I said this again recently, but it's worth repeating: Netflix is on the very fast downward slope. Their catalog is wilting, the space is heating up with well-established competitors moving in and serving the precise content that Netflix originally built their brand on, and their efforts to fund a new catalog with new IP (and taking ownership of old IP) is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place. The writing is very nearly on the wall. At one point, long ago, the Netflix CEO (?) said they were trying to become HBO before HBO became them. And, frankly, they failed. They are still the industry leader, but only for a moment.
While I don't entirely agree with you I do think the price of Netflix is getting a little higher than the value we personally get out of it. Our personal breakdown this year (in the UK):
Adults in the house, we are quite picky but if we love it then we will keep watching:
Netflix @£9.99: 2 tv shows, 4-5 films
Apple TV+ @£4.99: 3 tv shows, 2 films
Disney Plus @£7.99: 1 tv show, Loads of movies
Amazon Prime @£7.99: 3 tv shows, quite a few films, plus "free" shipping!
Kids (3 and 7):
Netflix: They watch quite quite allot but we don't give them free access even to the kids profile (*see note)
Apple TV+: Only 1 tv show, but haven't really explored.
Disney Plus: All of it, I think they have "completed" it!...
Amazon Prime: None
Disney is by far the best value for money for us as a family, Apple TV+ for us grownups is best value. I don't think we would get rid of any but Netflix is probably now the least value.
Point is, Netflix know from their retention metrics that you only need a couple of shows that a customer loves to keep them subscribed. Add in some content to amuse their kids and it's a done deal.
*Note: Netflix seems to still show image for adult shows in search results in the kids profile even if not available when clicked on, some of this images can be quite aggressive. Hence not giving the kids free access
After having sampled Disney+, HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime a fair bit in the past year, my take is that Netflix has the UX nailed. I can, for instance, "thumbs down" a recommendation. Some offerings I never want to see. Their catalog tends to the darker themes, and I'm not fond of that.
Hulu and Amazon Prime are mostly irrelevant to me. I'll probably axe the Hulu sub.
HBO has a few things I like. Disney+ targets the kids/family/lighter theme demographic tightly.
I think that the general provider landscape is a bit overdone; some consolidation would be welcomed by consumers, and any competitor that falls behind in offerings will crash exponentially.
UX is a night and day difference between Netflix and its competitors. It's mind-boggling that the giants like Disney and HBO can't even get close. It's especially more noticeable on slow devices like Smart TV's.
With respect, I hate, loathe, and despise the auto-play part of the Netflix UI. I hate that more than anything else I could possibly love about Netflix. Far too fucking distracting while you’re trying to focus on something else that you might actually want to watch.
And yes, I’ve gone into the settings to turn that feature off, and it doesn’t entirely work. It does reduce the auto-play somewhat, but not entirely.
I’ll fucking delete my Netflix account and the Netflix app from our AppleTV device, if that shit gets any worse.
> And yes, I’ve gone into the settings to turn that feature off, and it doesn’t entirely work. It does reduce the auto-play somewhat, but not entirely.
Not sure what you mean by not entirely? I've got both 'autoplay next episode' and 'autoplay previews' turned off and don't think I see it anywhere anymore, which dramatically improved the experience.
I’ve turned off both, and it has improved things, but I still find cases where it decides to fucking auto play anyway. Really fucking annoying, when I’ve supposedly turned off all the goddamn autopsy shit.
You're absolutely right, I don't like it either, and I hated it at the beginning. But, now I got accustomed to it so much that now other apps feel eerily quiet to me. It's been very interesting to observe that change of perspective on myself. I consider myself successfully brainwashed with it. Now, I feel like I'm browsing shelves in a store with noises, and the other apps feel like empty stores, if that makes sense?
You're right, even with the "autoplay" settings turned off when you drop into a TV show's subsection it will automatically start playing the next episode. Incredibly frustrating when you just want to check episode length of number of episodes per season.
Peacock uses a white glow around the preview picture as their selection indicator. No border. Just a faint glow.
HBO Max has no way of navigating to a show page from your most recently viewed carousel. You have to find or search the show separately.
It's death by a thousand cuts, but jesus... use your competitor's app. See what UX works and what doesn't. I can't imagine any of the little stuff is actually patented.
Paramount+ has subtitles that are almost impossible to read with some videos. And you're forced to watch an unskippable ad for their other content when you start your first show of the day, even if you have the commercial free plan.
Amazon Prime awkwardly splits their shows into individual seasons ('series' in UK) in such a way that it's difficult to ascertain how much of the show you'll actually be able to watch on Prime. Other seasons may be available to rent, purchase, watch on one of their partner subscription services, and/or watch for free on their IMDb TV ad-supported service, all of which is haphazardly jumbled together in their main window in no particular order.
The thing I hate most about Amazon Prime is that I added shows to my watchlist that were free at the time, then when I went to watch them later, they cost. IMO, Amazon makes things free until they see if they're successful, then switch them to paid. This pissed me off so bad that I no longer spend any effort looking for shows to watch. If I don't find something in 10 minutes, I turn off the TV. Which is most of the time.
I split my Amazon Prime with my neighbor so she can get free shipping. She doesn't care about the TV part, and to me, it's not worth much either.
I spent 30 minutes once trying to get out of the credits for a Disney+ show and go to the episodes..back took me to the main page, and clicking the show took me right back into the episode exactly where I left off in the credits... I guess it was the last ep but I wasn't sure, and even tried fast forwarding to the end ...cause it was really long Marvel credits.
It should always take you to a show page, from there you should have options to continue or see info or go to episodes, etc...
Disney+ is similar to HBO Max. "Continue Watching" often takes me to the episode I just watched, and there's no way to get to the episode list from there. I usually access shows I'm in the middle of by going to my Watchlist, which always takes me to season 1, episode 1.
Meanwhile on Hulu, I recently watched episode 1 of Over the Garden Wall and instead of continuing on the the next episode, it autoplayed the episode of a completely different series.
> HBO Max has no way of navigating to a show page from your most recently viewed carousel. You have to find or search the show separately.
Hit play then as soon as it starts hit back, you’ll be at the show.
My guess is most remotes or TVs don’t support long press or other alt-clicks so they just implement the main thing people would want in that carousel. Even on AppleTV or other platforms that have long press.
I agree with you that the Netflix UI is superb for browsing, however I have one major gripe - on Android TV they broke the back button.
I had to hardcode a kill app shortcut just for them.
For all other android tv apps that I have been using so far, the back button works normally, exiting the app at the topmost layer. However, repeated clicks of the back button in netflix UI just re-triggers the menu - part of their dark patterns to make it harder to quit the app...
I think back button suddenly closing the app is more hostile. When you do it accidentally, the recovery steps are painful (app switch, find app, focus to it etc). I totally understand why Netflix would prevent it from happening. I think iPhone solved it better than Android with the "super back" link or the app hopping gesture. Android could improve the back button with a long-press requirement in order to navigate away from the app too. In this current situation, Netflix is completely in the right to disable the behavior.
Sorry, I totally disagree that is is "completely in the right", I use 3 other video apps, they all give exit prompts instead, here is an example:
Netflix could have done what Prime video does
Prime Video: "Do you want to exit the app? (Yes/No)", then done
Netflix: scroll all the way down the menu options: Home, Play something, New & Popular, TV Shows, Movies, My List, Get Help, Exit Netflix (click), 8 clicks in total before you can exit.
So it takes orders of magnitude more clicks, and more time out of my life, every time I try to exit the Netflix app. Considering that exiting an app is something I do all the time, it is not great
I think the existence of exit prompts is sole admission of how painful this experience is for the users. The prompt itself can be a hindrance for the user too. I still think that it's an Android UX problem, not Netflix.
I feel like there are two minutes of ads for every ten minutes of content on Hulu. It's ridiculous that you have to pay even more for an experience that is similar to the flat rate on Netflix and Disney+.
I refuse to watch anything on Hulu. Every time my wife insists and makes me watch something she really, really wants to see on Hulu, I am reminded of why I refuse to watch it.
And yes, we have the highest level of Hulu+ that is supposed to avoid most ads.
I'm the same.... though we did watch Catherine the Great and that Murder Podcast one w/ Martin Short /Steve Martin...
The thing that irks me w/ Hulu -- we have kids sleeping and it'll be soft for the actual show, then the ad comes in and it's like 5 decibals louder. and we have to physically just mute the commercials... it's the most annoying thing ever!
Subtitles on Hulu on my Roku TV have been broken for months now, despite regular app updates. They work in every other streaming app. I’m this close to just investing in a seedbox…
I've been saying for a long time they need to team up, or a 3rd party and create bundles... that's basically $40/month and you get HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Disney+, Apple -- and the $40 is split $5 to the 3rd party company, and then based on 'hours watched' by users... so you can watch whatever and whoever you watch the most of gets the majority stake in your monthly fees.
As a bonus this actually encourages them to work hard for your views.
A problem is that voting and getting recommendations is a tiny market compared to Disney basically pumping out what people are wanting to watch.
Yes, you can say they just focus on family content. But that is kind of the point. They identified their market and cater to them really well. Who is the market for Netflix?
Their curse is that they can find untapped markets, but then the content owners can invest surprisingly well into clawing back that market.
I don't actually like 99% of the Disney+ catalog and don't watch it. I like watching the MCU aaaand that's about it. Its great that D+ hitting a niche and hitting it hard, but I don't want it. A pal of mine has basically seen all of it with his family though. Niches, right?
I would estimate the Netflix target market is basically the non-family under-35s. It's actually closer to my tastes in general. Netflix also has a better real international selection IMO.
There's no clear differentiator between any of the above outside of (1) UX and (2) content. They all are a means of schlepping video to my screen. They are all almost perfectly commodity in my opinion.
I've found on my streaming device that Netflix is seriously fast at buffering and playing once you press play compared to D+ and Prime. Like 2 seconds vs 10+ seconds. Of course could just be my device but seems like they have really optimised the UX.
It supports profiles on an Apple TV using the system-wide profile switcher. Don’t know about other platforms, I won’t connect any other set top box to the internet to find out lest they start spewing ads forever.
Whereas I hate, loathe, and despise pretty much all sports.
I’d be really happy if I could delete all sports from all video sources I have available to me, or at least just hide them so that I don’t have to look at any of that crap.
I'm about in your boat, except with HBO Max instead of Apple TV+ (their shows aren't as appealing to me). And as those numbers climb and I look at one to cut, Netflix is the easiest. That's the whole point, though: Netflix is going to be the service on the chopping block before these others.
Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you? If you dropped them on HBO I wouldn't know the difference. There are lots of different genres, great actors, and compelling stories.
We have Netflix (via T-Mobile), Hulu, Prime, HBO, Disney+ and Apple TV. Some of these (Disney/Hulu) are from family or friends. WE only pay for Prime (probably the lowest quality of all of these) and Apple TV (because of Apple One subscription).
HBO and Apple TV and Disney+ have the best quality content IMO. Netflix is kind of around there sometimes but a lot of just pure garbage (Looking at you Cowboy Bebop). Hulu isn't bad. Comparable to Netflix but less content. Prime is just bad for the most part. If Wal-Mart had launched it instead it's about what I'd expect it to be.
> Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you?
What actual content do they have?
I've seen a Beastie boys doc, Ted Lasso and The morning show * edited from Newsroom when my error was pointed out.
That's a month's worth of content. What else do they have to justify continuing a subscription?
Disney has more content with just the Simpson's episodes alone. Add on top of that the entire Marvel catalog, the entire Starwars Catalog and the entire Pixar catalog.
I enjoyed "For All Mankind", "See", and "The Invasion". I get it for free due to a laptop purchase. I'm not sure if I'll pay for it once that runs out..
Those are all good as well, but I'm sure the person you're replying to was unaware that they could watch them.
The UX of Apple TV+(which is a terrible name) is nothing but bait and switch. After my first week of using my free subscription I completely gave up on trying to browse on the app.
90% of the content I would click on would then ask me for 5 to twenty dollars to pay for it, which is ultimately just a rental until Apple decides they aren't interested in running a streaming service anymore. There's no indication it's pay until you're already excited to watch a show and click on it.
There are good shows on there now, but I only ever bother to open the app when I see an article listing best shows on streaming services and happen to see an Apple one. Sitting down to relax and just opening the app brings about nothing but frustration.
I agree, the app is horrifically bad. Its hard to find the included content, it takes a long time for it to bring up the description of the video, the play delay is terrible, and it has smooth fast forward/rewind which I personally despise.
The only thing that makes it worth dealing with is the excellent content. Oh, and the fact that I can generally download something quickly to watch on a plane after boarding but before takeoff, since T-Mobile throttles Netflix, but apparently not AppleTV.
Not OP but the only show I've enjoyed on ATV+ was Ted Lasso. They have no back catalog either. Not enough content to even get me to browse around. Only had it because they bundled it with student subs of Apple Music, otherwise never would have subbed.
Ted Lasso is the best thing there, but far from the only thing. The catalog is pretty solid. I personally loved Mythic Quest and Schmigadoon. I have mixed feelings about Foundation as an adaptation, but I like it pretty well as a stand-alone thing.
Looking forward to trying out For All Mankind, See, Macbeth, and Invasion; the first two seem especially well liked by friends.
Bounced off Physical and Dickinson, but that had nothing to do with the quality of the shows; they're well made and have excellent acting.
The wide variety of stories and genres are lacking, but I think the quality of the average Apple TV+ show is quite a bit higher than the average Netflix show, on par with most of HBO.
HBO is known for hugely popular shows with critical acclaim. Just last year, HBO had Succession, Mare of Easttown, and The White Lotus in several top-10 lists. It's hard to compare the mostly-okay offerings from Apple TV to either the current HBO shows or its back catalog full of hits.
> I think the quality of the average Apple TV+ show is quite a bit higher than the average Netflix show
Netflix has a ton of content so 'average' is going to differ based on your algorithm. But in the last year I can think of... The Crown, You, Cobra Kai, The Queen's Gambit, Bridgerton, Squid Games, Arcane all being massive successes. There are probably more I'm forgetting because they pump them out month after month.
No, I just thought that as someone who is highly critical of TV shows and movies that even I found a few shows to be good. I was just surprised given the number of different genres that there was nothing whatsoever that was appealing to the person I was replying to.
I agree they don’t have much of a catalog, but they also don’t charge much and give the service away bundled with new devices. It’ll take some time to build up content. No big deal.
I like some Apple TV shows a lot, but there's not a lot. RN I think I'm "finished" with what I really wanted to watch: Ted Lasso, Central Park, Dickinson. I started Acapulco and it's nice, but things in other platforms seems more appealing.
That being said, I think as they expand, it's going to get pretty good.
I have enjoyed Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, and Foundation. That’s all I can recall at the moment for AppleTV+. Still enough to make it worthwhile as part of my AppleOne account.
Youtube is pretty magical. It has everything, even in the "kid zone". Which also means I can't leave them unsupervised for 30 minutes and come back.
If I do, my kids will've gone from educational video about the rain forest to sponsored video to toy videos to slime to fart jokes to music videos of bikini-clad bimbos to steamy romance videos to ...
Anyway it's just too much work to curate youtube for a child, IMO.
For example, my kiddo found a bunch of inappropriately steamy fan fiction for her favorite cartoons narrated on youtube... and she demonstrated that she knew it was inappropriate because she started hiding her screen from us.
The other thing we find with our 3 year old is that he can have his tablet and watch movies or shows on Netflix/VLC, etc. and it's pretty much all positive.
But he always prefers YouTube and when he's using YouTube, he mostly watches 3-5 minutes of something before getting enticed by another thumbnail.
At times when he's had free reign to YT, it really seems to drastically affect his general attention, patience, temperament and even ability to sleep (he wakes up super early asking for his tablet).
Once we cut it off hard, he goes back to normal.
We don't really believe in complete abstinence of those sorts of things (I think it will just make him even more sensitive to those algorithms in the future) but being aware of the effect, reducing YT and prioritizing actual movies/series has made a noticeable difference.
As they get older, you’ll also find YouTube Kids serves as the primary gateway for consumerism / corporations to begin influencing your child. Between Netflix / Disney+, the traditional 30s television commercial has effectively disappeared for kids. Corporations have pivoted to sponsored content on YouTube kids.
YT Kids most popular channels are streamed play sessions and toy reviews with superhuman production values and unrealistic depictions of what the toys can do. Once a child has watched an episode of LOL doll play along (for example), YouTube algorithm will recommend LOL doll collection videos, which associate completist collecting with peer group social acceptance. Free to play video game spots were even worse, directly focusing on alluring introduction of the game’s addiction economy.
I gave my children access to YouTube kids for some of the excellent educational content reasoning that it would be a relatively safe experience. Within a month their homepage and all recommendations (and I do mean 100%) were sponsored 5-15 minute long toy commercials. Their interest in animals, nature, science, and dinosaur programming remained strong but disappeared entirely from view outside of keyword search.
All YT and Google apps are now removed from the devices they use. I allow unsupervised use of PBS Kids, PBS in general, Nat Geo, Disney Plus and Netflix Kids (with time limits) but YouTube is filtered from my kids devices at the router. They are not allowed Google accounts; all YouTube content access is done via keyword search with a parent selecting the material and remaining in the room during viewing.
There are programs on YouTube that can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the recommendation engine is distilled corruption and dismay.
My kids couldn’t handle youtube. They would watch algorithmically created garbage (5yo) or endless game streaming (9yo) and be impossible to handle afterwards. First we did youtube time-outs, but every time we added it back into the mix we saw their behavior get worse, so eventually we banned youtube outright. Give me a curated platform like disney or netflix any day.
I can sit with my kid and watch a couple episodes of a show I've never heard of (Like Bluey) and say, "Yep, this is a definite thumbs up. You can watch Bluey when you have screen time" And I trust that when an episode ends, another episode of Bluey is what will show up.
For a youtube channel, I have to watch the entire video and I can say, "Yep, you can watch this exact video. Make sure autoplay is off."
I have no clue what video would play next. I have no clue what product the youtuber will try to shill in the middle of the video, etc.
I see so many of these complaints about YT having lots of good family-friendly content but at the same time being terrible at curation even in the kids mode.
Seems like the problem can be solved with a crowdsourced list of family-friendly videos (on GitHub?) managed by trusted collaborators and then a simple page that embeds only these videos?
Over time I assume it should work given enough people contributing. It's not like the content needs to be kept continuously up to date either (unless old videos disappear faster than new ones are added).
The problem is that the business model of YT kids contact creators contains incentives similar to those of SEO farms operating in the Google keyword ecosystem. Good content is shouldered aside by low effort, low value, high profit messaging.
Wish there was a way to block everything and whitelist allowed channels. There are some really quality ones but there are also a bunch of really creepy content, even in the kids app.
Does the kids app show ads? Aside from the creepy content (which required in-person parental filtering) the advertising was the thing that drove us away from YouTube.
It's fine on a laptop or desktop where you can run an ad blocker. It's not fine when you're trying to let kiddo watch YouTube on an actual TV screen.
Yes, on certain channels. Some channels are ad-free, but this can change over time. A channel that’s ad-free on the YT Kids app today doesn’t have to be ad-free tomorrow.
Things my son (2 and a half) likes to watch on YT:
- Lorry trucks (semis/big rigs) driving on the road/motorway
- The tube/trains/subways coming in and out of stations
- Large excavators digging in quarries and loading dump trucks
The videos are usually pretty slow paced and calm, and we're happy to let him watch in small blocks (5-10 mins max) from time to time. He's shown no interest in typical cartoons, kids shows, etc. I'd love to cut off YT completely, but are there other places to get this type of content for him?
In previous threads I’ve asked about the same thing and some parents have very strong opinions about what’s available on YouTube.
I remember one thread in particular where someone told me that you could find some very strange stuff just by typing a period in the search box (autocomplete does the rest, NSFW if that’s not obvious), and that school age Kids tend to figure this out or share this “trick” amongst themselves. So to each their own, but I’m not a parent yet so I abstain from having any strong opinions for the moment.
What the actual fuuuck. Tried searching just a dot and I got a fish cutting video, an indian woman being slapped around, and some creepy horror doll shit.
Yeah I noped tf out pretty quick too. This isn't even the first time I've seen crazy shit about YT - these parents are 100% right not to let their kids on unsupervised. Weird how it's not news more often tbh.
Hulu (ad free) and HBO Max are easily the best services I have, these days. It's not even close. D+ is a bargain if you have kids and intend to let them watch any streaming at all. Apple TV only stays around because it's cheap and was free for quite a while initially. I've watched like two shows and a couple movies on it in the ~15 months I've had it. Probably ought to cancel, really. Netflix and Amazon (better catalog than Netflix but UI—on every platform—so bad that I rarely use it) are on my personal chopping block. I doubt I'll have either by next year.
Stillwater and the new Snoopy show are quite good Apple TV+ shows for kids. But otherwise, Apple TV+ has been very meh. We only have it because we have the big bundle for the icloud storage.
Although, if you're interested in one offering on a service, you really only need to be actively subscribed for 1-2 months a year (to watch the newest season)?
I think that's a major challenge here and it will ultimately drive up the costs for everyone.
Subscribe for 6 months = 50% annual discount
Subscribe for 4 months = 67% annual discount
Subscribe for 2 months = 83% annual discount
etc. And that looks great!
But producing the content costs the same regardless. So as more people do this, a vicious cycle will set in. Prices must increase to cover production costs with shorter subscription periods. Rising prices cause more people to shift to cycling through shorter subscriptions. Which further drives prices higher.
Basically you end up with the a la carte cable nightmare where you pay the same amount to for access to only one channel at a time. The only real way to stop this is to switch to longer term discounts and early termination fees or bundles.
Or maybe the market will naturally transition to an a la carte model, and we will maybe pay more for that one show we have to watch, but pay less overall, and have fewer recurring bills to clean up?
That would be great actually to move to a purely commoditized model where producers are paid directly. I think there's actually something extremely messed up about pricing. For example you can purchase the entire season of a show for less than a subscription and have permanent access to it.
Netflix has by far the easiest to use download feature (for Amazon Fire). As long as that's the case I'll be a subscriber so my daughter has something to watch when flying.
Same here. We’ve cancelled everything except for Disney+. Well, we also have Amazon prime, but that is mainly for the shipping. We rarely watch anything on Amazon.
I cancelled Disney+ when they wanted to charge extra for a movie, on top of the subscription. I'll just buy the DVD cheaper than what they asked for on top of the sub.
Admittedly, I'm not automatically entitled to all the things they release but still feels wrong and wanted to vote with my wallet.
You know that Apple TV+ has an artificially low rate to get people on Platorm and will do the same thing as Netflix over time (that is escalate its pricing).
Is there any decent way of creating a custom kids profile, ideally one that cuts across multiple services? For example, I would like my child to be able to watch 5 shows on Disney+, 4 movies on Netflix, etc.
Respectfully, this is a lazy take. If you even slightly dig into the numbers the price increase makes complete sense. Netflix spent 17 billion dollars on content last year. They are outspending competitors 2 to 1 if not more. Their catalog is thriving - you have big names like DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot, The Rock etc signing on for movies. You have shows like Squid Game attracting ridiculous numbers.
Netflix is, if anything, signaling how confident they are of their position by asserting their dominance over the market by raising rates. They know their offering is too good for subscribers to cancel. And most will gladly pay and keep paying if the Netflix content engine keeps churning.
I honestly don't see how their catalog is thriving. A lot of popular TV series and movies have moved to their own streaming services and I can only speak for myself, but I find the vast majority of Netflix Originals to be big budget, but at the same time low quality content. They produce some real gems, but I find that those are usually few and far between.
Combined with how frustrating their library is to explore, at least on desktop, I'm really having trouble justifying a Netflix subscription.
Endless horizontal scrolling which repeatedly presents the same movies/TV shows on sequential pages, extremely limited information before you click on a show and various other quirks in their UI add up to an extremely frustrating experience, to the point when I'm strongly considering going back to piracy.
Netflix has produced some good movies in recent years. Your big budget talk applies much more to disney marvel money milking the same cows with the same movie variation over and over and consistently riding the remake agenda of all their classics (which I liked tbh).
Can you name a few? I can only think of three memorable ones; Annihilation (genuinely good film IMO), Bright (mediocre; decent worldbuilding but lacking) and Bird Box (mediocre, massive budget spent on promotion and hype).
I get big "direct-to-dvd" vibes with most other stuff they put on. And nobody talks about these films, which for me is a big indicator that it's not worth watching.
I'll admit Netflix spends a lot of money, but they spend it safely; they try to min/max their content, try to fit ever box / category.
It's a lazy take because it underappreciates that Netflix saw this coming for the last ten+ years.
They made the switch from physical, mail-order rental to digital streaming when the average connection supported a streaming model.
But as soon as they switched from owning content (DVDs) to leasing it (limited time streaming rights), they saw the countdown until the content owners would eventually have an equivalent platform offering.
That's what kicked off the Netflix originals spend, and continues to drive their content creation spend today.
Netflix is 100% sober that (1) they need enough already-owned back-catalog to stay competitive & (2) they will never be in a stronger future financial position than they are today.
So it's literally "accumulate content or die."
And I'm not crediting them with foresight. It was abundantly clear to everyone that eventually the content owners would see {cost of developing platform} < {content value being pocketed by Netflix}.
It was only a question of how long it would take the legacy companies to random stumble into a viable offering.
---
The more timely question is "What is Netflix's edge, once they've finished becoming a traditional content producer?"
Because from the last few years of hits and misses, they don't seem particularly better than HBO or Amazon Studios at picking winners.
The benefit of Netflix was that you could binge 7 seasons of a show you didn't get to see back when it was new, for whatever reason. They have to heavily promote their own content and often there are only one or two "seasons", where a season is only about 10 episodes.
In short they may be spending a ton on content, but so does all the others and while I do pay for Netflix, I continually wonder if I should just cancel.
That and they used to have an excellent catalog of movies. I haven't watched a full length feature film on Netflix in almost year, because all of it is such garbage. Prime Video has a better movie catalog than Netflix now. My kids very occasionally watch something on Netflix Kids, but that's not even compelling these days. It's a running joke in the household that my spouse will spend an hour trying to find something decent to watch, only to hand the remote to someone else, who immediately exits Netflix. And their original content is so bad often enough that we have to look at online reviews just to try to avoid wasting 30 minutes on something that'd make a B movie look good.
Netflix absolutely needs to deal with shitty content for the same reason that Amazon needs to deal with fakes or crap: it's an existential threat to their brand.
Being Walmart doesn't work in a digital space, because you can't starve the business out from the physical neighborhood around you to prevent competition.
And once people get it in their heads that "All movies on Netflix are trash" or "All stuff on Amazon is trash," you have a much bigger problem.
Yes. Because most of us on HN are not their target demographic. You have to understand the average Netflix viewer is not a hacker nerd but a middle aged mom who watches Emily in Paris (their most popular show of 2020). :D
My personal taste agrees with this based on viewing their catalogue, but i'd like to see evidence that consumers agree, maybe the upcoming earnings report will show cracks in the foundation. Netflix has seemed pretty barren for a while and in trouble imo but then something like Squid Game becomes a global phenomenon and you realize that they have 213 million subscribers globally and likely a pretty good understanding at this point of what drives retention/churn.
Speaking of global, I have noticed that Netflix is one of the few who offers a variety of non-English/American targeted shows. There are quite a few Indian, Mandarin and Latino focused programs in their lineup, which I haven't seen on the other channels (except for HBO en Español).
Could it be that Netflix has seen that they can't compete in a crowded market with "the big boys" (though their bank share might disagree) and they're making the prudent, global market move? (I'm totally speculating and genuinely looking for an answer. Global enterprise is so far from my field)
Actually most countries mandate a % of local content from Netflix. So they sponsor, buy, produce shows for that country and make it available to the world to expend the catalogue. That is quite nice for smaller director/producer to get access to a global crowd.
I remember a local movie (1) that became, almost over night, the most watched movie in Quebec's history with more than 21M viewer. Quebec population is ~8M.
Yeah, they didn't come up with that on their own. But if others who I'd suppose will have to deal with the same regulations fail to make the best of it (e.g. if those others just check the boxes with some clever accounting tricks) it can very much become a unique brand feature. "Stuff that picks up unique qualities of country x fiction while pulling it up from the usual country x provinciality to global standards" can be a very powerful formula.
Yeah, it's pretty intentional. IIRC they set a few strategic international markets where they want to be the best content producer. They've been quite successful in that: Lupin (France), Dark (Germany), Money Heist and Elite (Spain); Kingdom and Squid Game (South Korea).
Also there’s a massive blob of Mandarin shows, especially in the Wuxia and Xianxia genres that appeals to both people with a Chinese background and some niche fandoms of those genres.
Almost all of my home screen in Netflix is foreign language shows because that’s what’s good on Netflix.
This is purely anecdotal and subjective but I've tended to dislike Netflix's taste in content as well. I refused to subscribe for years as every time I watched Netflix at someone else's house it seemed to follow the same shallow, drivelly formula. That said there have been a few gems I loved as the volume of content grew, and I get some endurance out of their library of classics (content produced back in the network television days).
I wouldn't write them off yet. Disney, Apple and Amazon seem the only real competitors as this is a game of scale.
Disney is even more content limited and better for kids. Apple never got it right, cant see them fixing it now. And Amazon stuffed it between their mixed model where half the stuff you want to watch has extra fees + generally limited inclusive content, though the prime membership might buy that back. Both Disney and Amazon will fix the back catalogue with money I would guess, something Netflix should have done more aggressively before the competitors arrived.
While Netflix content is on the decline, there is a huge inertia in the best existing catalogue + 200million subscribers. It does surprise they haven't flooded extra content on the price increase as that is a good way to justify to users. Nothing worse than feeling there's a lack of content + pay increase.
My guess is Netflix keeps building the moat with content creation/ownership and we'll see mergers start kicking in as groups with back catalogues like HBO & NBC realise gaining/holding subscribers on smaller catalogues is hard and there more value in selling than renting. Who forks out more money at this point will probably win. Wild card is sport, that can be attractive and sticky if someone merges that in.
As a consumer that's exactly what I'm waiting for, I don't need yet another streaming service. Would rather save my money and let those niche streams starve
Exactly; what we all want is a Spotify/Apple Music situation for video streaming, but it sadly never happened. This is where I'd like government to step in and require content licensing. If you offer it on your platform or for physical sale, you have to offer it to other streaming providers at a reasonable (this is complicated) price.
> Wild card is sport, that can be attractive and sticky if someone merges that in.
Amazon Prime Germany has been showing me adverts, that they have soccer/football games (not sure what league or if there is an extra cost associated as I don’t watch sports), so they are at least in some regions already there.
The HBOMax model of "get the theatrical release today" has been good to us so far. I really enjoyed Dune at home. But they keep rotating things in and out their catalog for some reason, and things that could be on there aren't.
I hear rumors alot of content that should be in their portfolio has streaming rights tied up in Hulu atm which doesnt help them.
Yeah, Apple's content has been some of the best, particularly for such a new player. I was shocked at how they became an HBO equivalent in about two years.
A bunch of people in this thread share your opinion, but I consistently feel like they have the worst writers on average. Most of their shows have poison pills. Foundation had representations of math akin to the hacking from hackers(1). See didn't have many societal mechanics based around... Not seeing - this seemed especially silly with the warfare. Ted lasso and mythic quest are the best, but suffer from the "a little bit for everyone" curse. I like what they're going for, but I've been wondering if they can't hire writers from the same talent pools as the other services or if it just that they are new.
I guess I was able to give foundation a pass on that simply because of the fact that there is by definition no way to express an unknown branch of mathematics. The sin of hackers was that we knew at the time what mid 90s hacking offense looked like. We don't know what a new branch of math in the year 10,000 dependent on many branches ofath also unknown to us in the year 2020 looks like or what tools and processes mathematicians would use to help them manage that complexity. At that point is sort of give the writers/vfx carte blanche to make it at least look really sweet since accuracy is off the table anyway.
Foundation's problem is not with "math visuals", but that it's amazingly bad. Cliffhangers so dumb that made me vow never to pay for that show. Plotlines so weak I was wishing they'd just show more of the bland visuals in quiet. Pacing so fucked Asimov is going to rise up and bitchslap them.
(Of course in the books there is some mention of how the math looked. Just a fuckton of equations on a wall :D)
I cancelled my subscription shortly after they started getting rid of small-time films and started producing their own content; the two reasons were (1) I don't like businesses that can't cooperate with others and (2) their own content sucks and likely continues to suck to this day because their KPI is "how many people watched >1s of this?" and not "did we allow passionate, talented people to do work they are now proud of?".
I actually surprisingly enjoy their international content, Dark, Squid Game, Vikings, etc- but their American content does suck. It also comes off as too preachy/propaganda-ish. If I was actually the one paying for the account, I simply wouldn't subscribe.
COVID should have helped them a lot: plenty of big, well made films suddenly needed a way to get in front of people that wasn't a movie theatre and they went with Netflix. (The Mitchells vs The Machines, for instance). Unfortunately, I think they've made two mistakes: what should be landmark content is just kind of muddled in there with pointless documentaries, shows that were immediately cancelled, and old second rate sitcoms; and they're way too aggressive with the Netflix branding, which has a poor reputation. It's over-saturated to the point that I can't imagine someone having a favourable impression when they see that extra Netflix logo on a piece of content. Ambivalent, at best. Just think if they used that kind of space for human curation, or to emphasize the excellent creators that are represented on their platform instead.
> "did we allow passionate, talented people to do work they are now proud of?".
That's what independent movie studios used to do like Miramax, It gave us Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, No country for old men, and dozens of gems. Even Miramax failed in their quest.
Anyway, Netflix has produced solid movies regardless of what you think, well rated by critics and public. Not all or most of them, but no way worse than competitors studios.
I think Netflix is worth it for the comedy specials alone. Which was the only reason I ever got HBO back in the day. The original shows I watch are just icing on the cake. I think they would have more mindhsare if they released episodes weekly like Disney+ it's easy to forget how much you like a show when you only watch it one day a year.
Now I have HBO for south park and then my family got into some of the DC shows. I'm cancelling after this season. Then turning it back on when Titans or young justice comes back.
I want to make a script that suspends all my subscriptions every day, or cancels every month if youre not allowed to suspend. Then automatically signs me back up when I want to watch something.
The main problem is you would need a reliable way to see every service's catalog without an active account.
You could sign up and immediately cancel. Your access lasts a month at that point. I think JustWatch has notifications or emails for when new seasons drop.
Also it's about the easiest task for a marketing team to email you to resubscribe when a new season of a show you watched comes out
I know atleast one service that will cancel your service the minute you cancel, but yes canceling immediately would be the plan for services that don't have a suspend option like netflix. [1]
As far as keeping up with the channels catalog, I meant I would want to build a discovery/search interface with data from every service so I could seamless signup/resume when I want to watch something.
[1] njpwworld.com which is the streaming service for a japanese pro wrestling company, will cancel your subscription the moment you cancel, no matter how much time you have already paid for. So if you sign up and immediately cancel you would be charged for a month, but never get access to it.
Most of the competitors can lean on a decades long backlog of hits that attract people. Netflix needs to build everything from scratch, and the cost of creating TV series is ridiculously high nowadays
> the cost of creating TV series is ridiculously high nowadays
I disagree with this claim. Their problem is that they enjoy losing money - a fetish if you will - in an attempt to draw and cater to a very particular and very young crowd. Its like they forgot that somewhat mature people over 35 actually do exist and are usually the ones paying for the service.
Its a pity because with all that talent and resources - they should be well above everyone else of they werent so damn focused on everything but good storytelling. I've seen stick figures on youtube tell better stories than Netflix.
I'd love to see Netflix make knockoffs of popular back catalog shows that are just different enough to get away with it. 3-camera sitcoms with no-name actors should be pretty cheap to produce, and one of the shows could end up being ironically good, and one might be genuinely good.
> Netflix spent approximately $17 billion on content in 2021 and ended the year with an estimated 222 million subscribers, a cost per subscriber of $76.60 (keep in mind that Netflix has other costs like sales, marketing, facilities, and labor just like any other company). Under the new subscription pricing model, 41% of the annualized price of the standard plan will go towards covering Netflix’s content costs, down from 47% before the price hike.
How many are subscribing to competitors to watch backlog? If they are, it's going to be short lived where folks subscribe for a month or two, hit the target backlogs in binge mode, and move along.
I have a few streaming services and rarely ever am I watching old content (the key stuff I've already consumed). I subscribe to services for their new content, not their old catalog. Maybe I'm the exception and not the norm of the typical subscriber.
I blame the lack of investment in target shows and focus on broad short lived and quickly canceled shows to the decline. I understand their business model catering to short attention spans but it puts me off a large swath of their content. Unless it's a movie or mini series with full conclusion, I tend to skip right over the content anymore no matter how interesting the story may seem to be. The last thing I want is to get drawn in and invested in a story only to have wasted my time and have the remainder canceled. Entertainment is part of it but many people want a beginning to end story of some sort. If you want to cater to short attention spans, good luck competing with YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok content.
Yeah, although if you're older and don't rewatch a lot of content the backlog doesn't really help a lot--especially if their older movie catalog is thin.
I wonder what the percentage of old shows is in total watched minutes. I almost never watch shows or movies older than ~2 years or so. I'm sure that's different for kid's movies, but I think I'm not too much of an exception.
I'm definitely stuck in the 60's through 80's for television shows, and tend to watch my favorites over and over. But honestly, I've downloaded and stored most of the stuff I like because I'm terrified of it disappearing off streaming sources.
Interestingly, "You Bet Your Life" highlighted the fact that Groucho Marx got old, and it's weird in kind of the same way that Elvis getting old is weird.
Interesting in other social ways as well — Groucho was allowed to (literally) "cat-call" the attractive female guests on his show.
I suppose there was a sieve that their guests went through but it is still fascinating to see the parade of suburban Los-angelites: housewives, people with strong ethnic ties to the "old country" that had yet to be melted into the pot that was 1950's America. Who knew door to door salesman really was a typical working class occupation?
Oh yeah, all kinds of baggage attached to the last bits of the vaudeville Borscht Belt. That's also something that makes the transition from Allan Sherman to Weird Al Yankovic so jarring; they did the same act, but even aside from production values, Weird Al didn't bother dragging a previous audience along, and was willing to go anywhere.
Two years is about the length of time required for me to consider a show on Netflix. They kill a lot of shows after two seasons. I don't want to invest the time in a storyline that Netflix is going to axe without a natural conclusion.
True but networks have a severe time slot constraint, in addition to the same production costs as Netflix, so it's a lot more understandable. Maybe my perception is off but Netflix seems even worse about killing new shows after 1-2 seasons, which is pretty ridiculous IMO.
Netflix seems overly reliant on small scale KPIs at the expense of the overall experience. Of course it's possible that they know exactly what they're doing and I'm just far away from their target consumer.
Wired had an article about this a year or so back [0] that said shows get more expensive after the first two seasons, so Netflix is inclined to kill them in favor of new shows. It also said viewership during that initial window also heavily influences the renewal process. Netflix has a lot more data than network television ever has and I think it leads them to be a bit overzealous with their decision making. Most shows I've really enjoyed have a weak first season as they find their footing.
I don't know the numbers but Netflix probably kills shows faster.
>Of course it's possible that they know exactly what they're doing and I'm just far away from their target consumer.
Maybe. So long as a show doesn't get canceled at a completely unnatural point, I'm actually fine with just a couple seasons a lot of the time--especially with the historical network model of 20 episodes per season or so. And, conversely, by the time a show hits 4 or 5 seasons I'm done with it even if it's still pretty solid. I'm just tired of it.
There are a bunch of network shows I liked that stayed pretty good but I just stopped watching them at some point.
I'm this way _for Netflix_. HBO Max and Disney both have an awesome back-catalog of things to revisit, and I'm constantly finding myself watching an old 90s or 00s movie I had forgotten about on a whim, because it's there. The catalog is curated enough to focus on including good stuff, and HBO Max also has all of Batman: TAS.
That would indeed be very interesting, but back when I joined Netflix that was almost all they had, and I watched a lot of content. From time to time the special effects are bad enough that it breaks immersion (TOS), but for the most part if the movie/show was any good when it was written it is good today. So why not watch it?
I didn't get to see Buffy until it was on Netflix and I enjoyed it as much as I would have when it was new, I think. Granted the computers and cellphones are obviously dated (but if you think of it as a period show, it is fine) and it is a bit grating how everybody is always fully covered during/after sex, but the stories are as great as they were back then.
In recent years I'm too busy to focus on watching something new, so usually I'll put on something I've already seen a hundred times for background "watching". Currently rewatching Silicon Valley, before that was Saved By The Bell (ahh, nostalgia).
As far as I can tell they've succeeded at becoming HBO.
I admire how the company has evolved over the years. It's cool that they distribute (and sometimes fund) movies made by excellent directors (Coens, Scorsese, Sorrentino). It does seem like a precarious business model: they have to keep picking or making winners but so far they're doing well.
> As far as I can tell they've succeeded at becoming HBO.
Have they? Have they really? As far as I can tell, nothing that Netflix has ever done in-house has ever come close to the best of the cable channels. Like, The Witcher is fine, but Game of Thrones it is not, neither in quality nor buzz/cultural significance. House of Cards is no Succession and Ozark is no Breaking Bad. Nothing they have could even come close to comparing to stuff like The Sopranos or The Wire in terms of cultural impact. The closest they've ever come, in my opinion, is probably with Making a Murderer, and they've spent the last couple of years churning out pale imitations that make Netflix look like "True Crime TV".
You're paraphrasing that quote from the Netflix CEO that goes like "We want to become HBO faster than HBO can become us". To me, HBO has won that race handily.
Discussing only on the merits of their content, and stipulating that this is neither here nor there with respect to Netflix's long-term prospects vs. HBO:
Breaking Bad isn't an HBO show. So I assume we're just asking, "has Netflix produced any world-class content". The answer to that is yes.
The jewel in their crown, their "Game of Thrones", is clearly Stranger Things. It's undeniably successful, each new season a cultural event. I'd put Stranger Things up against any HBO show for relevance and impact. (Perhaps not for artistic excellence; but, The Wire is the best show that's ever been on television, and it's far from the most watched).
Add to that Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Sex Ed, the annual Flanagan miniseries (Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass), Master of None, and Big Mouth.
They're doing about as well as any premium cable channel ever has. Doesn't, of course, mean you like their content! But I have about as much faith in Netflix coming up with a new prestige show than I do in HBO, most of whose recent stuff has left me pretty cold.
House of Cards was certainly a big thing at the time--for the first few seasons anyway. Queen's Gambit. GLOW and Russian Doll were quite good. I'm not a huge fan of The Crown but it's well done.
Honestly, Game of Thrones notwithstanding, I'm not sure that there's a lot on HBO I consider must see level content either although some is quite good.
I'd probably consider them about a wash for content.
I am still upset that they canned GLOW. I think the folks who decide to kill shows at Netflix severely underestimate market faith that they’ll keep a show around — as others have mentioned, there’s little more frustrating in the TV space than a show that leaves mysteries and plots hanging.
Considering they have a lot more flexibility than your average network, I’m surprised Netflix hasn’t made movies or mini-seasons to wrap up stories more common. That would be a huge improvement over what they’ve done with a lot of their original content that didn’t quite make the cut.
I think Stranger Things season 1 had a big buzz to it, but it feels like culturally, it completely dropped off after season 1. I’m sure the fans still like it, but I just don’t hear broad swaths of people talk about it anymore after that.
Game of Thrones had far more consistent cultural impact across all seasons (although they managed to nuke its legacy completely with the horrible last season).
They had to C&D a Chicago bar during S2 for completely rebranding around the show. There are still, 3 years after the last season, billboards around here (for random companies) making oblique references to the show. I think it's hard to deny the cultural impact the show had. Again: I'm not saying it's better than Game of Thrones (though: than the last season? probably.)
First I’ve heard of Arcane. Is it actually good and worth watching if I have zero interest and know nothing about Lol, or is it really just rated highly because of anime/gaming fans?
It's among the best quality animation I've seen. Story is excellent in the beginning, though degrades to only decent towards the end as the video-game origins start showing through. Definitely worth watching, IMO.
The Crown too, a good example of something that would be flagship HBO content.
Another thing that's easy to sleep on is that Netflix is much, much better connected to its audience than HBO is to its own. Netflix makes a lot of content that I couldn't be less interested in, but that's probably a strong positive indicator for them; I obsess over The Wire, Deadwood, and Community, and am thus pretty clearly a niche audience. For years, HBO did a good job of serving people like me, to their detriment.
Nothing will have the sort of cultural impact you're talking about ever again. There's too much content, platforms and viewers are both fragmented, and viewing habits have radically changed.
I don't think the data is proving this out at all. Streaming will probably be a winner-take-most market and Netflix is on track to remain the leader.
We'll see what total 2021 subscriber growth was on Thursday, but estimates for Q4 are still around a net addition of 8 million subscribers. Compare this with Disney Plus growth in the same period of 2 million subscribers and I think the results are quite favorable.
If you pay attention to the details, such as in earnings calls, executives have reported that average subscriber watch time has only been increasing over the past few quarters. (Also see refs such as: https://backlinko.com/netflix-users#time-spent-with-netflix)
Keeping in mind that Covid has slowed production of content, in 2021 Netflix still managed to create the two most watched movies _ever_ on the platform (Red Notice, Don't Look Up). There are follow-up seasons launching for at least three of their strongest series, including Witcher (released tail end of 2021), Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. Plus the regular spikes of culturally relevant content such as Squid Games, Cheer, etc. which now happen fairly often.
> is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place
I'm not sure how you are inferring that the business model has been destroyed here. It's certainly evolving over time but the promise has always been 'pay us a monthly subscription and we'll give you lots of things to watch'. I don't see how that has changed meaningfully or negatively.
Netflix has had naysayers at every stage of its growth. The landscape is always changing but I believe the critical idea is that Netflix leads in streaming and this has only strengthened over time. Total subscribers, revenue per user, and watch hours per account are all drifting up, and I fail to see how that represents a downward slope.
Completely disagree. This is about power, they are raising the price simply because they can and people will stay on. They've got a long way to go to increase it before the elasticity changes.
The business model was never about being really underpriced, that was just a way to acquire customers.
How do you imagine they are "raising the price simply because they can" when their growth has slowed[1] and they have decided to no longer use debt in order to finance content?[2] I think those two facts taken together are a much more plausible explanation of why they are raising prices i.e because they have to. Further given the competitive head-winds they're now facing streaming space they are definitely not in position of price leadership.
At least two of those three went to Peacock (NBC's Netflix-like), though, right (maybe all three, I never followed Parks and Rec)? I imagine they'll be looking for a new home soon enough.
After GE bought NBC, David Letterman joked that staff were encouraged to use Sylvania fluorescent bulbs as lightsabers. The top brass had little sense of humor then, and now that the studios own everything, I'm guessing much less now.
I think they are stumbling because they are trying to grow their catalog too fast. They have achieved a lot of this by taking on debt, not an unresonable amount, but I think they have too much money to burn and that means they aren’t always making smart or selective bets on content.
In the beginning of their foray into original content it felt like everything was good or at least interesting even if it wasn’t for me. Now it feels like they have a new original every week, but less that I find compelling or even watchable. A lot of it is lowest common denometer trash content. They risk being associated with that. I once associated them with high quality content even if it was low budget. Now I associate them with shows that feel like were concepted and written by a user acquisition algorithm.
At some point they decided Netflix is for every human on earth and to be for everyone you have to have content that can be digested by everyone, but to do that you make a pretty bland product without much taste.
I definitely don’t disagree with this, but here’s a question for people: if Netflix used their original content budget to instead procure existing content like they originally did, would this save them? This is obviously complicated with everyone creating their own streaming service to charge for their own content, but I’d certainly be happier with Netflix if I had a much better selection of other stuff and not “Netflix Originals”.
The problem with the old Netflix business model is that it's basically just "cable but better". This only worked because streaming rights were priced cheaper than cable carriage fees, which wasn't going to last. If Netflix had continued just licensing existing shows and movies, they'd be charging closer to cable prices because they aren't getting a deal on licensing cost anymore.
This is the first time I read about a price increase and thought, “do I really use Netflix much?”
Right now I use prime more often and I bounce around with various add-one’s. Right now using Paramount Plus.
And the voice-overs on Netflix are down right annoying. I wish I could hide content with voice overs. The translations are terribly comedic as they try to match the mouth movements somewhat. It’s terrible. I’m tired of sifting through them.
Yeah, this last increase got me thinking too. I don't have anything on my "must watch" list from Netflix and I've got four other services I either subscribe to myself or are on someone else's plan.
I really struggle finding a lot of stuff on Netflix, but frankly I do on most all of them. I know that Netflix actually has a much larger catalogue than I'm seeing when I login but it's impossible to get to in order to find anything. Amazon Prime video is even worse at discoverability.
The thing is that Netflix has established itself as a staple and most no one is going to cancel it unless they are just hurting. Netflix knows that and has hiked prices to show it has market power. It's like Amazon Prime, I honestly don't order enough from Amazon to justify that expense each year but when I do use it, it's convient.
I'm not sure what you mean by Global, exactly, but Disney+ covers all of North and South America, Europe, Australia, all of S.E. Asia, India, New Zealand, and parts of Africa (including soon South Africa).
>Disney+ is only available in Singapore and India, not sure why you're saying it's everywhere in South East Asia
That's incorrect.
>Disney Plus Malaysia officially launched on 1st June 2021, making streaming Disney+ movies and series more accessible and worth the purchase in Malaysia. After Indonesia and Singapore, Malaysia has become the third South East Asian country to get Disney+ as Disney Plus Hotstar in collaboration with Astro Malaysia.
It is also available in Thailand, but Philippines is only announced to be coming soon.
First, Netflix' games have the same issue as Apple Arcade: the majority are ad-riddled trash. And Apple Arcade has App Store tie-in.
Second, the global numbers are likely to keep Netflix afloat (the same way they seem to for Facebook), but stateside numbers are abysmal compared to emerging services [0]: Netflix boasts 74.02 million subscribers in U.S. and Canada, and HBO Max has 45.2 million domestic (give or take 5 million). Within a year of launch, HBO Max has captured 2/3 the subscription size of Netflix! (Globally, it is barely doing double the numbers of Disney+.) The other competition has proven itself viable in a fraction of the time, and are using their built-in infrastructure to continue to compete. Netflix no longer has any differentiating factor, except that their US adult-targeted content is usually lower quality.
Wait, what Apple Arcade games have ads? Some of them have “formerly had in-app purchases” vibe, but no actual ads. I would guess Netflix’s stuff to be the same.
I actually like their content, but I do feel like they'll eventually fizzle out... the only chance they have to compete w/ Disney is join forces w/ Amazon, or just sell out to Disney.
Either of those would make me happy cause then it'd presumably be a bundled service... maybe $15 for hulu, netflix, and disney+. or slightly higher prime membership but much better content+interface. (Hopefully prime would move all their free stuff for prime members just to the netflix apps/ui/etc.
I can feel it happening. When Netflix was cheap, I kept it around and rented 2-3 movies a month. Now I have no interest in their new content and they don't have much old content anymore. It's now just too violent and sex obsessed for my tastes. They even continue to host "Riverdale", a show that tries to be hip and cool by rewriting Archie comics with plenty of statuatory rape. But it's not even presented as a bad thing. Just more "forbidden fruit."
I saw this reality working for them in 2012 and I lost a lot of money not buying the discounted options. When were pitching about becoming HBO before HBO became them, and I thought, who the hell wants to be in HBO’s market?? Netflix at that time was considered externally as a tech play but internally they always knew they would go Hollywood.
Totally Agree. It is well known proverb in showbiz - you are as good as your last hit. In this business you have to constantly be at the top to stay at the same place.
There is no possibility to create a 'moat' in showbiz. Technology (distribution over internet) was once, but now that has become a commodity.
You need hit shows, but they don't have to be new. For example, Disney+ has enough back catalog that they could probably shut down production and coast for years.
You only need 1 show for me to subscribe to your streaming service. It worked the same way during the cable days, I paid for HBO to watch the Sopranos, and canceled it 5 minutes after the series finale.
Like instead of “netflix is garbage its oversaturated” it seems like they greenlight stuff in batches where some quality content is released all around the same time
I disagree. The future of Netflix is in harnessing shows made all over the world. They’ve had some success with Korean and Indian shows so far but it is a vast untapped market especially when their audience is global too. They’ve also set bars for production value which results in world class content. My only qualm with them is they seem to enforce a feminist agenda where every show has to have a “strong, independent” woman character that turns out to be extremely limiting.
> But Netflix’s quarterly subscriber growth is now slowing in spite of spending more money than ever on content
To me the problem is the content. They now seem to produce shows for particular niches that are never my niche. Some of these extremely expensive shows are laughably low quality on all fronts: story, acting, stylistic choices, cinematography/direction... everything.
Take the new Cowboy Bebop: it's obviously not made for fans of the original. Is it made for new fans? For adults? For children? I couldn't tell.
Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it's not as though I'm a difficult audience.
If Netflix produce shows with particular political or cultural slants, they need to make sure there's an audience of people who watches shows for their politics & cultural slants, rather than for being, er, good.
I watch shows with compelling stories and solid characters. I'm not interested in race, gender, sexual orientation, identity, etc, except inasmuch as it makes for interesting stories and adds to a character's personality or motivations.
There's an audience of people on Twitter who defend/malign Netflix shows, and people on Youtube who make/consume video essays about them, but is anybody in that group actively watching that original content with joy and getting more value from their Netflix subscription than they got the previous year?
> Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it's not as though I'm a difficult audience.
I know what you mean - but is that Hollywood, or is it us becoming grown-ups?
I mean, it's possible all movies are aimed at the tastes of teenagers, and the reason Terminator 2 and Robocop and Die Hard seemed like great movies is because I saw them when I was a teenager.
The innumerable superhero movies we have nowerdays may seem like a snoozefest in comparison - but maybe that's just because I'm no longer a teenager.
You had to choose those three movies as movies that only seemed great as a teenager? I'd argue they've aged better than a lot of movies from that time period and I'm pretty sure I don't hold the minority opinion there.
Hell, I got tired of adults making nonstop jokes and references to watching Die Hard as a Christmas movie on Facebook just a month ago.
Wait, Die Hard isn't a Christmas movie?? We watched it with our college age kids over the break as one. Sure seemed like a perfect Christmas movie to me, even redeeming a rocky marriage at the end.
Of those 20 bad movies, the majority are the fun-to-watch kind.
Even the descriptions in the post grudgingly admit that many of these bad movies 1) did well at the box office and 2) developed a cult following:
> Cobra failed with critics and was a disappointment. It's one of the worst movies of the 80s. However, turns out the fans loved it. It soon gained a massive cult following. It follows a basic action movie formula that failed to impress. Sylvester Stallone wrote the film but had issues with the studio. However, It did well at the box office. On the other hand, the violence and story failed to connect with fans at the time. Of course, things can always change. Cobra managed to find a whole new fan base. It's now a cult classic.
I think I agree with you, in fact it gave me a few movies I hadn't seen that are now on my to-watch list (and a couple to rewatch, like Tango & Cash). But at least it's a better list of action movies that haven't aged as well than Terminator 2, Robocop, and Die Hard.
Maybe I'm just in some kind of weird minority (I also like modern art and brutalist architecture) but many of the TV shows I've most enjoyed watching over the last year have been Netflix originals. Arcane and Castlevania are both up there with the best western animation ever, The Witcher and Cobra Kai are great pulpy fun while still having compelling characters, and Kate is my favorite action movie.
Yep, sometimes Netflix manages to produce a good season one of a new series, but they lack the ability create followup seasons. My favorite example is Luke Cage. Season one is fantastic, but season two is so bad that it makes you think that season one was written by someone else entirely.
The main issue for Netflix has been losing their back catalog, as the content owners started offering their own streaming services. Netflix could produce a few good shows each year, but not as main as they're trying to. It's just that few people would pay for that, without the vast back catalog.
There's still much to watch, but finding the good stuff is becoming increasingly hard. A better recommendation engine might fix some of the issues, but in the long run I think Netflix is becoming a niche player.
Not taking away from your main point, but the ABC-Marvel-Netflix shows were sandbagged by Ike Perlmutter at Marvel, who wouldn't let them be treated as first-class citizens with the movies. Daredevil was still pretty sweet across all seasons, thankfully.
discoverability on netflix has been incredibly poor for many years. i don't want to dig through infinite feeds of twee-sounding categories your algorithm came up with. i don't want to see what you think i want (a bunch of cheaper derivatives of things i've already watched). i want to look for specific things in specific categories and find them.
i don't even recommend movies on netflix to friends and family anymore because now it's a coinflip whether they'll still be available. but the most damning indictment i've witnessed is that my technologically illiterate parents have simply gone back to getting dvds from the library.
The golden age of Netflix was when it had a full library of other networks' shows.
It was completely unsustainable at $8.99/mo or whatever it was back in 2013-15. The price of the brick went up each time renewal discussions happened, and the rights holders were planning to set up their own networks anyway.
What I didn't anticipate was how fast Netflix would dump AAA content and replace it with a deluge of B and C grade TV shows. The halo effect that "Netflix Original" used to have thanks to shows like House of Cards is long gone. Browse through the listings past the Top 10 shows and it looks like a 3rd rate cable tv channel showing nothing but straight to DVD movies.
> The halo effect that "Netflix Original" used to have thanks to shows like House of Cards...
It wasn't even 'original' in that it was a UK series years earlier. I understand they made changes, and, IIRC, milked it for a lot more than the UK series. But that wasn't... "original". Good original series though. There's likely more good UK stuff Netflix could mine.
> It wasn't even 'original' in that it was a UK series years earlier. I understand they made changes, and, IIRC, milked it for a lot more than the UK series.
I hear you, but the first season of the US House of Cards comprised the action of all three series of the UK version. It's hard to say that the Netflix version was not original considering it went on considerably longer.
Amazon has the rights atm and even tried making an American version that really really sucked and had nowhere near the cinematography and editing chops of the British version
While obviously Netflix has a lot to loose here, it don’t think it’s “their fault” for dumping AAA content. The reality is that every content producer on the planet knows they’ll make more money selling their own subscription platform. Netflix can’t continue to get Marvel movies, for example, now that Disney has pulled the plug. There’s not any amount of cash Netflix could afford to pay which would be enough for The Mouse to take content off of Disney+.
This is the same for every studio out there — well-loved shows like The Office, Brooklyn 99, Parks & Rec, etc. are getting taken back by their owners. Dozens of new streaming services are appearing.
In reality, there’s not much Netflix can do about it besides double down on original content.
I think an ideal future for consumers would be federated media platforms, where all content is available in any number of media platforms, and the amount you pay is passed back to the content owners based on what you watch. But I doubt that will ever happen under current IP laws.
In capitalism, profit wins. Right now, streaming services are essentially pure profit and make money because content owners have exclusive access to their own content — who would pay for Disney+ if all of their content was available elsewhere?
There's two sides of this coin. On one hand, consumers have gotten a horrendous deal in the past with cable. Expensive price, plus tons of commercials; they literally don't even broadcast a good portion of the day. Even current Netflix, with their shitty lineup, beats the deal I was getting on cable.
On the other had, consumers have now grown accustomed to really favorable deals on content. All media must be free. Everything must be rolled into one low, low price. We used to happily buy 1-4 CD(s) a week. I'm pretty sure I've spent more on CD(s) in a single transaction than on an entire year of spotify... and that was as a kid with no money.
We used to buy DVD(s) all the time. You'd spend $200-500 a year on several streaming services. I feel like I spent that just on DVD(s) as gifts for christmas every year. People don't want to pay a cent for news or subscription media. This used to be a major expenditure.
It used to be that a good chunk of your money was spent on media. You have to have entertainment to make your life better, so you pay whatever you have to. In the past there was far less competition, and consumers were getting some really bad deals. Now I think consumers are often out of wack with their expectations.
Why on earth should the government implement price fixing to limit what people make on intellectual property? Why do you think $10-20/mo is the fair price for ALL THE CONTENT IN THE WORLD, vs. the $50-100 you'd have to pay (and a cable package would be like $100-300)... In the 90s we'd pay over $100/mo for like 5 CD(s), and cable prices were insane.
This stuff isn't cheap, easy, or risk free to produce either. I've been as critical of producers as anyone, but people often lose sight of this.
Eh, our family freaking loves Netflix originals. And there are many from different countries. But I guess it's probably because we generally like to explore more than just look for something artificially hyped up through marketing.
IMO the Netflix originals over the past several years are terrible, and this pricing hike is to pay for more of them rather than buying AAA catalog content. No thanks
What about the outcome of a generation that watched nothing but reality TV, Fear Factor, and prank shows? Not disagreeing with you entirely, but I don't think it's scary, because it's nothing new to have swaths of people exclusively consuming low-quality junk.
The Three Stooges know they are stupid and are in on the joke and so is the viewer. Most of the top 10 don’t acknowledge it and the viewer is the joke. There’s a big difference.
You could literally replace "Netflix top 10" with any popular media that was a boogey man in previous generations including rap music, video games, MTV, rock and roll, horror movies, etc.
Netflix is part of the FAANG acronym because they have all these highly paid engineers. Presumably those people have been doing something for the past 5 years in anticipation of being disrupted by Disney/HBO/etc. besides maintaining their CDN and tweaking recommendation engines, but it's not clear what - the product is more or less the same as it always was.
> Presumably those people have been doing something for the past 5 years in anticipation of being disrupted
A lot of cool technology, no doubt. Unless they start writing scripts, directing, acting, editing it might not help.
It’s a bit like if a hospital had a really cool IT department, highest paid engineers, latest database tech and hardware. But it’s not enough, as their surgeons are not as good as ones from the older hospital across town.
I think Netflix's product is not software but content. I understand what you're referring to but if Prime Video's UX is any indication, content trumps software product quality in this market segment.
If I were Netflix I'd probably divest the technology side of the business (which is arguably the best in the market) and sell that "software product" as a white label streaming platform to the myriad of media houses across the world trying to get into streaming.
That’s pretty surprising to me. Prime’s video playback UX is very bad on Roku TV, iOS, and the web. Netflix isn’t just faster to use, it also looks better, doesn't have shockingly pixelated elements on 4k displays, and is easier to control.
Netflix keeps randomizing things: Thumbnails, order of categories, order of shows within. In addition, they keep stuff I don’t want to watch in "keep watching" forever, and keep asking me to rewatch shows I already watched.
They are probably still a bit better than prime (showing shows both in keep watching and other categories, but in the other categories it’s specific seasons ignoring your last watched status; sometimes shuffling subtitle state or language for fun), but all those issues were not a thing a few years ago.
Really? Amazon Prime had(has?) one of the worst UX issues I've ever seen... with Auto Starting episodes from a shows page (if you had partially viewed) and if you x out of the episode auto starting again - with no way to navigate to other episodes of the show. Like being stuck in an MC Escher painting.
Prime video seemed like the worst example. How many people but people video separate as opposed to just having it’s because it’s included in Amazon Prime?
I agree with your point. Netflix is in the custom content business. If anyone is confused about that and thinks their engineers will ultimately make or break the business, a rude awakening is inbound.
The Netflix tech lead, if it matters much at all at this point, is perpetually shrinking. There's only so much that shuffling what-to-watch-next algorithms on the Titanic deck will do for you. Disney has an epic amount of money to throw at anything they want to, so do Apple and Amazon. Netflix stands zero chance of keeping a magic lead via a couple thousand very highly paid engineers; there is only so much those engineers can do to make a difference, only so much to optimize in that product, and they can do absolutely nothing to bolster the biggest value proposition: content wins out.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for a very long time. I can't name anything they make that I care about or have watched recently. I can't name a single mega show I permanently associate with them (like I might the Sopranos with HBO etc). I agree with most everyone else in this thread, Netflix is first on the chopping block, because their content sucks. A streaming product has to be exceptionally bad to lose in the market if you have superior content (with a reasonable price); the largely tech superior streaming product that Netflix has had isn't going to be enough to beat their competition unless their content is stellar too.
I won't say a streaming platform is a commodity at this point but it's close. Others may disagree but I don't really find a meaningful usability difference between Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+.
I do. Netflix always works for me and I don't think I've ever found a bug. HBO Max on the other hand routinely fails to stream with an error and has lots of UI bugs. Little things like if you're watching a show and go to the episode list there's no way to change seasons.
That said, it doesn't matter much because HBO's crappy app is the only way to watch their content so I put up with it.
On a similar note, I didn't end up getting Peacock or Disney+ for several months because they just didn't have apps for the streaming devices I use. Whereas Netflix up until recently even had an app for Nintendo DS. They've put a lot of effort into being available on most platforms.
FAANG was coined as an acronym for best performing stocks in mid-2010s. Netflix has some of the top paid engineers in the world, but that's not why they're part of FAANG.
At least for me, Netflix consistently has the fewest problems (failing to load, apps crashing, buffering on a 900 mbps connection, etc) of any streaming service I use. So the engineering is working in that regard.
Based on what I've seen in their engineering blogs, they've been spending a lot of time on streamlining the production and distribution process. I guess that makes sense for a production company. But I wonder if they're getting good value for what they're spending on it. It may so much less than what they're spending on producing content that nobody's paying attention.
Anecdotally, I've heard working with netflix on the production side is not that fun. They ask a lot of you and pay a little, and you don't have creative freedom. Maybe that's the streamlining they are referring to? We will see if this helps them or hurts them by shooing what could have been good production talent for them to HBO and other competitors in town.
Streamlining production seems like a wrong goal in this game. I mean, who cares if you can efficiently churn out dozens or hundreds of new TV-shows and movies if none of them are good? Having one really good TV-show on the catalogue is worth a hundred crappy TV-shows. And if you manage to produce one good show, who cares if its' production process was extremely efficient. It's a long tail game.
Being able to quickly and efficiently set up a group pitching some creative vision but lacking any experience with Netflix-sized budgets? Preferably without installing some cookie-cutter producers that make everything they touch look, feel and taste the same? That's huge if they are good at it.
I'm not saying that they are, but now that streaming seems to be basically solved (it has become a commodity) this is the quality that will likely make the winners.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to be defaulting to "Netflix didn't see this obvious thing" rather than "competing with Disney is ridiculously hard even if you have the smartest executives on the planet".
Is it? They could (hypothetically, for the sake of argument) pivot to become a PAAS for the competitors (exit the streaming market, offer to today's competitors a superior/cheaper underlying technology, let them watch fight among themselves for who get what series while they provide the plumbings)
While Netflix level performance is difficult, getting 90% there is a lot easier today than 10 years ago. And 90% there seems to be fine for consumers as long as the content is there
I think there would be a market for that, but not one that justifies a $230 billion valuation. It would be virtually impossible for Netflix to pursue a strategy like that because they would be admitting defeat and taking a loss for their shareholders.
I couldn't tell you what they are doing, but Netflix easily has the best app experience out of any of the streaming platforms and it isn't even close. I've been using HBO Max and Disney+ a lot over the last few months. Plenty of good content, but I pretty consistently have issues with both of their apps.
Well they destroyed/lobotomized the recommendation system. I don’t know how much of that was command from up above but engineers were definitely involved in that.
Well .. they did boast a lot about their microservice architecture. Five years just strikes me as the typical time to get completely entangled in bitrot...
The infrastructure engineers built an awesome highway, but the other half (content creators) aren't creating enough quality cars. Content creators, and the people who make content/entertainment decisions, are not the same people as the infrastructure engineers and have little in common except they both use computers.
Even in the 1980ies, owning all the best guitars, microphones and Marshall stacks (and hair products) wouldn't help you become a rock star if your music wasn't any good.
In streaming subscriptions you can very much fail from bad tech, but better tech won't make any difference over good enough.
Netflix's user experience has always been bad, and it's worse than ever. Engineers also don't make content, so if they're doing any good, I guess it's backend.
I think my point has been missed. You don't need that much manpower to maintain CDN. They have to either be working on something new, or sitting around doing nothing. I'm assuming they are not doing nothing so I am wondering what their product people have them working on that could be so inconsequential as to not be having any effect on their loss of market share.
Honestly, at $167 a year the content on Netflix is very…blah. Yet it’s also very diverse with more niches and sub-genres to explore. Also it’s foreign content is amazing and has introduced me to things like wuxia, xianxia, the Scandinavian Police Procedural, and Whatever The Heck French Cinema Is Doing These Days.
Unfortunately, with the content being so vast and “throw it at the wall” I’ve found it’s recommendation engine is becoming far, far worse.
The Lost Daughter is exactly the sort of Indie Film Navel Gazing Trash (TM) that I want to watch on my iPad in bed. I only found out about the movie from a Reddit post. It did not once hit the hero banner on any of my devices, much less surface in a recommendation category further down. I’ve thumbs up’ed several movies of similar style, content, and even actors (Olivia Colman ALONE should surface it in my recommendations considering how many things she’s in were thumbs-upped.)
There’s also the weird place that the whole “My List” feature sits. Sometimes their A/B testing (or something) completely removes it from my home screen. All I get is “Keep Watching” and then recommendations. However, adding a show to your list seems to suck you immediately into a black hole of just that thing. It completely overrides the recommendation engine until you go out of your way to watch something else.
I dunno, I just keep finding my interactions with Netflix baffling and with the price continuing to rise harder and harder to justify outside of picking up for a month at time when my “Things to watch on Netflix” list hits a show and two movies worth.
It's all starting to get expensive. The content on Netflix keeps disappearing without warnings. Half the time you have subtitles in a limited number of languages. Also they now started adding games, why do I need to pay extra for games I never subscribed for or even want? Make it a add-on or something.
For example, Netflix DE has subtitles but the Netflix UK won't have the same German subtitles available. Disney+ is doing this better by offering the nearly all subtitles nearly all the time. I can understand that dubbed audio might not be available on other country Netflix' but the subtitles?
Sometimes I am too tired to listen to English and prefer to read subtitles :)
Also the German subtitles are often very different from the German audio, apparently translated by completely different people. Makes it very annoying to watch with subtitles on.
Same goes for English too, my partner has a processing disorder with speech and needs subtitles to help her, and Netflix subtitles are among the worst we've ever experienced. Not just minor mistakes but completely different sentences that change the entire meaning of the conversation/scene. It's become an ongoing joke for us in our day to day watching, but is also annoying enough that if she actually cares about the show/movie we end up torrenting it purely for the better subs available.
It can get a bit impossible. I recently wanted to watch Don't Look Up with Croatian audio (am Croatian, I know it's stupid but I thought it would be funny) and Chinese subtitles (because that's my GF's first language), but it is not possible. If I am on my Croatian profile I can use Croatian audio but not Chinese subtitles. If she is on her profile she can use Chinese subtitles but not Croatian audio.
I get that it's a UX thing because most people aren't interested in Swahili subtitles, but it would be nice to have an option to expand the list since I know they have the data.
> I can understand that dubbed audio might not be available on other country Netflix' but the subtitles?
Subtitles are absolutely limited by region by the studios as part of stopping people VPNing around to access titles that haven't been paid for in that region.
Netflix content that is available in .nl and .br (I'm in .nl, my wife speaks pt-br) only have a couple of subtitles (english, german, sometimes dutch) and the same content in .br has totally different set of subtitles.
appletv+ and disney+ and amazon prime simply offer all available subs. So it's not a UI issue, simply have a look at how they do it.
And then they wonder why people pirate and use opensubtitles/legendas.tv ? Should be really really easy for them to fix.
Netflix only shows audio/subtitle tracks that are in languages they think are relevant to you.
But nowadays you can configure additional visible languages yourself on the language settings page (checkboxes under "Programmes & Films Languages") without changing the UI language: https://www.netflix.com/LanguagePreferences
Seems silly to me not to list all available languages. I would have never known this if you didn’t tell me. I didn’t slipped my mind to consider its a Profile Settings thing.
I stopped using Netflix when their catalog went from a rotation of decent movies and TV series to a pile of house produced content that shoves irrelevant content at me.
Something about Netflix produced shows seem too crafted by marketing types. It's like a committee comes up with a list of attributes for a show that are just the right amount of woke, edgy, trendy, and demographic evenness. The result is a simulacrum of a TV show, like it is in an uncanny valley. It looks and smells like good content but it just isn't.
Typical startup play: charge almost nothing for a decade or longer, then raise prices or reduce offerings later on after killing almost every competing offering in the world. This time, there are still several competitors left though. One day these services that aim to replace cable will be basically identical to cable but more expensive, or else there will be a bunch of walled gardens
It’s like YouTube will the ad spam. YouTube wiped out every competitor who played ads or tried to monetize. Now that it stands on their corpses with a monopoly, they are pushing subscriptions and ads extremely hard, sometimes 3 ads in a 15 min video now
> Typical startup play: charge almost nothing for a decade or longer, then raise prices or reduce offerings later on after killing almost every competing offering in the world.
If this is meant to describe Netflix, it’s categorically incorrect.
10 years ago, Netflix was a library of third party content. Today, their top content consists of Netflix’s own produced shows.
The nature of their business has changed. You may appreciate their content or think all their originals are horrible. Regardless, it’s unreasonable in my mind that after 10 years in an evolving business, prices would stay the same.
> One day these services that aim to replace cable will be basically identical to cable but more expensive, or else there will be a bunch of walled gardens
Again - cable services were merely an intermediary. The business model shifted where you pay the content house directly and watch shows without ads. I don’t see any direct comparison here.
They don't have to cost a lot of money though. I've heard its getting to the points where its cheaper to shoot practical special effects like miniatures again than it is to contract out CGI work.
There are networks that operate on low budgets. But Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Disney, etc. aren't spending hundreds of millions of shows out of generosity to artists.
This argument is a strawman, come on, is YouTube really wondering about any content consumption habit after being the most popular video portal for more than a decade? It's all just doing business, and all of that is just part of doing business. If enough people block youtube's ad domains, they'll just start embedding them in the video stream. And then just obfuscate the player so that you can't make it skip. Then maybe integrate the whole stack vertically so that you can't do anything with it, because it's encrypted from the server to your display panel. There's no "wondering" here at all.
ads are already embedded in the stream, usually by youtubers themselves ("this video is sponsored by shadow nord raid vpn,..."), and extensions block this too.
But once the ad to content ratio gets bad (and we're getting there), people just move elsewhere.
I don't think so. We're already burying Netflix in this comment section, and cable still exist. Look at any sporting events, just how much more ads can it have? They have sponsored content plastered everywhere, and then, the exclusive broadcasting rights are sold to the highest bidder, so if you care about sports, you have to watch it on that exact one platform. And yet, it's very popular. So no I don't think people would move. People, in general, want things, and weigh in how much it also affects them negatively. They'll defer, deny, ignore, whatever it takes to participate in that "want". And the providers of that "want" know exactly this and ram as much profitable negativity in there as they can, and cover it up as much as they can. And people on the receiving end will tolerate. That's how ads will stay, with a combination of legality and applied psychology.
I really hope Netflix proves everyone wrong. HBO and Disney+ may have a huge advantage but neither seems interested in the tech side. Disney+ may be OK now (it's been a while since I checked) but HBO Max seems to be extremely inconsistent when it comes to streaming quality. Even new, popular shows like Euphoria on HBO Max are only 1080p with a bitrate so low that the frequent, dimly lit scenes are a blocky mess. At the same time, AAA movies like Dune stream in nearly Bluray quality. Meanwhile even dumb reality shows on Netflix still stream with suburb quality.
IMO assuming Netflix doubles down on original content which seems to be the assumed direction, they have two strategies. Strategy one is to produce/distribute content that is developed outside the US where production is much cheaper and existing production companies have less of an advantage. Partnering with local, smaller production outfits is probably a good strategy.
Strategy two is to use their tech advantage to lower the cost of content production. I'm quite surprised that we haven't seen Netflix create a Holodeck-esque production method. The Mandalorian (Disney+/Holodeck) and The Witcher Season 1(Netflix) have somewhat similar production costs per episode at ~$15M and ~$10M respectively but The Mandalorian had significantly more and better CG then The Witcher so clearly the Holodeck method has a lot of benefits and cost savings.
That said Squid Game only had a total budget of ~$21M, although a lot lighter on CG, strategy one offers a more cost savings.
I dropped Netflix about a year ago in no small part because any show with dark scenes (e.g., "Stranger Things") look like a blocky mess in HD. For a while, I thought somehow my network was at fault, but I don't have the issue with other services. When I looked into it, it seems Netflix's HD compression is bad on OLED displays and the "solution" is to pay them a premium to get 4K streams. Meanwhile, the other providers include 4K in their base offering and things generally look great.
That is not surprising. If you aren't paying for the highest bitrate stream then it's not a fair comparison. HBO Max's highest bitrate is far more like Netflix's mid-tier option. What's weird is that movies that were released on HBO Max like Dune are in great quality and a much higher bitrate.
TBH it's a bit strange to pay the premium for an OLED but then not be willing to pay for the highest bitrate. The fact that it's called 4K and it's technically in 4K is a bit misleading. Plus having Dolby Vision will make a huge difference when watching on an OLED.
I'm not sure what's unfair about the comparison. No other 1080p source I've tried has this problem. OTA TV, HDHomeRun, Plex, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon, Apple TV+, Vudu, HBO Now -> Max, video game consoles, Blu-ray, and some others. I don't care too much about what the underlying bitrate is. I have a 350 Mbps connection and expect the stream to eventually settle on something high quality. Netflix's HD plan is more expensive than any of the others'. For that, I'd expect the stream to not suck. Some of those services do stream content in 4K and I agree that's not a fair comparison, but they do have HD content and they don't upcharge for the 4K stuff.
Keep in mind, it's not like it's Netflix alerted me to a problem. I've used the LG built-in app, so they know what TV I have. I just had shows with crappy scenes for a long time.
The 4k subscription is easy to share with friends/family and looks great on OLED. Getting a group together to split subscriptions is something that really wasn't possible with cable but greatly increases the value of these services.
OLEDs can display true black whereas standard LCDs cannot. If the black regions are compressed and blacks become something close to black, but not quite, it looks bad on an OLED as that region is illuminated. Netflix appears to compress blacks very heavily, so you end up with large rectangles of slightly different dark shades, none of which are really black.
I'm not an expert on panel technology, but I think because LCDs have a backlight, the issue isn't as pronounced there. It just kinda washes out.
I've also seen this issue on regular LCD TVs with HD streams. It can get really pronounced in scenes with slow camera movement where a static dark background turns into a blocky, jumpy mess of compression artifacts.
I want to trust that the codecs know that it's hard to see dark, so I wonder if the displays are being calibrated incorrectly, maybe to pump up the brightness for the showroom.
Fortunately, Netflix is the only service exhibiting this issue. Blu-rays look great in 1080p and UHD. Other streaming services look good as well. I've also tried Netflix on multiple devices connected to the TV. In all cases, the Netflix HD stream is distractingly blocky during dark scenes.
My best guess is their choice of codec and compression settings predate OLED availability and they don't want to re-encode and just expect people to upgrade to their 4K plan. I've never had their 4K plan, so I can't say whether that truly addresses the problem.
The entire streaming division (DSS) was born out of BAMTech, the pioneer of streaming media. There is no place other than DSS that has that kind of tech pedigree in regards to streaming.
Wow your interview anecdote is totally different from mine. My interview at Disney+ was one of the weirdest I've ever had. Really open ended questions, but the interviewer was looking for very specific answers. At one point the interviewer just laid back in his chair and closed their eyes for a few minutes. I came away really confused and – unsurprisingly – without an offer but not really sure what I was expected to have done differently.
Here in Europe netflix content/catalog is degrading so rapidly that I have no reason anymore - since at least an year and half - to keep a subscription up, especially for what it costs now. Last time I resubscribed to look at it was in December and I just ended up watching just squid game and rewatching narcos. Nothing else interesting anymore in there, and their own IPs are mostly bad
I am honestly sad for how the market ended up, even if yeah, for sure now there is more competition... But I don't want to subscribe to multiple services, it makes it all inconvenient compared to just grabbing a torrent
It's a larger problem than that, isn't it? We collectively moved from piracy to Netflix and other streaming platforms because the appeal was gone.
But pulling the rug from underneath your users and removing movies and TV series they have built a relationship to just serves to piss off the very people you expect to pay for your service -- I understand it's a "complicated" IP problem (really, it's just too many greedy parties), but this will end in one result: more piracy.
Cancelling shows, pulling content to replace it with ... nothing (sometimes they pull content to force users to watch the new netflix original reboot), providing only a subset of available subtitles/audiotracks based on the region of your account ...
Really, today it's actually A LOT easier to pirate content and have tools to automatically fetch missing subtitles then to follow netflix content before it is sent to the void.
> But pulling the rug from underneath your users and removing movies and TV series they have built a relationship to just serves to piss off the very people you expect to pay for your service -- I understand it's a "complicated" IP problem (really, it's just too many greedy parties), but this will end in one result: more piracy.
You're saying that like Netflix has any choice in the matter. Yes, it's in part a problem of greed in the abstract sense, but it's not like Netflix has any incentive to pull shows off its catalog, or any way to stand up to the likes of Disney.
Netflix signed the agreement in the first place, they clearly knew what would happen: important and large parts of catalog was only temporary, until the competition started their own services or otherwise pulled content. They knew their catalog was going away, yet they offered it to attract users, who are now increasingly becoming disillusioned and leaving the service with a bitter aftertaste. See sibling comments.
I also did not pin this on Netflix, though I did say users -- it is in the rights holders' interests that their content gains popularity so they can sell merchandise, and produce more content. They are pulling the rug out from underneath that audience too.
This is showing basic cable in the 20-30 range? What company is giving out those prices? Even at promo prices, which are going go up like crazy once the promo period is over, basic cable is still higher, and they have added costs like local broadcast station charges.
Basic cable in my area is really just all the free over the air broadcast channels but with a reliable connection. Cable with all the channels you would expect (VH1, MTV, ESPN, Disney, etc) is $100 and HBO is still extra on top of that.
You should compare quality and bitrate with an OTA antenna. We switched to an antenna and the quality is WAY better! There’s an insane amount of compression happening on the coaxial cable TV feed.
A few months back I went through my watch history on the app after thinking I hadn't seen a good Netflix series in awhile and comparing 2018/2019 to 2020/2021 Netflix put out 5X less content I was interested in. There was a period where almost every weekend there was a new series dropping or a comedy special or something interesting and then it just fell off a complete cliff. Understandably covid impacted productions but somehow other streaming networks seemed to do much better.
Netflix's position on cancelling shows on a whim is also extremely frustrating. It's also completely bizarre to me that they (or really any streaming service) don't seem to be willing to even try to create any quality sitcoms despite paying fortunes to license all the good ones from the past 20 years and these clearly having massive value from a re-watchability perspective on a platform compared to a watch it once drama series.
Also I don't understand why the user interface particularly on AppleTV particularly around new shows is basically straight up hostile to the user. Just show me a damn feed for new content (this is one of the most insane trends in tech lately of refusal to have a time series feed of content (Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, etc). Netflix will show under "New" stuff that came out months and months ago and at the same time a new season will come out of a show they know i've watched previous seasons of and it won't even be the first thing on my feed.
Now in December for the first time in ages they actually had some good content to buy back some goodwill after being so bad for nearly all of the pandemic and what do they do... immediately jack up prices. Insanity.
Er if you look at their charts, it looks like in absolute value, netflix didn't raise prices faster (the article does a good job "omitting" the average price of cable in 2011). It's because it was cheaper in the first place that the percentage is higher.
The extrapolation in the chart is laughable.
Not defending netflix, but this article is an insult to the reader.
Yes, but article calls out some big differences that the headline skips…
even with Netflix’s recent price increase,
the company’s standard plan is still only
about half the price of a typical basic
cable plan and arguably offers more value
with no advertising and a lot of original
content that doesn't appear on TV.
Bit of a Schrodinger's cat situation isn't it? If it became difficult to unsubscribe, you would only find out when you attempted to do it, not at any time before.
I unsubscribe immediately after subscribing. If someone in my household notices the lapsed subscription after a month, only then do I resub. We're usually, but not always, subbed to Netflix.
I figured the best way to purchase is to subscribe for one month, watch all you want, and then stop. Repeat when new series that you are interested in show up again.
Again I really think this business model is stretching for them. I would rather to subscribe on a full catalog of all classic movies and Documentaries before the year 2000 and I can subscribe that for many years.
They realize that people might do this, and they of course know exactly how many are doing exactly this. And currently it's not many enough to be a threat to their bottom line. What happens when it does become an issue, is that shows roll out with episodes every week (so you must wait a season until you can binge watch), and also that per-months subscriptions become more expensive while yearly subscriptions become cheaper.
Netflix needs to figure out how to put out good content that people actually want to watch.
I cancelled when they thought that rebooting Masters of the Universe, turning it into feminist propaganda, and then having Kevin Smith lie about the content, was a good idea. I don't give money to companies who actively trash the things I like for woke points.
Lol. I mean they probably did go through some of these motions but there is no way to trust the predictive value of such methods in a constantly-changing and competitive industry.
Netflix will be probably be the cable "channel" I think of canceling last, for the simple reason that their usage ergonomics are stupidly simple.
When I go to the Netflix app, I have a simple value proposition – pay money for viewing, in any country across the world if it's a Netflix original, and without any add-on crap. The only thing they did wrong was autoplaying previews, and I hope whoever was responsible for that has been fired, or at least demoted.
Competitor streaming services refuse to implement this basic, simple model of content consumption for some reason. They seem determined to be Yahoo! in comparison to Netflix's Google-like simplicity. Here are some examples of my usage, with a bit of light ranting about pain points thrown in.
[Amazon Video]: Makes me think about whether to rent or buy from them, or whether buy a Showtime "add-on" (yay, more subscriptions within this subscription!). Also, a lot of the content is moving to some sort of ad-supported "IMDb TV". Good luck with that, I'm out. Lots of content restrictions when outside the US (admittedly a niche use case). Oh, and they have autoplay on some content that I can't figure out how to turn off.
[HBO Max]: Makes (or used to make) me log in through my cable provider. Huh, why is this streaming service asking me about my internet provider? I cut my cable package a year ago, and haven't gotten around to re-subscribing to HBO Max; I don't really miss any of the shows enough.
[Hulu]: Close to the Netflix experience, except it makes me think about ad-supported v/s ad-free versions. I don't want to feel bad about losing money for not watching ads. Also, doesn't work outside the US (admittedly a niche use case).
[Disney+]: Not much of a pull if you don't have kids, but if you do, I imagine that this is closest to the early-2000s Netflix experience, but for kids.
[Peacock]: More ad-supported nonsense, plus my cable provider is trying to push a "free" subscription to it in exchange for installing one of their weird devices on my network. No thank you, and please be more mindful of the environment before contributing to e-waste in landfills with your horrible devices. I would do it if I wanted to re-watch The Office, but I managed to finish it before it was leaving, guess what, Netflix.
[Apple TV]: I...don't understand why people give Netflix a hard time about surviving on original content when the only good things about this streaming service are Ted Lasso and maybe Foundation. Watched those on a free subscription, hard pass for everything else. Is this the best that the most valuable company on Earth can manage about media?
HBO Max has more and better content than any of the other ones you listed.
* I watched the new Dune on it, a bunch of other new movies are there
* most (all?) the Cartoon network stuff like Rick and Morty is there
* all the HBO content is there, Jon Oliver, GoT, etc.
* it passed the Matrix test. (1. I want to watch the original Matrix. 2. I searched for the Matrix and clicked the result. 3. It streamed the Matrix to me.)
* that crazy Ridley Scott series with those shrieking harpies that fly around asploding the hell out of atheists
* HBO has a track record of producing high-quality content on subscription model. If they win the streaming wars they are the least likely to do annoying ad-support bullshit dark patterns (like those ads shoved in the middle of a fucking scene on some ad-supported services now)
Edit: reworded so I only use the adjective "fucking" once when referring to ad-based streaming services
> * it passed the Matrix test. (1. I want to watch the original Matrix. 2. I searched for the Matrix and clicked the result. 3. It streamed the Matrix to me.)
This Matrix test is a great one, I'm going to apply it to a bunch of services and see what I get.
I think I might just have a bit of a hangover from how many times HBO Max logged me out and made me log back in via some contorted system with my cable provider that has caused me inertia with renewing it. Also, now that I think back, another problem that caused me to avoid it a bit was that the HBO Max app sometimes just seemed to freeze up on my Roku in the middle of navigating through shows. Certainly possible they have improved the app over the last year, and will respect my time more if I pay them $15 + taxes per month directly instead of through a shitty cable subscription.
In any case, I freely concede that HBO Max probably does have a higher-quality backlog of content overall – my main point is that a simpler interface can actually make up for lack of content in some cases.
> * that crazy Ridley Scott series with those shrieking harpies that fly around asploding the hell out of atheists
Raised by Wolves? I think the creepy sci-fi vibe of Scott's stuff is just not my thing – everything in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant both just made me uncomfortable instead of interested, even though they had visuals that were technically impressive. The trailer for that series seemed similar when I watched it.
> Edit: reworded so I only use the adjective "fucking" once when referring to ad-based streaming services
I think you were right the first time. Ad-based services these days always remind me of the 15 Million Merits Black Mirror episode.
> In any case, I freely concede that HBO Max probably does have a higher-quality backlog of content overall – my main point is that a simpler interface can actually make up for lack of content in some cases.
I agree with you there. I find the interface for HBO Max really frustrating.
Also, discoverability is a problem. On Netflix if I do a search for something, I can usually feel ahead of time "in my bones" when the search won't return a result. I think this is because Netflix does a decent job of advertising its niche of content. However, on HBO Max I was actually surprised that Tenet was available on there. I still don't have a good sense of exactly how deep their catalog is.
"Outside USA", might be a niche case for you but it's the main reality for most people. It's the best thing about Netflix that I can have an account in any country and go to any other country and still access most content.
I've got some other services too, so I'll see how they cope with me being in a totally different country to the one I subscribed in initially.
If you still have a valid payment option in the original country, you can stay subscribed. But if you move to europe, and you want a south-american netflix account, have fun trying to get it paid.
Also, subtitles and audio tracks dont always stay in the list they were in the origin country (shows that have brazilian audio and subs when you are in brasil dont always have those while you are in europe. I am in this boat)
:) It's not a niche use case for me either; I was just trying to account for the fact that it is likely niche to most of HN's (likely US-centric) readership.
Something I’ve found interesting with cable vs. streaming services is that when cable was the only option, people didn’t like that you had to get the sports package to somehow get the history channel. In addition to this, it’s extremely difficult to turn on and off access to certain cable packages because you’d need to call them. Now though, we have the content split up very piecemeal and I now hear complaints that “there are too many streaming services”. It seems like we got what we asked for as a market but the model is still flawed.
But you still don't get content a la carte; Paramount's service comes with Nickelodeon and CBS football whether you want them or not, and they continue to push their favorite broadcast stuff no matter why you originally subscribed.
I think the ideal setup from a user-convenience standpoint is where you just pay a monthly subscription to access everything and the money is distributed across whatever you watch the most.
Though obviously that has a lot of logistical issues, like how you could get all these competing companies onboard with something that takes so much control out of their hands. And also the fact that watch time isn't a great metric for who deserves the most money. It wouldn't be surprising if low-quality, factory produced children's content would start making the most money since parents would just throw on some kid's show and let it babysit for most of the day. That's basically what happened on YouTube, with the weird auto-generated algorithm/SEO-optimised children's content.
I often wonder why Netflix is willing to pay so much for the Office and Friends but isn't trying to make a new show like that. Every new show is an 8 episode season of "prestige" TV.
> I often wonder why Netflix is willing to pay so much for the Office and Friends but isn't trying to make a new show like that.
Because the hit rate for sitcoms is infinitesimal, and it's still cheaper to buy Friends than it is to commission two hundred new shows 199 of which sink without trace.
They tried with Space Force. A workplace comedy starring Steve Carrel created by Carrell and Greg Daniels, who was the original show runner for the Office and also helped create Parks and Rec. It had a great cast. It just wasn’t very good sadly.
My layman’s interpretation is that creativity thrives under constraint.
The Office and Parks and Rec struck creative gold under strict network constraints. Easy to produce, affordable ensemble cast, relatable content. Then, as they found their footing, they could expand upon this soulful base and have more elaborate sets, celebrity guests, broad plot arcs, etc.
By contrast, Netflix shows are unconstrained, working from the other end. They are trying to spend endless money to emulate these predecessor shows in the late stage when they were massively successful, rather than when they were uncertain and fledgling.
I think Space Force is a good example of this. All the right pieces to make a hugely successful show, high budget VFX, setpieces etc, but no soul.
They have "Grace and Frankie", which is their longest running show at 7 seasons.
Netflix IMO tries to make shows that are very zeitgeist-y, instead of evergreen, like Friends and The Office. I think that will come back to bite them in the future because I don't see anybody wanting to license one-offs like Tiger King or Squid Game for syndication down the line.
Meanwhile, decades-old shows like Law and Order, Frasier and Two and a Half Men are still making bank because they have tons of episodes and are generalist enough to be popular across pretty much any cable network globally.
I really question the Netflix strategy. When they started streaming, they had something very unique —- a large streaming user base and the technology to deliver them videos. They could have built a big platform business where everyone funneled their content through there and Netflix took a cut off the top.
Instead they licensed the content outright giving the studios the incentive to compete, now everyone has the technology to deliver streaming video and Netflix is competing on content where there have been tons of incumbents for 100 years.
I wonder how long it will be until they reconsider their "disc by mail" approach.
Bear with me a bit: one of the largest complaints I hear from people is the fragmentation, that is, if you have a particular section of content, you need a particular subscription. Many people are fine with "whatever is on these N services I have" but others are not. They want a particular film or show.
Blockbuster is gone, but for one store in Oregon. Redbox has managed to skim off the top of any rentals. Family Video has apparently pivoted to selling discs at some very reasonable-looking prices. This leaves Netflix as the sole group that could work on distributing the "long tail" of movies that are not in the cream skimmed off by Redbox.
I have never used it myself, but I have heard secondhand that Netflix has been neglecting this segment, letting the waiting lists for desired movies become longer and longer. It may simply be inherently unprofitable. However, if it is only relatively unprofitable, they may turn this around and refresh the service. One of the bigger problems with it is that the discs all eventually die, so something that only had a few thousand copies made will eventually just vanish, as mishandling kills one disc after another.
It's interesting to think about it. I will admit that I am one of those "I want to see this, not 'whatever is available,' but this particular thing!" viewers, but perhaps my segment of the population is so small as to just not be worth it.
Netflix has no significant cash flow from other channels.
Many competitors, like Disney (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+), Amazon (Amazon Prime Video), WarnerMedia (HBO), Apple (Apple TV+), ... can fund streaming wars (=exchange profits for market share) with their cash flow from other sources for long time if needed.
If you count every streaming service as separate, Disney has already more market share than Netflix in the US.
Isn't netflix big enough to no longer focus on growth? Is there some mantra among tech companies that the second you stop growing, some up and coming competitor will eat your lunch?
Don't they have enough subscribers that if they offer enough quality content to retain them, their business can do well on any horizon?
I am curious if the new law that prevents companies from auto redirecting to a Swiss page with higher prices would require Netflix to let Swiss people purchase the subscription for example in the US where it costs less? The new law also forbids companies from blocking the use of Swiss credit cards on non Swiss sites.
It makes sense as cable is no longer an interesting offering at all. We don't like to sit down at a certain time anymore just because some show is starting. That's so 1985 :) And the 'watch later' options are usually only available for a couple weeks here.
In fact I gave up my live cable 4 years ago and haven't missed it. I only have internet now. I had a service to watch some channels over the internet but cancelled it in 2020 because of covid as there were only doomsday talkshows left. And since that time I didn't miss it at all. Don't think I'll ever go back to live TV. All the news I can get more easily on a webpage.
Having said that the level of fragmentation in video streaming services right now is ridiculous. Eventually the industry will just make piracy mainstream again.
I think the fact that Netflix has been increasing prices faster just means they have had greater pricing power than cable cos.
…and, arguably, if Apple, Disney, and the others hadn’t come to market, Netflix would have been raising prices even faster.
If you think how much you are currently paying for the “content” component of your cable subscription, that’s no surprise Netflix is finding that pricing power.
With the likes of LG and Samsung even making their own channel offering available for free (at least on mid/premium TV sets), if Netflix, HBO, Disney, Apple keep raising prices, I suspect the first thing consumers are going to want to do is to stop paying for content from cable cos. (and keep all the premium subscriptions)
I wish Netflix understood how tone-deaf their engineering blog can come off. They frequently tote how they're 'saving bandwidth' with this optimization or that optimization. If you have a mid-range or better TV and care about quality, you'll notice pretty quickly that their bitrates are abysmal.
I get it, they are responsible for a lot of bits flying through the matrix and they need to be smart about it. But I expect quality to remain the same or get better over time, not get worse. It's not engineering at that point, it's accounting.
I too notice the drastic decline in content quality.
I normally watch one episode per day of...something. Before, this relatively low usage meant I got to watch pretty much only excellent shows and could barely keep up with them.
Now, even with this low-ish usage I'm struggling to find the next show to watch. I already have to dig deep below my standards. I can't imagine what garbage heavy users are watching.
There's this general trend towards pulp content. No imagination, proven formulas, terrible writing, shallow, woke and "safe".
I canceled my Netflix subscription and went all-in with Disney+.
I rarely find interesting things to watch on Netflix, my kids watch Disney+ most of the time and I get Prime Video for free.
I don't mind the price increase for Netflix, we get good value out of it, especially for my family that uses the service a lot.
However, most of the original series I watched from Netflix are cancelled now and that's why I don't like or trust their offerings, I usually don't have free time and when I want to spend it watching something I just don't want to watch something half-baked and cancelled.
Hopefully the Witcher doesn't get the same treatment but hey! history always repeats itself.
Netflix has by far the best UI but the same can't be said about content. When you start using a streaming catalogue app like JustWatch, the UI becomes less important and content becomes the main focus. I think content is what we are looking for at the end of the day, right?
It's getting hard to justify Netflix price because they have a great UI and a few interesting shows. IMO, the best bang for your buck today is Prime Video, Disney+ and CuriosityStream, all wrapped up by JustWatch.
Are there any streaming services of video, beyond youtube, the BBC and national broadcasters, that don't use DRM? I've been interested in looking around this space, but I won't buy a product with DRM. The closest thing I've found is the excellent www.arte.tv, but that's mostly a documentary, dance, classical music and generic "cultural only" platform (funded by the EU).
That's fine. With one, (still) cheap subscription I'm entertaining people in three different households right now. It's well worth it. I don't even like much of the content on Netflix anymore, I'm just glad I can entertain so many people without three cable bills.
When they take away multi-household family support, I'll either cancel or pass the buck to someone else.
My Netflix account goes way back to the mid 2000s. I just cancelled it over this price increase. I'm definitely not getting $22 (Premium + tax) of value from Netflix every month. They just don't make all that much good content. My go-to is still HBO (and not 'HBO Max'), whose production quality I would have preferred Netflix to emulate.
Call me when Netflix costs $100/month and has ads after every 2 minutes of content. I mean, its sad to see Netflix slowly getting worse, but don't forget what kind of hot garbage cable is.
Keep in mind you can rotate streaming services. You can basically have a never ending buffet of content for $10-15 bucks a month.
Most of the contents is mediocre at best, but I feel that it's absurdly cheap. Every once in a while there's a quality show or old film there. If you watch 10 hours a month it's a bargain, and I'm guessing a lot of people watch 10 hours a week or more, especially in the US.
Netflix needs to fire and retool their current content production leadership; they're killing their product. They then need to stop allowing their productions to be written by inexperienced writing teams (Cowboy Bebop suffered from this acutely, look up the IMDB resumes).
While I think streaming platforms are still a better experience than cable ever was, one thing that is really irritating is that I have to have half a dozen services if I want to watch a variety of content.
IMHO, the cable model of having all (most) content in one place was nice at least.
I wonder how much is companies playing on the expectation of inflation. Inflation is a mass psychological phenomenon - if people expect prices to rise, they do, and also businesses can raise them with less loss of sales volume.
If Netflix increases their price, than so can their competitors. And many people are now subscribed to multiple services instead of just one. In practice, this is not a 2X increase in 10 years — it is 5X.
I used to have a movie rental around the corner. For like 3USD I could rent any movie I wanted from all major publishers. Old and new.
9USD/month for a rather small selection of those is just bad. The buffet fallacy is strong with how people value all you can eat streaming vs. one of rentals.
If you want a specific rental, you can still get that with apple/google/amazon, right? You don't need to sign up for the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Although I kinda agree a bit with prime-video channels. Apart from the basic service you get (if you have prime), you can get specific add-ons for more focused content.
Another note on the rental: I really don't understand why we are able to rent movies, but not TV shows. For TV, you have to buy the episode/season, and buying a 20-min TV episode costs same or more than renting a 2 hour movie. I guess I'll just get it 'somewhere else' if it's not available on my platforms and I really want it
So, my family shares their subscriptions. One pays for Netflix, another Youtube and the other Hulu. We all just keep it running on our end while the others mooch off each other's accounts.
To be fair part of the reason that it's price is rising faster than cable is because cable is more expensive. To a large degree they are catching up to where cable is.
I can't believe they increased the price of the top tier as well. It was already expensive and IMO the lower tiers are useless - it's the illusion of choice.
Isn't it still pretty expensive compared to what an average Indian can afford, though? They're presumably hoping to be able to get much wider adoption by lowering prices. In the US on the other hand, there wouldn't be much room for growth among people who can't afford their current prices.
Netflix's lowest plan in India is about $2 USD/month while the per capita GDP is about $1,900. A year of Netflix costs about 1.2% of per capita GDP. If they charged a proportional amount for the US's per capita GDP of $63,500, their lowest plan would be about $67/month.
Well, it's still wayy cheaper than cable/DTH TV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You won't get far trying to measure Indian consumers' purchasing power from the country's per capita GDP; it has never been a good measure for that. India's is the hottest market in the world after the US and China for most digital services and probably has the largest population of netizens globally (if you were to discount those behind the Chinese Great Firewall). The per-capita GDP gets brought down by a large segment of population living in abject poverty, but this segment generally does not get counted into measuring the prospective marketable population for most companies. If you were to exclude this population, Indians still are a formidable bunch of consumers.
Why doesn’t Netflix explore adding ads to their viewing experience?
Yes, I wouldn’t like ads, but cable’s revenue model is subscription plus ads, so I’m curious why Netflix thinks their optimal revenue model would be any different?
The moment I see an ad on Netflix is the moment I unsubscribe. I’d rather spend time digging through sketchy torrents than watch ads in something I paid for.
Cable tv makes $70 per viewer per year. Assuming the same for Netflix, they’d need a third or more of their users to churn to be non accretive. If they create a no-ad tier that’s slightly more expensive, I doubt churn would be that high.
More like 5% or less. People are used to commercials. I like having short 30-60 second breaks when watching Amazon Prime content, gives me a chance to check my phone or get a drink. Sure, if they went to multiple 4 minute breaks per hour like broadcast tv, that would be too much. But short breaks will not turn off many subscribers.
HN has a small subset of individuals who are extremely vocal about being ad-free... like many things, they may be vocal but represent a very small group.
When I first signed up for Netflix it was (briefly) $8/month. At that stage it had a great catalog of old TV shows, which was (and is) way more interesting to me than movies. I actually figured that anything less than $10/month and I'd subscribe to it forever without thinking about it.
But the prices keep ballooning while the catalog keeps shrinking to the point that Netflix HD is now more expensive than HBO Max. Like WTF? For the record, the UI/UX of HBO Max is decidedly worse than HBO Now was (IMHO).
I support Netflix's strategy of having to make original content as the popularity of streaming caused every content owner to launch their own shitty "me too" streaming platform. Most of these won't survive (eg CBS All Access -> Paramount+).
But Netflix has proven once again you can't solve a problem by simply throwing tons of money at it. HBO is good at producing original content because it has a long history of doing so and has built up a culture to do just that. But Netflix acts like they're just throwing money around (eg [1]). Some of their content is good (eg Ozark). A lot of it is mediocre and samey. Even some of the good stuff gets killed prematurely.
So once Netflix was an "always have". Now it's something I'll sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on old content. I'm not paying for 6 different streaming services continually. The only service in my "always have" bucket now is Prime Video simply because Amazon Prime is too useful not to have it.
What I think Netflix should've done is concentrated in building regional content and then dubbing that to other languages and regions. They've had some success with that (eg Money Heist, 3%) but nowhere as much as they could have (IMHO). This should help avoid creating samey content.
But here's how you know this isn't a high-priority strategy: for some reason all the voice acting on dubbed content is beyond terrible. This goes beyond Netflix. Like Netflix has some other dubbed Spanish TV series (I forget the name) and there are common voice actors with Money Heist. And they're bad. Years ago I saw German-dubbed Friends and I couldn't get past how bad the dubbing was.
Why is this? Is this a small industry rife with nepotism? Or is it just something no one cares about?
Anyway, I'm not surprised Netflix is struggling to retain subscribers in the US and Canada. It's simply too expensive and there is now fierce competition.
OK I'll say it.... What are you going to watch when no-one bothers to make good TV anymore, because people like you don't pay for it, but watch it anyway?
I'm sure you are employed also, so how about I say 'hey I'll take and use your output, but I won't pay you for it' ? You'll be fine with that, right?
Pirating TV/Films that you can legally watch in your country is immoral, and left unchecked will lead to the overall decline in quality shows.
However... pirating a show (that you've been watching for a few years legally already) because for some dumb reason it's now no longer available in your country (I'm looking at you, Paramount+) is different thing entirely!
Video streaming services, games-on-demand like Game Pass or PlayStation Now, or even launcher storefronts like Steam are providing a valuable and _convenient_ service. They are all middlemen. But when their value decreases to the point where it becomes _more convenient_ to seek alternatives, then it’s these middlemen who get what they deserve in the sense of market economics. It is widely accepted and even celebrated in the U.S. that corporations behave amorally in our so called “Free Market” so don’t give me a sob story about how some poor Netflix exec can only afford to resyndicate Mexican telenovelas because of me and what an immoral dude I am. What goes around comes around.
When the streaming service blocks certain subtitle/audio languages (that they do have available if you have an account with them but in a different region) and they DONT allow you to watch their content in a 3rd party player (so I can actually get those subs/audio channels), they ASK for people to pirate the content.
I would subscribe back to them instantly the moment they simply provide their content over an API so I can use things like plex or kodi to watch their content.
I think I'm the only one still renting their discs by mail. I've been on a tear for several years now trying to fill out the "1001 Film To See Before You (I) Die".
I’m like you. I got grandfathered into their old 2-disks-a-month plan that costs 5 dollars. I do enjoy putting movies on my queue and then getting pleasantly surprised a few months later when I receive them.
Too bad their fantastic DVD catalog dwindles every year. Soon it will be reduced to not much bigger than their streaming catalog.
I reupped for a while earlier in the pandemic. Their back catalog has withered though and whether it's COVID or just my tastes I dropped it when I wasn't finding a lot I wanted to watch.
I feel like they represent a consensus of sorts as to the "great" or influential or somehow representative films.
I am looking forward to completing the list to restore choice (ha ha), but I can tell you there are "genres" (dislike that term) of films that I would not have otherwise even known to explore before.
For a company with a "Culture of Reinvention", Netflix has failed to compete on the only thing that matters for a content provider...content. Apple, Disney and HBO all have better - and more curated - content. What use is there in having a slick app if all it does is deliver garbage?
Things like Squid Games are manufactured hits and not the kind of content one wants on the reg.
