers lost explicitly, and
2.) whether the ~1,3M spanish households which access 6 or more (!!) VoD-services have reduced their "portfolio"
Kantar[1]:
- By September 2022, the number of households that used at least one video streaming service in Spain reached 66%, 12.4million households.
- VoD-enabled households accessed on average 3.3 different video streaming services, with 11% of households accessing 6 or more different VoD services.
- 2.7% of Spanish households took out a new Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) service in the last three months.
- 23% of those planning on cancelling at least one SVoD service in the next quarter are doing so to save money, the #1 reason.
And that opens another risk for Netflix. Paying users that canceled will be more eager to check the competition, and migrated user is harder to regain.
Anyway, the catalogue is so fragmented that cyclic migration makes sense.
The paying user in Spain is already among those who use on average 3.3 VoD-services. He already thoroughly checked the competition, he's merely deciding to cut his cost.
So in the end the issue is the competitiveness of the content at the given price for this market.
But note that it correlates to a loss of paying users too. "Only" 2/3 of those users were sharing a password.
There's another danger here for them, and that is cultural. Currently e.g. my girlfriend users my password. It means we both watch the same things, and talk about things that are on Netflix, and that serves as a reason for me to keep watching Netflix too. A whole lot of my Netflix watching is down to her. If she were to, say, spend her time on Disney Plus instead and talk to me about series there, I might end up spending more of my time on Disney Plus, and value my Netflix subscription accordingly lower. Do that to enough users and you'll start losing them.
As long as people keep watching Netflix they have a chance to convert them to paying users, but even if that fails, at the very least they have a chance to prevent those people from converting their paying customers to users of other services.
If I was Netflix I'd think long and hard about less invasive means of doing this, such as e.g. putting restrictions on additional household that might nudge them towards paying (e.g. limiting number of profiles so people need to share profiles; putting ads for Netflix in front of shows on "secondary" locations etc.) without outright pushing people off the service.
> As long as people keep watching Netflix they have a chance to convert them to paying users.
I'm not rejecting this (and I'm also not a fan of Netflix's practice here), but when REALLY thinking about it, how would that work practically without devaluing your product/service?
If people are repeatedly sneaking into your cinema and you don't crack down on them, but let them watch every time because one day they may buy a ticket, what's a path to conversion here...?
The only values provided are the content itself and the quality of service. NOT restricting access to the content but making it less convenient for everyone will just devalue your service...
Hence why my last paragraph contained ways of putting restrictions in place that'd make it less practical/desirable to keep sharing. (Here's one more suggestion: Add premium content, and let anyone buy from any profile... Now you have a strong incentive not to share with people you can't trust to not buy stuff on your account... I'd never share my Amazon Prime Video access for that reason).
In terms of conversion avenue, consider e.g. kids moving out of the house. My son has his own Netflix profile. For now there's no incentive for him to get his own, and having him get his own would be impractical because he most often wants to watch it on my TV. But once he has a family of his own running into a profile limit would be an incentive to get his own subscription eventually.
A lot of people are in situations where they initially legitimately are in the same household, then move out for all kinds of reasons (flat shares, kids moving out, breakups), might not want the hassle of switching profiles right away, but eventually want more flexibility (more profiles), or privacy.
(Incidentally, a feature they really need is a "convert this profile to a separate subscription"; that goes for a lot of services that are not at all geared for a situation of kids growing up and wanting to untangle their online lives from that of their parents)
A lot of this problem would also just go away if they priced based on a combination of simultaneous streams and number of profiles and stopped worrying about where they are. E.g. there's never any reason for more than 5 simultaneous streams from my Netflix subscription. But if I had to pay per simultaneous stream I'd probably only want to pay for 3.
You don’t need to convert every potential customer when you are the biggest and most profitable streaming service. The bigger risk is losing that position when paying customers go to co prying services.
Not really that surprising is it? I'm waiting for the day they send me the inevitable notice to pay more, aka the day I cancel Netflix.
They could get away with this if their offering was substantially better than the competitors but thse days it's not. Pumping out complete crap like 'The Floor is Lava' and the 9 millionth cake contest isn't what built their massive customer base. These days when a new hyped show comes up its often not even worth watching until you know for sure it's not already been axed, having left the show on a cliffhanger.
This was my main problem with Netflix and why I cancelled it a year or so ago. When I realised we often couldn’t find anything we were bothered about watching, it just became a waste of money.
If they were smart they'd realise they could launder their overall viewer figures in the stockmarket and (ponzi-style) have the latest shareholders pay them* for inflated 'low rent' users instead of scaring away those users and trying to turn a profit on a shrinking viewer population tolerating higher fees.
* via SBC with SP maintained by higher viewer figures.
Netflix axing incomplete shows has become like Google killing products: people are starting to become aware of it, and that puts them off picking up new products.
It's also self-sabotaging behavior from the point of view of a back catalog. If people know in advance that a show had an unsatisfying ending, they're not going to recommend that people go back and watch it. But then Netflix and everyone else seems to treat shows as disposable these days, as if nothing mattered six months after it came out. Yet people still talk about The Wire (first broadcast 2002)
This happens with a lot of modern media. There's a lot of indie authors that keep starting new series which get dropped or continue getting written based on sales. But once you know an author is prone to dropping a series without finishing you stop picking up their books.
It's actually really frustrating to see an author continue starting one new series after another rather than finishing any of their existing works. It's probably not as fun or exciting, but it feels like an integral part of bulding trust. If I'm going to get emotionally invested in a series I want it to have a real ending.
In Japan it's very common for a series to get a single anime season, but if you're really invested in the story you can continue reading the light novels. But if a story is a Netflix Original, there's no source material you can turn to when the series gets cancelled.
I wish one of the streaming services would give a "no major loose ends" guarantee.
If a show really needs a cliffhanger the show should budget for an extra episode to air if the next season is cancelled. If they don't want to do that, just end the season finale without a cliffhanger.
If Netflix had this guarantee, I would watch a lot more series. (I'm still a bit upset that HBO cancelled "Beforeigners" that had a major cliffhanger)
On that subject, I really like what Josh Whedon did with Buffy's season 4 ending episode, "Restless", where the big bad was defeated on the penultimate episode, while the last episode serves more as an introspection on each character's fear.
Per Josh Whedon commentary [1]:
"This was one of the years where I was pretty convinced we would actually be picked up for another year, so we left a lot of things hanging. But at the same time I always felt if this was the last episode we ever filmed, it would be a good last one because it really did just get us into the minds of our characters, whom I love very much, and let them just sort of exist."
I'd even settle for a sit-down with the writers and show runners where they go over what the ending would have been, even if they don't get a chance to actually film it.
The only new show I thoroughly enjoyed on netflix lately was "who is the mole" which is based off the dutch hit series "wie is de mol" which is an absolutely fantastic and unique game show.
> The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password
> Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.
So they lost 300,000 paying users whom they think will come back, but 10% of existing users plan on leaving despite Netflix investing in Spanish content.
I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
> I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
That's the case for me indeed. I myself basically stopped watching Netflix, somehow the content doesn't do anything for me anymore.
But I shared my account with family and they watch it. If this gets to us, and I'm the only one who can watch it, I'm for sure cancelling. The family members with whom I'm sharing the account are very unlikely to get their own account either.
(Sharing accounts is a great form of stealth giving to family members who would otherwise not be able to afford such "luxuries". It's much easier to say "hey, I got one free account on my Spotify plan, would you like to use it? Otherwise, it will go to waste" as opposed to awkwardly offering money directly)
Interesting you say that the content doesn't appeal to you anymore. I feel the same way. My observation is that, for the most part, most of Netflix's original content is reality TV and comedy specials.
They don't even seem to be bothering to create great content like Stranger Things anymore. We are at the enshittification of Netflix stage.
I'm watching korean drama and fantasy, also chinese or spanish, they've got a different way of story telling, and I find the aesthetic appealing, can recommend sysyphus, or so, sci-fi and time-travel
Their entire business model is that there is value in the long tail of possible choices. The paradox of choice is not a complete description of human behavior.
It is outdated. Streaming is now cable, which means the business model should revert back to be cable like. Get a couple of killer titles that carry the brand... Disney is doing this well with the Marvel titles. one ends, a new one starts, and they start putting ads of the "new" thing.
I almost feel it is a problem with the thumbnails. Everything looks so unappealing. I've liked a few Netflix shows in the past year (heck if I could name them though), I have a profile on my brother's account, but I primarily watch through an IPTV service. When I browse in the Netflix app I cannot find a single thing I want to watch.
And they have so many (non-'original') where they only have a few series available at the end or in the middle. I don't understand the licencing/purchasing decision that can lead to that. Seems to happen far too often for it to be different studios/licencors, obviously that happens sometimes.
BBC's QI is one example. I understand new series not being available on Netflix (in the UK) as the BBC now have their own subscription platform. But it's not just that, because Netflix don't have the earliest ones either, just a seemingly random set in the middle, perhaps even non-contiguous.
I found that to be one of the drawbacks of Netflix, and all other streaming services. A story that could easily be told in 100min or a few hours takes 10+ hours to slog through. Excessive sequences of characters getting high, or repeating tasks, or irrelevant side quests to pad the content time statistics, or make people feel like their monthly fees are worth it.
Yes, this is especially true for successful shows. They can be told in 2-3 seasons but they end up as 5 seasons. The pace of storytelling crawls to a halt in the middle seasons typically.
Short seasons are perfectly valid and have existed since before Netflix. I remember watching British TV shows in which a season consisted of six half-hour episodes, and feeling that more (and more interesting) things had happened in that time frame than a USA season of 24 one-hour episodes.
These days that’s even more of a plus. When someone recommends something to watch the first thing I check is how many seasons it’s up to, then the number of episodes, then the runtime. Shows with too many seasons of too many too long episodes are immediately ignored.
But then why do the rug pull of making one or two seasons of a good show and then killing it? That serves to piss off everyone who took the time to watch and get interested in the show. If Netflix only wants to make reality tv they should just own that.
I stopped even considering Netflix shows with only one or two seasons because they almost always get killed mid-story. Which means I pretty much never watch Netflix now. Out of state relatives using the account is the main thing keeping me subscribed, so when that sharing gets cut off it'll be the end of my subscription.
You have to love that under "Why was X cancelled" they basically just compliment the show runner and actors for their work or cite "creative differences", rarely do they actually provide an actual explanation, such as "The show had to few viewers".
It's also becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shows get canceled before they can conclude, so I don't watch any Netflix shows now until after the final episode airs. But the final episode never airs because there weren't enough people watching the show while it was in production.
I feel the same way, it's becoming harder and harder to find something interesting. Just the other night we opened it up and couldn't find anything in 5 minutes browsing and just went to watch TV instead. That's not the experience you want your users to have.
their catalog isn't as good as it used to be. They've cut a ton of content for seemingly zero reason recently (including their own shows like westworld).
What I like best about HBO is that they have an A-Z listing of every show they have (something people have been asking Netflix for since day one of their streaming service) and how peaceful it is to use their platform.
You can browse without anything auto-playing, you can pause a show for more than 3 seconds and ads don't start rapidly flashing on the screen, and shows don't jump to more ads immediately as credits start rolling so you can actually let an ending sink in without having to scramble for your remote.
HBO max is just much nicer to use than netflix.
I also really like their "last chance" section because things are leaving all the time and that gives you some warning.
What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.
I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.
If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.
Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.
It doesn't help that their software changes so much from device to device. It's been pleasant to use on phone, PS5, and roku but I haven't tried apple+
Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.
Cold case files, the first 48, unsolved mysteries, any cooking show - "reality TV" is a huge market. It's not all toddlers and tiaras and big brother, those were just the "huge, impossible to ignore" ones.
My situation exactly. We're sharing a 4 screen account with 3 friends and no-one even watches netflix every month - we just liked the idea of having access, in case we want to watch something. We already decided, when netflix doesn't allow low-use sharing any more, we'll just cancel and forget about it.
Absolutely agree. I also had a family account that kept instead not watching anything anymore. In the end I felt like paying for watching propaganda that I could see for free in national television. This came at the perfect time as an excuse.
I mean, what are said documentaries about the nazis like? Are they presenting an uncritical viewpoint? I don't think I've ever seen a documentary about the nazis not include the context of all the horrible shit they did
Not OP. They're pushing an agenda is the general criticism. E.g. I'm all for them not excluding minorities. If the show does good, it does good. It's a universal unassailable good/win. But when they want to enforce quotas and promoting DEI content synthetically and unnaturally, then they've crossed a line.
I don't think there is an agenda, but design by committee has gotten to the point where it does look like there is one. If you are hell bent on checking the same set of was-well-received-before boxes in every piece of schlock you pump out, people reasonably start to believe that checking boxes is the point. From there any checkbox that doesn't align with viewer's world view is perceived as propaganda.
> I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries, and all I have to do is pay a measly $17.99/mo. If that goes away, I will be cancelling my subscription.
I guess their calculus is how much does it cost to support 10-20 streaming users. Is it worth getting $18/mo for? I don't know the answer, but that seems to be their approach.
It feels the same as back when the music industry thought that those that pirated music would automatically purchase it if the "free" version was removed. They were wrong then and the streaming services are just as wrong now.
I think Netflix (and others) are looking at that 10-20 x $18/month and salivating, not realizing that the money just isn't there. They need to take a page from the Microsoft book and let people "steal" some of the content so they can have a least some paying customers. It beats having no paying customers.
I'm pretty out of the loop. Is pirating still easy? I thought tbp isn't reliable any more, and finding reliable torrent sites is kind of hard now? Younger people aren't really on the computer anymore. Like your not going to be torrenting off ipads and stuff
TBP is now proxy software that anyone can install[0] which talks to a central API[1] for torrent listings. Each provider can tailor the experience and add ads or donation buttons as they desire. You can search for "TPB proxy list"[2] to find a list of TPB sites. I currently use tpb.party which I find the fastest and least intrusive.
> Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries,
You're sharing an account with 20 people across 4 countries? It's honestly kind of amazing that they let this level of sharing go on for so long.
It's hard for me to believe that out of 20 different people, every single one of them would decide to boycott Netflix forever because of this. If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
Extrapolate this across their userbase and it's not hard to see why they're doing it. Obviously some people will cancel, but I guarantee Netflix has run pilot trials and analyzed the net effect to their bottom line.
> If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
While extrapolating over a large dataset, it's important to get the initial numbers as correct as possible. Since the person you're replying to is paying for the most expensive plan (probably to get the 4x devices-at-a-time perk for so many people), the plan those people would re-subscribe at is important (and less likely to be the same plan if only for one person).
They'd need at least 3 people to re-subscribe on either of the two cheapest plans to net a profit, or they'd need at least 2 people to re-subscribe on the "Standard" $16/mo plan to net a profit. Anything less is a net negative. It's a favorably-biased population for Netflix, but that'd still require a 15%-30% conversion rate for users.
I'm sure they'll come ahead in the end, but I imagine a high % of the expected profit comes from cutting costs from serving 20x "free" users per plan rather than converting them into paying users themselves.
You’re assuming they have no variable costs (content fees, peak demand services) in delivering the service. One person at $12.99 a month is certainly more profitable than 10+ at < $1.799/mo.
Reading your comment makes me sympathize greatly with Netflix. I don't think they should care about customers who demands a "measly" price to continue their subscriptions.
I was on the fence about it since I share it with 2 people who wouldn't get a subscription otherwise due to technical reasons... but this is really shameless.
> "Towards the end of 2018, European Parliament approved a law that requires all platforms that provide audiovisual content throughout the continent to have at least 30% European productions within their programming."
I would say it is known and while they are obliged in a way to do it, I don't believe any other streaming service is doing it in the scale that Netflix does
It is so well known that it's common to automatically skip content from within the EU. It's usually low-quality fund-farming subpar filler stuff. The most notable exception are spanish films, and those from lesser-known EU countries. Anything from france and germany is almost by definition trash.
In other words: no different than almost all efforts of the EU to "regulate the market" instead of creating incentives.
My family is in the process of finding the best suitable and possible emigration target. Unfortunately this is common. The hardest problem are family ties and care of our parents :/
If your downvoting because of derailing the thread, I deserve it, go on. I'm just frustrated how the EU is, at least from the perspective of my bubble, losing almost every game it wants to play.
This is where I am. Once they cut off password sharing here I'll be cancelling my subscription. They produce very little content I watch these days and license even less as other streaming services have started ring fencing it. It's not a huge expense, so it's fine as long as my parents are getting use out of it, but once that's gone it's going to make no sense for me to keep paying.
The mistake Netflix makes is to assume that the families and friends, who have been using a shared login, will signup for a subscription on their own. They won't, the value proposition isn't there anymore and these are people who didn't want to pay for the subscription to begin with.
I have serious doubts about Netflix calculations on this decision, but I also don't see what else they could do. They can't buy the content people want and they struggle to produce high quality movies and shows. Their productions are beautiful, but the scripts are severely lacking. Sometimes they get lucky and do a good season of a show, only to screw up subsequent seasons.
I think Netflix sees 3 people sharing 1 account and thinks that 2 of the 3 would maybe pay for accounts if they block sharing.
But in reality they end up losing the 1 account instead because none of the 3 people are willing to pay full price individually. They were all willing to pay 1/3 of the price when sharing.
According to Netflix, there is an initial wave of cancellations, but over the ensuing months, they end up with more paying subscribers than there were before the password-sharing crackdown.
They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
> They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
Companies regularly do things that are detrimental to their bottom line because they either misunderstood how their customers use their product, or because they are trying to please shareholders, or a combination of both.
> According to Netflix, there is an initial wave of cancellations, but over the ensuing months, they end up with more paying subscribers than there were before the password-sharing crackdown.
The question begging to be asked here is whether those are new subscribers or people that were using someone's else password, natural growth, or just a good show landed in meantime and a bunch of people subscribed
Yeah, we'll see how this works out for them in the long run. I have a feeling that the end result here is they'll drive away people who use them for years, and would have continued to use them for years out of loyalty, in exchange for customers who are a lot less attached to them, and will probably be more likely to cancel later on.
It's an increasingly crowded market, everyone's distracted, everyone's sick of subscriptions, and nobody has enough money. If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
> If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
It does seem like this was a plan that was in the works for a couple years, and momentum is keeping it moving. I doubt they would have picked this timing if they knew what was coming!
Netflix had some great quotes about this from their earnings and specifically called out Kantar's data would show less viewers in the short term.
They had noted they saw or expected the users who were on someone else's account and who used it actively to come back with their own accounts or convince the account holder to pay for them
I always thought these types of services didn't go after account sharing as a form of flexible pricing. The users who are OK paying $10/mo pay that. The users who wouldn't pay $10 share an account and get a slightly less convenient service.
Are their profit margins so tight that a 1:2 paying non-paying user loss ratio is a net win?
probably it's stupid on their part, but on the other hand users cost them money too. If you have two users on one account - one watching from 8-12 in the morning, and the other from 4-10 in the evening, if you get rid of one of them you are streaming 4 hours less for the same price. So I guess this kind of thing must also affect their calculations on this matter.
This trend may be masking the fact their Spanish originals are overall pretty poor. In my opinion, Money Heist is the only high quality Spanish show they have produced. These days their non Spanish output is not that good either, though. Netflix should study World of Warcraft's player exodus after 2009 or so, as an example of what happens when you offer too much low quality content to the masses.
IMO this is what happens when you create data-driven series. Being a good producer of shows is a different business than being a tech company.
Plus losing the old catalogue rights that they got for cheap. Once other companies saw it was viable they were not interested in selling the rights for cheap.
On the other side, every time I use another streaming service (channel4, any German tv, even hbo) the basic player experience is much worse than netflix. I will miss them but, like Blockbuster, it is a matter of time.
Are you Spanish? I find the Spanish content pretty good, it's the woke American shit that they force into the platform that is a bore to watch, like the Nth heroine who just so happens to be a black woman. Maybe make it a guy from Kansas for a change? Of course, you might have a different opinion.
From the comments in this thread, many are not understanding that password borrowers are typically contributing to the account owner's monthly subscription, and many account owners, when faced to the full price of the subscription will eventually unsubscribe as well.
5€ month for what Netflix has to offer is one thing, 18€/month, for many, becomes an instant no-deal.
Do you think most sharers are contributing to the price? I really don’t think that’s the case. I’ve never heard of anyone charging family members for access to their Netflix account.
There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords, or more well off siblings letting less well off siblings use their account.
>> Do you think most sharers are contributing to the price?
All of them? Certainly not. Many? Yes.
>> There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords
Yes, but although we don't have details on demographics, in Europe it is widely "accepted" (for lack a better word) that many friends, relative and even acquaintances share an account and its costs. I don't have number so consider it totally anecdotical, but it is honestly common sense, especially in southern and eastern Europe. (I am from Italy, FWIW)
edit: this is also true for Spotify Family accounts.
Agains TOS? Sure. Do they do it anyway? Yes.
It is very common sense here to say "Ok, I'll cover Netflix, you'll cover Disney+/Spotify/other"
The moment when one of this services doesn't allow sharing anymore, this system will fall, and users will be incredibly more selective to what they will subscribe to.
This anecdote resonates much more than explicit sharing of costs, thanks.
I suspect this might be cultural, and not just at a country level. I wouldn't dream of charging a family member £5 a month for something, I'd either let them use it or not. But that may not be true everywhere. Between friends it makes a lot more sense, but as I said I've typically seen Netflix/etc shared in families not friends, probably because the lack of money changing hands makes it easier.
This is my take as well. All people I know either share the expenses or share different streaming accounts, which by extension is a share of expenses, just across the streaming universe instead of only Netflix. Now Netflix may not be too hurt by being the first to do this, but if all the streaming services do this, it will basically amount to a price hike for most people.
> We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts. “In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” Netflix said.
I'm not sure if that's the case necessarily. I'm sharing my account but people aren't sending me money every month to cover expenses.
Instead, we pool accounts. If I wanted to, I can get Disney+ and regular TV, while I provide Netflix and Amazon Prime in return. If all else fails, there's a Jellyfin server that gets regular use.
Everyone pays full price, but everyone only pays for one service, maybe two. The fragmentation of services is the real killer here. This wasn't a problem back when Netflix first came here and basically offered everything there was to offer until then Disney clawed back a whole bunch of its properties. €18 for Netflix would be fine if you weren't also expected to pay €17 for Amazon Prime and €19 for Disney+ and €14 for Paramount Plus and €15 for HBO Max (only available on some ISPs).
I'd pay full price for a streaming service that had everything and I think many people I know would too. I'd even be able to look past the stupid 720p limit (I run Linux so I cannot be trusted with the noisy 1080p encodes). Instead, my workflow now comes down to "check Netflix, if not found, download torrent".
These companies could've had the Spotify of video streaming services, which basically ended traditional music piracy, but instead wound up burning their version of Spotify down for a short term profit.
Depending on the service/people sharing with, I personally witnessed both sharing costs of the single service and distributing full ownership among different services...
There are people who want to control all of them while absorbing costs, there are others who just want access.
> If I wanted to, I can get Disney+ and regular TV, while I provide Netflix and Amazon Prime in return.
Reminds me of old days when all we had was dialup and we would pool our warez downloads with the community. I send you Seasons 6 & 7 of Buffy and I get the latest Season of Stargate in return. All burned on CDs or DVDs shipped via post.
They know who all the password sharers are. They've spent months, or even years running models to predict the fallout if they cut off password sharing. None of the actual results are going to be in any way surprising to them.
So while people here think they're doing this to their own detriment, their legion of scientists have already told them the end result which is obviously not detrimental or they wouldn't be doing it now.
They can run all the models in the world but it only takes one misunderstood factor to underestimate the fallout. I think they want the other streaming services to follow suit (like Apple with the AUX) but if the others dont bite, Netflix screwed themselves. Most of their users feel betrayed at a time where competition is more than ever. You dont have to be smart to understand its not a good move.
As a "scientist" mentioned in your comment (they call us Research Engineers), I have to tell you that this is a business decision. One or more than one suit in the C-level made this decision.
And, as a scientist, you cannot build a model with a never-happened-before phenomena. Only "risk specialists", "risk engineers", etc. which are different names for BSers will even try to "predict" this.
How can one build a "model" with no x (password policing enforcement) and only y (stay or drop) is beyond me. If anyone does, I will show you an idiot/BSer.
I am sure this is a business decision. Or MLEs/Deep Learning Engineers are going beyond the capabilities of their fields.
Sure, you can predict if a user is going to drop if a show he was binging is going away or his watching pattern, time spent watching, etc. But to build models with password policing enforcement? Hah!
Trying to predict whether this decision is harmful in the long run is not in the realm of science, but of art, business, or bullshitting.
I don't know if NFLX did a smaller scale pilot study and tried to build a model, but that would be inadequate.
By this logic big tech companies could never make mistakes since they all have legions of data and analysts, which is just objectively not true. Collecting the right data, analyzing it well, and using that to make the right product and business decisions is non-trivial work. Some folks think that you can blindly throw big data at a problem to solve it, but that is usually not the case.
I didn't attack Netflix at all. You seem upset that the market dynamics seem to behave in a way you don't like/support. Am I the one that has to grow up?
$NFLX brought in customers with the Sharing is Caring campaign. If at that time they patted themselves on the back for customer growth, they should hold themselves responsible for the about face and customer exodus when they have changed their stance to Sharing is a crime.
I doubt these two scale linearly, otherwise how would they make money? Also, I could imagine that the people that want their comfort show to be running in the background 24/7 are the ones that won't cancel their subscriptions. It's the occasional watcher that will most likely deem netflix worthless to them, so their subscriber to usage cost ratio might even worsen. I'm just guessing here though, obviously.
I definitely agree, it all depends on their profit margin correlation to their infra cost. For a normal SAAS I'm assuming it's not very strong, but for a video streaming business, I think the cost is much higher and therefore a lot more highly correlated. We also need to take into account the reasoning behind this decision. They're also removing multiples of users but losing only one membership so it's even more skewed towards being even. In the end, I'm assuming this is a calculated decision from their end, so they should have the numbers, if they're skewed in their favor they'll proceed, if not, they can always backtrack and not release this in the US, which I think is why they're releasing to smaller markets first.
All good points, especially the one vs many membership to viewers ratio. You're probably right (at least I hope so) that someone will have run the numbers. I guess we will see.
Actually, if NFLX pivoted their DVD-rental business (which they are planning to sell) to Digital Dowload-to-Own, there are new customers they can bring. Also, since it is a transactional business, there will be a steady income stream with every new release and people who want to own the Blu-ray equivalent digital edition.
They probably are worried about the cannibalization of the subscription base and hence caught in the Innovator's Dilemma.
Netflix’s current plan makes people pay for four devices even if they only want to enjoy 4K videos by themselves. That creates an incentive for them to share their passwords and split the costs with others. Wouldn’t it be more effective to limit all plans to one device and tier them by quality? That way, password sharing would be less appealing.
Let me add a couple 100 more to that count. Did you know that netflix doesn't support resolutions higher than 720p on windows/linux? You could subscribe to the 1080p plan (like me) and the players will stream 720p videos to you with no indication whatsoever. The only way of checking the netflix video resolution is `document.querySelectorAll('video')[0].videoWidth`. There are FF extensions but they don't work for every title.
Yes. Chromium and “Edgium” add a lot of their own closed-source services before releasing package. One example is that “Translate website” toolbar that Chrome has, which sends the entire content to Google’s servers using their own API key. That’s not present in the Chromium source.
Also the software restrictions on the linked Netflix page seem to be arbitrary. When I download a movie in a DRM-free .mkv file, I can play it in all my browsers, all media player apps (typically VLC and MPV), and the HDMI version doesn't matter.
No, but I wouldn't pay 65% more unless I could actually tell the difference. I could probably tell the difference between 1080p and 720 on my laptop, but I doubt I could tell between 4k and 1080p so I wouldn't pay for that.
thats the thing, you can actually tell but for adaptive streaming its harder to be definitive. Also content resolution becomes secondary when you are neck deep in show & storyline. that does not means its insignificant, just that its effects are subtle. In fact, this is so much more true for HDR vs non HDR.
Source: I've done a lot of HDR processing development for a leading media company.
I imagine they're trying to prevent the reverse, purchasing a cheap subscription in a developing country to use when you actually live in a more expensive country.
I believe they need a license to stream in different countries. If they don’t have a license to stream in Thailand I don’t think they will let you watch there.
This kind of thing is exactly why most of my media library is on iTunes (and Bandcamp) because for the longest time, I had to work abroad and it was the only service that allowed me to watch what I paid for and allowed me to buy more.
Even Steam used to be an issue: I could play my existing library abroad, but not purchase more until I was physically back in the country.
It's funny. Right now I have access to around 5 streaming services while I only pay for 2. My girlfriend's friend has access to Netflix, my sis HBO. I provide access to Disney+ and Prime to my family. I used to get YT premium from my sis's boyfriend, but they detected I'm not in the family household and they kicked me out. If it wasn't because other people use my accounts (and I use theirs), I wouldn't be paying for disney+ or A. Prime.
Maybe other people are in the same situation as me. There's a tenuous balance in the streaming service subscriptions thanks to the fact that people can share their accounts. If they close the door to account sharing, maybe the subscriptions will start falling like domino pieces.
> I used to get YT premium from my sis's boyfriend, but they detected I'm not in the family household and they kicked me out.
I'm surprised you achieved that at all. Google accounts are locked down hardcore... As it should be
My gf wanted me to share my ChatGPT plus account but I signed up via Gmail and it was impossible.
All of these sites can easily lock it down but choose not to. We're probably living in the Golden era. Although I still think Netflix's multi location accounts are far more expensive than their utility. And I fully see Netflix as an essential service but spending $35CAD/m is a serious consideration when I already buy 4 streaming devices that will very likely result in $18/m max if I pull the trigger.
If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free, quality, and meant to enrich the people instead of advertise and moralize to them.
I really don’t understand how a DVD collection is an “essential service” either. Or why you would effectively choose not to look at your watching statistics and then simply buy the media you watch the most.
No they cannot. And I am not just speaking in abstract terms, in the 1960s and 1970s (and even before) many shows were made that had a moral core but did not moralize at the audience.
Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
The only shows that I can think of like that now are Black Mirror or perhaps your odd HBO offering, but those are not shining examples, and often, even if they do discuss or engage with deeper concepts or ideas, it’s not handled in a way that allows for nuance.
(Black Mirror is happy to be quite crass at moments, same with HBO and other “top-tier” shows.)
> Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
There's something in this. Tickbox diversity is a lazy solution that doesn't really satisfy people who want broader representation while at the same time causes the rightwing culture warriors to go increasingly berzerk. Writers need to get better at doing incidentally diverse shows, because "hello I'm a token look at me" is bad characterization. Or address it by commissioning a broader range of shows from different settings; not everything needs to be a flagship.
While at the same time there are still lots of odd misses (Ghost in the Shell 2017 managed to annoy almost everybody in this regard).
>Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
Your memory of these shows differs dramatically from my own. None of the ideas discussed in any of them were complex or nuanced, much less culturally transgressive (no, not even Star Trek) and they were often ham-fisted and moralizing. I mean Star Trek and Twilight Zone so much so they became tropes and subjects of parody.
Is this a serious question? Why am I not buying DVDs on eBay?
At least ask why I'm not pirating it 24/7 when I already have an Android box connected to my TV w/ Kodi installed with 3rd party pirate extensions which gives me up-to-date lists of every show/movie available on Netflix/Hulu/Disney/etc (including their trending and genre based lists) with each show being a single click backed via 10 different HTTP pirate streaming servers they index...with the alternative of another app which let's me search any torrent movie ever and stream them on demand via my Fibre internet connection.
I use Netflix etc because
a) the recommendation algorithms are better than any 3rd party service like Reelgood hopes to be even with OSS plugins that track my torrents
b) I live with 3 "normal" people in my house who don't care to navigate the imperfect UI of my Kodi streaming/torrent apps no matter how many times I tell them it's better and has everything they need and more for "free"
> If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free
Who would foot the bill to produce this content? You suggest that content would be "free"... but free to who? The consumer, right? It certainly isn't possible to produce high quality films for free. People pour their blood, sweat and tears into these productions. Why should the fruits of their labors be given away for free? Would you wake up early every day and proceed to work eight hours for free?
So, like only have PBS? That could be better for society I guess, TV is a bit waste of time after all, but I think it won’t satisfy all current streaming service users.
For YT premium it's not necessary to share your account, you can become part of the google family group and tie the group to the YT premium subscription. They realized that I don't live in the same household (I am quite far away), so it was pretty easy for them I guess.
It's funny that they didn't explicitly kick me out. They simply asked me to contact their customer support and certify that I did indeed live in the same household.
It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.
Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies.
Nowadays, if you want to watch a particular movie, you have maybe a 10% chance that it is available on the streaming service that you are currently paying for.
And it makes more sense to just buy it directly, than pay monthly.
As an old movie kind of guy: I don't get why nobody wants me to have a big economical catalogue of all the movies. If you want to watch stuff from before about 1990 your best bet is pirating it off Youtube, oddly. Or hoping it's part of the 20th Century Fox that ended up on Disney+.
The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free.
(Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)
That's the paradox: everybody wants to build and operate that since it's obvious everyone would subscribe to such a service, it'd be a cash cow, a golden goose, etc. But nobody wants to share their slice of the copyright and licensing pie with anybody else for revenue reasons, brand reasons, whatever, so we're slowly moving back toward the cable model with 200 subscriptions and nothing to watch. Torrents will be back, big time, since they actually provide the service everybody wants.
This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring.
The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though?
It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment.
The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
I'm quite sure that the tax receipts from the sale, rental, and performance of the copyrighted material more than adequately covers the portion of those costs borne by society. (In fact, that's probably a fair part of the reason that government is willing to support lengthy and obstructive copyright protections: because it adds government revenue far in excess of the cost.)
I don’t know how one would tease that out of any tax receipt date, compared to economic loss due to suboptimal allocation of society’s resources.
Suppose copyright law was 15 years instead of 100 years or whatever. Society still gets the tax receipts and benefits from creation of the media, but the shareholders who own the media do not get to collect a price premium from the extra 85 years. That money can now be spent by consumers elsewhere as opposed to supporting media owners who already had sufficient incentive to create the media.
The question at the end of the day is, does a 100 year copyright term incentivize the creation of media with so much utility compared to copyright term of 15 years such that it makes sense for society to transfer extra resources to the media owners for an additional 85 years? Amongst other externalities to consider.
The real question is why do people feel like they deserve to have access to absolutely everything? The home entertainment landscape has continually moved towards more options, better technology, and more access, and always at a cheaper rate per hour of programming than before. Of course, if you want to maintain access to absolutely everything, then your cost is always going to go up, because the pool of absolutely everything continues to get larger and larger, not just from new content, but from the inclusion of old content that wasn't available in any form before. There is a disconnect that comes from the fact that people can't/don't actually watch that much.
The only thing keeping cable alive today is live sports, but that eventually will be folded into existing streaming services or they will have their own services. Which brings me to my next point. There will very likely be 200 subscription services (if there aren't already), but the more there are, the more niche and specialized they will be. But importantly, you will be able to choose what you want (a la carte). This is a far cry from cable because cable has never been a la carte. They've always required you to purchase at least a basic package with 30-50 + channels, and each channel getting a couple bucks each month. The consumer's total cost is at least $50 / mo, probably more
Compare that to one of the typical big streamers which are $10 - $15 per month. Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney - each of these alone has more content than you could ever watch. As long as they are all around to stay in competition, then prices will remain low. The absolute worst thing that could happen for consumers is for streamers to combine and form a conglomerate. Now that would be like cable - they'd have a monopoly and they'd end up charging you more overall than you were paying before, and then singling out "premium" content for even more money.
If you feel like you have to subscribe to all of them, that is simply a marker of their success in marketing to you. There is enough content (good content that you WILL enjoy) on any one of them. Or hell - even on Youtube which you can watch for free, there will be enough content to keep you from getting bored.
I don't know if I'd use words like 'feel like they deserve'. I'd rather use 'feel like it isn't possible because somebody said so'. It evidently is possible technically and people (IMHO correctly) are fed up with studios not being able politically to work together to provide a good service - IOW they vote with their wallets.
Mubi (https://mubi.com/) is nice. You don’t get a huge catalogue but they cycle it very regularly with varying thematic focus and showcase a mix of old movies and new art releases. It feels a bit like a cinema club. I recommend.
Sadly people focus as definitely shifted toward serial shows rather than films so movie streaming is not really an interesting market to address. I’m really confused by that because the feeling I get from 90% of the show I try to watch and always fail to finish is that there is a good movie hiding in the indulgent editing. Even prestige TV shows are full of padding.
Mubi's catalogue is tiny, and I find their marketing and interface (which strongly imply all the shows that have ever been been on the platform are currently on the platform, misleading). Criterion Channel (https://www.criterionchannel.com/) is a similar art film / critically acclaimed film network, which an enormously larger and more diverse catalogue. Officially it's only available in the US but if you sign up through a VPN it works everywhere.
From another old movie kind of guy: it's full of beautiful 1080p Bluray x265 torrents out there. Teams like VXT or RARBG release more old movies than one can watch.
I host a weekly 80s/90s obscure movie night (mostly Hong Kong action Z-movies, Godfrey Ho and the like) and RARBG has come in surprisingly clutch. If the movie got a HK theatrical release it's the first place I look. Japanese stuff too.
Other surprising sources: Tubi which often has better quality video processing for the stuff where the VHS/DVD master is all that exists (protip: yt-dlp works), and Internet Archive where people upload all kinds of stuff, including Blu-Ray rips.
A ton of stuff is also on YouTube but it's often a low-quality master and/or edited for content so it's usually a last resort.
I’ve been subscribed to Criterion since the beginning and it’s the only service I’ve kept without cancelling, or desiring to cancel, since. If the catalog is up your alley, highly recommend.
That said, I also buy their Blu-Rays during the sales, so I might just be a fanboy.
This is quite hard to achieve with original comment getting the spotlight and being a differentiator between services. For "the rest" of the content, I think the situation is pretty much close to streaming services with music.
Agreed, but I think it only works to a point. Content is becoming more commoditized/more generic (maximise margins/cash in on some big trend). This, coupled with way too many new services claiming exclusive originals and people are deciding to not even bother watching it or just to sail the high seas. It's much like at one point the music streaming services had exclusives too. Sorry Spotify I'd rather just not bother listening to Rammstein than have yet another subscription.
So an independent studio would produce a show, put it on all the platforms and the platforms would pay based on views? Sounds like youtube. The current model works because producing a television show is way more complex than making an album, it is way too much risk for indie companies to absorb.
Where precisely is the risk? If you already produced the content why not make it available on multiple streaming sites? Is it the production studio asking for exclusivity or the streaming outlets?
the most lucrative scheme for productions, while also staying within that invisible boundary of not alienating consumers, for films and series: the exclusivity deals.
How's that dr watson?
In an extreme example you are paying a long term subscription, let's say $200, for the exclusive privilege to access say 2 shows. That's $100 for one aficionado, per production.
What you are advocating for is
for each production to be made available on dozens of platforms each having most other productions, you end up with a prorata/ratio of that aficionado who viewed yours, but also happen to have viewed 8 other productions. Unless the viewer pays up 20x or 30x for some universal subscription, that's far less revenue than $100.
In practice subscribers simply won't even spend 10x. Why? Because they are only ready to pay 10 times more for certain beloved productions, but very little for those that aren't deemed that necessary to watch. So they tend to accept to pay a lot for a few hits, even if they have to give up on all the rest.
Why does it not work the same for music?
First, it used to. Apple, in the good old Steve Jobs days, did it good to break the practice. With iTunes. Which managed to catch up with every other platform and integrate well to provide a UX leaving the competition far behind. Pressure power, and master maneuvers accomplished the exploit. Apple TV didn't show the same prouesse, maybe Jobs started to fade away, Apple didn't make a great screen display like they did with the iPod to gain that consumer pressure against the trad distributors, and it was simply a much harder battle due to the second reason below.
A great tune is played many many many times. An average one at least far less. So the prorata formula used to compensate the owners, works OK. The pareto distribution applies where great hits get accordingly rewarded.
With movies/series, unless it is one of those rare non thriller/mystery gem, it is watched once and for all. A one to one view to reward system puts greater productions at a deficit.
I doubt the Entertainment industry saw all of this from the get go, but they have decades of accounting experience and shaped it up once cable/satellite tv with network channels became prominent. It roughly applies the same with with streaming.
Does it make it right? Legally it seems that they win, those exclusivity contracts are legal. Building a platform and funnel your productions through it only as well. Although legislators needs to step up their game, end the lobbying thr led to this abuse of Intellectual Property rights, to finally enforce what it is and just it: ownership of the art, not of its distribution.
This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in.
I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying.
The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot.
That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price.
Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription.
Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it.
The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced.
When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it.
I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap.
I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.
It's so weird that they still haven't learned to provide multiple audio tracks and subtitles. I don't know how sizable the portion of the market is that they lose this way, but people like you and me won't ever consider one of Google's services to rent films. Presumably, US-centric decision-making is to blame.
That’s correct, and I’m personally dissatisfied with the content currently available on Netflix, as well as the distribution of content across too many services. But it would be disingenuous to describe it as a market failure when the market was responsible for creating the industry in the first place.
If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.
Customers benefit from benevolent monopolies. If you can get everything you want from one place and for a good price, why would you ever shop around? One place caters to all of your needs, so you always know where to go. The problem is that having a monopoly doesn't incentivize benevolent behaviour.
If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.
That's only if you consider streaming services a separate market than cable television. With the decline in cable subscriptions, that's clearly not the case. Netflix was just the hot new innovator in the entertainment delivery market, and now everyone else has caught up. The same market Blockbuster was in.
I enjoy YouTube movies model for that reason, I wouldn't mind an overlapping service of all streamers and just pay to rent / buy almost everything on-demand.
Nothing in your post has anything to do with free markets... markets maybe, but copyright is not a "free market".... it is by definition a monopoly
a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library
Jup, gp was talking about unregulated markets. Those surprisingly often have winner take it all outcomes. I don't want to go back to company towns.
BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(
The number of movies I wanted to watch in the last few months that where actually available anywhere on streaming was devastatingly low. Some where available, but only dubbed (which I don't watch), most where not. Not even to buy.
So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)
> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.
I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this.
Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability.
When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.
Competition has forced all these streamers to up their game and produce more good shows to stay popular. Netflix has never been a one-to-see-all service. When Netflix was the only major streamer, other networks and studios were also producing great content. It's not like they came out of nowhere. You still had to find other ways to watch the very best shows and movies across all of TV, which at the time means you would've had to have a cable subscription with premium channels like HBO and Showtime. And if you just decided on a random movie, there is a way better chance it is on Netflix now than there would've been ten years ago.
Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.
Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.
> If they close the door to account sharing, maybe the subscriptions will start falling like domino pieces.
If people turn out to not watch that much content to warrant 3-4 subscriptions per (strict) household, I wonder if this could lead to a Highlander-like streaming showdown: There can be only one. The thing there is that Netflix should try to avoid the showdown, not push towards it, because they are the least equipped to win:
- Disney+, HBO Max (Warner) -> Own/produce AAA content.
- Prime Video -> Deep pockets, bundled as value added service, own distribution infra.
Netflix has a looooooong arm of international content. Which is probably an important reason why they are by far the largest internationally. I don't see anyone replicating that anytime soon.
Good point. Which makes me wonder why Netflix pushed back against EU regulation that would put content origin quotas [1]. They should be lobbying for that, as they would have to do very little (compared e.g. to Disney+ or Amazon) to be compliant.
That international content is quantity but not AAA quality. Dark is probably among the best and it doesn't clear the bar... 1899 is better, but cut short after 1 season. Most others are noticeably low budget.
My personal bar of what counts as AAA I guess? It actually started quite well, but second half of the series drags down the average in terms of story/screenwriting/camera/VFX. It doesn't stand near the likes of Foundation, Game of Thrones, Mrs. Maisel, Mr. Robot, The Wire
Doing TV is a marathon, perhaps Dark showrunners are more of sprinter people and should do movies instead.
You'd be hard-pressed to find much that's going to stand with Game of Thrones on production values.
Dark, I'd agree, faded in terms of the plotting as it got kind of all twisted up in itself toward the end, but I still liked it quite a bit. And you could say similar things about some of your other picks, like Mr. Robot (or Game of Thrones for that matter). Sustained excellence season after season is really hard to achieve.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
If Mrs. Maisel is not AAA then I don't know what is. Probably in top 5 shows of the current golden age of western cinema and TV (yes, TV is now way ahead)
Maisel has been canceled. Ended, more specifically since apparently the creators made the decision.
Point taken, though. Still, if they only have a 1/10 chance at being good I am not taking the chance. It's like the netflix stamp is a kiss of death to me now. On the rare occasions they get it right they muck it all up after season 1.
If I hear good word of mouth about a show I may check it out, but I don't waste my time giving Hollywood the benefit of the doubt anymore. They have to prove they are worth my time and at the moment no streaming services are worth the amounts they charge.
To me "canceled" is only bad when it's cut short like Firefly. Maisel had a good 5 years/seasons worth of run. Otherwise you can say "canceled" about every show that isn't running today...
If I could afford it in terms of money and time I would probably subscribe to all of them, I mean why not? To go see one movie costs about as much as a month of subscription to one streaming service. So subscribing to Netflix, Prime, Apple and HBO costs like going to see 4 movies per month, except you get more than 4 movies (I think a season of a good TV show easily worth multiple movies).
I appended it with it being more correct to say 'ended'.
Aside from that it didnt start with 5 in mind, it just kept going till the creators decided to nix it.
That's not the same as having a 5 season vision and completing the story you wanted to tell.
And for sure to each their own, if you enjoy the services by all means continue being a patron.
I'm over all of them personally, even disney+ is going to start charging to watch new movies on it.
If there was one place to watch everything I'd be interested.
But I'm tired of lack of content worth watching, constant fluctuations in what's available, and horrible UX designs for no discernable reason.
All that coupled with the constant preaching has me watching more older movies, and occasionally something new worth watching like Super Mario.
So the money I used to spend on subs I now use on watching the occasional movie in the theater, and more storage for my ever growing media collection I know will always be there.
That's AAA TV content. Maybe a tellatle of an ongoing diversification of streaming services between "TV-like" and "cinema-like".
Sure, all of Apple, Amazon, Netflix have dipped their toes into AAA movie production, but their collective throughput isn't anywhere close to becoming "players" in the field.
Netflix had first mover advantage, but that ship has sailed. Their only real moat now is their original content, but when stacked against Disney or HBO it's a pretty weak moat.
That sounds complicated, but with today's sponsor - piracy - you can get any content from any subscription service with just a few clicks for the low price of zero dollars. Sharing is caring :)
It's often of poor quality and not in 4k. I rented a movie from YouTube the other day and the stream supported HDR, and if I had a 5.1 surround that would have worked, too!
If you're not watching 4 hours of TV per day it's not that expensive to rent content, but I'm saying this from the point of a westerner. For other parts of the world a $5 USD for a movie for 48 hours doesn't make any sense over straight up piracy.
This really depends on how good of a pirate you are. If you put in some effort, you'll be watching 4k blu-ray movies in a higher bitrate than streaming services offer.
Yep. I actually prefer, ahem, sourced content because it looks better even on my iPhone. Apple TV+ is pretty good, but the other services are really stingy with bitrate.
I haven't encountered poor quality recently on usenet. Except for shows that are so old that it doesn't make sense to go higher than 720p. The tooling has also improved greatly and can be automated to the point that getting a whole series is a matter of 2-3 clicks.
I've been a subscriber to basically everything for years. The only reason I haven't cancelled 90% of them is because my retired parents use my accounts. I almost never use the streaming services they use (I use YouTube Premium _a lot_, but I don't share that).
Given our combined minor usage, the day they lock one of us out it's all over, I'm cancelling them all!
I don't invest in streaming produced series any more as they have a tendency to want to eat their cake and have it too. They won't tie up a series but don't commit to producing a second one to tie it up, then arbitrary cancel them. It's like reading The Hobbit and the last two chapters are missing, never to be written, and there are plenty of actually finished books out there!
I've had Netflix since it was DVDs by mail. I still pay for Netflix, but rarely use it. First time my sisters can't use it I'll delete my account. I honestly just don't use it enough to justify the price.
I think a lot of people are only holding their accounts because someone they love use it for access. These people would probably cancel it first thing, if their loved ones can not use it.
As Netflix says, they end up with more subscribers at the end of the day. I'm sure all these services will follow suit once they reach some point of growth, or rather a halt to growth. It's kind of crazy they've let it go on this long. It's weird people actually have the gall to complain about this move like they feel they deserve to get things for free. Either you pay for the service and password-sharing doesn't affect you, or you freeload off someone else and you're getting it for free. Either way, there's not much reason to complain
It was part of the business model. I've certainly kept my subscription longer because family was using it, so they've gotten more money from me by allowing password sharing.
This is across four countries. They've already seen growth in Canada [1].
The math makes sense to me. If the average "sharer" shares with three people, they could lose 66% of the active users in the "sharing" population, before losing a single paying customer. Who knows what the average actually is [2].
How do they detect account borrowing? only through simultaneous use? When I pay for the service I expect some low number of simultaneous clients (say 2-4) to be able to stream. Obviously sharing my password means sharing that quota and if the number of concurrent streams is 1 then the password isn't shareable at all.
What I don't like though is when there can only be a fixed number of authenticated devices, whether they are ever used or not. Once you have logged in to N devices (5, for one service I subscribe to) you can't log in to a sixth. Even if the first 3 are phones that are on the bottom of the ocean. At that point you need to call customer support to clear your authenticated devices. Hassle.
What kind of crackdown did they pull here? in legal terms only? Or in number of concurrent streams? or in number of authenticated devices?
Probably geo IP and calculating feasible travel times. E.g. if 2 clients connect that are 50 miles away within 5 minutes creds are obviously being shared.
That would give way WAY too many false positives. If I'm watching on the bus while my wife watches at home it would trigger. Similar if we have 2 homes etc. It would also rule out anyone using VPNs etc. Seems like a complete no-go and would see a huge chunk of paying users go simply because the product is now much worse for people who are not sharing accounts. That just can't be it.
Probably they recognize ips so they'll realize that you are sharing if you are logging in from another ip over time. I think it's like at least once every 30 days or so, that'll protect most people from false positives when travelling.
They probably also fingerprint devices as well and correlate those times the devices are in the same area, etc. With user agents/device IDs, IPs and time you can work out quite a few relationships.
If I'm ever blocked on some fuzzy reason I'd leave the service in a heartbeat. If they have clear rules then at least I can somehow learn to avoid the traps, such as having to connect from an IP or having a specified number of devices. But if I can get kicked out of the service right before/in the middle of a game, then I'd quit my subscription in a hurry. They just can't use some method similar to how financial fraud is detected. But while fuzzy rules don't fly, I can't see any rigid rules that also wouldn't be a hassle for paying customers.
You have to tell to Netflix what Wi-Fi network are you using (your usual Wi-Fi is assigned by default). If your device doesn't connect to that Wi-Fi network at least once in a month, your device is blocked.
You can still share accounts using a personal VPN network.
> At that point you need to call customer support to clear your authenticated devices. Hassle.
Yikes, which services require you to call support in such an instance? In my experience you can often kick out old devices right from the new device that you are trying to use (annoying, but manageable).
This is a swedish sports streaming service (cmore). Not sure if they have fixed so that this is possible to do by the end user now or no longer required, was a couple of years since I last did it.
I don't really care about Netflix anymore, or any other streaming service.
I subscribe for a month, watch any new shows or movies I like, cancel and move on. All of my devices are 4K+HDR capable, I don't know why "up to 4 devices" is even relevant anymore if you can't share the account with anyone else. My family? Living elsewhere.
Now that there are dozens if not hundreds of streaming services offering exclusive content there is no paying customer growth possible anymore. What are they counting on? That consumers will pay for more than one subscription on different platforms? While they essentially only watch one at a time? How stupid is that!
Netflix have really dissapointed me. I've been a subscriber since before streaming, and have even been content paying the subscription fee during the "breaks" of not using their service for up to months at a time because I so badly want(ed) them to succeed. I also understood the difficult situation they were facing when the producers of content were makkng ridiculous demands on their distribution, or worse, just pulling their content because they were opening their own service or some fuckhead like Murdoch threw money at them to keep an exclusive lock on it.
Their streaming model of watching on-demand (i.e., not a weekly release, here's the whole show to watch at your own pace) and their investment in shows that were not the usual low-brow trope-laden predictable shit meant I was actually excited when a new show was announced. My favourite TV-watching moments have been getting lost in shows like Narcos, The Ozarks, or even the seemingly polarising Orange Is The New Black.
Now I log in and see nothing but nostalgia tv, trash telly like Love Is Blind, or inexplicably 1/3 of my screen is listing mobile games that Netflix think I would be interested in.
.. and I'm genuinely concerned shows like The Diplomat are just going to leave us all hanging.
Meanwhile the other streaming services are at least as bad, but typically worse.
Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).
The first season could have been better, but it has great production values and as far as I can tell they see it as an investment and they are not going to cancel it soon. So for now I'm optimistic about a second season.
Many shows have hit their strides in later seasons. IIRC I found Breaking Bad a bit boring in season one. (Granted, probably the writing was already better than season one of Foundation.)
I really enjoyed foundation. I just had to let go of the book series and take it as a new universe and I’m really looking forward to what they do next.
I know some people are really irritated by how it differs from the book, but I really enjoyed it, especially "The Empire". I kinda want the bad guys to win, lol
Lee Pace and his character arch carried that show. Everything else was terrible. I LOVED the books and felt personally affronted with how they butchered the content. These are some of the best science fiction books every written, and THIS was the best they could do with it? The only way they could have screwed up this badly is writing egos the size of Jupiter and zero oversight.
I skip most of the Ted Lasso scenes with Mr Gruff and lil' Ms SideBusiness. If you had told me back in season one that I'd prefer watching the scenes with Mr BoringHomeLife, I wouldn't have believed you.
I really wish YouTube allowed 1.10 playback speed. It’s just fast enough to save you some real time on long video series, but slow enough that you can still absorb difficult subjects. Even slow talkers become fast talkers on 1.25 speed.
SmartTube (for Google/Android TV) used to allow this but a recent update has removed the other speed increments and it now only lets you use the usual increments you find on YouTube. :(
I agree, I like 1.1 speed. The playback dropdown actually has a "custom" button in the top right of the dropdown on the desktop view of the site. You can set 1.05 and 1.1 playback speeds with it. It's a little annoying to use on mobile, as you have to switch to "desktop" view in the browser and can't use the app.
Honest suggestion, try getting used to listening to things at faster speeds.
I started listening to podcasts at increasingly faster speeds, going from 1.1 to 1.2 and slowly increasing it. It only took a few days to a week of listening to slightly-too-fast-for-comfort content before it started sounding normal and I could bump it up again. Now the slowest I listen to is at 1.5 (going up to 1.6 or even 1.8 for my "filler" podcasts). Videos I can crank even higher, since the addition of visual content and/or subtitles can help process the audio information.
I now watch half my videos at 2x speed, and 1.25 or even 1.5 are how 1.1 used to seem for me.
Severance was great! I watched For All Mankind and Foundation, which both had great production values but were hurt by cheesy storytelling and sometimes iffy acting.
I'd love to see TV+ try something more experimental.
Interesting. I also like the Apple TV+ content, but my list is completely different. I liked BlackBird, Invasion, Slow Horses, Servant, and Tehran...and mostly didn't like the ones on your list.
Apple TV+ has really surprised me. They've quickly become my favourite streaming platform, and somehow even got me interested in Major League Soccer (a sport I didn't even follow previously) enough to subscribe to their MLS Season Pass.
I really hope they don't fall into the Netflix habit of cancelling shows before they have time to find their groove (Mr. Corman was really creative and just getting good and got axed), and some of their dramas are starting to veer into the forgettable "Netflix Hallmark made for TV" territory.
Mr. Corman was tough to see cancelled but that show was hard to watch. It was scarily depressing and I while I think some people say they want a show like that, I don’t think it pulled the viewership numbers to keep it on air.
Agreed. Apple TV in general has that feeling of quality. Another great one there that I'd highly recommend is Slow Horses.
I feel like I must mention though: as soon as For All Mankind decided to have a teenager seduce a grown married woman I lost interest. Then to top it off, they continued that plotline into the next season. What a shame.
Watching on the Apple TV+ app on an Android TV it frequently replays the same episode I already watched or starts at some random time earlier in the episode than when I left off which is a pain to fix using their scrubbing feature which is itself a bad experience.
Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content.
Which is a win for literally everybody. The consumer wins because they get a very high amount of enjoyment for their invested time. The service wins because the less time each loyal subscriber spends actually using the service the less their bandwidth costs are.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference they say so I'll take that ha! Any suggestions on how to better approach these things? I'm like a fish out of water when it comes to branding, so would be happy to learn from anyone with constructive criticism. Thanks!
I see the plug doesn't seem to be going well, but it interesting to me that Amazon is the only service with something somewhat similar with Prime's X-ray. I know it's easier for them since they have IMDB, but I don't understand why I can't at least have a "Cast/Characters" popup in the other services. Even if it's just the whole cast and not contextual to the scene.
You make a great point. X-ray is a prime example of the potential for extending and enhancing the viewing experience, even with something as simple as a persistent character/cast sidebar. Netflix has a version of this but as a separate site called tudum that feels more like a information dump. And Disney has disney extras which is primarily behind the scenes videos. I suspect it's harder for them to do in platform-agnostic way. Amazon has the benefit of IMDB as you noted, while Netflix, Hulu et al would have to build from scratch.
I genuinely don't understand this sentiment in 2023. Maybe in 2003 it was reasonable, but if you have the money, just spend it to buy the content you want. I get that there's a lot of "crap" that you don't want to see, but I appreciate some of that, and I'm sure you appreciate some of what I call "crap". I don't see how you go from that situation to justifying not paying for it. There's a price for the content and it's not $0. You can either pay it, or enjoy free things. There's so much content out there.
Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023, with so many options for consuming media legally, on whatever device, at any time? That was the dream of pirates in 2003, but we've achieved that dream legally today and it's still not good enough for the pirates it seems.
I don't pirate because I just can't be bothered. It's all too much work for a short temporary experience, but I do remember the promises.
Streaming was going to "save us" from the big cable companies. No ads, just pay that small subscription fee and watch what you want when you want it.
Now there are a dozen subscription fees, I'm getting ads anyway, and I'm not getting content I want to pay money for. Some are even streaming live TV now, with no way to watch what you just watched again.
Pirating popular shows is actually pretty darn easy, and you get the benefit of watching it with your favorite player wherever you want to, not with the crap player they offer under scenarios they dictate. Want to watch an HBO show offline on a plane or train, no problem. I actually “pirate” some of stuff I pay for.
> the benefit of watching it with your favorite player wherever you want to, not with the crap player they offer under scenarios they dictate
This is the part I don't get. Why do you feel you have this right?
FYIW, HBO Max allows you to download episodes for offline viewing, so it's not exactly true they are dictating the scenarios. I watch HBO all the time on plane rides.
So, if someone pays for HBO Max and watches the latest episode of Barry at home via the app, but, as I do, feel that HBO's UI/UX is dogshit, and they then download a copy of it and slap it on their phone or laptop in a way that's more comfortable to them for their flight tomorrow, what's the difference? OP continues to pay HBO, but that next view is just on a local device.
Edit: HBO Max downloads "expire" after 30 days, and you have 48 hours to finish it once you've started[1]. You're also limited to 30 downloads at once. This is hardly 'convenient' for some people.
I use Apple Shortcuts + VPN + seed box and the shortcut grabs the magnet link and hits my torrent boxes API. I shared the Shortcut with my wife and it has made pirating so dang convenient and easy we’ve filled up 20TB of space, whoops, time to delete some shows.
It’s also fantastic because I know -exactly- what my children are watching and if there’s some episode of Paw Patrol that’s particularly annoying it get deleted.
>I don't pirate because I just can't be bothered. It's all too much work for a short temporary experience, but I do remember the promises.
This is the opposite of my experience. It took next-to-no effort, maybe an hour or two one time, to set up my Synology NAS box with Plex, Sonarr and Radarr. The result isn't something temporary, it's a fully-working system that obtains all of the shows and movies I want to watch and drops them onto Plex almost immediately.
All I have to do is fire up Plex and the latest episodes of everything are right there, often within an hour of them airing on the east coast. I'm on the west coast, so this sometimes means I get to check them out before they air here.
The result is a carefully curated library that's far more tailored to my tastes than any algorithm has offered me on any service.
I put far too much time into my server but now that it's up and running it requires zero input. I tell it what I want to watch and it serves it to me on a gold platter.
I bought and ripped the stuff we tend to rewatch a lot (The Office, Friends, Star Trek, Stargate, etc.) and am serving them from a local Plex instance.
I occasionally pirate episodes of TV shows that would require another subscription (already paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO and Prime). Honestly, I'd much rather cancel all that and just pay à la carte for content as long as it's something reasonable (like $0.50 - $1 / episode or ~ $10 / season and $2 - $15 / movie - that adds up to about the same cost based on my family's viewing patterns, plus I get flexibility).
It was nice when Netflix was the only game in town and it was worthwhile to pay it for the library, now it's too much to pay all these services for just a pile of 99% excrement.
This, absolutely this, for my wife and I. Movies and shows that we love, we also download because it's often been inevitable that they get dropped from a streaming service at some point. Or, they're moved over to a new service (see: Peacock/Office) and we don't think that paying an additional monthly fee just to access that one show that we only occasionally watch is worth it.
Similarly, if the streaming service continues to play ads despite paying for the service, we will just pirate the content.
> Similarly, if the streaming service continues to play ads despite paying for the service, we will just pirate the content.
Why though? Why don't you just watch some other content? There's so much out there, and you have so many choices, available without any ads, and also if you choose you can consume free content as well.
Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
>Why though? Why don't you just watch some other content? There's so much out there, and you have so many choices, available without any ads, and also if you choose you can consume free content as well.
Because that content isn't this content, and I want to see this content.
>Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
First, see above - that content isn't this content, so if there's not a suitable alternative, well, c'est la vie. I've demonstrated that I'm willing to pay for these things, albeit to a point. If the service goes beyond that point, and I still want the content, then I'll obtain it via other means. Besides, much of the specific content I'm referring to in this scenario rakes in massive profits every quarter and is doing quite well for itself regardless of whether or not I "violate IP laws" to obtain it. That's setting aside the fact that it's been shown that piracy doesn't harm sales[1]. Further, in spite of our pirating, we'll still often inject money back towards the IP via other means.
> Because that content isn't this content, and I want to see this content.
I see. So is this your thought process?
1) I want it
2) I can't have it my way
3) So I take it, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks
Is that fair, or no? I notice you offered some rationalizations for your behavior, but those doesn't really change the above calculus right? They are provided to justify it.
2, fixed) We got to have it our way for a while, then more companies wanted a piece of the pie, and now we don't get to have it our way anymore.
They listened to consumers for a while. I stopped pirating for a good chunk of years because everything was glorious in the world of streaming. But after we finally got what we'd been asking for, they stopped giving that to us.
So, yeah, I'm going to go elsewhere to get it, your judgement be damned. I won't be losing sleep over it any time soon.
I'm not really judging, you do you, but you are confirming my original thoughts as to the motivations behind pirating being rooted in selfishness. I'm very selfish myself so that's not a statement of judgement.
Good question; I can find gimmicks and talk about how I hate ads and whatnot, but really, it's because I don't assign the same value to an infinitely copy-able digital asset (which is confounding since I work in software).
I did a lot of pirating when I was a kid; I still do a little now (but a lot less), mostly out of frustration with the cost and availability of the content on streaming platforms. I wouldn't steal stuff from a store (because I know that causes actual material loss among other things), but making an additional copy of a TV show episode (which I wouldn't have bought anyway) - it's a philosophical question whether that causes a loss for someone.
I do this. Buy DVD box set for ~one year of subscription fees, rip it all, store it in the cloud or on an external drive. Do this once for each show you like - probably less than a dozen. Legal, easy-ish, and I'm set for life.
Simplest answer is because one can. It is much safer to grab any digital content than physical goods. If it were easier like this to grab food from stores and restaurants, grab homes of other people, they would do that too. Its not even hypothetical, in many parts of the world this all happens very commonly.
> If it were easier like this to grab food from stores and restaurants, grab homes of other people, they would do that too.
You are implying that everyone pirating content would do these things if the chance of getting caught was low. I would posit that some people who pirate would, but it's a stretch to say that the entire group would.
Taking your simplest answer: just because one can does not mean one would.
For what it's worth, I am willing to pirate shows/software but would never steal physical goods even if there was a gurantee that I would get away with it.
If art has value, then its form has value as well since art devoid of form is just communication which is no longer art.
If the form of art has value, then the original form of that art has at least as much value since it reflects the original intention of the artist which inherently has value by being part of the historical record.
If the original form of art has value, then there's value in preserving it for future generations to appreciate.
If there's value in preserving the original form of art, then there's value in distributing it widely since history has shown time and time again that copyright holders alone are not enough...
I think I'd need to see more to consider it an argument for violating the law. I'm all for civil disobedience if the cause it just enough. Preserving media seems like a good idea, but it doesn't seem like something we need to break the law to get passed. Also, the civil disobedience line is really undercut but posters (some in this thread) who broadcast their real reasons for pirating have nothing to do with ethics, but fulfilling individual wants and needs without remorse.
I use plex as an interface and it organizes my content in an easy to find and watch manner.
It’s the fewest clicks to see new content.
Comically I subscribe to many online services (Hulu, Netflix, apple+) and will end up discovering and watching new shows through plex and my rss feeds than the actual apps.
So pirating still gives me the best user interface. Especially with combining content from multiple services.
Also, it’s not just pirating. I ripped my couple hundred dvd collection years ago when kids kept breaking DVDs.
Comically, the cheapest way to watch most movies is to buy the dvd at Walmart for $4 and rip it to watch through Plex. The file never goes away and it skips the frustration of figuring out if Wolf of WalStreet is on Netflix, or Hulu, or HBO, some stupid one off streaming service that I’ll never use (peacock, paramount, whatever whatever).
So I think it’s the same reason in 2023 as it was in 2003.
So piracy gives you the best UI. Sure. But why do you believe your need for the best UI is enough to clear the bar for ethics when it comes to violating other people's IP rights? Stealing food from the store is way more convenient than going through the line. Best UI there is for grocery shopping.
I certainly wouldn’t steal food from a store as that deprives the store of food. That seems cut and dry.
If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal. It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society. So I don’t feel bad when I subscribe to HBONow and also “illegally” download torrents so it’s easier for loved ones to watch.
I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So we need some distinction between essential rights that seem real to me (bill of rights stuff) and “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry (content industry is only like $100-200B globally where agriculture is $1.2T in the US alone).
I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution.
> If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal.
Context and perspective. We're talking about a media landscape that is flush with content, to the point where people complain that it's all just rehashed. There's plenty of media to go around.
> It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
It deprives someone of their rights, which is something I think pirates don't really care about at all, as it's never considered in the calculus. It's always "what's more convenient for me and my desires to consume particular media, rights be damned". I wish pirates would just be frank and admit this like the other poster who was replying to me.
> I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society.
Me too. But I also enjoy the rule of law and the hard work of people who make content that I consume.
> There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I would feel more sympathetic to this argument if pirates had ever given an inch, or seriously attempted to organize to fix the law in the US over the past 20 years. Instead, they just kept pirating as hard as they could, even when the industry moved toward streaming services, and rationalized their behavior away.
> I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So you're saying my strong feelings about copyright infringement are due to a PR campaign, and not a carefully considered position I've come to on my own, through my own experiences as a content creator, artist, and owner of copyrighted works?
I understand that some people are so blasé about violating copyrights, they don't even think they could possibly be doing anything wrong. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have to spend money and resources to defend their rights from violations of law by others. I fully understand that digital media and physical goods are not the same. But I categorically reject that zero people are harmed when copyrights are violated.
> “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry
As I said, copyright is a fundamental provision of the US Constitution. We can talk about the parameters of "securing for limited Times" but "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." is not up for debate. The word "exclusive" is important here.
And as for the size of the industry interested in copyright... upending copyright would also upend trademarks and patents. There's a much larger industry (well... all of them) interested in those forms of IP.
> I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution.
Copyright was 14 years at the time of the Constitution. If it was still that, I’d have no problem waiting it out and only watching material 14 years old.
Following laws isn’t always ethical. The constitution also allowed slavery. Do you think owning slaves was ethical? There’s lots of instances where laws are out of sync with ethics and morality, and, hopefully change over time.
In the past 20 years gay marriage became legal and I would argue it’s always ethical. Same for recreational drug use. And therapeutic mdma and ketamine. The list goes on and on.
Especially when the copyright laws aren’t the result of some specific debate and determination but by very targeted lobbying by Disney and others to extend copyright from 14 years to its current length of life+70 years or 95 years for corporate works.
Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
I’m not making a judgement on your beliefs or how you formed them. I don’t know you. But there are PR campaigns to promote copyright targeted toward school kids (remember “don’t copy that floppy” [0] and “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1]) and I think they are in alignment with “copying a friend’s video is like stealing bread” so you just seem to be using simile analogies. It’s quite possible that you reached the analogy independently. It’s also possible that you aren’t aware of how you reached this analogy and are influenced by advertising and PR, just like everyone else.
Let's take a moment and recap this discussion. I put out a call for a "full throated" defense of pirating. In your reply, your full throated defense was that:
"pirating still gives me the best user interface"
To support this argument, you cited the various inconveniences you face when dealing with copyrighted works. Only after more prompting have you landed on a high-minded, ethical argument. Why didn't you argue this in the first place if you feel so strongly about these points? Why was your first foot forward an argument based on convenience?
Personally I pirated a ton back in the day due to convenience. Why did I stop? Because now I have money and it's all on my TV one click away. It's so convenient today compared to 2003, so that's why I don't understand why people who can afford it still pirate. I can understand why people without money would, but still... it's like $10 a month for all the music in the world, anytime, anywhere; whereas back then all you got was a CD for $10 that you could play in your crappy boom box or walkman. As a young pirate, Spotify was my dream growing up, and now that it's a reality, the pirates still aren't satisfied.
> Do you think owning slaves was ethical?
I think you know the answer to this question.
> slavery... gay marriage.... medical drugs.... etc...
Everything you listed was changed due to robust and organized social movements to effect that change. Because the societal ills were so egregious, society mobilized to neutralize those.
If you want copyright to stand next to slavery, gay rights, and the drug wars as a worthy social cause, it's fine to make that argument. But you've got to back it up with a robust social movement centered around effecting change, not selfishly consuming.
When I look at the last 20 years of piracy, I don't see the same kind of movements. I see a lot of petulance disguised as civil disobedience (looking at the Pirate Bay), and a joke of a social movement (the Pirate Party), but other than that really nothing. Could it be because most of society doesn't really care about this issue the way they care about human rights? Maybe society recognizes piracy as the selfish act it is. I know that's not popular to say here on HN, but as a former pirate myself, I really can't justify my behavior any other way. I'm certainly not going to compare my actions to those of civil rights leaders and the movements they formed.
And if I did feel so strongly about the ethical nature of my actions, I wouldn't start by grounding my argument as "pirating still gives me the best user interface". Because if I did that, others would think that's what I really care about, and any ethical considerations would be secondary.
As I said to the other poster, I'm not judging you for this. It's okay to be unethical and selfish. I'm very unethical and selfish as a person (most people are), so it's okay if you are too. You can also be ethical and giving in other areas of our lives. Just be honest about your motivations like they were, and it's all good.
> Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
My reply to you in this regard was in response to your assertion that copyright is not an "essential right", but instead a "right" only due to successful lobbying. My point was that this right is grounded in the Constitution itself, and no corporations today lobbied for that.
It's true that rights holders have broader protections today, and as a rights holder, I appreciate that. But as a citizen, I also recognize that the term should be much shorter, and we can indeed reform the whole system. But I wouldn't go back to the drawing board, because that requires a rewrite of the Constitution. As long as it&...
> Everything you listed was changed due to robust and organized social movements to effect that change. Because the societal ills were so egregious, society mobilized to neutralize those.
People had illegal gay sex for centuries before society mobilized. So it was the groundswell of “unethical” activity that eventually led to social movement. Same for drugs and whatnot.
I think the societal change for legalizing what I think is ethical (and what billions of people think is ethical enough to do despite laws) will come about after many years of people just not caring and doing what’s convenient.
The convenient argument is just the most straightforward and I think why people continue to pirate. So that answers your question. All the other parts are going into additional detail that you requested.
It’s like if you asked someone why they illegally smoked pot 40 years ago they’d likely say “because I like to get high.” That doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep reasons why, just that that is the most important one.
Obviously legalizing pot cost corporations lots of lost revenue. And modernizing copyright will cost corporations lots of lost revenue as well.
> No body has been deprived of anything, it's just copyright violation.
The second part of your sentence doesn't follow from the first. If someone is violating a copyright, that someone else has been deprived of their rights to control their IP, and they're owed compensation. That's the system we set up, so that's the system we should follow.
If a rights holder wants to grant you the privilege of copying the data, that's great. Many of them actually do that. But that doesn't mean we're allowed to just violate the rights of those who choose otherwise. The response should be to consume media that is offered in favorable terms, not to pirate media just because you feel it's convenient.
Granted fair use is a thing, and rights aren’t unlimited. I’m not arguing against fair use, but many here advocating piracy are not arguing from a fair use perspective. Or are you trying to argue that all piracy is fair use? That would be a more interesting argument than pointing at the existence of fair use, not that I would agree with it.
The Criterion Collection now offers a streaming service, which consists mostly of what would be considered "better options" than the typical mainstream chaff.
I agree. I haven't watched anything on Netflix since 2019. Don't have D+, Hulu, HBO, or anything else. I have YouTube TV which I use pretty much only for sports.
Pretty much all the other video I watch is independent content on YouTube. Just people talking about and showing stuff they are interested in. I'm sort of amused that these people come up with more compelling stuff to watch than the big studios with their huge budgets, writers, celebrities, etc.
I'm not sure what the huge problem of wading through things you don't like. I don't like 90% of what Spotify has on it, so what? I just don't click it.
Use Reelgood or justwatch to search, and you can still find good stuff.
Netflix may have a quality problem, but another one (and a much easier one to fix) is their stupid recommendation algorithm. It shows me nothing but trash and genres (like Love is Blind) I absolutely dont want to see, while I have to use a 3rd party service to dig for gems.
I cant help but wonder if thats skewing their own metrics. People are going to watch trash if thats all they present.
Justwatch refuses to show me multi channel searches without amc+, for some reason. Either a really annoying advertising plot or a glitch with my account.
When Reed Hasting left and Ted Sarandos took over he had a bit of power shakeup and handed over the content reins to Bela Bajaria - who was brought in to head up international over Cindy Holland who was in charge of US content. Holland had brought in House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Stranger Things, The Crown, Ozark and Narcos.
Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?). It also aligns, however, with a timeframe of the launch of the studios having their own top tier services such as Disney+, Peacock and even the new HBOMax (MAX now) all of whom are more tightly holding the streaming rights to the studios to which they're associated.
This for me aligned with when Netflix started going downhill. I have to say some of their newer content seems better but I'm not sure where its going to go. Right now HBOMax and Apple seem to be the most consistent for fewer, higher quality shows which also more closely aligns with my viewing habits. Netflix we keep mostly for my daughter these days and the few random hits that come through on Netflix.
“I wonder if, say, a bonobo throwing shit at a whiteboard full of titles as a method of deciding what projects to make would have more or less success than all of these other ‘deciders’ who think they know what people want or don’t want.”[0]
Why is Netflix not following short high quality 1-3 min videos model which is popular with young crowd? They already have Fast laughs tab which mimics that.
Youtube / Creative studios could pitch 1-3 min video ideas which Netflix could greenlight and provide just bare minimum capital to produce. If the final film is good, Netflix could buy the film and release on their platform.
Current Trends which are in favour of above idea:
1] Story generation will get cheaper thanks to ChatGPT.
2] Film generation will get cheaper thanks to Stable Diffusion.
3] Short video formats are already very good, engaging.
Not sure why Quibi failed. Maybe trying to get distribution/tech and content right at the same time didn't work for them. Netflix doesn't have distribution problem, just content and it should try to iterate on what works.
Personally, there are so many short stories (e.g. by Greg Egan, Borges, others[0]) which I would like it to reach mass audience. Rights are tricky issue though.
Quibi failed because they over capitalized it and then pulled out when it didn't have the xxM DAUs. They basically launched and had an amazing journey in the same month.
To be fair to the backers (such winning personalities as Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, ugh), it wasn't a case of 1M DAUs when they wanted 5M. It was more like 5k DAUs when they wanted 5M. The idea was dead on arrival, no amount of money and effort would've saved it.
Quibi was interesting - the more I think about it (I work in this space) the more I think they actually might have had something.
The reason they failed is mostly because they went too big too fast. They spent almost a billion dollars in content at launch and expected to get a ton of people subscribed quickly at $8 a pop. Had a bit of a chicken and egg situation there. They needed enough quality content to justify that amount per month. But it was all new, untested content. When they didn't get the subscribers they had pretty much zero runway to ride it out and iterate.
The pitch/studio model does not work for short content, and it never will. It's too slow-moving and corporate. The videos that succeed in this format are zeitgeist, flash-in-the-pan trends that are faster to produce and more dynamic than even the laziest reality show. The production value doesn't really matter--if anything it's a downside past a point.
Odd1sOut (Youtube Creator) has a animation series on Netflix. So in some sense, Netflix is already doing it. They just have to create a marketplace for this.
If hackathons in software work and produce good product ideas, why can't the same be possible in creative fields? Cutaways in Family Guy are already short jokes which are shared without broader context on social media and they are popular. Netflix can always A/B test newly introduced content to determine engagement. Already built up cultural context (e.g. idea of multiverse, matrix and so on)need not be re-introduced from scratch, so no need to spend screen time on them.
>Funny how saying Bandersnatch was innovative gets HN absolutely livid.
... huh? I didn't say Bandersnatch wasn't innovative and my feathers are far from ruffled. I just don't see how citing one thing from five years ago that no other streamer, nor Netflix themselves, have replicated since (correct me if I'm wrong) is a strong is example of Netflix being "innovative".
I'd argue that other streaming providers would've explored this sort of thing already if they felt there was enough interest. Anecdotally, I'm in multiple communities that involve the discussion of film and television and people just aren't asking for that sort of thing.
Bandersnatch was a silly gimmick, not innovation. Sierra was doing stuff like that in the 90s.
Choose your own adventure TV may be for some, but I hate it. I want to be told a story, not just pick how I want things to go.
Besides, that or AI genned to taste would remove the social aspect. I love discussing shows, movies, etc with friends. That gets hard to impossible in this model...
"Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?)."
I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
All the studios were looking over at Netflix making all the money and wanted to disintermediate the middleman, but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. That worked for a bit but it's wearing out.
The solution of just pumping out more is the obvious one to try, but it hasn't been going well.
I'm... actually not convinced that's impossible? The bottleneck on these seems to be quality writing. Generally the actors act, the editors edit, the directors direct, the effects crew broadly succeeds at the effects, etc. But Hollywood in 2023 seems to have negative respect for writing. Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I recognize of course that any 101 course is only the intro and the basics, but current Hollywood writing is not taking the rules, deeply understanding them, and then transcending them by virtue of the deep mastery of their craft... they're just plain writing for crap. They've got a ton of other priorities and "good writing" is so far down the list that it might as well not be on there.
You can't get the best of the best to write for 100% of every season, but a lot of streaming stuff is several cuts below what middle-of-the-line episodic television shows were managing in the 90s in really, really basic stuff. Surely there's enough competent writers to at least get a solid C on the writing front to let all the other factors carry over to "at least worthwhile", if Hollywood would just raise the priority on that quite a bit more.
Tons of high quality content is probably not on the table for anyone, but surely with all these resources we could scrape together some medium quality content more consistently?
A lot of wisdom in that rant. I too have noticed the big gap is writers (who are going on strike it seems). I think we're all going to have to suffer through "stuff written by LLMs" for a while, but I really think that a studio that restructured their revenue sharing to focus more of the proceeds towards writers would find quite a bit of success in today's market.
I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.
Exactly! I had the same reaction. First episode, "Okay, an interesting (if well worn) setup, a lead character that is somewhat interesting, some dynamics." to second episode "Well that really didn't feel particularly entertaining", to the third episode, "not getting better, time to get off this train."
I just watched “Ghosted”. It was somewhat entertaining, but hardly stellar. This is the sort of movie that is being released these days, and we can easily take it or leave it.
Dexter Fletcher as director piqued my interest in Ghosted just a wee bit. I read The Rachel Papers as a youngster and quite enjoyed the film when it came out (in which he plays the main character in the book).
I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)
I feel the same is also happening with Rabbit Hole, though I might persist with it. The Kiefer and Charles Dance in the same series, what's not to like?
The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue.
On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage.
The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.
One of my friends is a writer, and his take on the problem is that the seasoned writers Netflix used to have (a few years ago) are now all getting fairly "old". Aka around their 50's.
So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing.
But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years.
No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance.
Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)
I wonder if some of that is TV writers growing up on ubiquitous TV writing, like how anime is increasingly made by people who just like anime and weren't as interested in a wide variety of media as the older generation.
Certainly I would agree that letting go a lot of experience folks would have an effect on the product.
However, I think this comment could use some more justification:
> But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
Thus the "(heh)" in my post. I recognise the same thing, and found it ironic.
> Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault.
It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".
Barely on-topic, but this is sort of the plot of Reboot, and I remember watching this show seeing the dynamic between the elder writer played by Paul Reiser) and the much younger writer played by Rachel Bloom.
The gist of the (relevant) bit of plot is that the younger writer wants to take an old classic series (ala Full House) but do a gritty reboot of it, but the studio brings in the original writers on to help, and there is unsurprisingly a culture clash.
I remember thinking (of the younger generation) how sad it was that they were so eager to dismiss all the experience of the elders, and how glad I was that this was just a TV show and probably not at all what was happening in the real world. I was safe in that ignorance right up until I read your comment.
This was a great show I can't say enough about. It really mad me laugh out loud far more than any other show in recent memory. (And in the end, if I recall, both groups of writers learned that the other was actually pretty decent at their jobs and had a lot of good ideas.) Unfortunately, it didn't do spectacularly in the ratings and was immediately canceled. I seriously hope someone else picks it up, but I don't know how likely that is.
I've never seen the show but it sounds good and reviews were decent.
Given that it was killed off after one season, is it still worth the watch? Does it end well?
I really felt this when I was watching Andor. It's about a bunch of nobodies in the Star Wars universe, no Jedi at all. But there were so many moments when things just made so much sense, that it actually took me out of the moment in surprise. There's so little good writing anymore that it's shocking when you see it.
> I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
This. There simply isn't that much really great content.
Bringing up episodic television shows in the 90s brings up an interesting point. For 90s episodic television, script submissions were open to the public. Each show still had a team of staff writers like they do today, but the staff writers would mostly write the really important episodes (like finales and two-parters). The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads. In today's binge-able format, almost every episode is written by the staff writers. (They might still let someone with connections, like an actor on the show looking to make a career change, submit an episode.)
Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.
> The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads
Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.
I worked with a copy writer that had written an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." By coincidence she had submitted an a script for an episode that coincided with a major plot point they were working to (a character leaving). I asked her about it, and it was really the only major writing credit she ever got.
I know that at least Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Golden Girls accepted freelance scripts. You can sometimes find the submission guidelines for Star Trek: The Next Generation on fan sites. You can also tell if this is the case for a show by looking at the writers. If there are lots of writers who only wrote one or two episodes, the show probably took submissions.
All the old books about television script writing I've read are about submitting in this way, but by the time I was actually considering it episodic television was rapidly dying out.
>but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription.
And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison.
The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch.
I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.
A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks.
So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons.
Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
This is why all the streaming services are constantly trying to hype up their one "must watch" show. If you aren't watching it now, you're left out of the conversation, and nobody will want to talk about it in three months.
Are they though? Netflix in particular is famously bad at actually promoting their hot new stuff. I suppose they may do it more on-platform and just assume it's enough, but it seems like (and this is just from my memory, which is maybe wrong) that the ads for streaming services generally fall into the "look at all this stuff we have and maybe I won't even tell you what show I'm giving you a clip of right now" kinds of commercials.
I practically never see an ad for a particular new show -- tho in addition to memory faults there is also of course selection bias here.
I think the release cadence can be a double edged sword for viewer retention.
Certainly with Wheel of Time I felt that there was a few weak\boring episodes in a row and I hit the point where I dropped it, for me wasn't worth waiting a full week to see if quality of subsequent episodes improved.
If there had of been a buffer of episodes available I could probably power through the bad episodes until the show picked up again but with weekly release cadence it just caused me to give up on it.
I wonder whether some of the media streaming companies are going to try to use the sports streaming playbook, where you get penalized for canceling and then resubcribing within <12 months.
Those penalties could be "we just won't let you sign up" or "oh you don't get the promotional rate then, your rate for Netflix will be $44.95/mo for the next 11 months".
I wanted a smattering from like 10 different services. No I'm not paying 120$ a month. So I pirated every last bit.
Turns out friends also wanted to watch them so I made my JF instance available via cloudflare. And now I get requests of shows, the arrs parses the request, downloads, and just shows up.
The services had their chance. They failed us. We came with alternatives. Until their offerings are better, we see no reason to change.
> Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that.
I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons.
Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.).
Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.
Well said, writing makes the difference. Quite a few great movies have an extremely simple setting. Even if we establish that writers can't write anymore, let's turn to books not yet televised?
One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.
I'm starting to wonder if Netflix is maybe just trying harder in newer markets.
I cancelled my subscription out of frustration at the crappy content I saw all the time in the US app (and the terrible discovery too) -- but now I keep seeing ads for fairly compelling Asian shows and I might resubscribe "in" another country.
If you are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, the stuff you get to throw might not be so good when you're competing with Apple, HBO, and all the rest. In a smaller market maybe the best people are still willing to be thrown at the Netflix Wall, so to speak.
For me it started going downhill with the high quantity of shows molded for ESG, now I download well-reviewed shows to my Plex even if I missed binge watching easily with Netflix.
Disappointment can only come from your own expectations. Good doesn't last. I like to have a mindset of using these kind of things while they work for me, until they don't, then leave and not look back. Don't get attached to commercial endeavours.
I think some people's expectations of Netflix were downright unrealistic.
When they started streaming, the platform was paying pennies to license shows that were already in syndication. Programs that had already made their money in first runs on network TV and cable.
As streaming became the de facto distribution method for new content, of course the cost of licensing that content ewas going to go up. Streaming licensing fees are no longer just gravy to the studios, they are their primary source of income.
The idea that Netflix could somehow afford to bankroll the entire entertainment industry on $15/mo subscriptions is ridiculous. There were three possible outcomes:
1. Netflix becomes the new cable and charges $100+/mo
2. The output of the entertainment industry shrinks until it is sustainable on $15/mo subscriptions
3. Competitors start popping up and fighting for market share
None of which says "Make a million garbage shows and movies that nobody asked for and few actually enjoy - then raise monthly rates to bankroll these pet projects".
Here's an idea - quality over quantity. Make fewer, but better shows and movies.
That is Netflix trying to carve out their niche in timeline #3. They think they can compete with the other services by having a little of something for everyone.
The poor average quality of their content is why I cancelled Netflix and switched to a mix of HBO, Hulu, and Paramount.
> But how do you determine what's "high quality" and what isn't?
There's zero chance Netflix isn't aware they are peddling more junk than gold these days. It's a gamble to have more content than anyone else - and it seems to be slowly killing them.
Everyone has a story about spending 45 minutes surfing Netflix trying to find something interesting to watch while dinner gets cold. Everyone has stories about how awful the latest Netflix Original is, etc.
The amount of poorly dubbed foreign films is appalling, for instance. That's not a gripe against foreign films, it's a gripe about the utter lack of quality Netflix green-lit straight onto the front page of results. These things could be done well - but often are not.
I thought about listing all the popular, critically acclaimed shows that Netflix has cancelled on a cliffhanger or without a “final season”, but that is a long list and there are plenty of BuzzFeed type articles about it. Not every show is going to be a hit, but Netflix consistently abandons great shows after 1-2 seasons because they aren’t Stranger Things level popular. So now they have a catalog of great shows no one wants to watch or recommend because why would you start a show that you know ends after 1 season on a cliffhanger? How many shows could have been tentpole shows, but people are hesitant to start them when they know how cancel happy Netflix is?
Netflix is shortsighted and myopically focused on tentpole shows that directly lead to “new subscribers” that join just to watch that show. All while ignoring having a strong catalog, since it is hard to measure how a cumulative collection of shows drives subscriptions.
Quality over quantity completely ignores differences in taste. One person's best show in the universe is another's torturous crap they'd avoid like the plague even if they were paid for watching.
It's perfectly possible to ignore that and still aim for some focused quality, but that's the path to becoming a niche operation. Might as well switch to pay per view.
The main challenge streaming networks are facing is that there is no attention on-ramp now that nobody is zapping through linear tv anymore who might get hooked on an earlier iteration of the franchise. When I know that I am multiple installments behind in $franchise, my willingness to pay for the latest one is zero. And if earlier ones are the same price as the latest, they will feel overpriced. That's why the focused "I subscribe x because of some specific production y" that would be implied by quality over quantity doesn't have much future, they need habitual subscription where discovery just happens.
> Disappointment can only come from your own expectations.
Reductionist victim blaming and, frankly, nonsense. Pessimism is not healthy.
I supported their business (by paying) because I liked their operating model, and their campaign (for lack of a better word) to keep adverts out of the platform and to support "better" content.
I am dissappointed that model has, apparently, failed and they are pivoting away into yet another low brow, low IQ, garbage distributor - even if it is an inevitability.
"Meanwhile the other streaming services are at least as bad, but typically worse."
So then isn't it just good? Cable didn't have on demand and you couldn't share even in the same house. Beyond basic cable channels you needed a cable box for each tv for around $5 a month in the late 80s (around $11 today).
A Brazilian man speaking mexican spanish as Pablo Escobar, with mexican actors using mexican slang in a show about the colombian drug trade, completely omitting Pablo regularly raped and afterwards executed 13-15 year old girls and other insane stuff.. this was not a popular show in Colombia
Netflix has always been unwatchable crap or woke garbage. Time to unsubscribe and pirate
Netflix should be a little ashamed that they revived the cult of Pablo Escobar. The amount of memes and “sigma male” videos featuring Escobar is embarrassing. They turned Escobar into a folk hero, not a scumbag criminal.
If you came away from narcos thinking Escobar was a good person, you only saw what you wanted to see in that show. Any amount of rape wouldn't change that. He blew up a plane full of innocent people...
To succeed they had to make streaming video easier than torrenting it, and cheap enough to attract the casual torrenter.
And like every company, v1 was run by the founders that understood their customer base.
Of course, we're at v2, with legions of sales, accounts and advertising execs, and layers of management whose performance and pay is based solely on company performance.
The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023.
Competition is coming at them from all sides.
I know that they get precise viewing figures for their series, but cancelling some of them is just baffling. No more chance of "Growing The Beard" for shows given the crowded marketplace.
I cancelled a year or so ago after they cancelled some of the programmes I used to watch. The only thing left on Netflix for me is Stranger Things and that's not enough to keep me.
> The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023
Netflix didn't drop the ball; it was clearly never going to happen. When Netflix launched their streaming service, I thought it was a dumb idea because I figured it was 10 years tops before all the major studios could run their own streaming services, at which point Netflix would have no content to stream (unlike mailing DVDs, you need permission from studios to stream their content).
Most of the movie studios jealously guard the rights to their movies; Netflix got a lot of its early streaming content by sublicensing from Starz, which pissed of the studios (most notably Disney, but there was murmuring from Sony as well). At this point, Netflix invested both in TV back-content as well as creating original content.
We are now entering an era in which Studios can potentially have complete control over legal distribution of their content, and they look likely to do so. I'll pause for a moment while you try to buy a copy of the (now 3.5 year old) Mandalorian season 1 on DVD or Bluray...
I'm not sure why music ended in the "(almost) 1 site to rule them all" while video did not, but a couple possibly contributing factors:
1. MP3s had a one-two punch of coming practically out of nowhere, and portable players that significantly improved on the walkman/discman experience. Napster wasn't even around that long (2 years, 80M users at peak) but planted pirated MP3s as a big deal. Then the iPod came around and being on iTunes was important to stay relevant. If you're on iTunes, why not be on all streaming and purchasing services at the same time?
2. There is a long history in the US of compulsory licensing of music for various purposes. It doesn't cover on-demand streaming, but does cover satellite, terrestrial radio and "internet radio" services.
3. Retail media sales have long been the public metric of success for music; for film studios it's been retail ticket sales. The music charts even have formulae for translating streams into equivalent purchases of physical media.
No one is owed but this question is flawed. Users were paying for 5 households. Now they can only use it for one. However you look at it, its a reduction in service or an increase in price.
I stopped watching new Netflix shows after they left too many unfinished. I might consider it if it was a finished series, but it was too frustrating to start watching something, have it end a season on a cliffhanger, and then get cancelled before things got resolved.
I think they lost a lot of customer goodwill with those frequent cancellations. Even if they didn't want to finish the series, investing in a short special episode to wrap some things up might have kept more of that alive and made me more willing to invest my time in a newer series.
I'm not an expert but it really seems like Netflix is doing self inflicted damage with some recent decisions. Maybe an exec failed upwards and ended up in charge of some policies they shouldn't have been trusted with...
Seriously. It doesn't matter that scooby doo is different or the little mermaid is different or that any thing is different.
What matters is that we have ONLY REMAKES and REMIXES and REHASHES instead of new content. Woke or not, I just want to see something original instead of dug up oldies.
I learned in this thread that apparently there's a remake of Perry Mason? Did that need to be a thing??
What kind of woke crap? I don't really understand the definition, but that's because it is US identity politics and nobody wants to define it apparently. But maybe from afar you have a particular definition?
Like when you change the gender/race of literature/historical characters to hit a diversity quota or when there is a whole carousel of movies with the genre “Black History Month” which is a US thing. That kind of stuff
That seems like a better point -- at least, the part about changing the gender/race/etc of a real (or perhaps mythical, but well established) person. Although I gotta say, I sure did enjoy Hamilton in spite of the wild disregard for trying to make the actors resemble the people they were portraying.
Certainly more solid than what I usually hear from local people, which tends to just be complaints that a minority position was represented at all, even if it is an entirely new character. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
>So, was Cleopatra Black? We don’t know for sure, but we can be certain she wasn’t white like Elizabeth Taylor.
Seems like a fair point. I'd take this outrage more seriously if the same people were also protesting about the innumerable portrayals of Cleopatra by white actresses.
>but over the trailer of the documentary (i added the link) which literally says she was a black woman.
Err, no, it doesn't literally say that. There is:
1) A man with light brown skin saying that he imagines Cleopatra as having the same skin tone as him and curly hair, which is entirely plausible (though far from certain) given what is known about her ancestry.
2) A woman saying that her grandma told her that Cleopatra was black.
It's nothing more than a nod to the longstanding controversy over Cleopatra's race and appearance, which far predates anything usually covered by the meaningless term of abuse 'woke'. Part of the problem here is that 'black' as a racial category didn't really exist in Egypt in the 1st century BC, so it's a bit of a silly debate anyway.
It briefly shows one person saying that their grandma said it. There's no suggestion that any particular claim about Cleopatra's appearance is endorsed by the documentary as definitely true. In general, as I'm sure you're aware, it's misleading to say that a documentary "says X" if X isn't a claim that the documentary itself is endorsing.
> they could at least show a bust of her
Are you sure that they don't? This is just the trailer.
Why did you delete the variety link? It was a thoughtful exploration of the problem. This is undoubtedly a complex issue but I don't know that their approach can be dismissed as "woke".
She literally says it was a political act for her, but the most problematic is this:
> I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that
if you try to lump all the cultures of africa in a single word 'black' that is synonym 'african-american' then yes it s very woke and insulting to egyptians (who are more culturally arab than sub-saharan). Asking egyptians to see themselves as african-american is profoundly american myopia, but netflix doesn't even see that.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to describe woke. It’s mostly genders and race, it becomes a problem when you’re trying to watch a movie and you start noticing the minority token that exists exclusively to gain imaginary social points but adds nothing to the story.
This isn’t anything new however, cinema is soft power and the US has been at it for nearly a century now.
Is that not a perception issue, and more descriptive of the viewer than any specific action on the part of the creator? How do we objectively define what 'adds nothing to the story' looks like?
You can't objectively define that because what adds nothing to story A could add everything to story B. However, it's not very difficult to read an individual story and pick out which parts do and don't contribute to the plot well. This is just talking about Chekov's Guns.
How is someone having a particular ethnicity a Chekov's gun? When a show introduces a white character, do you expect there to be some kind of plot payoff in a future episode where the fact that they're white makes all the difference?
Not every story with a black person in it has to be a story about the person being black. We're pretty used to seeing shows with white characters whose whiteness doesn't contribute anything to the story. The implicit rationale here seems to be that any character who isn't white and male needs a special justification for existing.
I get the US woke vibes from TV commercials. Plenty of black people on TV, but over here the US style black are a very small minority. I see much more black people on TV than in reality.
Meanwhile, the Turkish/Morrocan/Islamish people are mostly absent in the commercials, even if 10% of the local people have that background.
Apart from that, it all somehow feels fake and USA. It's hard to define, but everything is subtly wrong.
Weird thing, the local commercials somehow adapted around 2000. You get the same black people overload and US vibes in commercials from EU-only companies.
Yep same here and also for some strange reason, there is always a mixed race couple and the man is almost always black and the woman white. Almost never any other races involved basically and it's almost never a black woman and a white man.
It makes me a bit disgusting when it's so obvious and somehow it's like many, many companies colludes to spread this image. It's shit like that which makes conspiracy theories seem less like theories.
If you're in the EU, why bother with American content? There's a lot of EU content, plus all the Korean stuff. I'm learning French and have been watching lots of French movies and series that only have French subtitles.
I can understand the outrage over content, wokeness, the direction, etc. But being angry over having to pay for services rendered? Come on. Don't use Netflix (or the alternatives) as a comfy Piratebay. Get it together, we're not children.
Fascinating to get downvoted for saying: pay for things you use. I hope you're proud of yourselves.
My salary comes from people that buy product from my employer. What you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys. (No, I do not work at either of the streaming services.)
The problem isn't paying for Netflix, it is that their earlier "love is sharing a password", "sharing is caring" etc. campaign made it seem like password sharing is sanctioned and therefore included in the price. I understand that people are upset now that Netflix have changed their stance without changing the price.
Also I think the downvotes are because of your tone, e.g.
> you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys
Or the value proposition under the new conditions for many users is simply not there?
Paying $X per month and allowing family and friends to watch is both convenient and cheap enough so it doesn't bother you. It's like paying for electricity in a family house.
But when you are forced to be the only user of your paid account you evaluate if the cost for using a service 5-10 hours a month is truly justified.
Degrading people as "children" is not an interesting analysis. It's obvious that Netflix made their bed by flirting with users that like account sharing (long ago). It will not be easy to take that away now.
I understand this and will grant you that. But I'd bet a fair chunk of cash on this password sharing being something other than spouses sharing or running a de facto family account.
I mean: fine, Netflix sux, etc, tt's not worth $X. All fine.
But what's happening here is not that and you all know it. It's easy and cheap to just share passwords. When you do that, you're saying that I should pick up the bill for you. And my answer to you is: tf I'm not! You pay for you, I pay for me.
Fair, both sides should act in their best interest.
What I think is happening is that people realized they aren't getting much value from Netflix and this also served as a wake-up call for them to cancel. If you look at other comments you'll see several stating exactly that: they no longer think Netflix is worth paying for even if they have no trouble at all paying for it only for their own usage (and I'd think 99% of the users of HN can afford it easily).
It's also very possible this will end positively for Netflix i.e. they might want to get rid of the "leeches" and end up only with the paying users that obey their rules. If there are enough such people out there to cover their expenses AND turn a decent profit AND if they are loyal then Netflix will find themselves in a businessman's dream scenario.
In the end time will tell, as it happens with everything. I am mostly just offering you explanations for the current reactions to the news.
Many people already pay for the service. They pay for a multi user account, the problem is that they are cutting off people that are not living under the same roof.
Then they require you to pay an additional $8 for each extra member, it that would be the premium cost (approx $19 where I live) and an additional ~$16 if you add two users. That's $35 a month for a service that is filled with woke bs content, 10% of what you get in the US due to geofencing. This is the way it usually goes for me and my gf:
1. We finally find a movie we want to watch, after a lot of time researching
2. We search for the movie name and where we can stream it for money
3. Oh it says its available on Netflix, HBO and some other renting stores.
4. Oh they were all not available to us. Sometimes we can "purchase" the movie for like $20+ but since that is just a ridicolous amount to watch a movie once we usually don't watch anything at all or pirate it for free.
I have a really hard time seeing a bright future for Netflix in the EU if they continue down this path. Honestly that is probably a good thing though, since european alternatives can take that market share.
The problem is that for europeans that want to pay for contnent it's STILL hard. I still have to download stuff from pirate sites since most content is not available to us for reasons unknown.
What do you suggest that I would do when I want to watch a movie that is not available anywhere? I am here ready with my wallet but no one seems interested.
So of the two alternatives: pay $X for a full subscription or pay $X * 0.2 for a shared one, you are choosing to pay $0 because it is annoying to pay money compared to not paying money?
If it's not good enough to warrant either $X or $X * 0.2, then cancel it. I.e.: Netflix sucks, cancel it!
Y'all are defending not paying while still using said service with arguments that don't support your case.
I stopped pirating stuff a good 15 years ago and Spotify and Netflix are both part of the why. Now, they both kinda suck and I might actually cancel Netflix. But you won't find me on Piratebay for that reason. It's just going to suck for a while.
> Y'all are defending not paying while still using said service with arguments that don't support your case.
I am barely using Netflix though. But yes it happens that sometimes I'll watch something on Netflix, perhaps once or twice a month. Will that warrant a $20 monthly subscription? The answer to that is hell no. They offer a bad service and require us to pay a lot for it so it's simply not worth the money.
I don't pirate that much either anymore tbh. I most often than not just do something else instead. Sometimes I'll pirate it if we really want to watch a movie and it's not available though.
I can't be arsed with the piracy bullshit any more.
The reason that I've not canceled Netflix even though only using it pretty rarely, is that it's still very cheap and I have the "biggest" option. 179 SEK a month in Sweden which is about $17. This is about a third more than _one_ lunch in the city will set you back. Are we really crying over this amount?
I agree with this sentiment but this isn't Netflix' fault (nor is it any of the other service providers'.)
But then this still comes down to a sense of entitlement: I should be able to have access to anything and even though this has value to me, I shouldn't have to pay too much for it.
I do feel this myself as well, however. Definitely not above that. But let's be real here, still.
At least in Germany I can find a streaming source via justwatch.com for most movies that I want to watch. Often they are included in one of the flatrate offerings, but the vast majority of classics are available to rent from Amazon and Apple for ~4 euros.
I feel the same. Netflix (and other streaming sites) provide insane value for a measly subscription price. In comparison, I think books, DVDs, CDs are way overpriced. Youtube Premium is the other thing. They make their own advertisements go away for $5/mo in Hungary, which is half of a cheap meal at a restaurant, and people act like it's pulling teeth.
I know, right? It's so stupid. Similar situation to paying for games. My friend group still games - and we have been growing up in an era with no internet, and rampant piracy. We could barely afford the cheapest hardware, and we have never paid for software. Nowadays though? Every one of has a good job, and gaming comes out way cheaper than any of our hobbies. Some still act like it's the end of the world dropping $20 on a game the group will play.
I live alone. If I want to share the second screen that Netflix forces me to buy with my brother, why should it matter if he lives with me or not?
And don't mention TOS, they can write whatever they want in there. I wouldn't care if they didn't permit me to watch it in bed either, I watch where I please.
964 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread> Last week Netflix missed expectations for new subscribers in the first quarter, but the company said that the password-policing plan and a cheaper streaming version with ads will accelerate growth in the second half of 2023.
They’ve ran test in a couple of countries. Maybe an initial drop in subscribers followed by an increase is in line with their expectations.
If the streaming companies start to provide subpar and cumbersome service and charge hundreds of dollars for it per year I can see people going back to proven and free ways that were very popular 15-20 years ago
Since when are HN comments policed for the word "torrent"?
Vouched it so it's visible. It also makes a valid point, torrenting is definitely a reality and denying it will not make it go away.
There was a study a while back (can't find it ATM, I'll have another look later) that suggested those using other people's accounts were more likely to be heavy users in terms of bandwidth than average, so perhaps this sort of thing has been factored in to the plan.
Having said that, I can't imagine they expected 300k dropping their account now they can no longer share it. Perhaps there are a lot of friend groups clubbing together to share the cost of subscription services like Netflix.
Can you explain why? I'd have thought they absolutely do and on top of this their caching strategy becomes even more effective.
Bandwidth isn't an infinite resource. It effectively is up to a certain scale and with a few caveats (the costs are not consistent globally) but I'm sure Netflix is beyond the scale where it can be assumed to be and at that point they will be bidding against other big users for peering priority.
With a dedicate server I have some stuff on I can upgrade to 10gbit unmetered for a lot less than 10x the cost the current 1gbit unmetered link (in my case neither dedicated, but 1-shared-to-10-shared will likely scale in cost similarly to 1-dedicated-to-10-dedicated). With another where I have a total bandwidth cap not a speed cap I could likely extend that cap relatively cheaply. At the scales required by a small company, even one running SaaS services, the same is usually true. But at Netflix's scale a small percent increase in any particular locality is still a huge amount of extra to ask for, and it might not really be available (it could be allowed to eat into slack for a short time, this is one of the reasons why networks are provisioned for more than 100% of expected use, but if the extra is needed permanently then infrastructure upgrades may be needed). They can get around lack of cheap bandwidth by instead temporarily increasing compression rates (this will in fact happen automatically, as dropping overall bit-rate is supported to deal with congestion at the level of a user's connection and that will kick in due to congestion elsewhere too) but this will be easily detectable by some users (particularly those with huge screens and great eyesight) who will compare the quality with other streaming content providers and talk about the difference which may affect future sales.
> on top of this their caching strategy becomes even more effective
Caching in terms of keeping data geographically spread will reduce international bandwidth needs, and ISP-level caching through their local boxes will help considerably again (and get more effective as more users join from the same ISP), but there will always be an amount of traffic that needs to travel costly routes (the ISP level caches will only be large enough to support the best caching candidates, like new high-profile shows, a small proportion of the whole catalogue, and many ISPs do not have that facility at all).
> ““Not only are we placing content on all of these servers around the world, but we are pre-placing them based on what is popular. Because we predict what is popular, we’re able to put it as close as possible under the correct server,” Haspilaire says. “This pre-placement of our films and shows allows us, based on prime time viewing hours, to store 100 percent of our catalog locally."
And they have 17,000 of these boxes. Extra users in these areas will have essentially zero marginal cost. And outside of that, I don't believe the bandwidth market we see - in terms of upgrading our small servers - has any resemblance to the deals they can do.
[1]: https://top10.netflix.com/
If these 3 go, i can downgrade my package to 13 Euro (in Germany) and i will only order it 3 - 4 Month a year. Currently i pay every month 18 Euro.
The time changes, Netflix is not the only player on the market, we can choose now from many.
Put into context of the same source's (Kantar) report from end of last year on Spain's VoD consumption, it would be much more interesting to know
1.) how many paying subs each of the providers lost explicitly, and
2.) whether the ~1,3M spanish households which access 6 or more (!!) VoD-services have reduced their "portfolio"
Kantar[1]:
- By September 2022, the number of households that used at least one video streaming service in Spain reached 66%, 12.4million households.
- VoD-enabled households accessed on average 3.3 different video streaming services, with 11% of households accessing 6 or more different VoD services.
- 2.7% of Spanish households took out a new Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) service in the last three months.
- 23% of those planning on cancelling at least one SVoD service in the next quarter are doing so to save money, the #1 reason.
[1] https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/technology/newly-launched...
Anyway, the catalogue is so fragmented that cyclic migration makes sense.
So in the end the issue is the competitiveness of the content at the given price for this market.
There's another danger here for them, and that is cultural. Currently e.g. my girlfriend users my password. It means we both watch the same things, and talk about things that are on Netflix, and that serves as a reason for me to keep watching Netflix too. A whole lot of my Netflix watching is down to her. If she were to, say, spend her time on Disney Plus instead and talk to me about series there, I might end up spending more of my time on Disney Plus, and value my Netflix subscription accordingly lower. Do that to enough users and you'll start losing them.
As long as people keep watching Netflix they have a chance to convert them to paying users, but even if that fails, at the very least they have a chance to prevent those people from converting their paying customers to users of other services.
If I was Netflix I'd think long and hard about less invasive means of doing this, such as e.g. putting restrictions on additional household that might nudge them towards paying (e.g. limiting number of profiles so people need to share profiles; putting ads for Netflix in front of shows on "secondary" locations etc.) without outright pushing people off the service.
I'm not rejecting this (and I'm also not a fan of Netflix's practice here), but when REALLY thinking about it, how would that work practically without devaluing your product/service?
If people are repeatedly sneaking into your cinema and you don't crack down on them, but let them watch every time because one day they may buy a ticket, what's a path to conversion here...?
The only values provided are the content itself and the quality of service. NOT restricting access to the content but making it less convenient for everyone will just devalue your service...
In terms of conversion avenue, consider e.g. kids moving out of the house. My son has his own Netflix profile. For now there's no incentive for him to get his own, and having him get his own would be impractical because he most often wants to watch it on my TV. But once he has a family of his own running into a profile limit would be an incentive to get his own subscription eventually.
A lot of people are in situations where they initially legitimately are in the same household, then move out for all kinds of reasons (flat shares, kids moving out, breakups), might not want the hassle of switching profiles right away, but eventually want more flexibility (more profiles), or privacy.
(Incidentally, a feature they really need is a "convert this profile to a separate subscription"; that goes for a lot of services that are not at all geared for a situation of kids growing up and wanting to untangle their online lives from that of their parents)
A lot of this problem would also just go away if they priced based on a combination of simultaneous streams and number of profiles and stopped worrying about where they are. E.g. there's never any reason for more than 5 simultaneous streams from my Netflix subscription. But if I had to pay per simultaneous stream I'd probably only want to pay for 3.
They could get away with this if their offering was substantially better than the competitors but thse days it's not. Pumping out complete crap like 'The Floor is Lava' and the 9 millionth cake contest isn't what built their massive customer base. These days when a new hyped show comes up its often not even worth watching until you know for sure it's not already been axed, having left the show on a cliffhanger.
* via SBC with SP maintained by higher viewer figures.
It's also self-sabotaging behavior from the point of view of a back catalog. If people know in advance that a show had an unsatisfying ending, they're not going to recommend that people go back and watch it. But then Netflix and everyone else seems to treat shows as disposable these days, as if nothing mattered six months after it came out. Yet people still talk about The Wire (first broadcast 2002)
It's actually really frustrating to see an author continue starting one new series after another rather than finishing any of their existing works. It's probably not as fun or exciting, but it feels like an integral part of bulding trust. If I'm going to get emotionally invested in a series I want it to have a real ending.
In Japan it's very common for a series to get a single anime season, but if you're really invested in the story you can continue reading the light novels. But if a story is a Netflix Original, there's no source material you can turn to when the series gets cancelled.
If a show really needs a cliffhanger the show should budget for an extra episode to air if the next season is cancelled. If they don't want to do that, just end the season finale without a cliffhanger.
If Netflix had this guarantee, I would watch a lot more series. (I'm still a bit upset that HBO cancelled "Beforeigners" that had a major cliffhanger)
Providing such a guarantee would be akin to guaranteeing that a multitude of small businesses will not fail... which just isn't really possible.
Per Josh Whedon commentary [1]:
"This was one of the years where I was pretty convinced we would actually be picked up for another year, so we left a lot of things hanging. But at the same time I always felt if this was the last episode we ever filmed, it would be a good last one because it really did just get us into the minds of our characters, whom I love very much, and let them just sort of exist."
[1] https://stormwreath.livejournal.com/69633.html
> Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.
So they lost 300,000 paying users whom they think will come back, but 10% of existing users plan on leaving despite Netflix investing in Spanish content.
I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.
That's the case for me indeed. I myself basically stopped watching Netflix, somehow the content doesn't do anything for me anymore.
But I shared my account with family and they watch it. If this gets to us, and I'm the only one who can watch it, I'm for sure cancelling. The family members with whom I'm sharing the account are very unlikely to get their own account either.
(Sharing accounts is a great form of stealth giving to family members who would otherwise not be able to afford such "luxuries". It's much easier to say "hey, I got one free account on my Spotify plan, would you like to use it? Otherwise, it will go to waste" as opposed to awkwardly offering money directly)
They don't even seem to be bothering to create great content like Stranger Things anymore. We are at the enshittification of Netflix stage.
None of us are interested in the kind of content they are pushing anymore.
The drop in the stock price was expected news for everyone familiar with the service, at least in my circle.
In short, without quality, there is no choice.
Now they do 7 episodes and call it a season and frequently their shows only have one or two seasons.
BBC's QI is one example. I understand new series not being available on Netflix (in the UK) as the BBC now have their own subscription platform. But it's not just that, because Netflix don't have the earliest ones either, just a seemingly random set in the middle, perhaps even non-contiguous.
Buy what you can when you can afford it. It seems like good business strategy?
These days that’s even more of a plus. When someone recommends something to watch the first thing I check is how many seasons it’s up to, then the number of episodes, then the runtime. Shows with too many seasons of too many too long episodes are immediately ignored.
Expensive is a word accounting, finance and investors really don’t like.
I stopped even considering Netflix shows with only one or two seasons because they almost always get killed mid-story. Which means I pretty much never watch Netflix now. Out of state relatives using the account is the main thing keeping me subscribed, so when that sharing gets cut off it'll be the end of my subscription.
Let's say you aren't alone in your subscription situation, to put it mildly.
That's why your average nigh-unreadable dogpoo novel off the bargain bin has writing on par with an excellent TV show or movie
What I like best about HBO is that they have an A-Z listing of every show they have (something people have been asking Netflix for since day one of their streaming service) and how peaceful it is to use their platform.
You can browse without anything auto-playing, you can pause a show for more than 3 seconds and ads don't start rapidly flashing on the screen, and shows don't jump to more ads immediately as credits start rolling so you can actually let an ending sink in without having to scramble for your remote.
HBO max is just much nicer to use than netflix.
I also really like their "last chance" section because things are leaving all the time and that gives you some warning.
> You can browse without anything auto-playing
What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.
I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.
If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.
Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.
Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.
I searched for Dracula, got documentaries about nazis.
The value proposition isn't there for me, I'm just being nice to my mom.
Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries, and all I have to do is pay a measly $17.99/mo. If that goes away, I will be cancelling my subscription.
I think Netflix (and others) are looking at that 10-20 x $18/month and salivating, not realizing that the money just isn't there. They need to take a page from the Microsoft book and let people "steal" some of the content so they can have a least some paying customers. It beats having no paying customers.
Today, who would waste time pirating music instead of paying for a streaming service?
[0] https://piratebayproxy.info/setup.html
[1] https://apibay.org It has no public-facing site, probably to keep it off the radar.
[2] https://piratebayproxy.info/ is what I use.
You're sharing an account with 20 people across 4 countries? It's honestly kind of amazing that they let this level of sharing go on for so long.
It's hard for me to believe that out of 20 different people, every single one of them would decide to boycott Netflix forever because of this. If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
Extrapolate this across their userbase and it's not hard to see why they're doing it. Obviously some people will cancel, but I guarantee Netflix has run pilot trials and analyzed the net effect to their bottom line.
While extrapolating over a large dataset, it's important to get the initial numbers as correct as possible. Since the person you're replying to is paying for the most expensive plan (probably to get the 4x devices-at-a-time perk for so many people), the plan those people would re-subscribe at is important (and less likely to be the same plan if only for one person).
They'd need at least 3 people to re-subscribe on either of the two cheapest plans to net a profit, or they'd need at least 2 people to re-subscribe on the "Standard" $16/mo plan to net a profit. Anything less is a net negative. It's a favorably-biased population for Netflix, but that'd still require a 15%-30% conversion rate for users.
I'm sure they'll come ahead in the end, but I imagine a high % of the expected profit comes from cutting costs from serving 20x "free" users per plan rather than converting them into paying users themselves.
They are obligated by law to create this content
See: https://www.innovationmcc.com/post/spain-will-now-protect-it...
> "Towards the end of 2018, European Parliament approved a law that requires all platforms that provide audiovisual content throughout the continent to have at least 30% European productions within their programming."
Edit: formatting
In other words: no different than almost all efforts of the EU to "regulate the market" instead of creating incentives.
My family is in the process of finding the best suitable and possible emigration target. Unfortunately this is common. The hardest problem are family ties and care of our parents :/
If your downvoting because of derailing the thread, I deserve it, go on. I'm just frustrated how the EU is, at least from the perspective of my bubble, losing almost every game it wants to play.
For me the European content has been the fun part and much more exciting than boring low effort shows like Chicago $THING.
The two last shows I actually enjoyed on Netflix were both french (a very secret service, and call my agent)
The mistake Netflix makes is to assume that the families and friends, who have been using a shared login, will signup for a subscription on their own. They won't, the value proposition isn't there anymore and these are people who didn't want to pay for the subscription to begin with.
I have serious doubts about Netflix calculations on this decision, but I also don't see what else they could do. They can't buy the content people want and they struggle to produce high quality movies and shows. Their productions are beautiful, but the scripts are severely lacking. Sometimes they get lucky and do a good season of a show, only to screw up subsequent seasons.
Or cancel really good shows like The OA or Mindhunter...
But in reality they end up losing the 1 account instead because none of the 3 people are willing to pay full price individually. They were all willing to pay 1/3 of the price when sharing.
They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
Companies regularly do things that are detrimental to their bottom line because they either misunderstood how their customers use their product, or because they are trying to please shareholders, or a combination of both.
The question begging to be asked here is whether those are new subscribers or people that were using someone's else password, natural growth, or just a good show landed in meantime and a bunch of people subscribed
It's an increasingly crowded market, everyone's distracted, everyone's sick of subscriptions, and nobody has enough money. If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
It does seem like this was a plan that was in the works for a couple years, and momentum is keeping it moving. I doubt they would have picked this timing if they knew what was coming!
They had noted they saw or expected the users who were on someone else's account and who used it actively to come back with their own accounts or convince the account holder to pay for them
I did more of a write up based on what they are shared in their earnings here: https://upollo.ai/blog/learning-from-netflixs-earnings
Are their profit margins so tight that a 1:2 paying non-paying user loss ratio is a net win?
Plus losing the old catalogue rights that they got for cheap. Once other companies saw it was viable they were not interested in selling the rights for cheap.
On the other side, every time I use another streaming service (channel4, any German tv, even hbo) the basic player experience is much worse than netflix. I will miss them but, like Blockbuster, it is a matter of time.
5€ month for what Netflix has to offer is one thing, 18€/month, for many, becomes an instant no-deal.
There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords, or more well off siblings letting less well off siblings use their account.
All of them? Certainly not. Many? Yes.
>> There might be some friend groups who split the cost of an account between them, but I suspect far more common is that parents have an account that kids (who might be independent adults) use, couples who don’t live together sharing passwords
Yes, but although we don't have details on demographics, in Europe it is widely "accepted" (for lack a better word) that many friends, relative and even acquaintances share an account and its costs. I don't have number so consider it totally anecdotical, but it is honestly common sense, especially in southern and eastern Europe. (I am from Italy, FWIW)
edit: this is also true for Spotify Family accounts. Agains TOS? Sure. Do they do it anyway? Yes.
It is very common sense here to say "Ok, I'll cover Netflix, you'll cover Disney+/Spotify/other"
The moment when one of this services doesn't allow sharing anymore, this system will fall, and users will be incredibly more selective to what they will subscribe to.
I suspect this might be cultural, and not just at a country level. I wouldn't dream of charging a family member £5 a month for something, I'd either let them use it or not. But that may not be true everywhere. Between friends it makes a lot more sense, but as I said I've typically seen Netflix/etc shared in families not friends, probably because the lack of money changing hands makes it easier.
> We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts. “In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” Netflix said.
Although you may be right, I would never expect Netflix to admit my thesis, even if well known around here.
Instead, we pool accounts. If I wanted to, I can get Disney+ and regular TV, while I provide Netflix and Amazon Prime in return. If all else fails, there's a Jellyfin server that gets regular use.
Everyone pays full price, but everyone only pays for one service, maybe two. The fragmentation of services is the real killer here. This wasn't a problem back when Netflix first came here and basically offered everything there was to offer until then Disney clawed back a whole bunch of its properties. €18 for Netflix would be fine if you weren't also expected to pay €17 for Amazon Prime and €19 for Disney+ and €14 for Paramount Plus and €15 for HBO Max (only available on some ISPs).
I'd pay full price for a streaming service that had everything and I think many people I know would too. I'd even be able to look past the stupid 720p limit (I run Linux so I cannot be trusted with the noisy 1080p encodes). Instead, my workflow now comes down to "check Netflix, if not found, download torrent".
These companies could've had the Spotify of video streaming services, which basically ended traditional music piracy, but instead wound up burning their version of Spotify down for a short term profit.
Depending on the service/people sharing with, I personally witnessed both sharing costs of the single service and distributing full ownership among different services...
There are people who want to control all of them while absorbing costs, there are others who just want access.
Reminds me of old days when all we had was dialup and we would pool our warez downloads with the community. I send you Seasons 6 & 7 of Buffy and I get the latest Season of Stargate in return. All burned on CDs or DVDs shipped via post.
So while people here think they're doing this to their own detriment, their legion of scientists have already told them the end result which is obviously not detrimental or they wouldn't be doing it now.
You can't make reasonable conclusions during transients. Wait until things have settled before judging if the move was smart or not.
When they tried this in other countries, they saw a dip and then growth. According to their statements, a dip is part of their model.
And, as a scientist, you cannot build a model with a never-happened-before phenomena. Only "risk specialists", "risk engineers", etc. which are different names for BSers will even try to "predict" this.
How can one build a "model" with no x (password policing enforcement) and only y (stay or drop) is beyond me. If anyone does, I will show you an idiot/BSer.
I am sure this is a business decision. Or MLEs/Deep Learning Engineers are going beyond the capabilities of their fields.
Sure, you can predict if a user is going to drop if a show he was binging is going away or his watching pattern, time spent watching, etc. But to build models with password policing enforcement? Hah!
Trying to predict whether this decision is harmful in the long run is not in the realm of science, but of art, business, or bullshitting.
I don't know if NFLX did a smaller scale pilot study and tried to build a model, but that would be inadequate.
Note: Never worked for Netflix.
$NFLX brought in customers with the Sharing is Caring campaign. If at that time they patted themselves on the back for customer growth, they should hold themselves responsible for the about face and customer exodus when they have changed their stance to Sharing is a crime.
They probably are worried about the cannibalization of the subscription base and hence caught in the Innovator's Dilemma.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
I only noticed when I got to the third act of annihilation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBsJgceM0KI&ab_channel=Prime...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...
Source: I've done a lot of HDR processing development for a leading media company.
If I knew where to get the one I have installed, I'd send it to you people.
Customer support told me I can only watch Netflix in the country I purchased it from.
This was not my first trip so must be a new development.
I did try using a UK-based IP too, but that didn't work (it was a data centre IP, so I guess they block them all).
Through some mystic fuckery it worked via VPN for me, but not for my wife (same exact VPN server).
Even Steam used to be an issue: I could play my existing library abroad, but not purchase more until I was physically back in the country.
Maybe other people are in the same situation as me. There's a tenuous balance in the streaming service subscriptions thanks to the fact that people can share their accounts. If they close the door to account sharing, maybe the subscriptions will start falling like domino pieces.
I'm surprised you achieved that at all. Google accounts are locked down hardcore... As it should be
My gf wanted me to share my ChatGPT plus account but I signed up via Gmail and it was impossible.
All of these sites can easily lock it down but choose not to. We're probably living in the Golden era. Although I still think Netflix's multi location accounts are far more expensive than their utility. And I fully see Netflix as an essential service but spending $35CAD/m is a serious consideration when I already buy 4 streaming devices that will very likely result in $18/m max if I pull the trigger.
If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free, quality, and meant to enrich the people instead of advertise and moralize to them.
I really don’t understand how a DVD collection is an “essential service” either. Or why you would effectively choose not to look at your watching statistics and then simply buy the media you watch the most.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/134503468553
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/285243804109
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/145050977289
Why not just buy what you like?
I feel the current crop of writers employed by Disney, Netflix, Amazon etc. cannot tell the difference between these two.
Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.
The only shows that I can think of like that now are Black Mirror or perhaps your odd HBO offering, but those are not shining examples, and often, even if they do discuss or engage with deeper concepts or ideas, it’s not handled in a way that allows for nuance. (Black Mirror is happy to be quite crass at moments, same with HBO and other “top-tier” shows.)
There's something in this. Tickbox diversity is a lazy solution that doesn't really satisfy people who want broader representation while at the same time causes the rightwing culture warriors to go increasingly berzerk. Writers need to get better at doing incidentally diverse shows, because "hello I'm a token look at me" is bad characterization. Or address it by commissioning a broader range of shows from different settings; not everything needs to be a flagship.
While at the same time there are still lots of odd misses (Ghost in the Shell 2017 managed to annoy almost everybody in this regard).
Your memory of these shows differs dramatically from my own. None of the ideas discussed in any of them were complex or nuanced, much less culturally transgressive (no, not even Star Trek) and they were often ham-fisted and moralizing. I mean Star Trek and Twilight Zone so much so they became tropes and subjects of parody.
I guess if you think it recommending you “MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus Cat”… because you liked Jaws is helpful? I think personally it is not.
At least ask why I'm not pirating it 24/7 when I already have an Android box connected to my TV w/ Kodi installed with 3rd party pirate extensions which gives me up-to-date lists of every show/movie available on Netflix/Hulu/Disney/etc (including their trending and genre based lists) with each show being a single click backed via 10 different HTTP pirate streaming servers they index...with the alternative of another app which let's me search any torrent movie ever and stream them on demand via my Fibre internet connection.
I use Netflix etc because
a) the recommendation algorithms are better than any 3rd party service like Reelgood hopes to be even with OSS plugins that track my torrents
b) I live with 3 "normal" people in my house who don't care to navigate the imperfect UI of my Kodi streaming/torrent apps no matter how many times I tell them it's better and has everything they need and more for "free"
Just fool the normal people into a better UX.
https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/plex-meta-manager-guide#05
How does morality not enrich people? Isn't moral behaviour a good thing?
Ethics, on the other hand, is a set of self-imposed rules or rules of a group that you wilfully accept and join.
I'd say the issues surrounding ethics and morality is that of consent and willful acceptance. I do not consider 'morality' itself to be ethical.
Who would foot the bill to produce this content? You suggest that content would be "free"... but free to who? The consumer, right? It certainly isn't possible to produce high quality films for free. People pour their blood, sweat and tears into these productions. Why should the fruits of their labors be given away for free? Would you wake up early every day and proceed to work eight hours for free?
It's the same in this case.
It's funny that they didn't explicitly kick me out. They simply asked me to contact their customer support and certify that I did indeed live in the same household.
Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies.
Nowadays, if you want to watch a particular movie, you have maybe a 10% chance that it is available on the streaming service that you are currently paying for. And it makes more sense to just buy it directly, than pay monthly.
The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free.
(Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)
The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
What investment is “society” making in tv shows and movies?
Suppose copyright law was 15 years instead of 100 years or whatever. Society still gets the tax receipts and benefits from creation of the media, but the shareholders who own the media do not get to collect a price premium from the extra 85 years. That money can now be spent by consumers elsewhere as opposed to supporting media owners who already had sufficient incentive to create the media.
The question at the end of the day is, does a 100 year copyright term incentivize the creation of media with so much utility compared to copyright term of 15 years such that it makes sense for society to transfer extra resources to the media owners for an additional 85 years? Amongst other externalities to consider.
The only thing keeping cable alive today is live sports, but that eventually will be folded into existing streaming services or they will have their own services. Which brings me to my next point. There will very likely be 200 subscription services (if there aren't already), but the more there are, the more niche and specialized they will be. But importantly, you will be able to choose what you want (a la carte). This is a far cry from cable because cable has never been a la carte. They've always required you to purchase at least a basic package with 30-50 + channels, and each channel getting a couple bucks each month. The consumer's total cost is at least $50 / mo, probably more
Compare that to one of the typical big streamers which are $10 - $15 per month. Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney - each of these alone has more content than you could ever watch. As long as they are all around to stay in competition, then prices will remain low. The absolute worst thing that could happen for consumers is for streamers to combine and form a conglomerate. Now that would be like cable - they'd have a monopoly and they'd end up charging you more overall than you were paying before, and then singling out "premium" content for even more money.
If you feel like you have to subscribe to all of them, that is simply a marker of their success in marketing to you. There is enough content (good content that you WILL enjoy) on any one of them. Or hell - even on Youtube which you can watch for free, there will be enough content to keep you from getting bored.
Sadly people focus as definitely shifted toward serial shows rather than films so movie streaming is not really an interesting market to address. I’m really confused by that because the feeling I get from 90% of the show I try to watch and always fail to finish is that there is a good movie hiding in the indulgent editing. Even prestige TV shows are full of padding.
From another old movie kind of guy: it's full of beautiful 1080p Bluray x265 torrents out there. Teams like VXT or RARBG release more old movies than one can watch.
Other surprising sources: Tubi which often has better quality video processing for the stuff where the VHS/DVD master is all that exists (protip: yt-dlp works), and Internet Archive where people upload all kinds of stuff, including Blu-Ray rips.
A ton of stuff is also on YouTube but it's often a low-quality master and/or edited for content so it's usually a last resort.
That said, I also buy their Blu-Rays during the sales, so I might just be a fanboy.
Some of the films they review are either only available on YouTube[2] or on second hand VHS tapes.
1. https://videoarchivespodcast.com/
2. Until the someone helpfully gets them taken down. Cheers for that.
Want to hear an album? it's on Spotify / Apple Music / Deezer / Qobuz...
You pick the one that offers the best user experience (or unique features like HD songs).
Exclusives are basically non-existent.
Stranger Things is on Netflix only for X days (a month?) and then it's everywhere.
The hype train will still give Netflix its edge, because a lot of people want to watch in the first few days after release.
How's that dr watson?
for each production to be made available on dozens of platforms each having most other productions, you end up with a prorata/ratio of that aficionado who viewed yours, but also happen to have viewed 8 other productions. Unless the viewer pays up 20x or 30x for some universal subscription, that's far less revenue than $100. In practice subscribers simply won't even spend 10x. Why? Because they are only ready to pay 10 times more for certain beloved productions, but very little for those that aren't deemed that necessary to watch. So they tend to accept to pay a lot for a few hits, even if they have to give up on all the rest.Why does it not work the same for music?
I doubt the Entertainment industry saw all of this from the get go, but they have decades of accounting experience and shaped it up once cable/satellite tv with network channels became prominent. It roughly applies the same with with streaming.I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying.
The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot. That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price.
Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription. Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it.
The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced. When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it.
I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap.
I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.
Urgh.
If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.
If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.
There is nothing "free market" about the crazy copyright regulations we have today.
a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library
BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(
What are you talking about?
So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)
Netflix streaming never had a good library of the most popular movies - especially after the initial STARZ partnership.
I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this.
Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability.
When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.
I think you mean "the only game in town" because the selection was worse back then!
Plus HBO and Hulu were around. I still remember Hulu commercials with Alec Baldwin. He hadn't shot anyone yet, that we know of.
I also remember getting GOT dvds mailed from netflix because i didn't want to pay for HBO service.
Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.
Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.
If people turn out to not watch that much content to warrant 3-4 subscriptions per (strict) household, I wonder if this could lead to a Highlander-like streaming showdown: There can be only one. The thing there is that Netflix should try to avoid the showdown, not push towards it, because they are the least equipped to win:
- Disney+, HBO Max (Warner) -> Own/produce AAA content.
- Prime Video -> Deep pockets, bundled as value added service, own distribution infra.
- Apple -> Very deep pockets, customer loyalty.
- Netflix -> ???
[1] https://tbivision.com/2022/12/09/exclusive-streamers-push-ba...
American shows do of course get wild budgets and can do some crazy stuff, but there’s good international tv
Doing TV is a marathon, perhaps Dark showrunners are more of sprinter people and should do movies instead.
Dark, I'd agree, faded in terms of the plotting as it got kind of all twisted up in itself toward the end, but I still liked it quite a bit. And you could say similar things about some of your other picks, like Mr. Robot (or Game of Thrones for that matter). Sustained excellence season after season is really hard to achieve.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
Point taken, though. Still, if they only have a 1/10 chance at being good I am not taking the chance. It's like the netflix stamp is a kiss of death to me now. On the rare occasions they get it right they muck it all up after season 1.
If I hear good word of mouth about a show I may check it out, but I don't waste my time giving Hollywood the benefit of the doubt anymore. They have to prove they are worth my time and at the moment no streaming services are worth the amounts they charge.
If I could afford it in terms of money and time I would probably subscribe to all of them, I mean why not? To go see one movie costs about as much as a month of subscription to one streaming service. So subscribing to Netflix, Prime, Apple and HBO costs like going to see 4 movies per month, except you get more than 4 movies (I think a season of a good TV show easily worth multiple movies).
Aside from that it didnt start with 5 in mind, it just kept going till the creators decided to nix it.
That's not the same as having a 5 season vision and completing the story you wanted to tell.
And for sure to each their own, if you enjoy the services by all means continue being a patron.
I'm over all of them personally, even disney+ is going to start charging to watch new movies on it.
If there was one place to watch everything I'd be interested.
But I'm tired of lack of content worth watching, constant fluctuations in what's available, and horrible UX designs for no discernable reason.
All that coupled with the constant preaching has me watching more older movies, and occasionally something new worth watching like Super Mario.
So the money I used to spend on subs I now use on watching the occasional movie in the theater, and more storage for my ever growing media collection I know will always be there.
> Aside from that it didnt start with 5 in mind, it just kept going till the creators decided to nix it.
Many good shows are that way, it's good when they know when to stop. It's never good if it drags on or if it's cut early
Sure, own media collection is always better if you have the physical space for it...
Sure, all of Apple, Amazon, Netflix have dipped their toes into AAA movie production, but their collective throughput isn't anywhere close to becoming "players" in the field.
If you're not watching 4 hours of TV per day it's not that expensive to rent content, but I'm saying this from the point of a westerner. For other parts of the world a $5 USD for a movie for 48 hours doesn't make any sense over straight up piracy.
This really depends on how good of a pirate you are. If you put in some effort, you'll be watching 4k blu-ray movies in a higher bitrate than streaming services offer.
Never again will I rent / buy anything from YouTube, ever.
Either Netflix has it, or down to pirate bay it is.
Given our combined minor usage, the day they lock one of us out it's all over, I'm cancelling them all!
I don't invest in streaming produced series any more as they have a tendency to want to eat their cake and have it too. They won't tie up a series but don't commit to producing a second one to tie it up, then arbitrary cancel them. It's like reading The Hobbit and the last two chapters are missing, never to be written, and there are plenty of actually finished books out there!
Also my ex shared my Disney with friends, so 2 other families are now also using it.
Ah well, as long as no issues, the more the merrier.
I've had Netflix since it was DVDs by mail. I still pay for Netflix, but rarely use it. First time my sisters can't use it I'll delete my account. I honestly just don't use it enough to justify the price.
That's a strange thing to say, when Netflix blessed the behavior: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?lang=e...
It was part of the business model. I've certainly kept my subscription longer because family was using it, so they've gotten more money from me by allowing password sharing.
The math makes sense to me. If the average "sharer" shares with three people, they could lose 66% of the active users in the "sharing" population, before losing a single paying customer. Who knows what the average actually is [2].
[1] https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/04/18/netflix-password-sharing-...
[2] sharing with everyone at work? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719281
What I don't like though is when there can only be a fixed number of authenticated devices, whether they are ever used or not. Once you have logged in to N devices (5, for one service I subscribe to) you can't log in to a sixth. Even if the first 3 are phones that are on the bottom of the ocean. At that point you need to call customer support to clear your authenticated devices. Hassle.
What kind of crackdown did they pull here? in legal terms only? Or in number of concurrent streams? or in number of authenticated devices?
Yikes, which services require you to call support in such an instance? In my experience you can often kick out old devices right from the new device that you are trying to use (annoying, but manageable).
I subscribe for a month, watch any new shows or movies I like, cancel and move on. All of my devices are 4K+HDR capable, I don't know why "up to 4 devices" is even relevant anymore if you can't share the account with anyone else. My family? Living elsewhere.
Now that there are dozens if not hundreds of streaming services offering exclusive content there is no paying customer growth possible anymore. What are they counting on? That consumers will pay for more than one subscription on different platforms? While they essentially only watch one at a time? How stupid is that!
Their streaming model of watching on-demand (i.e., not a weekly release, here's the whole show to watch at your own pace) and their investment in shows that were not the usual low-brow trope-laden predictable shit meant I was actually excited when a new show was announced. My favourite TV-watching moments have been getting lost in shows like Narcos, The Ozarks, or even the seemingly polarising Orange Is The New Black.
Now I log in and see nothing but nostalgia tv, trash telly like Love Is Blind, or inexplicably 1/3 of my screen is listing mobile games that Netflix think I would be interested in.
.. and I'm genuinely concerned shows like The Diplomat are just going to leave us all hanging.
Meanwhile the other streaming services are at least as bad, but typically worse.
This thought process is how we got to the point where movies stopped having plots.
Tried with Mythic Quest for two seasons and just couldn't stick with it.
Ted Lasso OTOH I'll watch as soon as a new episode pops up.
I just skip the middle few episodes and feel like I did not miss a beat.
1.10 is perfect for most audiobooks.
Either on my real TV, or via input switching on one of my monitors when working on tedious tasks.
I started listening to podcasts at increasingly faster speeds, going from 1.1 to 1.2 and slowly increasing it. It only took a few days to a week of listening to slightly-too-fast-for-comfort content before it started sounding normal and I could bump it up again. Now the slowest I listen to is at 1.5 (going up to 1.6 or even 1.8 for my "filler" podcasts). Videos I can crank even higher, since the addition of visual content and/or subtitles can help process the audio information.
I now watch half my videos at 2x speed, and 1.25 or even 1.5 are how 1.1 used to seem for me.
I'd love to see TV+ try something more experimental.
I really hope they don't fall into the Netflix habit of cancelling shows before they have time to find their groove (Mr. Corman was really creative and just getting good and got axed), and some of their dramas are starting to veer into the forgettable "Netflix Hallmark made for TV" territory.
I feel like I must mention though: as soon as For All Mankind decided to have a teenager seduce a grown married woman I lost interest. Then to top it off, they continued that plotline into the next season. What a shame.
Which is a win for literally everybody. The consumer wins because they get a very high amount of enjoyment for their invested time. The service wins because the less time each loyal subscriber spends actually using the service the less their bandwidth costs are.
This is why I don't pay for Netflix anymore. They cancel every show I enjoy. No other service treats their fans worse than Netflix.
It's not just Netflix.
Disney+ has a bunch of National Geographic infotainment ... minus the info type shows.
HBO is going to end up with Discovery Channel ... stuff.
I want some way of telling them "I don't want to wade through crap..."
Yarr matey, one way do be not parting ways with coin for said services, instead making a more... equitable re-appropriation
Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023, with so many options for consuming media legally, on whatever device, at any time? That was the dream of pirates in 2003, but we've achieved that dream legally today and it's still not good enough for the pirates it seems.
Streaming was going to "save us" from the big cable companies. No ads, just pay that small subscription fee and watch what you want when you want it.
Now there are a dozen subscription fees, I'm getting ads anyway, and I'm not getting content I want to pay money for. Some are even streaming live TV now, with no way to watch what you just watched again.
This is the part I don't get. Why do you feel you have this right?
FYIW, HBO Max allows you to download episodes for offline viewing, so it's not exactly true they are dictating the scenarios. I watch HBO all the time on plane rides.
>I actually “pirate” some of stuff I pay for.
So, if someone pays for HBO Max and watches the latest episode of Barry at home via the app, but, as I do, feel that HBO's UI/UX is dogshit, and they then download a copy of it and slap it on their phone or laptop in a way that's more comfortable to them for their flight tomorrow, what's the difference? OP continues to pay HBO, but that next view is just on a local device.
Edit: HBO Max downloads "expire" after 30 days, and you have 48 hours to finish it once you've started[1]. You're also limited to 30 downloads at once. This is hardly 'convenient' for some people.
[1]https://help.hbomax.com/us/Answer/Detail/000001242
It’s also fantastic because I know -exactly- what my children are watching and if there’s some episode of Paw Patrol that’s particularly annoying it get deleted.
This is the opposite of my experience. It took next-to-no effort, maybe an hour or two one time, to set up my Synology NAS box with Plex, Sonarr and Radarr. The result isn't something temporary, it's a fully-working system that obtains all of the shows and movies I want to watch and drops them onto Plex almost immediately.
All I have to do is fire up Plex and the latest episodes of everything are right there, often within an hour of them airing on the east coast. I'm on the west coast, so this sometimes means I get to check them out before they air here.
The result is a carefully curated library that's far more tailored to my tastes than any algorithm has offered me on any service.
It is just that I'm never going to consume it.
I occasionally pirate episodes of TV shows that would require another subscription (already paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO and Prime). Honestly, I'd much rather cancel all that and just pay à la carte for content as long as it's something reasonable (like $0.50 - $1 / episode or ~ $10 / season and $2 - $15 / movie - that adds up to about the same cost based on my family's viewing patterns, plus I get flexibility).
It was nice when Netflix was the only game in town and it was worthwhile to pay it for the library, now it's too much to pay all these services for just a pile of 99% excrement.
Similarly, if the streaming service continues to play ads despite paying for the service, we will just pirate the content.
Why though? Why don't you just watch some other content? There's so much out there, and you have so many choices, available without any ads, and also if you choose you can consume free content as well.
Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
Because that content isn't this content, and I want to see this content.
>Given that you have these alternatives, why do you feel you have the right to nonetheless violate IP laws because you don't like that a subset of content carries ads or restrictions?
First, see above - that content isn't this content, so if there's not a suitable alternative, well, c'est la vie. I've demonstrated that I'm willing to pay for these things, albeit to a point. If the service goes beyond that point, and I still want the content, then I'll obtain it via other means. Besides, much of the specific content I'm referring to in this scenario rakes in massive profits every quarter and is doing quite well for itself regardless of whether or not I "violate IP laws" to obtain it. That's setting aside the fact that it's been shown that piracy doesn't harm sales[1]. Further, in spite of our pirating, we'll still often inject money back towards the IP via other means.
[1]https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
I see. So is this your thought process?
1) I want it
2) I can't have it my way
3) So I take it, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks
Is that fair, or no? I notice you offered some rationalizations for your behavior, but those doesn't really change the above calculus right? They are provided to justify it.
They listened to consumers for a while. I stopped pirating for a good chunk of years because everything was glorious in the world of streaming. But after we finally got what we'd been asking for, they stopped giving that to us.
So, yeah, I'm going to go elsewhere to get it, your judgement be damned. I won't be losing sleep over it any time soon.
I did a lot of pirating when I was a kid; I still do a little now (but a lot less), mostly out of frustration with the cost and availability of the content on streaming platforms. I wouldn't steal stuff from a store (because I know that causes actual material loss among other things), but making an additional copy of a TV show episode (which I wouldn't have bought anyway) - it's a philosophical question whether that causes a loss for someone.
Sure.
> If it were easier like this to grab food from stores and restaurants, grab homes of other people, they would do that too.
You are implying that everyone pirating content would do these things if the chance of getting caught was low. I would posit that some people who pirate would, but it's a stretch to say that the entire group would.
Taking your simplest answer: just because one can does not mean one would.
-- NOT OP --
In the general case, no, but consider the cases of:
1. "Altered media" e.g. (1) Star Wars, (2) THX 1138.
2. "Remixed media" e.g. (1) Terminator 2 not having its theatrical CDS mix, (2) Earthquake not having its SENSURROUND mix
3. "Omitted media" e.g. (1) Halloween not having its original mono soundtrack, (2) The Exorcist not having its original mono soundtrack
4. "Missing media" e.g. (1) The Star Wars Holiday Special, (2) HBO's "Real Sex" documentary show
5. "Censored media" e.g. (1) Fantasia, (2) Song of the South
There are entire online communities dedicated to finding, restoring, and preserving items like the ones mentioned above.
So, is piracy OK in these cases? I emphatically believe it is.
If the form of art has value, then the original form of that art has at least as much value since it reflects the original intention of the artist which inherently has value by being part of the historical record.
If the original form of art has value, then there's value in preserving it for future generations to appreciate.
If there's value in preserving the original form of art, then there's value in distributing it widely since history has shown time and time again that copyright holders alone are not enough...
It’s the fewest clicks to see new content.
Comically I subscribe to many online services (Hulu, Netflix, apple+) and will end up discovering and watching new shows through plex and my rss feeds than the actual apps.
So pirating still gives me the best user interface. Especially with combining content from multiple services.
Also, it’s not just pirating. I ripped my couple hundred dvd collection years ago when kids kept breaking DVDs.
Comically, the cheapest way to watch most movies is to buy the dvd at Walmart for $4 and rip it to watch through Plex. The file never goes away and it skips the frustration of figuring out if Wolf of WalStreet is on Netflix, or Hulu, or HBO, some stupid one off streaming service that I’ll never use (peacock, paramount, whatever whatever).
So I think it’s the same reason in 2023 as it was in 2003.
I certainly wouldn’t steal food from a store as that deprives the store of food. That seems cut and dry.
If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal. It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society. So I don’t feel bad when I subscribe to HBONow and also “illegally” download torrents so it’s easier for loved ones to watch.
I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So we need some distinction between essential rights that seem real to me (bill of rights stuff) and “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry (content industry is only like $100-200B globally where agriculture is $1.2T in the US alone).
I think following the law is ethical, and copyright is not only the law, it follows directly from the Constitution.
> If I could photograph food and turn it into food to feed myself, I would certainly do that, even if it was illegal.
Context and perspective. We're talking about a media landscape that is flush with content, to the point where people complain that it's all just rehashed. There's plenty of media to go around.
> It doesn’t deprive the owner of anything.
It deprives someone of their rights, which is something I think pirates don't really care about at all, as it's never considered in the calculus. It's always "what's more convenient for me and my desires to consume particular media, rights be damned". I wish pirates would just be frank and admit this like the other poster who was replying to me.
> I think copyright is designed and biased toward massive corporations to the detriment of society.
Me too. But I also enjoy the rule of law and the hard work of people who make content that I consume.
> There’s lots of injustice in the world. And I think IP leans more towards unjust than just. Do I think creators should be compensated? Yes. Do I think creators’ descendents should be compensated for 90 years? Probably not.
I would feel more sympathetic to this argument if pirates had ever given an inch, or seriously attempted to organize to fix the law in the US over the past 20 years. Instead, they just kept pirating as hard as they could, even when the industry moved toward streaming services, and rationalized their behavior away.
> I also feel like there’s a giant PR effort from wealthy entities against a few individuals and the fact that you’d equate downloading a movie with stealing food is so weird to me that it shows how distorted the discussion is.
So you're saying my strong feelings about copyright infringement are due to a PR campaign, and not a carefully considered position I've come to on my own, through my own experiences as a content creator, artist, and owner of copyrighted works?
I understand that some people are so blasé about violating copyrights, they don't even think they could possibly be doing anything wrong. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have to spend money and resources to defend their rights from violations of law by others. I fully understand that digital media and physical goods are not the same. But I categorically reject that zero people are harmed when copyrights are violated.
> “rights” that only exist because of successful lobbying on behalf of a very tiny industry
As I said, copyright is a fundamental provision of the US Constitution. We can talk about the parameters of "securing for limited Times" but "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." is not up for debate. The word "exclusive" is important here.
And as for the size of the industry interested in copyright... upending copyright would also upend trademarks and patents. There's a much larger industry (well... all of them) interested in those forms of IP.
Copyright was 14 years at the time of the Constitution. If it was still that, I’d have no problem waiting it out and only watching material 14 years old.
Following laws isn’t always ethical. The constitution also allowed slavery. Do you think owning slaves was ethical? There’s lots of instances where laws are out of sync with ethics and morality, and, hopefully change over time.
In the past 20 years gay marriage became legal and I would argue it’s always ethical. Same for recreational drug use. And therapeutic mdma and ketamine. The list goes on and on.
Especially when the copyright laws aren’t the result of some specific debate and determination but by very targeted lobbying by Disney and others to extend copyright from 14 years to its current length of life+70 years or 95 years for corporate works.
Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
I’m not making a judgement on your beliefs or how you formed them. I don’t know you. But there are PR campaigns to promote copyright targeted toward school kids (remember “don’t copy that floppy” [0] and “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1]) and I think they are in alignment with “copying a friend’s video is like stealing bread” so you just seem to be using simile analogies. It’s quite possible that you reached the analogy independently. It’s also possible that you aren’t aware of how you reached this analogy and are influenced by advertising and PR, just like everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Copy_That_Floppy [1] https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg
"pirating still gives me the best user interface"
To support this argument, you cited the various inconveniences you face when dealing with copyrighted works. Only after more prompting have you landed on a high-minded, ethical argument. Why didn't you argue this in the first place if you feel so strongly about these points? Why was your first foot forward an argument based on convenience?
Personally I pirated a ton back in the day due to convenience. Why did I stop? Because now I have money and it's all on my TV one click away. It's so convenient today compared to 2003, so that's why I don't understand why people who can afford it still pirate. I can understand why people without money would, but still... it's like $10 a month for all the music in the world, anytime, anywhere; whereas back then all you got was a CD for $10 that you could play in your crappy boom box or walkman. As a young pirate, Spotify was my dream growing up, and now that it's a reality, the pirates still aren't satisfied.
> Do you think owning slaves was ethical?
I think you know the answer to this question.
> slavery... gay marriage.... medical drugs.... etc...
Everything you listed was changed due to robust and organized social movements to effect that change. Because the societal ills were so egregious, society mobilized to neutralize those.
If you want copyright to stand next to slavery, gay rights, and the drug wars as a worthy social cause, it's fine to make that argument. But you've got to back it up with a robust social movement centered around effecting change, not selfishly consuming.
When I look at the last 20 years of piracy, I don't see the same kind of movements. I see a lot of petulance disguised as civil disobedience (looking at the Pirate Bay), and a joke of a social movement (the Pirate Party), but other than that really nothing. Could it be because most of society doesn't really care about this issue the way they care about human rights? Maybe society recognizes piracy as the selfish act it is. I know that's not popular to say here on HN, but as a former pirate myself, I really can't justify my behavior any other way. I'm certainly not going to compare my actions to those of civil rights leaders and the movements they formed.
And if I did feel so strongly about the ethical nature of my actions, I wouldn't start by grounding my argument as "pirating still gives me the best user interface". Because if I did that, others would think that's what I really care about, and any ethical considerations would be secondary.
As I said to the other poster, I'm not judging you for this. It's okay to be unethical and selfish. I'm very unethical and selfish as a person (most people are), so it's okay if you are too. You can also be ethical and giving in other areas of our lives. Just be honest about your motivations like they were, and it's all good.
> Upending copyright would have nothing to do with trademarks (perpetual as long as in use) or patents (usually 20 years) and can be reformed completely independently. Although those other IP topics could also be improved.
My reply to you in this regard was in response to your assertion that copyright is not an "essential right", but instead a "right" only due to successful lobbying. My point was that this right is grounded in the Constitution itself, and no corporations today lobbied for that.
It's true that rights holders have broader protections today, and as a rights holder, I appreciate that. But as a citizen, I also recognize that the term should be much shorter, and we can indeed reform the whole system. But I wouldn't go back to the drawing board, because that requires a rewrite of the Constitution. As long as it&...
People had illegal gay sex for centuries before society mobilized. So it was the groundswell of “unethical” activity that eventually led to social movement. Same for drugs and whatnot.
I think the societal change for legalizing what I think is ethical (and what billions of people think is ethical enough to do despite laws) will come about after many years of people just not caring and doing what’s convenient.
The convenient argument is just the most straightforward and I think why people continue to pirate. So that answers your question. All the other parts are going into additional detail that you requested.
It’s like if you asked someone why they illegally smoked pot 40 years ago they’d likely say “because I like to get high.” That doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep reasons why, just that that is the most important one.
Obviously legalizing pot cost corporations lots of lost revenue. And modernizing copyright will cost corporations lots of lost revenue as well.
If it's just a backup I can't see any ethical reason why you shouldn't be able to do this.
We went through all this in the courts when we got the rights to timeshift recorded TV programmes.
Comparing it to stealing food is ridiculous. No body has been deprived of anything, it's just copyright violation.
The second part of your sentence doesn't follow from the first. If someone is violating a copyright, that someone else has been deprived of their rights to control their IP, and they're owed compensation. That's the system we set up, so that's the system we should follow.
If a rights holder wants to grant you the privilege of copying the data, that's great. Many of them actually do that. But that doesn't mean we're allowed to just violate the rights of those who choose otherwise. The response should be to consume media that is offered in favorable terms, not to pirate media just because you feel it's convenient.
Again, no one has been deprived of their rights and the copyright holder’s rights are not unlimited.
Granted there aren't many / any.
I do donate to my local PBS station ... the content they provide is pretty dang good.
https://www.criterionchannel.com/
Pretty much all the other video I watch is independent content on YouTube. Just people talking about and showing stuff they are interested in. I'm sort of amused that these people come up with more compelling stuff to watch than the big studios with their huge budgets, writers, celebrities, etc.
Welcome to the infinity pool. Spotify playlists, Youtube search results, your Twitter and Facebook feed....they're all bottomless for a reason.
Netflix isn't going to be any different.
Netflix may have a quality problem, but another one (and a much easier one to fix) is their stupid recommendation algorithm. It shows me nothing but trash and genres (like Love is Blind) I absolutely dont want to see, while I have to use a 3rd party service to dig for gems.
I cant help but wonder if thats skewing their own metrics. People are going to watch trash if thats all they present.
Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?). It also aligns, however, with a timeframe of the launch of the studios having their own top tier services such as Disney+, Peacock and even the new HBOMax (MAX now) all of whom are more tightly holding the streaming rights to the studios to which they're associated.
This for me aligned with when Netflix started going downhill. I have to say some of their newer content seems better but I'm not sure where its going to go. Right now HBOMax and Apple seem to be the most consistent for fewer, higher quality shows which also more closely aligns with my viewing habits. Netflix we keep mostly for my daughter these days and the few random hits that come through on Netflix.
[0] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/netflixs-...
Youtube / Creative studios could pitch 1-3 min video ideas which Netflix could greenlight and provide just bare minimum capital to produce. If the final film is good, Netflix could buy the film and release on their platform.
Current Trends which are in favour of above idea:
1] Story generation will get cheaper thanks to ChatGPT.
2] Film generation will get cheaper thanks to Stable Diffusion.
3] Short video formats are already very good, engaging.
4] RunwayML and so on.
Personally, there are so many short stories (e.g. by Greg Egan, Borges, others[0]) which I would like it to reach mass audience. Rights are tricky issue though.
https://qntm.org/responsibilit [0]
The reason they failed is mostly because they went too big too fast. They spent almost a billion dollars in content at launch and expected to get a ton of people subscribed quickly at $8 a pop. Had a bit of a chicken and egg situation there. They needed enough quality content to justify that amount per month. But it was all new, untested content. When they didn't get the subscribers they had pretty much zero runway to ride it out and iterate.
https://pastebin.com/pDaJXHuC
https://pastebin.com/vyThZkvR
I assume they’re going to be (one of) the first with an AI-assisted or even completely generated show that is completely tuned to your taste.
I expect the same to happen with games, with the wildcard of multiplayer. Music probably earlier than movies / series and games even.
A one-off thing from 5 years ago that hasn't been replicated since and nobody really cares about now?
I’m not saying HBO or Apple TV+ (what a name..) couldn’t do it, just that they seem much less poised to.
Funny how saying Bandersnatch was innovative gets HN absolutely livid.
... huh? I didn't say Bandersnatch wasn't innovative and my feathers are far from ruffled. I just don't see how citing one thing from five years ago that no other streamer, nor Netflix themselves, have replicated since (correct me if I'm wrong) is a strong is example of Netflix being "innovative".
I'd argue that other streaming providers would've explored this sort of thing already if they felt there was enough interest. Anecdotally, I'm in multiple communities that involve the discussion of film and television and people just aren't asking for that sort of thing.
My original comment was at -3 when I said that.
Choose your own adventure TV may be for some, but I hate it. I want to be told a story, not just pick how I want things to go.
Besides, that or AI genned to taste would remove the social aspect. I love discussing shows, movies, etc with friends. That gets hard to impossible in this model...
I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
All the studios were looking over at Netflix making all the money and wanted to disintermediate the middleman, but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. That worked for a bit but it's wearing out.
The solution of just pumping out more is the obvious one to try, but it hasn't been going well.
I'm... actually not convinced that's impossible? The bottleneck on these seems to be quality writing. Generally the actors act, the editors edit, the directors direct, the effects crew broadly succeeds at the effects, etc. But Hollywood in 2023 seems to have negative respect for writing. Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I recognize of course that any 101 course is only the intro and the basics, but current Hollywood writing is not taking the rules, deeply understanding them, and then transcending them by virtue of the deep mastery of their craft... they're just plain writing for crap. They've got a ton of other priorities and "good writing" is so far down the list that it might as well not be on there.
You can't get the best of the best to write for 100% of every season, but a lot of streaming stuff is several cuts below what middle-of-the-line episodic television shows were managing in the 90s in really, really basic stuff. Surely there's enough competent writers to at least get a solid C on the writing front to let all the other factors carry over to "at least worthwhile", if Hollywood would just raise the priority on that quite a bit more.
Tons of high quality content is probably not on the table for anyone, but surely with all these resources we could scrape together some medium quality content more consistently?
I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.
I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)
On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage.
The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.
So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing.
But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years.
No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance.
Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)
However, I think this comment could use some more justification:
> But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.
Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
> Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault.
It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".
The gist of the (relevant) bit of plot is that the younger writer wants to take an old classic series (ala Full House) but do a gritty reboot of it, but the studio brings in the original writers on to help, and there is unsurprisingly a culture clash.
I remember thinking (of the younger generation) how sad it was that they were so eager to dismiss all the experience of the elders, and how glad I was that this was just a TV show and probably not at all what was happening in the real world. I was safe in that ignorance right up until I read your comment.
Oops, sorry. ;)
I mean that's what every generation of skilled workers has always said about the generation following them, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.
This. There simply isn't that much really great content.
Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.
Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.
I don't know what other shows might have done this.
All the old books about television script writing I've read are about submitting in this way, but by the time I was actually considering it episodic television was rapidly dying out.
And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison.
The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch.
I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.
So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons.
Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
I practically never see an ad for a particular new show -- tho in addition to memory faults there is also of course selection bias here.
If they have enough “must-watch” shows that are staggered then you lose out unless you’re paying constantly.
It’s what they want: gets them som earned media/socialmedia hype, and prevents the binge+drop discount watching approach.
Certainly with Wheel of Time I felt that there was a few weak\boring episodes in a row and I hit the point where I dropped it, for me wasn't worth waiting a full week to see if quality of subsequent episodes improved.
If there had of been a buffer of episodes available I could probably power through the bad episodes until the show picked up again but with weekly release cadence it just caused me to give up on it.
Those penalties could be "we just won't let you sign up" or "oh you don't get the promotional rate then, your rate for Netflix will be $44.95/mo for the next 11 months".
I wanted a smattering from like 10 different services. No I'm not paying 120$ a month. So I pirated every last bit.
Turns out friends also wanted to watch them so I made my JF instance available via cloudflare. And now I get requests of shows, the arrs parses the request, downloads, and just shows up.
The services had their chance. They failed us. We came with alternatives. Until their offerings are better, we see no reason to change.
I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons.
Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.).
Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.
One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.
I cancelled my subscription out of frustration at the crappy content I saw all the time in the US app (and the terrible discovery too) -- but now I keep seeing ads for fairly compelling Asian shows and I might resubscribe "in" another country.
If you are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, the stuff you get to throw might not be so good when you're competing with Apple, HBO, and all the rest. In a smaller market maybe the best people are still willing to be thrown at the Netflix Wall, so to speak.
The executives that ruined regular TV/cable with cheap and trashy TV are bringing that model to streaming.
When they started streaming, the platform was paying pennies to license shows that were already in syndication. Programs that had already made their money in first runs on network TV and cable.
As streaming became the de facto distribution method for new content, of course the cost of licensing that content ewas going to go up. Streaming licensing fees are no longer just gravy to the studios, they are their primary source of income.
The idea that Netflix could somehow afford to bankroll the entire entertainment industry on $15/mo subscriptions is ridiculous. There were three possible outcomes:
1. Netflix becomes the new cable and charges $100+/mo
2. The output of the entertainment industry shrinks until it is sustainable on $15/mo subscriptions
3. Competitors start popping up and fighting for market share
Here's an idea - quality over quantity. Make fewer, but better shows and movies.
The poor average quality of their content is why I cancelled Netflix and switched to a mix of HBO, Hulu, and Paramount.
What an insight.
But how do you determine what's "high quality" and what isn't? You don't think Netflix is trying to measure that?
There's zero chance Netflix isn't aware they are peddling more junk than gold these days. It's a gamble to have more content than anyone else - and it seems to be slowly killing them.
Everyone has a story about spending 45 minutes surfing Netflix trying to find something interesting to watch while dinner gets cold. Everyone has stories about how awful the latest Netflix Original is, etc.
The amount of poorly dubbed foreign films is appalling, for instance. That's not a gripe against foreign films, it's a gripe about the utter lack of quality Netflix green-lit straight onto the front page of results. These things could be done well - but often are not.
Netflix is shortsighted and myopically focused on tentpole shows that directly lead to “new subscribers” that join just to watch that show. All while ignoring having a strong catalog, since it is hard to measure how a cumulative collection of shows drives subscriptions.
It's perfectly possible to ignore that and still aim for some focused quality, but that's the path to becoming a niche operation. Might as well switch to pay per view.
The main challenge streaming networks are facing is that there is no attention on-ramp now that nobody is zapping through linear tv anymore who might get hooked on an earlier iteration of the franchise. When I know that I am multiple installments behind in $franchise, my willingness to pay for the latest one is zero. And if earlier ones are the same price as the latest, they will feel overpriced. That's why the focused "I subscribe x because of some specific production y" that would be implied by quality over quantity doesn't have much future, they need habitual subscription where discovery just happens.
Reductionist victim blaming and, frankly, nonsense. Pessimism is not healthy.
I supported their business (by paying) because I liked their operating model, and their campaign (for lack of a better word) to keep adverts out of the platform and to support "better" content.
I am dissappointed that model has, apparently, failed and they are pivoting away into yet another low brow, low IQ, garbage distributor - even if it is an inevitability.
Victim-blaming? What exactly are you the victim of here? Netflix not having shows you like.
>Pessimism is not healthy.
Your entire post was to complain that Netflix is failing.
>I am dissappointed that model has, apparently, failed and they are pivoting away into yet another low brow, low IQ, garbage distributor
Can't get much more elitist than this, can it?
There is tons of good content on Netflix. And Orange is the New Black wasn't very good, imho.
So then isn't it just good? Cable didn't have on demand and you couldn't share even in the same house. Beyond basic cable channels you needed a cable box for each tv for around $5 a month in the late 80s (around $11 today).
A Brazilian man speaking mexican spanish as Pablo Escobar, with mexican actors using mexican slang in a show about the colombian drug trade, completely omitting Pablo regularly raped and afterwards executed 13-15 year old girls and other insane stuff.. this was not a popular show in Colombia
Netflix has always been unwatchable crap or woke garbage. Time to unsubscribe and pirate
And like every company, v1 was run by the founders that understood their customer base.
Of course, we're at v2, with legions of sales, accounts and advertising execs, and layers of management whose performance and pay is based solely on company performance.
The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023.
Competition is coming at them from all sides.
I know that they get precise viewing figures for their series, but cancelling some of them is just baffling. No more chance of "Growing The Beard" for shows given the crowded marketplace.
I cancelled a year or so ago after they cancelled some of the programmes I used to watch. The only thing left on Netflix for me is Stranger Things and that's not enough to keep me.
Netflix didn't drop the ball; it was clearly never going to happen. When Netflix launched their streaming service, I thought it was a dumb idea because I figured it was 10 years tops before all the major studios could run their own streaming services, at which point Netflix would have no content to stream (unlike mailing DVDs, you need permission from studios to stream their content).
Most of the movie studios jealously guard the rights to their movies; Netflix got a lot of its early streaming content by sublicensing from Starz, which pissed of the studios (most notably Disney, but there was murmuring from Sony as well). At this point, Netflix invested both in TV back-content as well as creating original content.
We are now entering an era in which Studios can potentially have complete control over legal distribution of their content, and they look likely to do so. I'll pause for a moment while you try to buy a copy of the (now 3.5 year old) Mandalorian season 1 on DVD or Bluray...
I'm not sure why music ended in the "(almost) 1 site to rule them all" while video did not, but a couple possibly contributing factors:
1. MP3s had a one-two punch of coming practically out of nowhere, and portable players that significantly improved on the walkman/discman experience. Napster wasn't even around that long (2 years, 80M users at peak) but planted pirated MP3s as a big deal. Then the iPod came around and being on iTunes was important to stay relevant. If you're on iTunes, why not be on all streaming and purchasing services at the same time?
2. There is a long history in the US of compulsory licensing of music for various purposes. It doesn't cover on-demand streaming, but does cover satellite, terrestrial radio and "internet radio" services.
3. Retail media sales have long been the public metric of success for music; for film studios it's been retail ticket sales. The music charts even have formulae for translating streams into equivalent purchases of physical media.
I don't think your comment is exclusively about the password sharing policy, but I'll pretend it is at a high level:
Do they (as a business) deserve to do what is in their best interest (maximize profit)?
Why are users "owed" the ability to pay for 1 household and share it with 5 households?
I think they lost a lot of customer goodwill with those frequent cancellations. Even if they didn't want to finish the series, investing in a short special episode to wrap some things up might have kept more of that alive and made me more willing to invest my time in a newer series.
I'm not an expert but it really seems like Netflix is doing self inflicted damage with some recent decisions. Maybe an exec failed upwards and ended up in charge of some policies they shouldn't have been trusted with...
If people were sharing the cost,maybe they won't come back.
What matters is that we have ONLY REMAKES and REMIXES and REHASHES instead of new content. Woke or not, I just want to see something original instead of dug up oldies.
I learned in this thread that apparently there's a remake of Perry Mason? Did that need to be a thing??
Certainly more solid than what I usually hear from local people, which tends to just be complaints that a minority position was represented at all, even if it is an entirely new character. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Also, can't you just scroll past a carousel representing a genre you're not interested in? Are other carousels for things like musicals woke too?
Seems like a fair point. I'd take this outrage more seriously if the same people were also protesting about the innumerable portrayals of Cleopatra by white actresses.
Err, no, it doesn't literally say that. There is:
1) A man with light brown skin saying that he imagines Cleopatra as having the same skin tone as him and curly hair, which is entirely plausible (though far from certain) given what is known about her ancestry.
2) A woman saying that her grandma told her that Cleopatra was black.
It's nothing more than a nod to the longstanding controversy over Cleopatra's race and appearance, which far predates anything usually covered by the meaningless term of abuse 'woke'. Part of the problem here is that 'black' as a racial category didn't really exist in Egypt in the 1st century BC, so it's a bit of a silly debate anyway.
> they could at least show a bust of her
Are you sure that they don't? This is just the trailer.
Perhaps they could use this racially ambiguous 1862 depiction of Cleopatra by William Wetmore Story: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/william-wetmore-st... (The 1860s were, of course, a notoriously 'woke' period of American history.)
> I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that
if you try to lump all the cultures of africa in a single word 'black' that is synonym 'african-american' then yes it s very woke and insulting to egyptians (who are more culturally arab than sub-saharan). Asking egyptians to see themselves as african-american is profoundly american myopia, but netflix doesn't even see that.
This isn’t anything new however, cinema is soft power and the US has been at it for nearly a century now.
You can't objectively define that because what adds nothing to story A could add everything to story B. However, it's not very difficult to read an individual story and pick out which parts do and don't contribute to the plot well. This is just talking about Chekov's Guns.
Meanwhile, the Turkish/Morrocan/Islamish people are mostly absent in the commercials, even if 10% of the local people have that background.
Apart from that, it all somehow feels fake and USA. It's hard to define, but everything is subtly wrong.
Weird thing, the local commercials somehow adapted around 2000. You get the same black people overload and US vibes in commercials from EU-only companies.
It makes me a bit disgusting when it's so obvious and somehow it's like many, many companies colludes to spread this image. It's shit like that which makes conspiracy theories seem less like theories.
They should add more european style stereotyping to keep them happy.
You never would have.
My salary comes from people that buy product from my employer. What you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys. (No, I do not work at either of the streaming services.)
Compare with: right-wing, left-wing, christian, etc. Woke.
I don't want HBO Max to become right-wing or christian. Or woke.
The problem isn't paying for Netflix, it is that their earlier "love is sharing a password", "sharing is caring" etc. campaign made it seem like password sharing is sanctioned and therefore included in the price. I understand that people are upset now that Netflix have changed their stance without changing the price.
Also I think the downvotes are because of your tone, e.g.
> you're saying is that I should work for free for you guys
is unnecessary hyperbole.
Paying $X per month and allowing family and friends to watch is both convenient and cheap enough so it doesn't bother you. It's like paying for electricity in a family house.
But when you are forced to be the only user of your paid account you evaluate if the cost for using a service 5-10 hours a month is truly justified.
Degrading people as "children" is not an interesting analysis. It's obvious that Netflix made their bed by flirting with users that like account sharing (long ago). It will not be easy to take that away now.
I mean: fine, Netflix sux, etc, tt's not worth $X. All fine.
But what's happening here is not that and you all know it. It's easy and cheap to just share passwords. When you do that, you're saying that I should pick up the bill for you. And my answer to you is: tf I'm not! You pay for you, I pay for me.
What I think is happening is that people realized they aren't getting much value from Netflix and this also served as a wake-up call for them to cancel. If you look at other comments you'll see several stating exactly that: they no longer think Netflix is worth paying for even if they have no trouble at all paying for it only for their own usage (and I'd think 99% of the users of HN can afford it easily).
It's also very possible this will end positively for Netflix i.e. they might want to get rid of the "leeches" and end up only with the paying users that obey their rules. If there are enough such people out there to cover their expenses AND turn a decent profit AND if they are loyal then Netflix will find themselves in a businessman's dream scenario.
In the end time will tell, as it happens with everything. I am mostly just offering you explanations for the current reactions to the news.
Then they require you to pay an additional $8 for each extra member, it that would be the premium cost (approx $19 where I live) and an additional ~$16 if you add two users. That's $35 a month for a service that is filled with woke bs content, 10% of what you get in the US due to geofencing. This is the way it usually goes for me and my gf:
1. We finally find a movie we want to watch, after a lot of time researching
2. We search for the movie name and where we can stream it for money
3. Oh it says its available on Netflix, HBO and some other renting stores.
4. Oh they were all not available to us. Sometimes we can "purchase" the movie for like $20+ but since that is just a ridicolous amount to watch a movie once we usually don't watch anything at all or pirate it for free.
I have a really hard time seeing a bright future for Netflix in the EU if they continue down this path. Honestly that is probably a good thing though, since european alternatives can take that market share.
The problem is that for europeans that want to pay for contnent it's STILL hard. I still have to download stuff from pirate sites since most content is not available to us for reasons unknown.
What do you suggest that I would do when I want to watch a movie that is not available anywhere? I am here ready with my wallet but no one seems interested.
If it's not good enough to warrant either $X or $X * 0.2, then cancel it. I.e.: Netflix sucks, cancel it!
Y'all are defending not paying while still using said service with arguments that don't support your case.
I stopped pirating stuff a good 15 years ago and Spotify and Netflix are both part of the why. Now, they both kinda suck and I might actually cancel Netflix. But you won't find me on Piratebay for that reason. It's just going to suck for a while.
I am barely using Netflix though. But yes it happens that sometimes I'll watch something on Netflix, perhaps once or twice a month. Will that warrant a $20 monthly subscription? The answer to that is hell no. They offer a bad service and require us to pay a lot for it so it's simply not worth the money.
I don't pirate that much either anymore tbh. I most often than not just do something else instead. Sometimes I'll pirate it if we really want to watch a movie and it's not available though.
The reason that I've not canceled Netflix even though only using it pretty rarely, is that it's still very cheap and I have the "biggest" option. 179 SEK a month in Sweden which is about $17. This is about a third more than _one_ lunch in the city will set you back. Are we really crying over this amount?
Yes since using 4-5 services will cost like $100 / month and if you pay that amount and still can't get most content it's ridicolously highly priced.
But then this still comes down to a sense of entitlement: I should be able to have access to anything and even though this has value to me, I shouldn't have to pay too much for it.
I do feel this myself as well, however. Definitely not above that. But let's be real here, still.
And don't mention TOS, they can write whatever they want in there. I wouldn't care if they didn't permit me to watch it in bed either, I watch where I please.