All the handwringing over Netflix subscriber loss seems to be overlooking the fact that they raised their prices - significantly. Of course they could lose subscribers from doing that. But 200k subscribers out of 150 million? Combined with the end of the pandemic and sky high inflation meaning many people have less opportunity to watch and less money to spend. The fact they raised their prices something like 20% and lost less than 1% of their subscriber base in that environment could almost be seen as a positive.
The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.
Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.
They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it!
Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to watch and a good amount of things we both want to watch.
Things only I want to watch I mostly find on Hulu and HBOMax. Or I have to watch them the old fashioned way because they are too obscure to be on a streaming platform.
> They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
That's not particularly informative, though. It could be true right now. "Users" is not a group with a fixed population.
If they drive their content quality into the ground and hemorrhage users as a direct result, it would still be true that the quality of the content was uncorrelated with the amount that users consumed. Instead, quality of the content would correlate with number of users. But the users are always people who are willing to deal with whatever the current content is!
What's weird is that, as a flat-rate subscription service, they're already aware that increasing number of users is good, while increasing the amount of content that users consume is bad.
I noticed yesterday that nine of the top ten shows on US Netflix were squarely aimed at women; Better Call Saul was the exception and it was in last place.
Netflix is slowly turning into a weird mix of "high production quality Lifetime + HGTV" and imported dramas from places with strong media like Korea.
Same symptom happens with addiction: just because you see short term engagement because the product is designed to get users hooked, does not mean that they will not switch once better options are available. You can't retain long term loyalty with bad quality products - same thing happened with Facebook.
Yet another example of 'engagement' metrics ruining everything.
Lowering tye quality may not change viewership, hut it radically increases your likelihood to realise it's a pile of garbage one day and go climb a tree.
All this makes me realize that we have Netflix and haven't really watched or enjoyed it since, I think, the Expanse. I guess we watched the Squid Game, too, but I thought that was terrible. Like a low grade ripoff of an old (and much more intelligent) manga called The Liar Game.
Ironic that you complain about Squid Game being a rip off of Liar Game, when it's also derivative of another series, Kaiji.
Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.
When it was on scifi the funding was done by splitting syndication rights with scifi, amazon and netflix
Scifi dropped out because they didn’t think enough people watched it, their inferior cable model has no way of collecting data on what actual humans do, and when they would do it especially by being limited in airings things at a set time
This effectively cancelled the show since it didn’t have funding
And then amazon/jeff bezos picked it up completely after a major fan campaign
Few months ago I rage quit Netflix because their shows would start autoplaying and nothing I did could disable that. I couldn't read one synopsis distraction free or browse without having to constantly click my GTV remote just to stop the friggin thing from playing. WTF! I'd like to think there were more like me who voted by cancelling their subscriptions. I hope PMs at Netflix who forced this onto their users lost their jobs.
Had done that (obviously), didn't work on Chromecast with GTV. Had called customer support and filed a technical ticket. Nothing happened. Too late now.
And to combine your observations with the parent of this sub thread: Netflix raised an insane amount of debt to fund all the projects a lot of people didn’t ever end up watching, and continued to keep raising subscription costs to cover the payments on that debt they raised. I don’t really know if it could’ve turned out differently after other media outlets decided they wanted to make their own exclusive streaming services.
Same here. There is literally nothing I want to see on Netflix since The Witcher season 2 ended. Same with Disney+. Oddly enough Amazon has the most compelling content, and I'd pay for Prime even if they didn't offer streaming, so it's essentially free for me.
Seems like most content is dubbed foreign stuff now days, which I’m not at all into watching. The only thing they have at the moment I watch is Ozark and that’s ending on the 29th.
Subtitled (not dubbed; dubbing is a sin) is the best. Then again, for me all Hollywood cinema is subtitled. I wouldn't have it any other way, I love hearing the original actors speaking.
I hear in some countries like Spain, dubbing is the norm. And they are quite proud of it. I find that puzzling.
In France the dubbing is very well done and some movies are even better when dubbed. I still watch movies in the original language with subtitles but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French. There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
9 of 10 times dubbing doesn't fit with natural situational space(echo, reverb, any time based post processing in general). It's almost always out of space, stands out for me annoyingly which I find breaking the immersion. I wonder french dubbing is different.
I found that as a result, dialog was clearer. I really hate how loud everything other than dialog is in most movies for the sake of 'immersion'. I eventually gave up and settled on using subtitles when I don't want to miss any parts of a conversation.
I will agree with you animation is a special case where it can happen. But in general and in my experience, it's not common even in this case.
Spanish dubs of animé are sometimes good. All English dubs I've heard are atrocious. I remember one of the first dubs that was lauded was the English dub of Princess Mononoke... and it's hilariously bad, even if it has big names doing the voices. The Japanese version is the best, but even the Spanish dub is better.
I think this both misses the point and is incredibly insightiful at the same time. A cover of a known song may be better (it happens!), but you'd never claim you heard the original song if all you listened to is the cover.
A dub is like a cover, agreed. Almost always, a terrible cover. I can always tell when I incorrectly set the language on Netflix to something other than the original -- you can immediately tell it's a dub because of the drop in voice acting quality. English dubs are particularly terrible, it's like the voice actors are emotionless drones, and when they try emotion, they use it in all the wrong places.
Besides, it's disrespectful. An actor/actress is not just their face and mannerisms. It's their voices, too. The voices are an essential part of their acting (if you are deaf, you can't help missing them, but if you are not, unless it's a scene without speech, you're missing a key ingredient). Saying "ok, I'll replace his voice with this other voice, and his face with with this other face I like better.. you know what? I'll just edit him out of the movie and replace him with this other actor I like better!" is way too scifi and post-cyberpunk dystopia for me. It's just disrespectful.
I cannot honestly say I watched a movie if I watched it dubbed. I watched a cover instead.
>but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French.
what do you mean by this, that the French language is so much better that it renders the movie better by using it? Or is it that the writers translating the English to French are better and make the movies more interesting by their choices?
>There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
Or is it that the dubbing actors are better speakers than the original actors, for example most actors when they do voiceovers suck because they aren't trained for it I guess, and maybe a dubbed actor is trained for it or... I guess I am just confused by how a dubbing could improve a really good movie although I might suppose it would be possible to improve a really bad movie in this way.
So how does this work?
If it is a replicable aesthetic phenomenon you might expect people to aesthetically choose to make movies in this way, to make better movies.
I despise subtitles, I watch films for the visual medium when I turn on subtitles they distract me from watching the actual film. I know I’m uncultured etc but I can’t help the way I feel about it.
I'm ok with turning off subtitles, but then I can only watch English language (or Spanish) films. Only subtitles let me watch French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, etc.
Dubbing is out of the question because I do not hate actors and cinema.
Sure. Normally I find quibbling annoying, but I hope you can understand why I want to highlight accessibility on a site that many of the world’s best software engineers frequent. I care about accessibility on all dimensions not just visual. At the end of the day accessible design is good design.
Actually dubbed content is one of the few areas where I would say Netflix has stolen a march on its competitors with some innovative practices.
Through Netflix I've been exposed to a huge back catalog of great content just because they were the first ones to invest in having it dubbed (I assume). Even though the dubbing is often pretty crude it's surprisingly watchable still and definitely better watching first tier dubbed content than second or third tier native language content.
You're not interested because of the dubbing? Then just switch to subtitles. Or do you not have the patience to put up with subtitles?
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there's considerable high-quality content coming out of other countries. I love that Netflix brings that to the U.S., otherwise I'd never know of it or be able to watch it.
It's funny because I used to sound just like you. But now I am much more sympathetic to the above comment. I spent a lot of my youth enjoying films by a bunch of foreign filmmakers including:
Ozu
Bergman
Fellini
Suzuki
Clouzot
Bresson
Kurosawa
Mizoguchi
Costa-Gavras
Herzog
Renoir
and on and on
I especially loved the films of Jean Pierre Melville, Masaki Kobayashi and Anrei Tarkovsky. And yet, when I am done with a long day of work and chores, I cannot stomach anything with subtitles. Exhaustion plays a part in it. It just feels like work after a long day. And I wouldn't want to have that experience of any of the movies I loved back then, seeing them as a chore to be tolerated.
As someone not from an English-speaking country, most of the things I watch anywhere are subtitled.
I'm really puzzled by people with no stomach for subtitles or who would only watch stuff in their native language. Subtitles + original language of other cultures is so much better.
Yeah this is it. At the end of the day I just want some background noise that’s entertaining not to have to focus entirely on what I’m watching. It’s rare that I have the time and energy to sit down and watch a show or movie just to take in the plot. That is usually reserved for the theater where I’m forced to not distract myself.
I have wached a bunch of stuff with subtitles, mostly anime. But more recently even movies, esp. recent movies(I find the sound balance off, effects are too loud and voices too soft).
That said, subtitles can be very distracting. You end up focusing on the word and missing things in the scene/shot as well as the background.
Also the subtitles are not always faithful to the dialog. A good example of this is watching One Piece in English w/ Subs on Netflix. The spoken dialog will be one thing, the written will be another. I have some Japanese knowledge and can tell you that the subs(and the dubs) definitely do not reflect the feeling in some scenes.
I agree neither dubs nor subtitles are 100% faithful to the original. By necessity, they cannot be. There's no such thing as a perfect translation even with books, but with TV/cinema you also have to keep the pace, which makes things doubly difficult.
Even then, just hearing the original language, even if you don't understand the words, conveys essential emotion. I like to hear the original voice actors, which are essential for the cartoon/anime (even more with live action movies, of course).
At the end of a long day of work and chores I cannot stomach a 90-120 minute film, regardless of what language it's in. I much prefer 30-60 minute content. At that length subtitles are much more digestible.
When I turn on subtitles I spend the whole time reading, so I’m not a fan of doing it that way. I’ve no doubt that the quality of the plot acting etc is great (I did watch squid games) but I only really watch TV at the end of the day and I’m usually browsing on my tablet as well.
Watch it with subtitles instead then—most non-English content has English subtitles in my experience. Many of many favorite shows of recent years have been non-English Netflix shows that I watch with subtitles: Fauda, Dogs of Berlin, A Very Secret Service, Lupin, etc.
Yeah, and I was right on the edge, not really watching it enough to justify the previous, cheaper, price. When they raised the price it served as a motivation to cancel it. In a 6 months I might join for a bit to watch some newer shows, then probably cancel again.
Raising prices works well perhaps if people are in love with the product or there is just no other alternative. But people have been auto paying and not really thinking much or using it, raising the prices is a decision point to re-evaluate the value of the service.
Yeah I’m surprised at how little I’m seeing about this. I canceled last month because of the price increase, and I would not have canceled if they hadn’t raised prices. At $9-$14 it’s fine if I only watch it once a month. But at $20 it’s no longer worth it.
I recently got a new monitor, and new internet, so I’m finally able to watch 4K Netflix, I upgraded at right about the time the price rise went through, and must have glazed over the announcement, so I just went “oh right, that’s just got much 4K costs, ok”.
Given the subsequent lack of actual 4K content, general lack of content, and the fact that I’ll be finishing the shows I’m watching means that I’ll likely join the lost-subscriber group in a week or 2.
The full effect of price increases will take time to fully play out, plus the effects of implementing commercials have yet to be seen. Also, it remains to be seen how other streaming services will respond. Will they raise prices and add commercials too?
If Netflix becomes the one streaming brand most associated with actions hostile to their viewers, this could be the beginning of a long decline.
This 200k subscribers number is missing the elephant in the room. They expected 2.5 million new subscribers. They didn't get those 2.5 million new subscribers and actually lost 200k, so they're technically -2.7 million subscribers.
This may have also triggered an exodus of subscribers too, even if Netflix doesn't do anything additionally stupid to turnoff consumers.
I know it’s commonly used logic, because announcements and expectations and whatnot, but I find the logic of:
> They didn't get those 2.5 million new subscribers and actually lost 200k, so they're technically -2.7 million subscribers
To be extremely questionable, if not outright incorrect.
They didn’t lose something they didn’t have. 2.5m people didn’t leave, 200k did. Sure, they didn’t reach a target of 2.5m new users, but that’s not the same as losing them.
I know, shareholder announcements/analysts predictions etc, I know I’m not going to change that logic, but I still think it’s bad logic.
They didn't "lose" 2.7m subscribers. but they did miss their goal by 2.7m.
The important thing to note is that stock prices aren't tanking because of 200k. If they had gained 200k subscribers, the stock would have tanked still. and the headlines would have been "netflix misses subscriber goal by 2.3m" instead and only investors would care
They actually lost 700K subs to Russia, when they stopped the service there, and some around EMEA too. They actually added 500K subs net minus Russia impact.
I mean, pedantically, you’re correct but you’re missing a very substantive point - we regularly deal with metrics which are rates (or vectors) of change. Velocity is change in distance over time, for example - what Netflix had is a reversal of their growth. They had expected all inputs to yield at positive 2.5 mil. change in members. Instead, the lost 200k members. It is completely sensible to talk about their loss of velocity of growth. Moreover, if you want to be get into technicalities, they lost many more customers than 200k - but they gained enough new customers to net -200k - so why not object to that technically imprecise language too? Why? Because while technically incorrect, it still communicates something useful, just as it does to talk about the lost growth vs. expectations.
For all your points about technical and substantive arguments, I think you have skipped over the crux -
> They had expected all inputs to yield at positive 2.5 mil
The crucial word here is expected. I can model all the things and expect that I’ll get a million dollars next week, but I haven’t lost a million when I inevitably don’t get it the next week.
If you make a prediction of +2.5m new subscriptions, during a pandemic and associated economic flux, and the prediction doesn’t pan out, the only thing that’s happened is that you made a bad prediction.
> If you make a prediction of +2.5m new subscriptions, during a pandemic and associated economic flux, and the prediction doesn’t pan out, the only thing that’s happened is that you made a bad prediction.
I mean, that’s demonstrably false. The world works by individuals taking action based on expected outcomes. That crosses species and pervades every waking moment of life. It is involved in things as simple as walking and as complex as mate selection, migration or habitation choices among thousands of others.
To treat this instance of variance between expected outcomes and reality as somehow different makes little sense.
I think it's still very much relevant within the context of the stock dive though - no-one invests in what you've done, they invest in what they think you're going to do next. So they've disappointed their investors, and their investors have disappointed them right back.
I think it’s that the logic only matters to shareholders who are willing to pay a premium price for the shares based on trajectory. Mess up the trajectory, mess up the share price.
They also guided that they expect to lose another 2 million subscriptions in the next quarter. The stock price collapsed because it appears the growth story may be over.
> The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different.
to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.
I completely agree. I was only lightly using Netflix so when they last raised prices it was the push I needed to actually cancel. The recent content they've rolled out doesn't justify the heftier price tag compared to competitors. I love the UX of Netflix, but content rules and they're losing that battle. I don't even want to try new shows because of their reputation for cancelling things unceremoniously.
> I don't even want to try new shows because of their reputation for cancelling things unceremoniously
Ah, so I’m not alone in this! Nowadays, I typically only consider shows that have at least a few seasons, I will never ever try one with just one season. The chances of them killing it off are just too high, and that would ruin it completely for me.
I like to binge watch, I can’t enjoy that when they keep killing off shows. It feels like a restaurant with only starters.
It's an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy of the modern data-driven mindset. Sometimes the very act of collecting and acting on that data materially affects the data itself by creating perverse incentives.
The two parent posters are far from alone in my experience. Lots of people are getting turned off by the variable quality and uncertain future of the home-made productions, which means lots of people are holding off starting to watch a show until it's somewhat established and had some positive reviews. If your management strategy is to measure early engagement with your own shows and viciously kill off anything that doesn't make the cut, and if your viewers know this, then you have defeated yourself no matter how good the show is or how popular it would naturally have become.
A few years ago there was almost a trend for shows that weren't getting the numbers to get wrapped up with some sort of mini-series or TV movie so at least there was a chance for the production team to finish telling their story and give some closure for the fans (who might be fiercely loyal in sentiment even if too few in number to sustain the show). It's a little ironic Netflix would probably have been in a better position than anyone to adopt this kind of strategy and establish a reputation for being trustworthy and loyal to fans. Now it has the opposite reputation and we're openly speculating about whether it will ever recover.
It’s classic modern fuckery where analysts focus on data without understanding the information it contains.
I sold my Netflix a few years ago when they started talking about how they are an attention sink vs an entertainment company.
A/B tests and manipulative apps have a hard time accounting for external competition.
The CEO’s reaction confirmed the cluelessness - pulling some bullshit non-plan about ads out of his ass is like ripping out the IV. If I was on the fence about Netflix, having the company accuse me of being a thief for allowing my family to use it and announcing ads will certainly get me off the fence.
It feels like a restaurant where the chef loves creating new dishes and has ADHD and rearranges the menu every time you go. Oh, the prosciutto eggs benny? Yeah, we don't do that anymore, but I can get you a tofu scramble!
I'm rapidly running out of things on Netflix I actually want to see but haven't gotten around to. Once I run out, I'm not sure why I would keep the service around.
I think many single-season Netflix shows would have been movies 15 years ago. But many types of films just don't get made anymore, and many directors and performers would rather work on series.
I’d still watch a show with one season, just like I’d watch a film without a sequel. I don’t tend to watch Netflix shows because they just aren’t that good.
i agree, as long as it has a clear finale. cancelling series which were meant to have more seasons is what troubles me.
I absolutely agree where i’d rather watch an entire season than a movie, tho. i really enjoy the depth that can be exlores from doing an entire season. but like i said above, if a show requires further seasons to finish the story, it’s very frustrating when it’s canceled.
to me it feels like reading a third of a novel and having it yanked away.
I've watched some great shows that were one-season-and-done. Unfortunately in the Netflix era you might instead instead get half-and-dropped or one-and-unresolved-cliffhanger. A lot of us find those endings very disappointing and so don't engage with new shows at all even if they look like we might enjoy them. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven times since the start of COVID binge-watching...
I prefer the long form, it gives more time to flesh out the world and characters, but it has to be done right there shouldn’t be a minimum episode count on a streaming services. If you only have 6 episodes worth of story please don’t add 6 episodes worth of filler so you have 12.
> I think many single-season Netflix shows would have been movies 15 years ago.
There would be one big change there I believe, in a movie they make sure to kill off arcs terminally pretty often, in series they make sure not to do that in order to be able to spin on it perpetually if demand be.
Yeah it feels like the binge watch mindset kind of papers over and enables this.
Shows like a lot of their lower-tier Marvel ones can have significant pacing/padding issues but it's such easy watching and you can just burn through it in a weekend while doing something else anyway.
You focused on price and I think that's a significant factor. Where once Netflix was $8 not really that long ago, it's now $15.50, which is more expensive than HBO (and HBO Max with the merger has an even deeper catalog than it did in the HBO Now time, even though the HBO Now software and website was IMHO much better).
What these media companies seem to want is for us to pay $100/month in various streaming services rather than the $80/month we were paying for cable because, hey, we should pay for the privilege of unbundling right? I refuse. Netflix is no longer an automatic renewal. I'll sign up for it 1-2 months a year to binge watch on certain shows.
But you glossed over a really important point I haven't seen given much attention: the pandemic. The pandemic was a huge boost for subscriber numbers for obvious reasons and we're now pretty much at the end of the pandemic (as far as staying indoors goes, anyway). That has to have an impact.
Additionaly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has cut off hundreds of thousands of subscribers due to the sanctions. IIRC I heard this was 700,000. If so, isn't down 200K still a net increase?
The stock market routinely overbuys and oversells on good and bad news. It's the fear and greed cycle. And this honestly feels like an overreaction that'll be corrected as soon as Netflix spends some time controlling costs.
When everything was bundled together, we complained about paying for things we didn't use. Unbundling was initially cheaper because it was just extra profit on the side.
Now, it's becoming the primary business model and has to stand on its own.
It turns out economy of scale is real, and we've lost it. Other people were paying for our content before, but not watching it. How does real public educational content get funded in this new world? Most of us probably agree that there should be quality, unbiased content.
Cashflow consistency has a value as well, so subscribing and unsubscribing creates a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers.
I'm not saying things can't improve, just that many unrealistic, entitled attitudes exist. Content is better now than before as providers have to compete more to get subscribers, so the value is greater.
> a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers.
Those loyal subscribers don't get anything in return for that loyalty. the nash equilibrium is therefore to not be a loyal subscriber, but only subscribe for the shortest period of time and consume the maximum possible.
Hence, eventually the service would lose all loyal subscribers.
There's time, effort, and cognitive load in switching. Potential self-image impacts. Some people will think past their immediate needs and want to support Netflix, because that's how they fund good content. The most price-conscious people leave. Many people don't optimize.
Fairness here would be putting the externalities of switchers on themselves, but that doesn't usually work well in the market. We'll probably just tolerate a certain amount of these 'switch freeloaders'.
Given the number of services, the cognitive load of switching will become normal. I'll be cancelling Netflix at the same time I resubscribe to Stan. And consumers will demand it becomes easier, or they won't bother signing up in the first place. We are already seeing articles in the popular media about how expensive it is to subscribe to everything, so the market is well aware. Over here, if I want to subscribe to Paramount+ (and a few others) I just select it in the Prime app and start watching in the Prime app. All that is missing is easy cancellation, or being able to purchase a single month rather than a subscription. I'm reasonably confident that Amazon will provide a way to make this easier once they have the second tier streamers by the short and curlies. But just having one spot to 'manage my subscriptions' like it is now makes it pretty easy right now for anyone who pays attention to their credit card statement. Heck, even a bank may decide to differentiate themselves by identifying recurring subscriptions and sending service cancellation notifications on your behalf.
actually Nash Equilibrium would suggest loyal subscribers to be loyal unless the rules of the Game change for the service to exist at all i.e. someone has to keep not watching and paying for someone to keep watching in short busts and not pay for rest of the time to avoid catastrophic changes.
This is looking back at cable with some serious rose tinted glasses. It’s nothing like you describe. Also nothing forces people to sub to all streaming services. We switch them up and pay a small fraction of the $150/mo our parents paid for cable.
Agreed with the author of this news, the content killed netflix. In the last two years of pandemic and WFH, more people paid attention to the online streaming and willing to spend more. It didn't take long before you'd learn who's content hold the better quality. Netflix has been relying on foreign contents approximately 70% if not 50% in the recent years.
I wouldn't say netflix is completely out of favor at this point but definitely lost its edge comparing to others. It has occurred to me I could go on by weeks on HBOmax, Hulu and Amazon without missing Netflix, among which two are bundled with wireless plan and Prime membership, Hulu is cheaper with commercial. If it comes to paying full price I'd probably cut Netflix without a blink.
I feel like Netflix has been declining for years. A decade ago, their recommendation algorithm was phenomenal. Today, both their library and their recommendations are severely lacking. I'm not sure how much longer I'll bother to subscribe.
This is it for me. Maybe they have decent content but I can’t seem to find it easily anymore. Netflix was a necessity once upon a time, but now I am on the edge of canceling.
The first season of Dark was released in 2017. I believe the "shit content" phase got really strong in 2020. Which is also when Dark's last season was released, and it's the weakest (IMO).
Funny as paramount+ has done a better job of adding new content than netflix these past few months. The Halo TV show and Picard while C to B- are still miles better than much of the newer netflix content.
Racist homophobic bigots hate "woke" content, but so what? Who wants those snowflakes as customers anyway, who are so terrified of being exposed to cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto having steamy hot gay sex? Let them try to cancel culture and walk away from scary cartoon animal sex all they want. How's Trump's "unwoke" social network working out?
>TED CRUZ WARNS DISNEY PROGRAMMING WILL SOON DEPICT MICKEY AND PLUTO F--KING
>The senator from Texas thinks the company’s opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law means it’s going to introduce X-rated content featuring animated characters “going at it.”
Without being a "racist homophobic bigot", you can be tired of seing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the race/gender/sexual orientation bingo.
To me, it feels like the "diversity" of the characters included in a script is one of the factor that is taken into account when deciding to finance a show or not. It really shouldn't be: either a script is good enough and you should finance it, or it isn't and you should reject it. But adding artificial additional criteria just means that good scripts will be rejected and less good one will be accepted. And the logical consequence is that sometimes it feels like perfectly good stories are altered in a way that ensure more "diversity" is ensured, often times making the story worse.
And finally, casting is sometimes...weird to say the least. That does not help producing better shows.
Now you know how it feels to be tired of a lifetime of seeing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the cis heterosexual orientation bingo.
Eh, I'm gay and I still agree: those types of shows get a bit boring sometimes. I'm all for representation but it shouldn't be the only point of a show: it shouldn't be "here's Ghostbusters, the exact same film all over again, but with women!", or "here's Ocean's Eleven, the exa"- eh, you get the point.
I'm sure some people will hotly contest that these shows/movies are genuinely works of art, and representation just happens to be a bonus, but that's not how it feels when watching a load of this tedious paint-by-numbers pablum.
(This isn't to say that there are no instances where I feel the opposition to minority/female casting was driven more by bigotry than by people's finely-honed critical faculties. Of course there are. But I happen to think it cuts both ways in this case: many of those shows/movies are just godawful, and trade on the "you're a bigot if you don't like this!" card to drive sympathy/virtue demand, from people who want to feel like Rosa Parks for going to the cinema.)
But previously, movie houses would just produce the exact same film again without women. It's not like women are the reason every goddamn movie is a remake of a good idea someone had 30 to 70 years ago.
There’s no accounting for taste. You should not be so fast to hate; it prevents you from understanding that which you wish to change. After all, we’re talking about entertainment, not war. Aren’t we?
Actually, we are talking about war, a cold civil war in the US and a lot of the West, and often hot shooting ones in the countries in which we foment color revolutions, the Ukraine being the current extreme example of that.
Think I read somewhere that of one of their content production differentiators is their direct-to-consumer approach. Classically lots of content was produced for the "average" consumer. Netflix can use their subscriber data to create low-cost content for extremely niche consumers, who might love that extremely relevant production (think super edgy, super graphic, super cartoon, etc - the type of extremes not covered by the average).
Not sure how much this holds true anymore, as now many big players have direct-to-customer streaming, but just sharing since it was a neat thought when I first read it
This seems like a way of sugar-coating the actual content strategy Netflix deploys, which has much more to do with product placement than it does content production. Their strategy is to align their content productions with the brands that best correlate with their subscriber base. In so doing, they can create lucrative deals with brands where their products are intricately woven into the stories/narratives of the show.
As an example, Stranger Things featured an average of 9 minutes of product placement for each episode of their third season. [0] The company claims they did not receive any payments from brands for this placement [1], but they likely received other extremely valuable considerations in the form of payment instead.
Many of the big tech stocks are insanely overpriced according to traditional investment measures. The rational reasons to support those prices are expectations of similarly extreme future growth or a belief that it might be a speculative investment but the dollars will keep pouring in.
The discussions this week aren't just a wobble, they're about whether Netflix can still generate that kind of extraordinary future growth. If there's even a strong hint that it might not then the speculative bubble bursts. If there's a serious expectation that it won't then the growth investors are out as well. One stock price crash, coming right up.
It's literally the N in FAANG, a term that came from the investment world and referred to (at the time) the five tech stocks that had the most impressive performance.
It was treated that way by one commentator on MSNBC.
But let’s not forget that the original term was FANG and didn’t include Apple - the most valuable tech company or Microsoft that has been in the top 5 since 2000.
Netflix is around #50 in the most valuable companies - it at least it was.
Their streaming tech is a commodity. Any media company can throw money at someone like BamTech (now owned by Disney) and spin up streaming infrastructure.
The market reacted because a much higher subscriber growth was factored into the price. After the massive drop Netflix is still worth $100B and is one of the largest media companies out there, which is nothing to scoff at.
Along with the huge miss this quarter they quided that they will lose another 2 million subs next quarter. That signals and end to growth and a rerating of the stock.
The problem is that Netflix’s valuation was based on the idea that they could raise prices without losing subscribers.
That in turn was based on the experience with Amazon, which has raised the prices of Prime, products on its site, and the fees it charges its sellers all
while still growing.
Netflix’s valuation was based on the thinking that Netflix was now a necessity for people. But this shows it isn’t.
In fact, the loss of subscribers is an even bigger deal because it suggests Netflix is eminently replaceable.
I can't think of anything I care about that's on Netflix. I also can't imagine cancelling it... There's always something. Between my wife and I both barely caring, they have my money for years. I imagine they'll survive, and if content doesn't turn around, they'll be bought in some final round of media conglomerates mergers, where I'll be even less able to get rid of it.
> question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more
Netflix is a scalable company precisely because they produce content, when they are share other people's content any other platform can do that. But when they create their own content suddenly they operate based on a fixed cost rather than paying for other people's content.
With the established content producers starting their own streaming services, or having more competition of buyers for their content, it seems Netflix has little choice but to move into production. Otherwise it would be a slow death as competitors move in and content prices are bid up. Just my guess though.
One thing that always confused me about Netflix content is that how uniquely un-re-watchable all of it is. Literally, there isn’t one piece of Netflix content that I watched more than once. It is pure volume and even though some of it is good, they produce nothing lasting.
I just took a search through my email to see what I've been paying in the past:
2013 joined at 7eur/month. Can't find the email from when it went from 7 to 9. May 2016 increased from 9 to 10. August 2019 from 10 to 12. March 2021 from 12 to 13. April 2022 from 13 to 15. (All prices euro and rounded up one penny).
I cancelled the day the last hike arrived - it's the least amount of time between raises, as was the previous raise before it. At the same time, their offer is getting more and more disappointing, and they're talking publicly about reducing their content spend and the possibility of adverts.
I feel like they're hooked on a growth bubble, and now that they're reaching market saturation the only way they can maintain that bubble is to squeeze it out of us - charge more, deliver less - which as a user is the complete opposite of value for money, so I'm out.
$8.99, $13.99, $17.99 since the last increase. But in 2018 the prices were $7.99, $8.99, $11.99. It's definitely gone up significantly in just a few years.
consumers don’t everywhere react instantly to price changes. the number of lost subscribers is likely to be greater than what you see today as consumers explore alternatives over time and change. though by how much i don’t know. (for example, it pushed me past the edge to install Jellyfin & friends, but i’m keeping Netflix as backup until i’m comfortable/confident with my new setup).
Honestly for me I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad. I wish instead of pushing shows to me best on algorithms, it would just let me browse categories and recent additions etc in a simpler way. Maybe categorised by year.
Absolutely, Netflix would be 1000 times better if they just let me sort, filter and find content based on concrete metadata. Instead, I'm forced to rely on their recommendation algorithms that purport to know what I want to watch, but for some reason keep recommending low quality content in languages I'm just not interested in. I'd be happy if I could just filter Netflix to only show me content with original audio in languages I speak. The few shows I'm interested in watching with subtitles or dubbed audio are things I can search for on a case by base basis. And don't get me started on Netflix's non-intuitive categories which seem more intent on forcing me to view ideologically motivated content than on helping me to find content in a category I'm interested in. I don't want to search for "Christian Films with Family Values" nor do I want to watch "Films With Black Female Leads". Nothing wrong with those types of films, but I'm searching by "Action", "Romance", "Comedy", "Sci-Fi" etc.
"there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows"
Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
You never watched Sesame Street did you? They've been explaining social issues to kids since the 1960's. Of course Mr. Rodger's first episode was explaining the Vietnam War. Kids shows are and have always been political if they're not pure fantasy (even then...)
I didn't suggest it was "hurting" children however I do believe it hurts the overall quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
Cuties isn't a children's film, it's rated MA (for mature audiences).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
I've been seeing people complain about the presence of PoC in many of these programs too, even though artificial diversity has been a staple of children's programming since at least the '70s.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
I think you are straw manning vs steel manning the argument. I don't think people mind the inclusion of LGBQT or POC people in shows. I don't think people mind even the occasional artificial inclusions - e.g. Mr. Rogers did a great job of bringing in kids with special needs and helped the audience understand that they were people too. He also showed how whites and blacks could be friends and equals in a time when this was still a bit controversial in some pockets of the country.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
All anyone is asking for are examples and while everyone is happy to go on and on with long paragraphs about how white Christian men are under attack and portrayed as evil, while gays, browns and Muslims are portrayed as absolutely perfect saints, no one is yet able to produce any actual examples of children shows that are engaging in this indoctrination.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
They said they were not Christian, but I agree with the rest of your arguments.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
Cuties isn't a children's show. It's a commentary on sexualization of minors in France. Do you have any specific examples of political agendas in childrens' shows?
You mean about Abercrombie & Fitch? The company whose former CEO Mike Jeffries effectively spelled out his tactics in a now-infamous profile on the news site Salon, saying: "We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong (in our clothes), and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."[1]
There's a difference between targeting a segment and saying others don't belong.
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
Not really. I am saying there is an artificial corporate element of inserting political narratives into much of the programming. Authentic pieces where writers just create a good story typically reverberate better with audiences .. despite the writers political opinions whether they lean left or right.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
Exactly. I don't know why is it so difficult for people to understand that you aren't sexist, racist (pick your favourite -ist) for noticing this. The time you take to "educate" viewers about your preferred political agenda is time you are taking from the plot, from character development, from story cohesion... It feels forced no matter what.
Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
>Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
I disagree with the parent comment that is is commonplace (I think it is rare) but I have definitely seen it. Several episodes of shows for girls under 5 have the trope "boys/grownups say girls can't do X" which the girl characters have to overcome. This is absurd material to expose to children of that age, who have never been exposed to the concept outside of children's programming! It's so far removed from the reality of young girls today it makes me doubt that the people writing this stuff even have children.
They've been doing this my whole life, and it drives me nuts. I used to complain that nearly every Disney movie on TV contrived some reason for men to be assholes and say something along the lines of "GIRLS can't play soccer!" Only of course to be thoroughly flummoxed by the end. It's endlessly tiring, and as you note, it inadvertently demonstrates to girls the bigotry it hopes to overcome.
1. direct harm - a girl might get into a fight with a man and get hurt because she believed a falsehood
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
>And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/
"Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
It's not really vague, it's a very clear question. And my response is phrased as a question because it depends on your personal morality. No one can answer for you. Plus, I was very curious to hear other people's position on the importance of truth (or lack thereof), and I find that I am compelled to engage in whatever way I feel at the time of commenting.
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
Political themes in TV shows are pretty ubiquitous these days. In part this is because US politics are more interested in "culture war" issues than they are with specific political platforms. In other words, culture war issues tend to deal with moral and social values. In a previous time, political issues might be much more limited in scope: what should the government tax? Which regulations are helpful? etc.
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
Poppycock. Political issues in media have always included cultural and social issues, it's just that they now span a larger universe that includes more than white male Christians.
I grew up in the '80s and it was there then, too. Some example episodes from "Diff'rent Strokes," a show about a white industrial magnate who adopts a couple of Black orphans:
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
Except in virtually all of this woke programming white male christians are deliberately and exclusively portrayed negatively, if their characters aren't outright replace with race and gender swaps. It's petty revenge racism.
If you're saying that you cannot find a single example where a white male is portrayed non-negatively, you need to look harder. Longmire on Netflix is just one example. Jack Reacher and Bosch on Prime Video are others.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's?
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
>But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
Why do you think international audiences care about whatever is the American cause du jour? I for one don't and I'm put off by the hamfisted political content.
> D&I is not discrimination against straight white men.
Well, it isn't. As a straight white man myself, I don't feel like I'm particularly suffering from discrimination. Am I picked first for everything now, like maybe before I would have? Maybe not. Does it adversely impact my life? Not really.
It's OK to let others to have the first sip from the fountain once in awhile, and you can help lift up historically-persecuted people without it necessarily being a loss for you. Attitude goes a long way in helping yourself be at peace with it.
If you're a straight white man and you're feeling seriously oppressed by D&I, I'd like to hear from you personally and understand your situation better.
Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the discussion, which is really about specifically how media is harming people and children in particular.
This isn't some debate where you can score cheap points on technicalities. Frankly comments like this lower the quality of the discussion.
If you want to know why D&I is an issue, it's because it is re-entrenching all of the stereotypes by hamhandedly trying to give everyone different handicaps, like life can be simplified to a game of golf. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter what handicap I'm given, due to my poor golf game I'm never going to play against Tiger Woods.
The only thing the handicaps change is what we're measuring, and at some point people decide not to play the game, or lobby to change the rules. Look at the resurgence of the far right: it is D&I which gave them the resentment in people's souls to which they could place their hooks.
You’re just reading the news and jumping straight to conclusions. If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful (or personally harmful to you), or specifically how it is reenforcing harmful stereotypes with examples of such, then that would be an enlightening discussion.
>If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful
Because it's racist and sexist? Because it reduces people to their skin color and gender? Because it implicitly reinforces the notion that minorities are "different" and forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments? Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field? Because top to bottom it is not a cohesive, consistent, or rational policy and implies that all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed, and their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
On one hand your ideology implies that all of this is deserved because of the past and necessary for an equitable future, but then at the same time you blatantly deny that any of it's happening and shame anyone who speaks up against this discrimination by calling them bigoted. It's insanity.
> forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments
What is "forcing" you to do this? The D&I training I've been taking has been about finding positivity in differences to our mutual advantage, but never does it say that all aspects of it are 100% positive. People are always going to find areas of disagreement. Yet we find ourselves working together, and so we must find ways to collaborate as a team despite those differences, even to the point of respecting them.
> Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field?
The evidence on this is pretty clear, because several minorities do suffer from historical poverty (in money, in education, and quality of life) that has been very difficult to overcome. A lot of damage was done prior to the Civil Rights Act through mechanisms specifically intended to keep Black people down, and we haven't recovered from that yet. We're getting better, but I don't think we can just put our heads in the sand and conclude that the Civil Rights Act was the end of our journey to remedy the terrible legacy of slavery and racism.
> all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed
You cannot be serious about the silence of white voices in the media. Maybe some individuals are being silenced (see below), but the sentiments certainly are not. For every 1 person who may have been silenced, it's easy to find thousands who haven't, whose opinions track roughly identically. And those people who have been "silenced" seem to have no trouble getting their voices heard through other avenues. Alex Jones still has plenty of mouthpieces, as does Donald Trump. (Both also happen to own several of those mouthpieces...)
And it is especially ironic when a person claims they are being silenced... on Twitter, and then when it is republished through various blogspam ad nauseam.
> ...their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
I think it depends on the nature of the advocacy in question. If you're saying, "I want the opportunity to learn, to work hard, and be successful," I would be very surprised if people were to threaten your livelihood over that. On the other hand, if your advocacy consists of lies, exaggerations, and hysterics, then people might not want to associate with you.
I don't accuse anyone of being a bigot because they have genuine and good-faith concerns about whether we are remedying social inequity the wrong way. It's when they flat-out lie, deny the past, make racist remarks themselves, or make themselves out to be the victim without evidence that they deserve that moniker.
> Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
> Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
> Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
It would certainly be disingenuous to say that TV shows did not have political themes in previous eras: obviously they did. I believe what's different now is simply the speed of change and extremity of political viewpoints. This debate is sort of similar to when people worry about misinformation on social media, and someone answers back "well there's always been bias and misinformation in the news." This is true, but it fails to address that the nature of the problem is different now than in previous eras.
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
In one kid show "She-Ra" for example, every relationship is gay/lesbian save for one. I cannot prove harm in any meaningful way, but I think this sort of misrepresentation of reality is very confusing to kids.
She-Ra is a show that takes place in a world where people _wield magical swords while riding around half-naked on giant armored tigers_. Yet your chief complaint is that a friend group having several non-heterosexual relationships is a "misrepresentation of reality"?
Smurfs were all (but one) male. I wouldn’t read too much into She-Ra. And “same sex couples exist” is not really a political statement.
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
Gay/lesbian relationships are overrepresented relative to real life in She-Ra, but there is far more than one heterosexual relationship. Off the top of my head there is Bow and Glimmer, Queen Angela and King Micah, Mermista and Seahawk, and Entrapta and Hordak by the last episode.
It's very real. I have friends in the industry working on a Netflix series, and the amount of political correctness being forced on them from the Netflix side is insane.
I cannot give a specific example due to exposing which show this may be on, but if the stories I hear or true, the Netflix staff must do a lot of Yoga cause the stuff they force to change is a stretch.
The artists I know on the show went from being excited, to just there for a paycheck after certain fruits were deemed racist around black characters (not watermelons), and a LGBT plotline was forced into a childrens show just because.
The info you've supplied doesn't support your premise. You say "it's very real," but you admit you cannot cite a single example, and your only evidence is some vague hearsay.
Hearsay is this a courtroom? I'll cite an example : the entire front page of Netflix is an agenda. When they removed ratings I knew it was going downhill.
Not OP. But I looked it up. A lot of the ones I found are ones my kids watched and I didn't even notice! Just shows how insidious and gently "slipped in" it is.
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
I clicked that link expecting to see opinions on “Trickle down economics” or “abortion” or “ownership of the means of production” being fed to children but all I see is: “Same sex couples exist.”
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
I'm not clear that your children can become old enough to decide things for themselves without exposure to the world. Hiding things from them is going to make their decisions more naive.
I haven’t seen She-Ra, is it only gay relationships? I’m curious if you think a show with only straight relationships is propagandistic too (ie most TV ever made)
It isn't. But in a show called "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power", you're going to have a lot of lesbian relationships if the cast ends up mostly paired. But there's a mix of relationships.
`- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)`
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
An example is the complete unnecessary cast of Caroline Henderson (a black woman) to the series "Vikings: Valhalla". I understand it is a fictional story, but these are Vikings for pete's sake. The only reason they cast her was evidently for diversity reasons. It is a distraction to the story, I immediately turned off. Though we know that not all vikings had blonde hair, some may be even a bit more dark skinned, but definitely not black. And it is more laughable because she's a character that yields some power in the Viking society. Laughable and a distraction to the story.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
I think it's because most of the time the "politics" that are objected to tend to be things like having an LGBT character in a show. While it's probably not true that everyone who complains about "politics" on TV these days are objecting to LGBT people, it is almost certainly true that everyone who watches TV and gets disgusted by seeing an LGBT character will code their disgust in terms of "being tired of politics" shoved down their throat, etc.
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Nonsense, its simply that if writers are engaged in social signaling some of that results in much worse shows and that is seriously annoying.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It sounds to me like you have an issue with bad writing, not necessarily diversity of characters or the portrayal of minorities at their best. That's a fair position to hold, and one that I agree with.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
What I am saying is that if you have a dominate political culture then bad writing will reflect that and people rightly point out what those are. But that doesn't mean that its a wholesale attack on that political culture.
> Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently poisons or guarantees the latter.
I just wanted to thank you for writing this. It's a model comment - one of the character I'd like to see more regularly around here. Even if I disagreed with you, I would still respect you for it.
> I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spend major screen-time on another sub-plot where the evil alpha-male messes everything up and then the all-powerful woman to come in the save the situation.
Its a totally unnecessary plot shoehorned into the story with no relevance to the main story the show is trying to tell. The source material had brother sister team working together, but we can't miss an opportunity to rewrite it into incompetent alpha male/wonder woman narrative. That is a perfect example of force feeding 'woke-ism' into a story.
Again, this alone isn't a big deal. But this approach is pretty consistently applied.
> Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill.
I certainty agree that there is an over-focus on crisis of woke-ism and many-times unfairly so. For me this is not 'culture war' for civilization, rather annoying meme that makes TV show potentially worse then they could have been.
To give specific example in Wheel of Time. In the book the 'Two Rivers' is a part of Andor. Andor is basically the Britain of that universe. Given its history and isolation, 'Two Rivers' is very culturally and racially homogeneous.
In the show the 'Two Rivers' looks racially more like New York City. This certainty makes little sense from a story telling perspective. Cultures that are very isolated for 1000s of years simple are not that diverse. Now you can certainty change that from something based on white rural Britain to whatever other racial group want to insert.
You can of course explain this away in whatever way you want, its fantasy. Genetics might work different. Who cares. You don't even have to explain it at all.
One of my friends had a problem with this diversity suggesting it hurts the story and that priority should be an accurate representation of isolated cultures. He would have been fine with that being non-white of some kind.
I said, while I agree that it doesn't really serve the story, when creating a major 100+ million$ TV show with 5 lead actors all from the same village making them totally culturally and racial homogeneous isn't really all that practical. A am willing to throw overboard some story purity (or strict adherence to the source) as to give a diverse group of actors to chance to get a role in such a show.
PS: Pretty much all those actors doing a great job! That was the least of the shows problem. Fire the writers and keep the actors.
I ask to elevate the level of discussion here. Speaking in generalities and characterizing people's work without evidence is too facile; you can go to other popular social media sites for that. Elsewhere in this thread, my gentle prodding has led to discussion of some actual shows and scenes that people are thinking of, and it's led to much more interesting - and less heated - discussion.
I'm honestly curious too. Our kids watch chip & potato, octonauts, number blocks, and all sorts of things. None of it seems political. But maybe I'm missing something.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
That's funny, because I've never seen a question like this answered, except with handwaving about how the poster can't say more, or they don't want to get distracted with specifics, or a handful of other reasons the original claim can't be backed up.
> - there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
---
- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
> Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
Your kitchen drawers are full of chipped flint tools, right? I mean, that's what was used for cutting and chopping for most of human history.
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
> Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
Human history has existed for much longer with same-sex marriages than without it. It was mostly outlawed with the rise of Christianity. The impact of same-sex marriage on child rearing is well understood as same-sex couples raising children predates same-sex marriage by decades and studies can be found going back to the 1960s on the subject.
I mean almost every single one of them prior to the rise of Christianity and the influence of modern western culture. The Chinese had no qualms with gay marriage or homosexuality in general, there are records of famous Japanese Samurais who married one another, Native Americans have the concept of two-spirit marriages, numerous Roman Emperors married male husbands, and neither the Greeks or Egyptians differentiated much between homosexual or heterosexual relationships.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
"Disingenuous"? You link to a Wikipedia article based on two or three papers -- when there are centuries of scholarship on Rome -- and _I_ am "disingenuous"?
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
Well we know one thing about Rome. When sexual deviations reached the peak -> Rome collapsed and imperium was divided.
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”..
Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
I'm of the opinion all marriage is bullshit, and the very notion of anyone needing to register their social standing, regarding who they live with, as a very peculiar practise...likely to mess up children more than having any two persons ensure they are loved and cared for, and just getting on with it.
Exactly. A lot of new content made seems to be really poor to me.
And oh, did I mention content that keeps making frequent trips in and out of Netflix? (Movies like The Terminator franchise, Troy etc.)
So cringe I just want to cancel it after this month.
Yes! I recently went on a little trip and the AirBnB host had Netflix. This is the first time I’ve ever used Netflix. And oh my god how do people find anything with it?? I didn’t realize that you could scroll horizontally for about a day. And the categories are… useless. +1 for traditional “action” categories. And the content was mostly straight to DVD B-movies with a few “80s oldies.” I did manage to watch the new Blade Runner there so ok they did have something I could recognize.
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Modern videostreaming is such a poison pill. Where the rights come and go arbitrarily. So Netflix decided they were going to do their own content because they couldn't rely on production studios. Since they don't have to pay royalties on their own content the streaming apps intentionally push the homegrown movies and obscure the slightly better 3rd party content. And it was not always like this. In their early streaming days the AAA titles (The Godfather, The Matrix, etc) were front and center. The recommendations engine was actually useful. And there were few competitors so AAA titles would stay on their platform for years.
I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.
To be fair, I think their algorithm is way better once it gets a bead on your interests. Now, that definitely results in some shows never pop up in your 'feed,' but overall I'm in 2 modes of watching:
1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests
2. Navigating straight to something I want
If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)
I actually want to search for "action series with female leads" but I have no idea how to do it with Netflix nor does Netflix carry most of them. Instead, I "search" on Reddit and pirate them.
I cancelled my Netflix premium subscription some years ago due to the UI.
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
Agreed. I have never used such a non-deterministic UI. Every time I load the app I have to hunt around to find the show I last watched and continue it. It feels like it’s in a different place every single time.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
The recommendation system crash is coming. Name a recommendation system that shouldn't be replaced with simple rules based on obvious and transparent metrics like popularity and ratings, or by organizing things into categories.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
YouTube has the best recommendation system in the world.
Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.
A few points though:
1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.
2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.
Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.
YouTube repeatedly tries to steer my recommendations from the content I'm watching (stuff on terrain making and miniature wargames) to decidedly alt-right content, to the point that at the moment, I mostly watch it logged out and directly searching for the channels I want to watch.
That doesn't work so well if you're trying to push a social agenda to people who aren't interested in LGBTQ+ or racial "wokeness". Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+. There wouldn't be much of a catalog to watch.
To me most of the new shows that has LGBTQ+ content, the LGBTQ+ stuff feels incredibly forced to the point of detracting from the story.
I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.
I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.
Netflix had a great recommendation system for their DVD catalog 15 years ago without any ML hocuspocus. The problem now is that their content is mostly mediocre and user driven ratings can't be used effectively to identify similar cohorts. That's why they got rid of the stars.
I recently did a trial for Showtime's streaming service. It's set up this way. Choose a category then get an alphabetical list of everything available. I'm not sure it's any better, but worth checking out if that matters to you.
I've always preferred to use https://unogs.com/ which lets you search with a lot of advanced search parameters and the resulting pages are much easier to browse, and then just pull up specific titles on Netflix itself.
I particularly hate the way they keep pushing serial killer documentaries, and there seems to be little way to get them to stop. When it's late at night and I'm trying to find something relaxing to watch before going to bed, the last thing I want to see is a serial killer's face staring at me and then footage of them starting to play. It ruins my night. Honestly that's been the last straw for me. They're happy to force their customers to see disturbing things, as long as it boosts engagement.
I have taken to using the dislike rating on stuff I have no intention of ever watching. I don't know if it helps yet. It might be fantastic for people who like the genre, but I'm now rating for myself rather than other people. Hopefully these metrics don't feed into any meaningful ratings systems.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
Algorithms? Netflix hasn't done actual recommendation algorithms since the DVD days. These days it just relentlessly pushes its own third-rate content to viewers, presumably because it's cheaper than licensed content.
After all major content providers dripped out of Netflix (Disney, Warner Brothers, just to name two biggest ones), Netflix can't afford to show you "all the content" because they don't really have any content.
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
That seems plausible. Netflix has an obtuse interface in order to obscure the fact that their catalog of content isn't very big, and has shrunk considerably in recent years (due largely to other content owners realizing that it's more lucrative to start their own streaming services rather than license the content to Netflix).
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Just yesterday I discovered that youtube's "home" feed in the iOS app is not actually endless. I know this because I reached the bottom of it without tapping into a single video! For the past 6 months or so in particular, their recommendation engine has just been abysmally bad.
> I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
Back when Netflix had DVDs the recommendation algorithm worked pretty well, at least for me. It's gotten gradually worse over the years. Or perhaps they no longer have much good content, so no recommendation algorithm would work well? Either way I guess it's time to cancel my subscription.
Dvd Netflix[0] is still sending movies to your house (in USA). Many movies which are not available in any streaming service. They got worse with new releases since 2020, but for many famous movies of the past this is a decent service.
I can't agree with this more. I find it extremely difficult to find something I want to watch, because I simply can't find out how to look at their entire library.
I have to agree. If I remember a show, I can search by name but I can only browse through the stuff that their algorithm shows to me. And that's just a few dozen titles.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
I only use Netflix and Prime, and both feel really stale to me. It's all "content" - good to very good production values designed to fill a gap and appeal to a demographic. But very repetitive and production line, with no passion projects, nothing too arty or quirky, nothing outside of the box, no surprises.
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
I think Netflix's big problem is I'll occasionally discover something amazing, and then look at the release date and wonder "why did it take so long to find this?"
If the experience browsing their catalog wasn't so awful, I'd be more inclined to try and use the service. Instead, after I've finished something good, I don't tend to come back to Netflix for awhile - it's easier to just watch stuff on Youtube because I know how to navigate it, the search works well, and the recommendations are actually decent.
I remember a couple weeks ago, Blade Runner 2049 was the first thing that popped up when I logged into Netflix. I was so happy to see it there, but when I went back the next night to watch it, it wasn't there (which is fine, the homepage isn't static). So I went to search for it, and "Blade Runner" returned nothing relevant (nor did "Blade Runner 2049"). I had to search "2049" to find it, and after the movie ended, Netflix recommended the first Blade Runner (which also didn't show up in any of my searches).
The search isn't always this bad (both Blade Runner movies show up in search the way I would expect them to now), but still...even when I know something great is on Netflix, it can be an utter pain to get to. It's like they're trying to get me to go with the mediocre recommendations instead of watching the good stuff that I know is on there.
It's so annoying that if I was the one paying for it, I'd cancel my subscription. And I remember things used to be a lot better, which just makes it all the more frustrating when looking for something good.
I guess this is the cons of being such a data oriented company. It requires guts to think beyond ROI when you have so much infos about your users and their habits.
Data oriented optimization strategies tend to result in local maximums. Jumping across the solution space from a local maximum to the global maximum requires a visionary leader, and some luck.
Throwing money at graduate filmmakers and telling them to follow their passions would all but guarantee a catalogue full of $CURRENT_DAY political messaging, which would be poison for subscriber retention.
I feel what you say too, that all the content feels samey. But I'll offer a suggestion that works for me: try some animation. That's where you get the passion projects that can feel different. Animated characters and settings can be far more expressive and varied and fresh, compared to the stock sameyness you get from live action.
The new She-Ra on Netflix was the best thing I've watched in quite some time. It's not a kiddie show, it works for all ages, think like Pixar movies. Other great cartoons across a variety of streaming services: Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Star Trek Lower Decks, also the more mainstream Bob's Burgers. If you want something fresh to watch, try animation.
I have a similar experience with respect to watching foreign produced content. It's interesting because they present different approaches to the shows and even if they're using entertainment tropes they can be different enough because they're tropes of that nation.
But once I watched a few, Netflix filled my entire recommendation catalog with almost all e.g. Turkish and Korean shows. Pretty annoying as it's like ordering an ice cream dessert, then the only thing the menu ever shows is all ice cream desserts. It makes me think part of people feeling it's all the same is that the recommendation optimization is overbearing in shoveling too much of more of the same recent history vs presenting a mix of recommendation and discovery.
This exactly. Across a LOT of their anime, crime drama espcially (in my limited view, probably applies to other genres as well), I feel they have this minor variation on a theme, sort of algorithmically built, almost. Everytime i watch some new series i get this "wait a minute..." feeling. I occasionally find new stuff to watch that is interesting (of late, noir crime drama shows on Prime) but those also have the same ingredients. A lot of those are not prime original anyway. That original content seems rare.
I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.
+1 for Vietnam. And Jazz. And The West. There is something about starting a Ken Burns series that is super relaxing, and releases the pressure to find the "perfect thing" to watch for the next 10-20 hours.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
The West is pretty depressing, though, as it's mostly about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people of North America. I've been putting off the Vietnam one for similar reasons. Not exactly what I think of as relaxing.
Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
I haven't "watched television" in over 20 years. At the same time, the internet (YouTube to a large degree) has crept in to steal away my time.
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
I'm in the same boat, I cut the cord in 2008 and truly feel that my kids had a better experience as youths. Having cable tv in a hotel was a huge deal for them, although they didn't really understand commercials.
Strangely my reaction was the opposite. I didn't really have tv, and I LOVED commercials, I would even put on the paid programming channels if left alone.
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
So, I see this and think "ooh, BG, I'd watch that again". Then I think, how do I find it, will I need a new subscription, it's probably not even available in my geographical area ... or I could probably go to a Torrent site and be watching it in 5 minutes (the limitation being the speed of my internet connection).
As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??).
The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
Deadwood. Re-watching it now after 10+ years and am (again) impressed. Given the abundance of -isms in that show, I'm doubtful it would even be made today, which makes it even more of a find.
I think Arcane is probably the worst scripted show I've ever watched. It makes me immediately skeptical of ratings. My only hypothesis is that everyone enjoying it has never read a book.
My belief is that, like any media, there is a massive backlog of good content.
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
Under all that muck, you aren't seeing the nuggets. A great example is Severance which came out just this year (Apple+) and it's a masterpiece, from cinematography to high concept to acting.
We live in a golden age because there is something for everyone, but that also means there is a lot of trash. Luckily, there are also more gems available now than ever before.
Sure there's good content, but I'm not going to commit to yet another monthly fee. If there was a way to buy a season of a particular show for a one-time fee then I might do that. Amazon offers that option for some shows.
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
I've never been into "flow tv", and about 2 decades ago i simply stopped watching anything but the news, and that only for 30-60 minutes per day, and shortly after that i simply read the news on the internet and completely stopped watching "normal" tv.
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
During quarantine I switched to mostly movies. They require more singular focus (it's harder to watch a movie while doing other things), don't really have the binging problem (2 hour and done instead of just continually extensions of 45 minutes), and are generally higher quality. I've seen some very good (Memories, Son of the White Mare), some very bad (I went through a Bakshi phase), and overall decided I prefer this to watching yet another sitcom or graphic novel adaptation on tv.
movies can also better adapt to be a bit shorter or longer depending on whether the story calls for it.
something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season.
i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
Agreed, I never watch TV unless it's, weirdly enough, a social setting. My wife and I watch TV together all the time, we have shows that we like to enjoy together and talk about. My roommates and I would watch TV together all the time in college, and every now and then there will be a show that I'll go to my friends houses to watch (game of thrones). But now that I think about it, I don't think I've watched a TV show by myself in over 20 years.
I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
It's sad that we cannot own titles but are forced to rent them from these streaming services that can't seem to get their shit together. (Not blaming Netflix per se; this is a pox on all their houses). Used to be nice in the DVD days. I built myself a nice collection then.
This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its successor Movies Anywhere, in which Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate are not participating.
I still buy hard media (which makes me a Luddite apparently) because I consider it art and refuse to pay for digital media that is allegedly perpetual and then one day it goes missing because the wokes decided it should be memory holed.
Even things like iTunes Music Store which once claimed that all your past purchases are available for download from iCloud forever quietly became untrue when I discovered parts of my music library went missing. Come to find out the record company decided to pull licensing from Apple which made that media forever unavailable. So don't forget your backups..... rule of thumb is that you can never trust any company with your media no matter how much bullshit they sell you.
I have had 4 different shows have content cut from them that I noticed this year, for a variety of woke factors.
- Peep Show (Jeremy & Nancy "taboo" breaking episode)
- 30 Rock (Jenna & Tracy "role reversal" episode)
- Community (Chang D&D)
- Always Sunny
In these instances, the character that is doing the "deplorable" act is the villian or idiot. It's not like these shows are promoting those views, they're actually doing the opposite.
Do you have any little disc destroying demons around... oh wait, did I say that out loud? I meant little kids.
Discs are good for ripping then straight to storage (or mailing back to Netflix?) but that's about it.
It would be cool to have a shared database of binaries+commands to recreate scene rips from the discs. Or just following along with someone who knows what they're doing and doesn't go for one-size-fits-all compression.
The majority of the media I bought on iTunes from about 2006 onwards is gone. Some of the music is still there, but every music video, show, and movie is gone. If I hadn't had the common sense in high school to back it all up to my hard drive, it would be gone forever. that was a tough wake up call that I don't own any media I "buy" from Apple/Amazon/etc. I'm renting it until they're done hosting it.
More examples: There is at least one Disney film that is not available anywhere (Song of the South; even eBay banned sale of used dvds. I saw this film as a child on I guess VHS).
There are other Disney films and WB cartoons with large sequences removed.
Disney pulled the chord on SotS decades ago of their own accord despite their conservative leanings as an organization. That wasn’t because of “the wokes.” They straight up saw it as a liability.
It’s also very easy to watch if it’s that important to you to watch racist nonsense. Hell I think internet archive hosts it, they did a while back for sure.
>because the wokes decided it should be memory holes
You truly believe that’s the driving force behind the problem? That “wokes” are the primary reason some content is hard to get and/or keeps getting pulled from streaming services?
It’s licensing increasingly becoming the core product and everyone and their mother trying to launch their own streaming services. We’ve been slowly backsliding into this situation for the better part of a decade.
But how do you actually find content that you like?
Sometimes I have to go though 4-5 different shows/movies on various streaming networks before I find something worth watching and even then, the shows usually get really bad by season 2-3. I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
But how do you actually find content that you like?
Recommendations from friends. Reviews by trusted critics. The same ways we've always found other things we like really.
I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
I have a significant disc collection of movies and TV shows I enjoy. I have almost nothing I haven't rewatched at least once and enjoyed again and/or lent to friends or family at some point for them to enjoy as well. I don't really know how that happened but I can tell you that almost none of those discs were bought as new releases other than big names that I was already fairly sure I'd enjoy or sequels/spin-offs of things I'd previously enjoyed.
The cost is part of the reasons those never really caught on, not just participation. The number of titles I (and I assume, most people) will watch enough to warrant paying $20 for is vanishingly small. Even $4 a rental is a hard bar to pass at this point with streaming competing.
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
I would do a whole lot more digital rentals if the prices weren't so damn high. How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? How can I watch 20 hours of stuff on HBO in 4k for like $10 or $12 or whatever that runs now for a month, but a single 2-hour movie is $5?
It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.
> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once?
Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name.
If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay.
Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1.
In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money.
In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk.
At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).
If you want to sugar to help the medicine go down...
Compare the current digital rental prices to taking yourself to the theater. While the digital rental rate is high, it is less than one ticket for admission. If you buy concessions, it only goes up. If you take someone else, it gets higher. That one digital rental starts to look less steep from this vantage point. That being said, I still don't do the digital rental.
How do you know? I’m a highly paid engineer who is oncall on a SAAS, it’s been a wild ride. It’s expensive to keep this crap running. But a DVD burner and fedex? That sounds cheap and simple to me.
They don't even use burners at that scale, they use replicators. Takes seconds to stamp a DVD. Here's a place in California that charges as low as $.075 each per copy, and this is low volume pricing...
There are companies that provide on-demand pricing for just the steaming component (edgecast for example). Then just throw up a DynamoDB table and some simple apis in lambda and you have a pretty cheap (relatively) way to deliver streamed content.
They probably are making a significant profit off it, I'm not saying that's not the case. I'm just saying you can't figure that out by just looking at the marginal cost; you have to look at the investment and ongoing costs and planned payoff period too, which is information you probably don't have available.
Is it somehow cheaper when it's a subscription, and when the set of things you might start streaming isn't "this single thing I just paid for" but "anything in your catalog"? Because they don't just give a discount for that—they give a tremendous discount.
First Sale doctrine - you needn't pay any licensing fees to rent out a purchased disc. Practically speaking, Blockbuster that was did have special arrangements with the studios, but this paved the way for Netflix to rent out DVDs with little barrier to entry.
The problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
I kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done. It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.
This niche has largely been replaced by casual mobile games. Pop open Candy Crush and play for as long as you have time. You're never really done, but each session is basically independent of the past and doesn't require a whole lot of mental effort.
TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.
I have trouble imagining what the games / movies hybrid of the future will be. It's clear something is changing (game revenue exceeds hollywood - even if that's not a totally fair comparison).
There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.
Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.
My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.
I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end
I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !
I've been watching some of them recently. It's amazing how relevant All In The Family still is today. The Jeffersons is still good, Cheers is relaxing after a stressful day. That easy-watching episodic nature is nice for a change.
There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.
"serie" is the singular for series in a bunch of languages, which honestly makes more sense than having a singular noun ending in s and the plural form being identical to the singular.
This happened irrespective of Netflix streaming. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, BSG, Lost, etc. The thing is serial was fairly annoying if you had to be in front of the TV on Wednesday at 9pm every week to watch something. People would do it for a must-watch miniseries. But as soon as you could do on-demand it was a nice format for a lot of things.
Totally disagree, all of my favorite shows would have made terrible movies. Breaking Bad is just barely long enough as it is, trying to compress that down into even a long movie would have destroyed the story.
Netflix used to be an unlimited dvd rental service. It turned into the same thing without the mail step, so of course we stopped using it. I think if we had known what streaming would look like today, a lot of people including myself would have held on tighter.
I let go of DVDs for quite some time but have re-enabled https://dvd.netflix.com recently. Good selection, plus the much slower act of selecting, receiving and exchanging is sort of a welcome restricted diet compared to the endless buffet over the past decade.
It's OK although the back catalog has rotted a lot. I suspect that they repurchase a lot fewer disks that have been reported as defective for older films. I agree in general that most people dismiss this as an option--or even consider it weird--but many people I know who are much more into films than TV find this a good option. I do off-and-on myself.
The one thing about the DVD aspect of it is that DVD content just looks bad on my current viewing screen. Blu-ray discs are okay. However, the DVD catalog is much much larger. Whachagonnado
I admit I'm still at just HD. And getting rid of that TV with a higher-res one would be something of a task. So I mostly just stick with regular DVDs and HD streaming content.
Except back in the DVD rental days, Netflix could rent out basically everything instead of having to fight for exclusive content rights. You could subscribe to Netflix or go to Blockbuster but you could get the same selection more or less at either.
I don't know about movies, but music streaming is awesome. I have a couple thousand CDs that are sitting in a closet somewhere. For a while I kept them as mp3s on a hardrive, copied other people's mp3s to build up my collection. But its still so limited. I love going through my favorite artists on spotify, listening to the less popular albums I never would have bought and discovering new artists.
Isn't it because it differs so much from movie streaming? On major music streaming platforms you can find most of the popular music artists. I don't have any numbers to back it, but my gut feeling tells me a-number-so-close-to-100 percent that it doesn't even matter anymore it may not be actually 100. Movies? You can't get Disney on Netflix, you can't get Apple on HBO, you can't get... you just can't. Imagine having Metallica on Netflix, Madonna on Apple, Beatles on Sony and Silent Poets on Amazon.
Music streaming doesn’t suffer nearly the fragmentation issues film and television streaming services have, though.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
I don’t think this really affects my point that the fragmentation situation is infinitely better with streaming music than it is with video.
Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.
The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.
This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.
It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.
The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.
The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.
I did the same thing. I used to put a lot of effort into getting a perfect FLAC rip of everything I ever listened to, having them on my devices, or setting up streaming from a home server. I threw that shit out a long time ago, partly because I don't listen to the garbage that I used to, and partly because I've got better things to fuss over now. The amount of time worrying about file integrity, backups, server being up (and updated)...sorry, 90‰ of it is music I'll just get tired of soon. It wasn't worth it. Spotify makes more sense for me.
Same with movies. As I've gotten older, I can name about a dozen movies I'd like to watch again. I can afford to buy the next "highest quality release ever" when the time comes.
Agreed except a lot of my old CDs aren't available on Spotify. I do plan on ripping a select portion of them when I find them again. But it'll only consist of my favorite records and unavailable.
Before I do that though, I'm going to check into Youtube Music. It's possible what I don't find on Spotify is available there.
Movies, I don't find many are missing from services. Perhaps the movies I loved were less obscure than the music. I don't plan on ripping a single DVD or VHS tape.
I'd wager that UMG et al would be in breach of contract. I have to imagine they have an agreement not to "broadcast" in exchange for being paid license fees. Disney/ABC etc own lots of radio stations, and I doubt anyone really wants that legal battle.
There's a metric ton of neo-Nazi bands that aren't on Spotify as well. I don't know if it's Ice-T or Spotify stopping Cop Killer from being on the service, but Spotify and similar are private companies that don't have to host everything that they don't want.
I pay for a handful of streaming services but that's only because they're decent for content discovery and ease of use. If there's ever anything on there that I genuinely like I just pirate it (Arcane most recently) because the UX of having files that just work everywhere is so much better than the alternative. I would happily pay for unencumbered .mkv downloads if my recent buying trends wrt bandcamp .flacs are any indication.
The only way to stop me from pirating the media I like is if you actually let me buy the superior experience I can have as a pirate.
P.S. copyright and IP law in general need severe reform if we want to serve creatives and not executives
Blockbuster had web rental service for console games, which probably decreased piracy; Netflix used to have such a huge library with working subtitles it was pointless to pirate (nearly) anything.
Not just that but it's sad we can't even just rent the titles we used to be able to rent from videos stores. There is no much content that is just not available and I fear it never will be. If you were fortunate enough to have lived near a cinephile type rental place then you probably remember how directors often had their own sections. You could browse Kurasowa, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Godard ...
I remember looking at the Criterion Collection streaming channel not that long ago and what struck me was just how much of the Criterion Collection was not even available on their streaming channel.
If only there were a way to get a file of the same movie from a different site and then make a copy of it to save to your personal archive of movie files, ensuring you never need to worry about paying for multiple streaming services that will probably remove titles you like and never carry others in the first place...
I think an issue for me that prevents me from collecting DVD’s, to; say - collecting CD’s - is that while a CD from the 1980’s is pretty much the best quality of audio you can still get today, DVD’s unfortunately suffer from an issue where the SD quality has aged very poorly, and the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s.
Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio, it doesn’t matter if you play them on the most modern sound systems, they’re still going to sound great.
Streaming allows me to find a nice balance between quality and bandwidth, unfortunately while DVD’s are neat for bonus features, the quality unfortunately makes it rather unpalatable on even semi-modern (1080p) TV’s.
Surprise, the physical layers in your DVDs and CDs is also decaying, so a CD from the 1980s may well be unplayable now. I've found that with many of my old commercial disks, let alone the ones I've burned myself.
Unfortunately as a SEGA Saturn collector, this is no surprise, and disc rot has taken claim to games that could otherwise be worth hundreds of dollars today. :(
Weirdly, almost all of even my much older audio CD’s - stored in the same bin away from heat and moisture - don’t have this issue.
I have to wonder what effect the specifics of the manufacturing process have on how likely a disc is to experience disc rot, as actually even within the SEGA community it’s widely accepted that Saturn discs have an unusually high rate of failure compared to other compact disc collectables.
However - importantly - my original point about quality also applies to backups of these mediums as well - so, assuming any copy of that audio CD has been properly archived and backed up, it will pretty much always be the best quality it can possibly be. Backing up a DVD these days - when there is a majority of the time a superior Blu-Ray or streaming release, is frankly pretty pointless, except for, unusually - the much more abundant amount of special features often found on DVD’s.
I never understood why special features pretty much went the way of the Dodo when Blu-Ray became the standard.
Some DVDs are definitely noticeably low quality transfers, but the vast majority are are fine. I have a 60” 4K screen and don’t really notice in a way that bothers me, at least.
That’s fair - but also remasters can be subjective. For instance - I vastly prefer most of the original Beatles masters to the 2010’s remasters. Point is that we’re almost comparing 128kbps MP3 to CD quality with DVD vs. Blu-Ray.
Many Blu-Rays are remasters of the originals as well - so, it’s kinda moot with remasters. My point is with the massive quality difference, and that DVD’s in general will only get less worthwhile as time goes on.
> the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s
It's possible to make them look a lot better, but you're right that it's a huge amount of work to do so. There's basically nothing out there tagged "DVDRip" that's worth a damn IMO, because almost all encoders (both human and software) treat the DVD like encoding a CD where making the most exact copy of what's on the disc is the goal.
Encoding a DVD for modern screens on the other hand requires some art direction all its own. DVDs have a huge amount of legacy hidden in them, not only in the interlaced NTSC/PAL systems but in Sony's D-1 tape system as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)
A good modern DVD rip will be:
- Deinterlaced to 60FPS (technically 60000/1001 fields-per-second) using a temporal-smoothing filter like QTGMC. Handbrake will not do this. Almost all DVD rips are 30FPS and just look gross and feel gross from all the lost motion information.
- Cropped to avoid the black bars on the left and right of the D-1 resolution and to make circles into circles instead of slight ovals. This is really noticeable in cartoons with circle-guides for eyes like The Simpsons.
- Stretched to 960x540 (16:9) or 720x540 (4:3) at encode-time with a quality resize filter. This is probably the part nerds have the most internalized opposition to (I sure did) since the raw NTSC DVD res is 720x480 and expanding it feels kind of like encoding a FLAC out of an MP3. All DVDs are anamorphic (704x486 is a 3:2 res, stretched equally for both 16:9 and 4:3 DAR!), so the alternative is that the display performs the stretch in real-time using the container PAR/DAR flags. Most displays do a terrible job.
The vertical 540px is the EDTV resolution and still part of the ATSC spec to this day, technically as 544px with four dead pixel rows on the bottom for 8px block size. I've yet to meet a decoder fail with 4px blocks though so I prefer the panel-accurate res. It pixel-doubles in exact multiples to 1080, 2160, etc, so it looks way better on modern screens.
- Color-corrected from the oldschool D-1 colorspace to the newer HDTV or 4K colorspaces, or at least tagged as such if not converted. This doesn't undo the lossy nature of subsampled chroma but still looks a lot better, especially in the greens. This is another thing that cheap displays are terrible at doing in realtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601
- Rip the raster-based DVD subtitles to a modern format like SRT/ASS. I usually use SubtitleEdit and correct the few OCR errors by hand: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
- Encode AC3 audio to AAC, preferably with something nicer than FAAC. I include all languages because why not. I like FDK-AAC and will use VBR-4 or VBR-5 if I want low-pass or not based on the source waveform: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...
- MKV container, take the time to fill the container metadata fields, tag audio track languages so the player picks the correct one, attach a `cover.jpg` for Explorer/Finder thumbnail, name all the chapter stops, etc. This is actually grueling some times. My precious metadata.
Totally huge pain. Worth it though for things worth having :)
those DVDs come with an EULA backed by a dozen laws, which, if they were universally enforced and followed to the letter, would put you in jail for the criminal act of making a backup copy, among a myriad other possible violations
What people don't realize is that part of the pricing model for various physical media is that the media wouldn't last. VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc all age, get lost, break, get scratches, whatever. They're not "forever".
Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable.
A cloud copy of something on Google, Apple, Amazon or Netflix is essentially forever.
People don't realize what they're effectively asking for is digital rights to something in perpetuity. And you can't really price that realistically.
Streaming services actually far better match what users actually want (in general). There's no issues of storing media or keeping digital copies safe. The limited time you can view something is what makes it economical.
Remember too that most things tend to only ever be watched once. The satisfaction for collection isn't relaly about repeat viewing at for the most part.
Streaming services would match what I want if the content I want was on all services and the services competed on service quality.
Instead I want to watch “The Expanse” and I dont know if it’s a Netflix special or HBO or Hulu or Amazon or what. I logged into three of them and it wasn’t there.
Oh look, it’s on the Pirate Bay. Also, it’s not throttled / forcibly downgraded to 720p or whatever.
I personally possess CDs from the 1980s and vinyl records from as early as the 1940s. Meanwhile I can’t access digital purchases made in the last few years. Perhaps not “forever”, but frankly close enough.
I have friends who work in media archiving. Properly stored physical media can last a LONG time, like hundreds of years.
And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.
The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.
Do you use FOIAFS to let the NSA do all of your archiving for you? Just post your digital content you want to save along with a unique token, then when you need a copy, FOIAFS automatically issues a FOIA request for all documents the government has with that unique token. It's kind of slow and unreliable, though.
I don't know, I feel like my physical copies are much more "forever" than the censored and "improved" versions available for streaming. In my copy of Star Wars, Han shots first.
> It's sad that we cannot own titles but are forced to rent them from these streaming services that can't seem to get their shit together.
It's sad that the general public cannot get its shit together and every man jack keep and use his own library.
I know because I'm one of the sad sacks that owns hundreds of original LPs, CDs, VHSs, DVDs, and also has a couple TB of HDD worth of borrowed series, and hasn't touched the damn pile of 'precious' in ages.
"Give me Convenience or Give me Death", as those 1980s punks so neatly summed it up.
For better or worse, half way through realizing it was stupid, I've bought myself a massive collection that I don't "own" on iTunes. Technically, it is tied to my Apple account, but there isn't a way to transfer ownership, or etc outside of Apple even for e.g.if I die.
I think though there will be some laws passed hopefully that will allow us to own digital content outright in the near future, hopefully in a decentralized way.
Doesn’t apple still allow you to buy movies on their service? I only bought two (the iron giant and the bucket list) but i am pretty sure iron giant i bought close to 15 years ago. I can still download it from their service without any problems(just went to the tv app on my phone to confirm and just started to download them right now)
Yes, lots of services do. Apple is unique though in that a purchase entitles you to all versions of a film, including future versions. I bought 3:10 to Yuma on iTunes in 2008 and I can watch it in 4K/HDR today without spending another cent.
I still prefer buying and ripping Blu-Rays though.
It would be much worse if we were forced to buy the rights to watch a TV show or movie before we know if we even like it. I'd have a massive virtual library of half garbage.
I see a lot of focus on the "lost 200 000 subscribers", but less acknowledgement that they kicked 700 000 Russians off the subscriber list, meaning they actually grew by 500 000 subscribers (still well short of wall streets expectation of 2.5 million.)
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
You're right, but the article posted includes statements like:
> Two hundred thousand subscribers did not suddenly quit their subscriptions and start using their friends’ passwords.
That implies the author thought this was a natural subscription drop and not a result of losing 700k subscribers in Russia. I'm not sure I have any confidence in their predictions about the future, since they're so clueless about what's happening today.
The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has. Look at Apple TV+, they're absolutely TINY compared to Netflix in both library size and money spent on new production, but they have arguably more hits than Netflix. Like, since when has any drama on Netflix been as buzzy or as good as Severance on Apple TV+? When was the last time they had a comedy success like Ted Lasso?
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
"The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has."
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
>The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
I was really skeptical of subscribing to Apple TV (an additional streaming service really?) but after watching some of the Apple content I'm a convert. Ted Lasso, Severance, Pachinko, and many more.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
I think they've over-interpreted their viewing data. Seems like they concluded that viewers spend most of their time watching garbage filler, which is probably true. But they shouldn't presume that each viewing hour is equal to the next.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
Netflix always had a terrible business model dependent on transient properties of the media environment. I thought from the beginning they were not masters of their own fate (remember Redbox's hack to get around publisher restrictions? Weird streaming windows even from the streaming era's earliest days?) and once they started spending the big bucks to try and stay afloat it was clear they were doomed. They were only in "FAANG" to make the acronym funny.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
I blame Netflix for popularizing the stack of horizontal scrolling carousel of thumbnails. It is a terrible way to browse, and so many companies mindlessly copy it.
Can you point specifically to what you don't like about it?
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
I have to change from the traditional 2 finger vertical scroll to get to the bottom of the page to a single touch pointer action to bypass the area of the screen so I can get past the area and continue to scroll to the bottom. It's horrible UI if you have a multigesture touchpad, like apple macbooks. Instead of scrolling from the top, it starts scrolling vertically (like it's supposed to) to suddenly scrolling horizontally as soon as you hit that area. Amazon prime does it too. Instead of speedily cruising around the interface, it's a nonstop battle for control to go where I intended. You end up fighting the interface, which leads to a very poor experience day after day after day. If I want to scroll horizontally, scrolling left-right should do that, not horizontal to get a vertical action.
All that automatic zooming and whirring and auto-playing as my cursor moves around drives me batty! It's so distracting - it's harder to figure out what I might want to watch with all that chaos trying to grab my attention.
A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters. They go with the carrousel for better or worse because it lets you quickly scroll through categories without scrolling through every item in a category. If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
If you just want more search options, I agree but the search layout is also already a grid.
I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better. There are subtle issues with getting this layout right. Its not as obvious as you say when you need to deal with crap remote dpads and no keyboards.
> A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters.
It doesn't need to be a list of movie posters.
> If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
It's not though, you have to scroll horizontally for each section. That's not the same as a grid.
> I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better.
That's tough to do if everyone is implementing it poorly. However, I would say that something like this feels better in practice (even if it's still not ideal): https://i.imgur.com/AU6Az7e.jpeg
That wastes more space than a horizontal scrollable grid that’ll go back and for with the mouse wheel. Even Netflix large rectangular preview boxes still fit more shows.
Because then you can only traverse in one dimension as opposed to two. You can currently scroll through categories quickly. In a single list you have to scroll through every title.
I didn't mean to abandon two scroll axes. Only make the vertical scrolling the primary method people use to scroll though videos. Or do people prefer to scroll through categories?
The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating. There are a lot of people who were content to pay for a couple services, but even without any sports, you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60, just to get content that used to be on Netflix (plus whatever's been released since). Once you add one or two sports, you can be looking at prices above $100 per month.
> you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
> I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show? They create mindless entertainment for society and yet they are so highly compensated. Yeah, I don't feel like I owe them anything.
> Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show?
Because that is the agreement they made for selling their labor/services/content to the buyers of the labor/services/content.
"Mindless" is a subjective term. Millions of people enjoy the entertainment you refer to, as judged by the fact that they go to the cinema and pay for admission. That's why they're so highly-compensated.
If you don't see the value in the entertainment those companies provide, you're probably not the target audience.
Media companies have been using the value of "content you want to watch" to subsidize "content you don't know you want to watch" for about a century now, the back catalogs are what will keep you paying but that only retains value so long as new content can be added to it.
While I myself have purchased many seasons of TV, I should caution you that none of it can be "purchased outright" on these platforms. Your account can be cancelled at any time, and you then lose access with no recourse. "Purchasing outright" requires buying physical media, and even then, disc players are becoming dangerously niche.
If people really start doing that en-masse, then the next thing the streaming services will implement is that cancellation means you lose access immediately.
Then I will set a reminder on my phone to cancel before next renewal. Or if too troublesome, I will just pay for the specific episode or show or movie.
Or if the price is too high, I will find something better to do with my time. Same as every other entertainment option in life.
> it is easy to see how a family of frogs is slowly boiled back into having an expensive "entertainment package" as if it were the old cable days again,
It is not easy to see for me. If you want access to all the content all at once, then pay up.
If you want access to specific content at the specific time you want, then pay then, watch, and cancel the subscription if there was one.
This latter option was not available before, and it is now. I am loving the new system which cuts out the middleman (cable/satellite tv) that was able to jerk around both me and the content seller.
The next problem needing to be solved is reducing copyright length to 10 years or so. That is what will make the price of content go down by increasing the number of content sellers.
Buy a subscription. Then get a VPN so they don't force me to watch things from the wrong country. Then dislike the political narrative forced on me? Or just click through to some streaming site and close a few popups?
Why not just have one streaming service at a time? Each has an absurd amount of content so just switch it up every few months. You get to watch everything and it’s super inexpensive.
This is what I do. When the "to watch" list of shows I got recommended or am otherwise interested in watching on one of the services gets a few items on it, I buy a month of subscription and immediately cancel. Then watch the stuff during the month, and some time later get another month of a different service. This has been working great for the past couple years.
All these services are going for the strategy of a couple big releases and hope people forget to cancel. But now with a dozen different services consumers are being forced to learn to swap in and out.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
> The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating.
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- Edit: Plex et al are not the *only* ways to download content, not sure why some replies are thinking so. I too can type in a show into a piracy site, click the magnet icon, and start immediately watching it. I personally don't even use Plex, Radarr or Sonarr myself, it was just a suggestion. In contrast, I can't just type any show into Netflix and watch it, since it might not even be on Netflix! Then I'd need to get on justwatch.com just to figure out which streaming service is playing the show. This is harder than piracy in my view.
- You can use whatever media player you want without having to go through a browser and its DRM. I use mpv and filters like Anime4k to automatically upscale my content, something that I cannot do via a browser or otherwise without the physical file on my hard drive.
- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
... and you are not forced to use those grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers (and their SDKs), in other words, open source drm software which is "obfuscated" via complexity and size: you can use the media player you like, and in my case my shmol media player I wrote (using ffmpeg).
This issue is actually critical as it is not really piracy as it narrows down to the right to have interoperabitily with technically reasonable and sensible software.
I don't really get why Netflix is so sour about password sharing, it's literally part of the subscription pricing, they tell you how many concurrent streams you're allowed to have.
In the 1990s some homes would have several screens of cable TV, so several people in the same home could watch different things at the same time. Parents with teenage children, for example. Because of the physical cables it only worked in one home - when the kids moved out, they had to pay for their own cable or go without.
Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.
Yes, this very much bothers me. You pay for streaming. How many streams do you want? Well, pay Netflix for that number. However you like to use those streams is up to you.
Having not touched this since early days of TPB, is there a decent overview to approaches in 2022 you could point me to? E.g. has torrenting moved to the cloud or are most running vpns? Asking for a friend.
Latest and greatest is "plexshares" just google that. I've been sailing the high seas since 2002 and this is my last stop. No fuss, no worrying about anything. Wife and kids are very happy.
Find one in there that you like in your price range. I pay $20 and have 1080p/4k remuxes. I used to spend at least 10 hours a month managing my own Plex/Emby, the money is well spent to me.
Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.
I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.
rarbg.to is the popular index site.
Bittorrent, the purple client. My smart TVs can access my PC's dedicated media directory - which took a bit of fiddling to get right. The big drawback is a lack of subtitles, unless they are baked in to the rip.
I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime).
I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.
I wouldn't recommend BitTorrent/μTorrent, they're now run by a Chinese cryptocurrency company and have ads.
qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.
I have heard this term and briefly looked into it. My takeaway was it’s a vps with prebaked software/config offered by shady looking providers. Is that roughly correct or did I get lost in adwords?
Basically, you'll find ones with fast storage with big storage for reasonable prices and that are... explicitly sanctioning this use case. And I'd bet the competent ones specifically design their network and client settings for good performance. In professional settings getting good large storage performance is sometimes a struggle or expensive.
I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.
A friend can recommend bytesized hosting if you want minimal hassle. They have installer scripts for all the most popular tools (like the ones in parent) and it's really easy to set up your own netflix-like experience, with Plex as the streaming UI, deluge as the torrent client and Sonarr and Radarr as automated torrent downloaders.
> It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
> It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Very true.
In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.
My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.
And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.
I don't think I agree with this level of negativity around plex, radarr, and sonarr. Using a seedbox provider and all of these things are setup and don't need any additional tinkering. You are right that the indexer is probably the least friendly part, but set it up once and it keeps working for over 6 months at a time.
Even without a widget I can definitely see that with Netflix I am getting 720p on a 4k TV, even more frequently when watching childrens shows. I have a 200Mbps internet link, Disney+ plays 4k just fine.
It is not. It's very clearly not HD and we gigabit internet. Other services do fine. Especially rented HD movies that are streamed. So instead of using my TV for Netflix, I watch on my laptop with a browser plugin to set a proper resolution.
All this. Plus, if you live in a country that's not the US, half the streaming services aren't available, and on the ones that are, half the content is missing because it's 2022 and geographic region licensing is still a thing.
Since the rise of streaming services it have been surprisingly hard to get older and less popular content as less people are seeding. Also seems there are stringent laws present for content sharing than it was 10 years ago. I doubt that content piracy will come back in the way it was so that an ordinary citizen could say "It's easier just to pirate".
> Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.
Theft, in plain english, is defined as the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive. Stealing is the act of theft.
As mention in a comment above, it is not the consumer's responsibility to provide income to employees of a company providing goods or services. Please stop with this fallacy.
You're conflating consumer responsibility with consumer spending. It's the company's job to provide wages - the company dictates and designs the means to acquire money to provide wages. If the company provides a widget that consumers don't want, is it the consumer's fault the company cannot pay the wages of the employees? That's just silly.
Technically stealing is depriving someone from his property which is not the case here. Also one should make a distinction between services. In the case of audiovisual content It can be consumed without changing anything in the life of the producer. I do not say that it’s a good thing but qualifying it of stealing does not seem right.
>You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k")
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
Maybe, but I'd pay for better content and UX. Many movies above that royalty threshold just aren't available. Also Netflix must die because they canceled Cowboy Bebop.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
Disney, Paramount, CNN would eventually be held hostage to their platform by a Spotify or Steam ... The Music business and artists have been destroyed by Spotify
Plex is nice! I run a Server for Family and Friends, it works great, but I’m an IT GUY and it’s a Hobby.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Maybe it's because I haven't done it in earnest since the days of Limewire but pirating sounds like such a fucking hassle these days. So I just don't do it not out of a strong sense of morality but because I'm lazy.
Sure. It's also stealing. And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy. Don't get me wrong, I've done it for some things that I wanted to watch, but wasn't willing to pay for. But let's not pretend that everyone torrenting is a reasonable solution.
There were a few years were I literally stopped all torrenting. Netflix and Amazon had everything I wanted. Sure, there were a few things that didn't exist, but I was too lazy to go after that minor amount of content. I was fully legal and paying for everything. I was fine with it.
Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
Back in the 90s you would have had to pay $3-5 per movie at Blockbuster. Drive to the store, hope the movie you want was in stock, drive home, watch movie, remember to rewind the movie when it's done, drive back to the store to return it before the due date.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
Movies are different than games (and music) however. While I have rewatched movies--multiple times in a (relatively small) number of cases, movies are mostly one and done for me--and I imagine most adults.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
It was normalized back when the first video rental stores opened decades ago. It remains today because there needs to be some way to differentiate between a rental and a purchase, otherwise everything would become a purchase at a significantly higher price point.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Do you also make backups of HD movies using this process, by any chance? Like you, I have no issue purchasing something. But I don’t like “purchasing” something stored in a walled garden online-only service that can be taken away.
I am fine with renting and paying. But the arbitrarily stupid rule “you have 48 hours to finish once you started” is what stops me from “renting” any lure.
Amazon and Youtube (and maybe other streaming services) also offer some of the movies for free with advertising. So the model hasn’t changed much from going to rent a movie at the store for a few bucks or watching it on cable tv, except you’re not paying for cable now.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
Why don't you just not partake in the content? You really don't need to spend all that time watching shows. If you don't like the terms under which it is offered, just find something else to do.
I have a TCL TV (with Roku) and searching for a show using the voice remote generally gets me the result and also which app is streaming it. I use it all the time these days.
JustWatch is good for this, but it mostly reveals how sparse most of their catalogs are. It confirmed for me, at long last, that the reason I couldn't find anything to watch is because there wasn't anything to watch. Paramount+ at least has all the Star Treks after pulling it from every other service, but it seems like all they have other than that is 30 seasons of 5 cop shows.
Most results would just be buried somewhere in the middle of a four page article filled with ads and popups about cookies and newsletters and the like.
> And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy.
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
I don't disagree. However, you can buy/rent movies and shows on an individual basis from amazon/google/apple now. The prices are just higher. There seems to be some benefit to bundling shows together into a service. You can also just jump around from service to service, which is what I do.
Ahh, but “buying” streamed content is a fool’s purchase. If the streamer loses the rights to film you “purchased”, you lose your purchase. This happened a few years ago with Disney content on Amazon.
I don’t want to assume anything about your financial situation but I just don’t believe most people would find 2 hours of entertainment for $4 unreasonable. Like that’s just silly cheap.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
> We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app....
Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
Sorry, but no. That’s what I find difficult to understand - let’s say I want to watch a movie and ready to pay 5$ for it - why would I watch it in Hd or even 1080p if I have 4k TV? I understand that Google has only HD option for me, but why would I want it if I pay? In my mind if I pay - I should get every technical option possible to watch it, otherwise raw files are just few clicks away and I already paid for my broadband.
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
Those are just excuses to justify your piracy. If you have a decent 4k TV and are sitting more than 5 feet away from it, the 1080p stream will upscale to "retina" quality and you won't be able to tell the difference.
That might seem silly cheap, but compare it to going to the cinema. The dining has a huge site to pay for, projection equipment and staff, cleaning and a million other things.
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
It's cheap in terms of absolute dollar value, yes. But it's also an EXCEPTIONALLY shallow form of entertainment that I can easily approximate for free by just streaming some different movie off Netflix.
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
I wonder if this is different based on number of people in the household. On amazon, I think it’s usually $3 (fucking $2.99 penny tricks), which amounts to $1.50 each for the two of us watching. In a family of four, it’s sub-dollar each. Which as a percent of the dinner you’re probably eating while you watch is very little. But renting for yourself alone feels at least twice as expensive!
Piracy is a protest. 95% of those shows are worthless fillers that would have never been watched by the viewers if the full selection was available. Most of those future "originals" shouldn't be happening in the first place.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
> And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy.
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
You're probably right, and honestly the thought of this happening just makes me feel sad. That premise is just like the character Dixie Flatline in Neuromancer. Simply tragic.
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement, and it's an act of protest. I paid for Netflix for years when the streaming catalog was good, but now the streaming video market feels like an anti-consumer predatory cash grab.
It's stealing, specifically from myself and others in my industry that you haven't heard of that. Making movies would be impossible to be without your
- Lesser Known actors
- Assistant Directors
- Stunt Coordinators
- 2nd Unit Directors
- Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
If you choose not to pay for their movie and watch something else, you are correct that you didn't steal from them. You did steal from someone else just like them though. If you pirate their movie, then yes you did in fact steal income from them. The act of choosing to pirate that particular movie changes it from a matter of potential income to a loss of actual income.
Right, so that isn't stealing. It is in fact what I advocate strongly. If more people did that, more content they would enjoy would be provided at a reasonable cost.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
ha. You are not wrong. The winds are shifting and I'm optimistic that i will be able to individually garner a better contract over time even if my union fails to help with it.
In this example, the banking provides the service of a safe place to keep my money until I spend it. That's what I pay for, in the form account fees and the banks ability to leverage my saved money for their financial gain.
100% the opposite. Bankers make their money from the flows of cash streams. Putting my cash under a mattress or setting it on fire steals it out of the hands of your banking friends.
This may be a regional difference, but we make most of our money on fees. Cashflow isn't actually worth that much in the current economy.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
How much of your money has been taken from you? Not hypothetical money you think you might have been entitled to, but money that was actually yours. How much was taken from you?
around anywhere from 2 - 25 cents per viewing per consumer. Over the course of my career that can break down to easily 7 figures if I was to work on say the original Star Wars.
did you extract the value of the entertainment without providing the fee? That's stealing money from me.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
Did you steal any content that was behind a paywall? If you did, you have taken money out of my industry and made it more difficult for it to be a viable career path in the future.
If I didn't pirate it, I wouldn't watch it, so you're not losing anything in my case. Additionally, if your work is actual art rather than mediocre filler content I probably bought your merch, which I definitely wouldn't do if I was getting raped by a streaming service, so if anything odds are you're coming out ahead. Beyond that, if I'm pirating, people start conversations about TV shows I don't feel compelled to hijack them by talking about how all streaming platforms are bullshit, which I totally would do if I wasn't pirating.
The purpose is to be a signal to the distributor: "fix your payment model or we're not paying". I pirated for a long time. When Netflix became a thing, I stopped pirating (since it was easier). Now I pirate again. If a new company came along with a good model, or the industry as a whole decided this streaming debacle is stupid, I would definitely stop pirating and give my money to someone. Until then, why would I pay money for a worse service than what I can get for free?
Wouldn't the appropriate choice be to not pay for the service AND not pirate? That seems like the best way to send the message. Pirating gives the impression that you want to view their content but not pay for it. So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Then they would replace the content but not the system. If you like the content pirate it. They may add more drm like music companies or they may reduce prices or they may make streaming easier.
Yes, I'm interested in their content. I'm not interested in their byzantine ways of inventing 20 million new streaming services that I need to subscribe to in order to watch one single show I want.
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
How do I do that? For instance imagine I would like to watch Book of Boba Fett (just an example, I saw it mentioned somewhere today). I don't think that Disney allows to purchase it individually, but I can only guess, because in the sticks where I live (EU country), Disney+ isn't even available.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
Boba fett is not provided individually. The cost value of producing that show is driving people to a subscription system. If you don't want to do that, don't sign up for it.
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
It was your suggestion to purchase individual shows.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
Effort of buying legally < effort of downloading illegally
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
You still have to find which service it's available on, enter payment information, download an app... And even then if you're not in the USA the selection is distributed across more apps, and lots of content isn't available easily even if you want to pay.
That's Amazon AFAIK, I don't know of any others. It's a step in the right direction but the price is still too high (it's usually $4-$5 in my experience). I only get to watch it once, not keep it, and I pay you double what I used to pay Blockbuster? No thanks.
Blockbuster new releases were $3 in 1990 dollars ($6.60 today). This was in a mid-sized town in the midwest, not Manhattan or LA. Blockbuster was also far less convenient.
When I open IMDB database a drop down with links appears. If publisher decided not to provide movie for purchase - these are links to torrent files to download movie in HD, FHD and 4k with preselected language and subtitles settings.
If publisher decided to provide movie for purchase - links to buy it with comparable price to a movie ticket. But you buy Movie not an HD+English+SpanishSubs file version and you don’t have access to 4k video.
You can also buy subscription to IMDB which will include 100-200 hours worth of content per month. You don’t buy movies this way. You stream them and they don’t belong to you once your subscription ends.
Publishers get their money based on minutes of content watched by users.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
There are many lifetimes of content out there already. What if I'm fine with there being no money for future shows?
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
If I pay for Netflix, which offers Friends in some countries but not my own, and I want to watch Friends, am I stealing it by torrenting it? Who has less property now than before I torrented the show?
I'm okay with that. The business is unfair to those in it, particularly at the lower end, and also unfair to its consumers. It is not the job of consumers to fix or perpetuate that system.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
Is it my responsibility to help these people continue their careers? I have worked on tools that help businesses fill out legal forms without the need of a lawyer. By the same logic, am I “stealing” from the lawyers who need this friction to continue their careers? The reality of technological progress is that some economic activities become unsustainable and some workers will be forced out of their careers.
i prefer not to pay for my own exploitation and being psychologically mindfucked by propaganda. i don't want to give money to Hollywood millionaires and the expensive product advertisements that classify as movies today
That's not how English works. "Stole", "steal", etc., have meanings beyond just illegally depriving someone of physical property. Here are several examples of correct usage of "steal" or "stole" that have nothing to do with illegally taking property.
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
> They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
A great moral crime, no doubt...
The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.
These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.
> Mallory "stole" his fiancé
Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.
> the rival company "stole" your secret formula
> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"
These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.
A better example is theft of services. If you sit down at a barber's chair and then walk out without payment, we all consider that stealing. But no property was actually deprived--just wasted effort.
All of these examples result in someone not having something any more (being the star of a show, trade secret, confidential data, fiance, winning of the game).
It doesn't matter how you rationalise it. Someone created content with the intention of it being consumed for a fee. You downloaded it, likely from someone who illegally copied/reproduced it.
Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.
Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.
How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).
They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.
Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?
Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.
I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:
* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)
* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.
Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.
The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.
> How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.
- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM
- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself
I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.
The other option, which obviously doesn't work for mega-corporate media, is independent, direct support (patreon, etc). Most of my favorite modern content is created in this way, and is entirely free to download and distribute - contribution is entirely optional.
problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.
I agree with everything you say here, and torrent a bit more than you and get things via newsnet a lot. I maintain a large media server.
The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).
I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.
Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.
More like I snuck onto a ride without buying a ticket. Or snuck into a theater without buying a ticket. Wouldn't you call that stealing?
Edit:
Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.
In those cases, your mere presence costs the operator more (fuel cost/ wear and tear/limited number of seats) - so sure, those cases could be considered stealing, but I don't think they're in the same realm as downloading entertainment.
I have some used oil I need to get rid of. I could drive the 45 mile round trip to the county hazardous waste disposal site and get rid of it properly. Or I could wait until we get a good rain and pour it into the drainage ditch in front of my house, where it will eventually end up somewhere in Puget Sound.
The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.
Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
If the environmental impact assessment (you should already have conducted this) shows the impact of dumping your 1 ml - 1,000 l is less than the impact of your driving 45 miles, go for it!
> Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.
This doesn't make any sense and is an incorrect analogy. Trains don't pay residuals to the people that made the train every time someone rides it. Imagine a different world where the people who made trains make most of their money from train rider residuals. In that case, I would say yes, they are stealing.
And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .
and then the carnival workers get fired, because there isn't enough income to pay 3 people. One person has to take tickets and run the rides, which is now more dangerous for you. So they shut it down, and all the cool rides leave town and you'll tell your kids how much cooler carnivals use to be and you'll never understand it's cause you stole income out of the workers pockets.
It’s always hilarious to see HN of all places get nitpicky about this distinction. If some megacorporation stole your code, we’d laugh them out of the room if they said this shit. “We didn’t steal your code, it’s still right there on github! We would have used it legally if you had licensed it differently!”
Not sure if you're being sarcastic... If not, you're just being facetious. Just because a thing is digital and therefore copiable, doesn't mean there's no reason to ever pay for it.
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Oh, are we doing argument by dictionary now? Here's another one then:
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It's not taken. It's copied. Digital piracy is not theft. It's unauthorized copying.
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
it's theft of the income of the workforce required to make movies. Whole departments receive residuals based on the post box office sales and that income is required to ensure that it is a viable career. That enables talented and safe people to continue making entertainment which in turn provides a better product.
No, it's not. If I pay for a movie, but I then download it from The Pirate Bay, it's still piracy, but nobody loses anything.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
In your example, getting a third party to provide a digital copy of a good you already own is not theft. I would argue it's a lousy way of doing things, opening you up to many more problems, but it's not theft.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
I sort of think piracy in this context is actually distributing some media, e.g. a movie, without holding the copyright or a license from the copyright holder to do so.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.
You're stealing income, specifically from me and all of my coworkers. Perhaps you think that you're only stealing from Producers and A list actors, but there are entire departments that receive residuals on a production.
- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.
- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.
- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.
- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.
You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
Uh huh, I'll stop stealing from you when you stop stealing from me.
Advertizements everywhere stealing my attention, public space, and landscape beauty. Stealth taxes on empty hard drives and other storage media. Hardware-destroying rootkits and other malware (lost a DVD drive to DRM, will you reimburse me?). Draconian control mechanisms and lobbying stealing my control of the devices I own. Mountains upon mountains of disposable plastic promotional crap stealing my planet and ecosystem.
I'm not stealing from you. I'm extracting some small reparation for the many toxic behaviors your industry engages in. When you start offering an honest product I'll start honest buying. And I do - I pay more combined to good people producing good content via Patreon than a monthly Netflix subscription.
You, personally, are stealing from my income. All those issues you raise are valid and important issues to address. Stealing because those things make you angry makes you part of the problem.
I don't personally pirate much, but I take umbrage at you characterizing it in this way. You seem to think that the issues of accessing media without subjecting yourself to user-hostile behaviors are wholly orthogonal to the issue of accessing media without paying for it. They aren't.
Imagine a hypothetical universe where, in order to watch one of your movies, people had to a) pay you $1 and also b) let you punch them in the nose. Then, when people sensibly start pirating your content instead because they don't want to get punched, you loudly proclaim that they are stealing the $1 you are owed.
That's what's happening here. People want to watch your content, and are willing to pay for it. But they don't want to pay for it AND get punched in the nose. They pirate because your distributors, and by extension you yourself, have made it impossible to watch your content (and pay you!) in any other way.
I get that your natural rejoinder will be "if the content is not worth being punched in the nose, just don't watch it!" Which is fair. Debatable, but fair. Just don't come here pretending that all you have asked for is the reasonable sum of $1 when you are actually demanding that your customers subject themselves to the indignity of your fist.
The world is full of problems. We are looking at actual massive potentially civilization or species ending issues in the large and dealing with trying to make a living, manage illness, deal with death, parenting in the small.
If you live in a big city you probably walk by people in the street slowly dying from a drawn out form of suicide because you can't possible change all their lives on your way to the grocery store or coffee shop and people at large are choosing to do the same with your income stream. They opt to deal with problems more important and more personal than fixing the way in which culture is monetized so as to funnel slightly more money to rich folks who could do more for society as soylent green in hopes that a few extra bucks will stick to the hands of useful folks like yourself.
For myself I'm not angry nor do I have any intention of fixing the problem because nobody with any decision making power gives two shits what my opinion on anything is. I have monetarily in life about nothing and indeed will have nothing tomorrow and the next day. You feel like people are violating the social contract by not paying for multimedia. Part of your problem is that you even believe that we are part of the same society or share the same ethics.
We really aren't. I am not the benefactor of the current situation nor do I have any meaningful power to negotiate new ground rules or even enforce existing ones so rejection makes worlds more sense.
You say stop downloading and I hear enjoy poverty but with fewer books, music, movies, games. I wont actually be supporting the folks you mentioned to any greater degree but you will find such more ethically palatable. HALF of America is sharing 12% of the income. We don't have anything but you can stick a $200 PC and plug it into a $20 monitor and courtesy of a $10 internet essentials package download as many books music movies shows as you can possibly consume.
I don't feel like making my shitty life shittier in order for you to feel better. Artificial scarcity is a dumb way to run a society and its not my fault the people with all the money in this society have chosen it.
Film is competing against loads of free content and the industry is thrashing to avoid accepting the obvious fate: it is no longer economically rational to produce films with budgets in the hundreds of millions.
Jobs will be lost, just like happened with farriers and switchboard operators. Your income will disappear regardless: the demand for stunts is elastic and the supply is increasingly competitive. Blaming pirates is being unable to see the forest for the trees.
If the entire world of piracy tripled tomorrow, it still wouldn’t have the tiniest shred of impact on your income compared to the decisions of rapidly consolidating tech/studio execs who are tanking your industry and fighting your unions to chase pennies.
A lot of us would gladly pay the cast and crew directly to own a copy of your output that we could access on our own terms, but that isn’t a reality for most trade under capitalism. There’s a reason Googlers on HN aren’t trying to guilt trip everyone for personally stealing their income by using ad blockers. Maybe this is particularly to the entertainment industry, but most of us would shrug our shoulders at the equivalent of petty shoplifting from our employers.
I, and nobody I know, has pirated games or music since Steam blew up about 12-15 years ago and Spotify/RDIO and similar blew up about 10 years ago.
There was about a decade when Netflix went full in on online streaming and was offering a fantastic service for a reasonable price with a far superior experience to piracy. That is no longer the case, and the unbundling to now a dozen+ of subscriptions is driving pretty much all my techie friends back to movie/tv piracy. I personally don't really watch much TV and might watch one or two movies a year, so I'll just not watch anything. I've already cancelled my Netflix subscription about a year ago, and I prefer playing video games and reading books anyway.
Until your industry can offer a product experience that is superior to piracy, people are going to pirate. The games and music industries have largely solved this problem. When will yours?
No, it's not economic at all. You've repeatedly failed to grasp this in this entire comments section. It's about convenience. It is actually more convenient to pirate the handful of movies or TV shows people want to watch than to maintain a dozen subscriptions or activate just the one for the handful of shows or movies they want to watch at any given time.
Steam and Spotify have made it incredibly simple to just get what you want without having to juggle or manage any kind of bullshit.
Steam charges by the game and often times you can find whatever you want on iTunes or Amazon video if you're willing to "buy" the movie/tv season. Why do you limit yourself to content that comes to you from a subscription? I'm guessing because it's kind of expensive to buy a season of tv.
I don't, actually. I pay for a number of things that I feel deliver value. I've bought movies and TV off of amazon video/youtube. I pay for some podcasts. I buy audiobooks off of Audible and eBooks from kindle (despite these being even more expensive and more convenient to pirate than movies/TV). I've commissioned some graphic design stuff for personal use. Though I'm personally not into sports, a friend of mine is super into the NFL and buys their online package (though he still has to pirate certain local games because...not enough people showed up to the stadium that day???).
As I've said in the thread, for me the alternative to movies/TV isn't piracy, it's playing games or reading books, which I do pay for because the experiences of finding what I want, buying it, and consuming it is a superior experience to piracy. If that ever changes across the entire media landscape and games/books go the way of movies/TV that may change.
ah, sidenote! I watch NFL too. Generally local games are blacked out so you need to watch them on the local broadcast via antenna or a cable. I do find this annoying but I have an antenna pretty much for that reason.
The only thing I pirate is movies / tv shows ... and it's extremely simple: because it's not humanly possible to purchase them digitally.
Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?
Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.
Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways?
(FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)
Yes, it is. But even though you didn't manage to communicate your point correctly, it still stands: the only reason streaming replaced piracy was because people could afford it and it was easier to use.
Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time.
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. If someone steals my car I no longer have my car. If someone copies my car my car loses values because there is now one extra copy of my car floating around.
If intellectual property is indeed property, it can be stolen. Considering (in the US, at least), intellectual property is codified within the Constitution, it's pretty hard to say it isn't real.
Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
Often when you have to qualify something (intellectual property instead of just property), it's because it's used as a metaphor instead of a subcategory. Intellectual property is a form of property as much as political science is a form of science.
You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property.
For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it?
If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
You've posted 67 (!) comments in this thread, mostly making the same point over and over in angry ways.
I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here.
> You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying.
This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.
I generally support this argument, but to play devil's advocate, you might consider the bit stream used to transfer the content to be new bits. The file may be a bit-for-bit copy if you ask a computer, but streaming it required a series of voltage fluctuations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You could consider that series of events to be roughly analogous to a CD-ROM containing some content. You can load the CD onto two computers and get two copies of its content, but there are two physically distinct CDs just like there are two physically distinct series of bits streaming to two locations.
An NFT is a certificate of authenticity. Copies of the associated item don't have a valid certificate. Getting satisfaction from a copy is orthogonal to the value associated with the authenticated original.
I'll go into your mailbox and take your paycheck. I'll provide you with a new identical copy of it. I'll leave the previous existing copy intact, but in my possession.
Theft is when you take something from someone. As in, what you have materially gained, they have materially lost. Copyright infringement is not theft, and must be treated differently, because what you gain, nobody has lost; the supply is infinite.
If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
Finally! I agree with this. I think that physically purchased goods should be free from any sort of "DRM." and is not stealing.
The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service.
When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders.
That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially.
I seriously don't understand why this point keeps getting repeated. It is just semantics!
Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
No, I am not taking anything of value. You still have all the things of value you had before. The difference between a rivalrous good and a non-rivalrous good is not semantics.
Call it stealing it or not, non rivalrous or whatever, the point is that the movie owners have intellectual property rights to their movies and can decide how it is distributed.
If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
Theft is not defined by the receiving, it is defined by the taking. The moral ill is not you being enriched, it is the person who had it rightfully, being deprived of it.
"Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying."
And this is again a physical situation, where one more person takes up limited space, reducing something.
Copying does not reduce anything.
It also does not contribute anything, true, so I am not saying it is always ethical to do so.
But when a poor person in bangladesh or bolivia living under very different economic realities, where 10$ means a LOT and who could never afford to pay for western realities anyway, streams some hollywood movie from a warez site - than I see zero damage. And guess what, they all do. So do poor teenagers and students in the west and they usually start paying, once they can afford it.
Judging them all as "thefts" from a position of being born into wealth, is maybe not very ethical either.
So to repeat it again, stealing implies taking something away. Which is not the case here.
> Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?
Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it?
Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?
In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].
I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.
We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service.
If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
What if 6 people watch it for one purchase? Does it become theft then?
How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?
What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.
I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.
If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.
If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.
Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).
Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.
You assume people are going to pay for it. If you provide a good service, they will, as shown by Steam and Spotify and, at least initially, Netflix.
If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.
It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.
I assume that if people want to enjoy a service without paying for it, it's theft.
It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.
Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.
What are your thoughts on me and all of my friends and family getting together in my home theatre and watching the latest movie that I paid 4 bucks for on something like Amazon or Youtube?
Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).
I am 100 percent okay with it. One entity has provided the fee for service (and afforded me 1/100th of an avocado toast, thank you very much) and is not in their ownership to do as they like.
That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast
The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.
I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.
It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. You have lost nothing you would not lose otherwise, and you have gained nothing you would not gain otherwise.
You gain the value of service without paying the requested fee. If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't. Watching it, without paying for it is theft and it takes money from me.
Proof by repeated assertion. The post you are replying to is an effective response to yours. Once more: It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. Watching it without paying for it does not take money from you, because you would still not have had that money if I had simply not watched it at all.
> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.
This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.
Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.
>if you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.
Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.
There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.
Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.
it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.
Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.
In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.
"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.
This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.
So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.
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Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the underlying financial model at play in the current market. fwiw im too lazy to pirate, but i still feel there is an incredible difference between people who pirate for themselves vs people who make it easy for others to pirate. People who invite some friends over to watch something they pirated, vs someone who distributes pirated content on common low-tech household media formats like USB, CD, etc.
You are wrong. You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. It’s not whether the good can still be sold, it’s about whether the business can continue to get money.
Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.
@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid.
But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?
This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.
Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.
That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy.
As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.
It's not though. You could argue it is indirectly stolen from you by impacting your potential for future earnings, but please explain how the "direct" part of your statement works. Are funds withdrawn from your bank account when someone pirates a movie?
The workforce's income is contractually tied to the amount of post box office profit the film makes. When you steal a show you get the entertainment value without cost of your money. That is directly reflected in my income.
That's fair enough and I did not know that, and will certainly take into account when making future purchasing decisions, thank you.
But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?
I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.
But what if I don't like Hollywood movies, consider them cheap crap, and don't care if more of them get made? I just want to watch them to see what everyone else is talking about.
But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.
If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.
> But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"
If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).
If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.
> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.
Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.
Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.
(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)
you are making assumptions about the prerequisites. Talking about "income" implies that the person is viewing a show inside a form of commercial contract like going to a place where the show is displayed or buying a dvd or paying a streaming plateform etc…
Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.
Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"
Say A makes a film.
Situation 1 : B do not watch the film a do something else.
Situation 2 : B downloads the film from P2P network and watch it.
What is the difference for A ?
They lost a potential sale because someone didn’t have to pay for something.
This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.
I don't know; it seems there is a clear learned aversion to the word "stealing" but doesn't change the unethical nature of the crime is equivalent to stealing royalties deserved for the consumed work. I pirate some times sure but I do so with the understanding that what I am doing is unethical and try to avoid it.
Consuming media/entertainment is no human right and if it is too expensive/too inaccessible/whatever and you wish to be ethical, don't pirate it in the first place.
Humans have great difficulty controlling their impulses especially in connection to crimes that are undetectable and easy to perform but the honest will at least own up to what they do.
Yes, obviously. I really don’t see how one could possibly sympathize with this argument. Say I go to a bakery and I only “sort of” want a cookie. I’m not hungry enough to pay for it, so I just take it, and claim “I’m not actually stealing because I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway“.
You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership?
So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.
What if most of my enjoyment of a cookie is looking at all of the pretty designs and crafty details on the cookies, and I don’t actually care that much to eat them. Is it stealing to go into a bakery and look at the cookies, then leave? I’ve gotten all of my enjoyment for free, after all!
You might be satisfied, but you only consumed a component of the work that the creator explicitly offers for free while refraining from consuming the component that requires payment. Just like browsing an art gallery: I'm satisfied seeing a painting in the gallery location, which is a freebie, and I don't care about also seeing it in the location of my choice, which has a price tag.
>Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
>If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it.
That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option.
And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.
This reminds me of the squatter issue and the claim that it's not wrong if the owner wasn't using it. This is only true if you have a vastly different idea of property (real and intellectual) rights that much of the country/economy is founded upon.
I don't pirate (out of principle), but I also basically don't stream because I'm a Linux user and your streaming platforms suck big fat ones.
If you want people to "stop stealing our shit", you should really address how crappy the distribution system is.
- Can't get it in __ country
- Can only watch it on __ closed-source devices
- Can't watch it offline
- A is only available on platform 1, B is only on platform 2, and I don't want either crappy platform
Anyway, as I said, I don't really watch movies much anymore, and haven't seen any of the ones on your IMDB page, I mostly play games or read books these days, but I'd probably watch more if the distribution system was better.
This is a valid complaint. I would tell you that on the many streaming services available for free like youtube, vimeo, etc. There is probably a small filmmaker who is making the type of show you enjoy. Finding them, providing value by first clicks and shares and eventually with income as they grow will encourage more filmmakers to make things you like.
Whatever chief executive that decided to create their own streaming platform for a price that's too high is stealing your money. They are the ones that made it more convenient to pirate.
How you worded that sounds reminiscent of mafia "protection". I assume that wasn't your intention, but that's how it read for me.
It seems to me like piracy of shows is tangential to whatever the root of the issue is. Folk are becoming disenchanted with streaming services. Whether they pirate or just stop watching instead, the services have clearly changed in ways that make them less valuable to consumers. Unless somebody figures that out, it's not going to improve. I doubt DRM is the answer, although a combination of higher prices and consolidated content might be. Folk would pay more for Netflix if it was still a "monopoly" with all the popular shows.
I think accusing folk of stealing money out of your pocket for downloading a video is quite hyperbolic and isn't winning you any arguments. You're trying to make it a moral issue, but it isn't really a moral issue, and nobody outside of the industry cares. You could claim that it's disrespectful to you as a participating member of society, and it probably is, but yelling at people to respect you more doesn't work, and has the opposite effect.
I think your point, though, is that it's a tragedy of the commons situation. The industry works as a whole because people are willing to pay a premium in exchange for entertainment. If people don't pay, then there's no incentive to produce. If folk value new entertainment, they need to support the industry that produces it.
If thieves are offended at having their behavior identified as stealing, they could stop stealing.
The problem, as I see it, is entertainment is being seen as a "good" and not a "service." Physical dvds and vhs has conditioned us to think that it's a physical good, so there is no harm in replicating the digital product. In fact that emotional state derived from viewing the entertainment is the service that is being paid for.
Taking the value of receiving that entertainment without providing the cash value of that service is stealing.
Make "cool things" overly priced, especially in a fucked up inflationary market manipulated by corruption and influence, where for the last several years everything costs more which is tangible and required to survive, (food, shelter, transport, employment)
Then the ephemeral luxuries, such as entertainment, begin to take a more relaxed position on our moral compass when one compares paying for entertainment services, vs, using funds for food.
I went looking for a la carte options for all the Star Treks. They really want almost $50 per season for DS9, a show that premiered almost 30 years ago. There's just no reasonable way to justify that but greed. I can't believe people like Stunting actually see much of that ~$50, and I think they're here fighting over people not giving them their scraps when there's no guarantee people are making a choice between paying $50, paying $10 to Paramount, or downloading a copy ("pirating" IP is a made up concept no one uses outside the world of RIAA, MPAA, and similar).
I love 90's star trek. I haven't watched anything past Enterprise and the Chris Pine movies because I don't have a CBS account. I could easily afford it, but none of the new content seems worth it to me, in terms of my time let alone my money. I'm not a pirate, and yet I feel like Stunting is upset with folk like me.
A significant proportion of 90s trek fans who have seen the new series would agree its not worth it.
I pirate-streamed the first season of discovery due to its lack of availability on other platforms. Felt like a 10 hour movie about a dystopian future with weak shallow characters rather than an episodic serial about the great people solving problems in a better society than we have today. Tried a few episodes of Picard and just didn't get into it. Neither were entertaining enough for my full attention, ended up watching on second monitor while playing a game.
I would feel like a schmuck if I paid CBS to subsidize this content: wasn't what I want more of in the world. There is no "voting with your dollar" in modern content delivery when you can't get a refund when a show ends up being a waste of time.
I have a very hard time taking Seth MacFarlane seriously as a non-voice actor. I keep hearing all the characters he voices, and that clashes with the attempts to play serious characters.
To you. The service I provide to society is entertainment. Perhaps in the dystopian sand planet of the future that won't hold much value but right now on Today's earth, entertainment is a service that is valued by society.
In the future, I suspect we'll still have storytellers for the same reason we do today. To Inspire, educate, and entertain. I cannot envision society with zero entertainment.
There's two (relevant) kinds of consumers here: Those who want access and those who want ownership.
Netflix was on a path to successfully serve the first kind, the only remaining problems being region locking and an incomplete catalog. Demand for piracy went down. Then the industry got greedy, made one of those remaining problems much, much worse, and now the demand for piracy is on the rise again.
The industry spends a lot of resources making life worse for the second kind, in a misguided attempt to both satisfy them and fully prevent the possibility of piracy. Instead they fail at both. The result is an increased demand for piracy.
> You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
So here's the problem: The only way I can spend money to encourage the production of content I want is to buy a terrible, abusive product I don't want. It only plays in 720p, it's only available through a shitty app, it may disappear from the platform it's on any time.
All of it is just a wrapper for content. Please sell me the content. Whatever file comes out at the end of the production process, sell it to me.
Instead I spend my money in other places. Streamers on Twitch want it. YouTubers want it. People on Patreon want it. Developers want it. Somehow they manage not to abuse the people willing to give them money.
Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way. Like OP said, if there’s something like steam or Spotify then I’d gladly pay for it. I still rent movies weekly on AppleTV because it’s a convenient experience. Geo gating, shitty compression and making us choose between n apps is not the way.
Also, we’re going to end up with shitty generated content regardless of my $10. If you’re making strong statements like OP is stealing from _you_, then go advocate for change. You’re in the industry.
> Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way.
While this may be a way explain why the masses pirate, it's a poor justification for an individual to do it. If you don't find the available payment mechanisms convenient enough, then walk away and support a product that does have mechanism convenient to you. (For the same reason that you wouldn't steal from a store that only takes Amex.)
Walking away vs pirating has exactly the same outcomes for the distributor. The only person affected in a nonzero way from the transaction is me, positively. Stealing from a store that only takes American Express would result in the store having less inventory; what I have gained, they have lost. The same is not true of copyright infringement. The only time copyright infringement converts into actual quantifiable loss for the seller is if I turn around and sell pirated copies at a lower price, which is why that's the degree of infringement that turns it from civil to criminal.
Every single show or movie I wanted to watch over the last year has been an exclusive to some streaming service or other.
Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.
Now I have a choice between:
1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like
2. pirating
3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch
I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.
However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.
I appreciate you not pirating. You are only being screwed if you think you are entitled to the entertainment. You are not.
You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.
Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.
The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.
Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.
Whether people are "entitled" to enrich their lives with art/entertainment or not is an interesting question in this context.
We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.
Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.
As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.
There is an inherent classism to "piracy is stealing" arguments: by gating access to culture, it effectively says "poor people shouldn't be able to participate in culture, because they don't have enough money"
"I'd like to steal things because I morally disagree with the rules to society that I am currently opting to live in. I could choose to move, address the change at a governmental level, or simply find my entertainment elsewhere but no. It is everyone else who is the problem. Therefore I take great offense to being labeled as a thief."
The first sentence is spot on. The rest is the distortion I was talking about. You demand empathy, but are unwilling to be empathetic yourself. In the end, you're the one opting out of discourse here, not the rest of us.
It doesn't ruffle my feathers at all. I've done my share of piracy when I lived in countries where that was the only viable way to get my hands on the information, art, or entertainment that was otherwise unavailable to the vast majority of people living there. And no, I'm not ashamed of it, and it doesn't offend me if you decide to label me a thief or worse.
What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.
One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.
If you're rich and disconnected enough to just drop everything and move over entertainment choices, I'm not sure you're in touch enough to have any kind of perspective on the people you're trying to convince.
Hard lesson learned from years of trying to "educate" people on things that matter to me: you're going about it all wrong. I've seen your posts all through this thread. All you've done is beat people over the head with your perspective and berate them for not agreeing with you.
I don't think this is what you mean to do. I think you really care about this! Lay down your sword and listen. Hear what people are saying in response. Let their responses inform and refine your advocacy. You can't stroll in broadcasting an ideological, self-interested position and expect people to react well.
> Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
I'm fine with this. Some of the best movies ever were made in the 70s, after the Hollywood studio system collapsed and a ton of money was sucked out of the industry.
While I agree with your sentiment, you can also make a better product. This is an easy fix with some of the smartest minds in the industry. People showed Netflix early on they were willing to PAY for ease of use.
100 percent agree. Voting with dollars is the fastest and best way to make better products.
The big studios know how many people are watching their stuff via theft. They are going to keep producting low end crap with studio friendly sponsorships, because piracy will have taught them that is a better business model.
Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
> Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
Where can I pay for a streaming service with no geo-blocking, no DRM quality limitations on Linux, offline viewing and all the shows/movies I want to watch? Seems the only way to vote with my wallet is to refuse to pay, which morally isn't really different to piracy.
Refusing to pay and refusing to consume is different morally from stealing.
I don't know where to find all those requirements. Perhaps they exist. If they are that big of a dealbreaker for you, don't consume the value provided by entertainment services.
When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a thief.
For one it's piracy, not theft. They are both legally and morally distinct. You're being deprived of a potential future profit rather than having a direct loss.
> When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a [pirate].
Correct, it is justifying being a pirate. The justification being exactly what you suggested: voting with my wallet. I want to watch a certain piece of entertainment, but it's producer has made it unreasonably unobtainable thus pirating it signals that it is both desired and that a sale was lost.
I think you're being angry about the wrong thing here. Consumers don't want to pirate; they are pushed to piracy by shit service. That's not a fault of the consumers, that's a fault of the seller. If you actually want to reduce piracy you should be advocating for better service rather than telling people they're stealing from you.
:) I know you're not yelling, more figure of speech. (did not mean to offend) But this is on HN where we allow pay-wall bypassing for all articles (which is also theft) so you wont get sympathy there. Like I said I agree with your sentiment, its just not the way to fix it. And I dont think it's a difficult problem to solve, especially from an extremely profitable and rich company.
Yet. I do have minor creative input depending on the production. When an audience shows they enjoy something I am able to argue more fiercly to include a similar thing into the next one.
When you work for the devil, don't be surprised to become collateral damage.
Thinking of all the stealing they've done from the public domain it makes my blood boil. Charging top dollar for artists work that have been dead for decades is a disgrace. How about "stealing" from the public and renting it out in perpetuity... Winnie the Pooh, anyone?
Most of the money goes to the top, and if you are going to throw around inaccurate/loaded terms like stealing, two can play at that game. 1%ers take a larger slice of the pie than street thugs but we are misdirected and situation quietly swept under the rug.
Wow I thought 2022 nobody would still be so 90s in this regard.
Most of those who pirate, wouldn't pay and since the content is not going away because somebody pirates it, it can't be stealing.
And Jesus...please...it's not like you're starving out there. Start producing original stories. We don't even need all that fancy and expensive CGI crap. Just start writing properly and in a creative way. Pay THOSE people more IF they deliver (though I'm not sure anymore if you really understand what's missing here with all your sequels and remakes...). We're not the audience you should cry to, go to those managers who messed up that market so piracy is coming back again.
This literally how the financial system is set up. Consumers provide money to a workforce that provides good and services that society enjoys. In turn, that workforce consumes goods and services providing income to a different workforce.
When you steal cool stuff, cool stuff stops getting made.
I'm super sympathetic that someone is not paying for you for the time you spent making the content (me, also a content creator) But, just a suggestion, you need to find a better way to put your message. As long as you call it theft / stealing you're going to get lots of push back because copying a movie is not the same as stealing/theft so instead of making your point you'll mostly get arguments about definitions.
I think your real anger should be directed at the studios that aren't fairly structuring your benefits and compensation, as well as the union that is not getting these for you.
My real and passionate anger is directed constructively at those entities. Today I am providing a face and a name to people who think "piracy isn't stealing"
Impressive list of movies! And a very good point you make.
NB: Your website loads pretty slow for me (I'm in Europe), and the video on the homepage is unavailable, it says.
We're on HN, so you probably know your way around websites. But let me know if I can help you with an 'internet friendly' website (quick loading, no third party code, stats without tracking, clear layout, beautiful styles, easy editing, and more).
Yeah - I have to admit, I was impressed with your list of credits...
I live under a rock and haven't seen many of them, but I really enjoyed 'The Accountant' and I'm a sucker for anything Spiderman/Marvel
The Acct was heavily provided by now Action Director Sam Hargrave, and you should look through his credits. He's most well known for Extraction on Netflix, but he's been doing it for a while. If you liked Acct, you'll probably like the other stuff he did before he was well known outside of our circle.
Thanks for speaking up about this from a perspective not often seen here on HN. It's really pretty weird that someone needs to explain to so many people that media piracy affects actual working people.
Direct your anger at your employer for not offering a product the market desires -- rather than at consumers who resort to piracy because the legal route is expensive, inconvenient, or nonexistent.
Our base pay is daily rate governed through SAG-Aftra CBA with the Producer's guild and scaled off the budget of the production. Then there are OT factors and bumps that go along with how difficult the particular work is.
Ugh. Never before have I seen a comment that I've agreed with so much but also wanted to yell at at the same time.
To put it really bluntly, pointing out how piracy is easier than paying again is not literally stealing money out of your pocket. The whole "lost sales" and "stolen income" thing doesn't always hold water, because you can't measure all the counterfactuals involved. A lot of pirates are either just data hoarders or collectors, and you aren't really in price competition with piracy as long as you are even slightly more convenient than it. Yes, that actually used to be the case for movies and TV shows, back when you could get access to everything you could ever want to watch just by subscribing to Netflix or maybe Hulu. Piracy was actually going away, right up until everyone pulled their content from Netflix to try and grab a larger slice of a smaller pie.
However, I don't want to actually trash your point too hard, because you did touch upon something worth talking about. I have noticed in HN and in other engineer-oriented spaces a certain contempt for the creative working class. I call it "kill and eat everyone below the talent line".
There's this weird meme that came about around the same time that the RIAA was indiscriminately suing casual pirates. Back then, some artists - usually ones at the start of their careers or doing it as a hobby - were distributing content over the Internet for free. In fact, some of them were even able to make money off of it through crowdfunding or advertisements without directly demanding payment to read, listen, or watch their work. So people made this assumption that this business model would be both sustainable long-term and scalable to large productions. Ergo, copyright is just an artifice of history, we can just abolish it, and the "real artists" will prosper while publishers and middlemen are out of a job.[0]
The problem is that "real artists" covers both the Toby Foxes of the world just as well as the Temmie Changs. Abolishing copyright beggars the songwriter in the name of the singer. A-list actors would actually survive and thrive in a crowdfunding-only market, because they have the name recognition to do so. But all the other people who support them would see their income shrink. And producers and publishers would just turn into the absolute worst kind of scummy for-sale pirates you could think of.[1]
The thing about piracy is that we as tinkerers and hobbyists assume it works exactly the same for everyone else as it does for us. I.e. me and my 10,000 friends all trade files around for free. Yes, a lot of pirates are data hoarders and collectors, but there's an entire world of bootlegs and knockoffs outside of the world of BitTorrent. For-profit piracy is far more pernicious than just the person with a Plex server, and it comes in a lot of forms you wouldn't even expect. For example, when Facebook launched their video service, there was an entire cottage industry of people reuploading YouTube videos and monetizing them on Facebook. This is the sort of thing that individual filesharers would not even recognize as piracy, but is absolutely immoral and wrong, and does pull nickels and dimes out of artists' pockets.
[0] The counterargument I'm making against copyright abolitionism does not apply to other things like shortening the length of copyright terms or adding more exceptions to it. Those at least still allow the existence of a creative working class.
[1] Fun fact: lousy speedsubbing jobs aren't just for modern anime pirates. Before we had international copyright, it was common for publishers to just take books published in other countries, translate themselves, and sell them before the original author could.
It is literally stealing money out of my pocket. Even if they don't watch it themselves, they will provide it free of charge or even for a personal fee I will never see to someone else.
The concept that Pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway is valid. Part of my problem with piracy is that so much bullshit gets consumed that without stealing, those things would be much less part of pop culture and we'd have a lot better stuff to entertain us.
However for definition sakes. Taking a service that you wouldn't have consumed by paying and using it for free is stealing.
I don't know how to phrase this nicely, but this is precisely the type of Hacker News nerd-blindness that I find amazing. It's "easier"? Is it? For young children who want to watch their kids shows and don't know what 4k means? For grandparents who want to see some k-dramas and have no clue about DRM or geo-locked? Sure, Netflix has issues and it's made some bad decisions, but let's not delude ourselves here. The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base.
I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.
It's not easier. I've got a BS in EE and am old enough to have downloaded episodes of the TV show 24 over 56k using early BitTorrent. I've successfully set up plex (which requires an in house server/spare pc), sonarr, radarr, usenet, etc. I'm probably the 99% percentile in ability to pirate. And its not easier than netflix.
90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services.
GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
I was at a friends house, he was starting GameOfThrones. I was like "you going to cancel hbo after??" He explained he was pirating. But! He is non technical (a nurse by trade). I was very confused asked to see his setup. He walked over to small black box under his tv. I was fascinated. It was a raseberry pi enclosure with hdmi out, it was prepackaged - networking p2p software for looking up stolen items, a UI better than netflix. All he did was take it out of the box, plug in the HDMI, and start watching UNLIMITED content on any streaming service I have heard of.
It’s a pretty famous quote and he’s correct. Steam has DRM aspects but is pretty seamless. It is entirely way more work to look for cracked games and download those than to just buy it on steam.
The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?)
The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
I was terribly skeptical to Steam when it launched, as I am to all online/hosted services. What if they just remove a game I'm using? Does all my games stop working if they turn off their servers? Am I really going to have to be online whenever I want to play?
But I gave in after several years, and now I'm a quite happy Steam user on Linux. It works as advertised, and the only issue I have is that I haven't found a way to filter games for «Linux support» and a genre at the same time. I've used EXT4 and BTRFS as file systems while using Steam, and never had any issues with that either.
I'm inclined to agree with Gabe. I've never spent as much money on games as after I got Steam. It makes it really easy to get a new game. Without Steam, I'd probably just go without. I have lots of things to spend my time on, and sometimes I'm even a little bit bummed that wasting time on games is an option on Linux these days...
You aren't the only one. Steam is DRM with good PR. Much of the goodwill gamers have for Steam is based on misconceptions, rumors, or delusions, particularly: "If Valve ever goes out of business, they said they'll lift all the DRM for the games I've bought" I've heard that from so many gamers it isn't even funny, it's a widespread misconception and it's obvious horse shit. Maybe Valve has or once had that intention with their own in-house games, but they wouldn't even have the legal right to do something like that for 99.99% of the Steam catalogue.
Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.
I agree that promises from these companies mean nothing.. but how much of a problem is this in todays gaming market though really?
many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam
There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated
The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM
there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway
Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.
Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.
And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.
Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.
Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.
>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?
older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.
Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.
Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)
Our use-cases must be vastly different. steam is actually one of the few applications my friends and i talk about as having good design.
I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly
the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale
i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting
I'm curious how old you are. I remember the days of when you had to travel to a brick-and-mortar store to purchase a physical copy of a game (if it was in stock). Then, you travel home, install it, and play it, saving your local saves on your computer, backing them up manually on an external drive so that you don't lose your progress in the event of a system failure. Oh, and writing your CD Keys in a notebook, and carrying that with you (along with your physical games) wherever you move. I don't remember how patches were managed, but I don't recall there ever being a 'day-one' patch of fixes, or being one message away from the developers.
No, you are not the only one. Fellow macOS Steam user here. Whenever a game I'm interested in comes out, I first go to the AppStore to see if it's available there, then to the developer's web site, and only as a last resort to Steam. The UX is some of the worst I have to use in a given week. It constantly shows me games that don't run on any system I've ever used (Windows exclusives, but I've never used a Windows machine since I signed up for Steam, for example). It's just awful all around.
I love steam. And the revenues from steam allow valve to experiment and explore (and support my favorite esport Dota2). The Valve Index and Steam Deck would not exist were it not for revenue from Steam. Not to mention Proton. As long as they keep doing interesting things, and allow me to play the games I buy offline (which they do), I will continue to be a Steam fan.
I don't hate it, but I'll admit that the Valve worship is some of the most cultish I've seen in video games. To the point where I feel gamers work against their best interests whenever they see a "threat" to their beloved library not having every game in history under one launcher (nevermind that Steam users can add non-steam games to their virtual library). You'd think Youtube and even Spotify lately would show the dangers of lumping all your eggs in one basket.
But, I will also admit that I'm a bit biased against steam due to using PC's for a lot of Visual Novels. And their VN submissions have always been a lottery of some sorts, to the confusion of readers and developers alike. Nothing worse than having an existing product on the store and then suddenly having a sequel to the product rejected, while the first product still sits on shelves.
>the other problems are personal preferences that aren't universal
few things in life are. But we're on the internet, so we inevitably here a lot fo "personal preferences", often exagerrated to the point where it sounds like it's the worst thing in the world.
GabeN is partially correct: It's a money & service problem. It's money for some, service for others, sometimes a bit of both. During college I had no money, so the issue for me was money. Once I got a job after college it was service: I didn't want to drive to music store & hope they had the CD in stock that I was looking for, not when I could definitely get it in 5 minutes online. Similar issue for videogames: I didn't want to spend $30-$60 for a game I couldn't return, when my computer might choke on it & not run or if half an hour in I realized it was crap. On top of which I might have to drive around to half a dozen stores to find a copy. That was a mixture of service & money.
These days it's faster for me to pay $1 for a song than pirate it, and I can instantly buy, download, and return a game in an hour if it either doesn't run or I hate it immediately.
Free is enticing, but so is convenience & instant gratification.
I think there is some merit in piracy being a service problem. There are certainly a number of situations where I just seek out a less than legal solution because there is no legal way for me to buy some media. Be it language barriers, region locking, license expiation, censored/rejected media, etc.
However, people professing this quote everywhere should note that it's very hard to compete with "free infinite media" for those with the knowledge to pirate. So don't be surprised if instead of catering to that crowd that they instead focus on people who can't or don't want to pirate. It's a double edged sword. If I do pirate, I don't pretend I do it in some effort to make the product better. I do it accepting the risk that they may never choose to cater to me.
I almost exclusively pirate movies and tv series from pirate bay. I would have no problem paying $20 a month for that service as-is (TPB + torrent network), as it's better than the currently available alternatives.
Not a money problem. I have a Netflix subscription, and yet end up going to pirate websites more and more often these days. I'll probably just cancel my Netflix subscription.
It's so frustrating to see that 90%of the shows I want to see are unavailable on Netflix. Video streaming is just so fragmented right now. And they try to compensate with a bunch of low quality Netflix original shows.
Why can't they just replicate what has been done in audio streaming? Spotify is what Netflix should have been. It's been years I no longer need to pirate music.
I would gladly pay for a service I am currently getting through piracy if there was a legal way to have it though. Availability of all content, no geoblocking (I live in a country where Disney+ and HBO Max is not available but I do pay for Prime and Netflix). For me if there was a way to have what I'm getting in a legal way I'd go for it but it is not an option. What I'm getting at is that its not a matter of money/pricing its also a matter of convenience, availability and not having to track 4+ subscriptions and apps when you can watch it all under a single platform.
that's where the "service problem" sentiment falls apart. All companies want to be this monopoly for you with no red tape over multiple governments. But of course, companies get the best cuts (100%) from hosting it themselves and countries (and media licensed) will never agree on what's okay.
In this case, piracy is a way around a world that hasn't quite caught up with how the internet works yet. I wonder in a few decades if governments worldwide create enough enforcement on this for it to be just as inconvinent as trying to steal a CD.
I have a shared folder on my home network where I download stuff from 1-click hosters with jdownloader. I get the links all on one platform.
I got that money. I paid for Netflix once but now I can't remember the last show I watched made by them. Instead I'd have to pay for at least 3 other platforms to watch those few shows I watch throughout the year. Sometimes I'd even have to use a VPN to get it in the original language.
It only is a service problem for me.
(there is a bit revenge for their inability to provide a single platform in there too)
For me, it's that I want a significant portion of a piracy set-up for things that I can't get at all (4k actual original Star Wars trilogy, certain shows with the original soundtrack rather than a worse replacement, some obscure pieces of media) or for things I consider likely to disappear any time (YouTube videos) so if I'm going to have it anyway, I may as well also use it to avoid the "where the hell can I watch this?" shuffle. I do also pay for several streaming services.
> GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
A service problem and a money problem are almost the same thing. Time is money, and I value my free-time very high. People will pay to not have to spend time to find the free.
Check out jellyfin it runs fine as a service on the users PC. You create different directories for TV shows and movies and drop files in and they show up shortly after.
I got a $25 Fire TV Stick and plugged it into the back of my TV. I push 1 button and everything powers on and Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ launch automatically. Any other service is a couple button presses away. All in 4k. (Well Hulu is upscaled)
I never have to leave my sofa. I don't have to dick around with plugging and unplugging my PC. No keyboards to manage. No OS or software to keep updated.
Your solution is easier than some other options but I'll stick with mine.
I too wish I could have a laggy experience with a bad interface requiring me to pull out my phone and search for which of the several services I pay for have a particular piece of content on my phone then slowly navigate to that service then try to enter the search term character by character by moving a little cursor to each individual character with my remote.
Then have a firmware update ad some advertising to the experience.
Sure beats my experience of pulling out my 12 oz keyboard plus touchpad bluetooth keyboard connected to a real PC.
It is extremely tired as well. Any time there is a post about Netflix, or some streaming service, I always predict there will be someone in the comments section talking about their “sweet, open source Unix based media server” and how much better it is.
It would make it quite suspicious and weird if the most obvious solution to the problems which are often the content of those posts, wouldn't have been posted by somebody in the comments.
Exactly. I’m a 59 year old man who knows how to pirate, but watches his content from streaming providers because it’s simpler and safer, and I don’t like to steal. I don’t think piracy is what’s killing them. It’s that there are too many streaming providers and people don’t hesitate to drop subscriptions. I tend to subscribe when there’s a deal, watch everything I want to see, then drop it and switch to another one for 6 months. And I’ll bet I’m not alone.
I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to.
It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life.
I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess.
I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses.
Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices.
I even have Plex set up with (mostly) ripped DVD content but I still subscribe to a few streaming services and buy/rent a la carte now and then. The fragmentation is annoying but subscribing/unsubscribing is pretty low friction. Though I wouldn't be surprised to see more discounting for longer subscription terms.
Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched.
It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see."
And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.
I think it's true in the same way that Media companies feigned that everyone was pirating.
If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.
It's not that everyone can or wants to run their own Plex setup, it's that the Plex model, once set up, is much more consumer-friendly: Get the shows you want, don't care about the distributor. It's probably naive to think that would work for a bunch of reasons (Who exactly runs this? Are they a for-profit monopoly now? Who will fund the content if there's no monopoly rent?) but I don't think it's crazy to imagine a service that works more like it. We went to all the effort of unbundling cable and now we just have a different set of bundles. It's a little better, but they've fallen back on old habits.
When it was still called popcorn time I used it. It was easy to use, but it was far from being as reliable as any other commercial streaming service. Buffering was very common and subtitles were missing or would de-sync a lot.
people forgive a lot of hiccups and quality issues when the service is "free". I see the same sentiment in the emulation scene where people will in one breath call a game "playable" despite weird graphical hitches, slowdowns, and crashes. And in the next breath berate some remaster because it dips under 60 FPS in a few moments of gameplay.
Wow, there's a "stremio" button on my TV's remote control? I can't find it. I have a feeling that the definitions of "difficult" and "literally" are unknown to you.
> Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than Netflix.
Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers.
There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me?
Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy?
None of this sounds literally as easy.
And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.
> The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base.
This view is very US-centric.
In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.
And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?
I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.
So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".
Indeed, pirating is very much an all-or-nothing solution. Torrenting your first movie might be difficult, but the second time it's easy as pie.
In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.
In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
As an amusing anecdote, my parents live thousands of miles from me. The last time I saw them I set up a Raspberry Pi with XBMC (yeah, that long ago) and a flirc IR receiver for a remote, hooked it up with local network, and an external hard drive that has a battery-backed power source. I then `dd`'d over the image onto 5 SD cards and left it with them.
Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it.
At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror.
Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network).
Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier).
Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV.
The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.
I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke.
Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English.
A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.
The thing that all these everyman-boosters that have invaded and gentrified tech seem to forget is that people are capable of learning, and with the right motivation, they will.
“It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.”
Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
> Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up
You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock!
"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...
>"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system.
and the thread here as a whole is rebuking the argument that Netflix is losing money because people are pirating. Most people don't or can't go through this work, so that likely isn't the reason why Netflix is seeing drops.
I agree that piracy likely isn't responsible for the larger immediate trend. But from the perspective of someone with a libre media setup, all these streaming/DRM/lockdown tribulations are like watching a storm from inside a warm house with a hot cup of cocoa. Especially on a technical forum where people should know better than to succumb to corporate ploys, its worth reminding everyone of that. And my comment did imply the end game for "most people" - technical friends/family running seedboxes and sharing them up.
Current market wise, I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix situation is people canceling their membership to spend that money on a different streaming service, and then swapping between friends to get the union of shows for a similar $/month. This would explain both pushes of membership going down, plus them wanting to crack down on sharing.
>But from the perspective of someone with a libre media setup, all these streaming/DRM/lockdown tribulations are like watching a storm from inside a warm house with a hot cup of cocoa. Especially on a technical forum where people should know better than to succumb to corporate ploys, its worth reminding everyone of that.
ehh, It's more like a speedbump than a storm. There's too much money in the game for it to end up being caught in a hurricane.
I just see the other side on how piracy can also harm more niche mediums and discourage businesses from even bothering to compete, which is why I can't even say piracy is a 'meh' at worst.
The manga indusry outside of Japan has this problem in that it's 5+ years behind the already decade outdated online solution for digital comics. Several JP storefronts for phyical and digital manga, but that is almost non-existent in English. Manga is fantranslated so fast that there's no incentive to bother having official localizers outside of the already huge works. Easier to cash in pennies on anime adaptations and merch sales afterwards.
I have a friend who pays $15 a month for a dedicated seedbox, with 1-click install of a browser-based torrent app + plex. He set up plex to use the remote torrent folder, then anything he downloads gets immediately listed on plex, streamable anywhere, supports chromecast, etc. Pretty cool and a _little_ harder than using a proper paid streaming site, but not a different order of magnitude. Hardest part is finding the seedbox company and also tracking down the right torrent for the show (the choices can be overwhelming).
This is why we need an Airport Hub model for media consumption hubs, like Plex. (Which is what Cable TV started out to be: We provide the infrastructure to get the signal into the home. You, the media-company, pays to land your content at our hub so that our subscribers to our infrastructure can see your content.
There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable...
"You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!"
---
That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.
I can agree it isn't easier for those who don't know it. It's like saying the CLI is easier than a GUI - sure, for you.
The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet.
Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.
Agreed. While the *arrs are "easy" to set up once you have good knowledge of Kubernetes or at least Docker Compose, that's not exactly common. If you're using the native Windows clients, there's a pretty good chance you don't have a NAS set up (or at least not well), which means there's a decent chance you'll eventually have a hardware failure, and then be surprised when your media is suddenly gone.
ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.
You can run a media service for example jellyfin on the same PC as the client.
Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt
Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker.
Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
Sure it is a magnitude smaller but it was even smaller a few years ago and streaming pages where you don't have to download a movie first are quite common and popular within the non-technical audience and they become even more popular.
I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.
It's amazing isn't it? Like people really think streaming services should care about mpv filters as a real use case for their customers. Incredible stuff.
Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall.
But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.
I've yet to explore Tor. Are you saying there's a reason I shouldn't? I mostly just want to see how my own sites perform, and haven't gotten around to it yet.
You mean the kids who don't buy all those streaming services? Or the grandparents who don't buy all those streaming services? We agree, not having to deal with all these streaming services is easier than having to deal with all these streaming services.
But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?
Well now only a fraction of content is on Netflix so if one compares the time cost of spending 2 hours doing so once this decade vs spending $200 a month for everything from live TV to Disney.
The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
There are also tons of benefits to just walking out of the grocery store without paying. No queues, no small talk with the checkout person and you save cash too.
The apples haven’t got any better lately, and they now have a DRM coating which prevents your photos working. The coating is a continual irritation to apple eaters. There is also a terms of service for apple eaters to sign.
False equivalence. 0 marginal cost of replication doesn’t mean that the item is valueless. The creators have a right to be paid for their work. Just as you’d be working your rights to charge people to look at your apple picture.
Netflix after canceling all of its best shows during a period when piracy has never been easier: "Let's start doing ads!"
I wonder if anybody at Netflix has seen the UX of popular streaming apps like (now defunct I believe) terrarium and its successors. They're easier to use, just as fast as Netflix, have much larger libraries, allow DRM-free downloads, ad-free, no algorithmic spam, etc. It is incredible that when faced with that as another consumer option they've gone for "severely degrade user experience" as the strategy.
At this point, some vulture private equity firm should just take them private and sell it for parts. Clearly they've spent far too much time being the biggest player and have completely disconnected from what their customers want.
I think it's not just canceling their "best" shows. They have lots of data on what people watch. Rather I'd say that when you cancel shows people love whether or not they have great ratings you're creating a lot of brand damage that is not accounted for. I think this latest price increase really tipped that over the edge for plenty of people that weren't getting much use from Netflix.
Price increases bring increased scrutiny on the value of the service compared to just hiding as a monthly $15 charge or so amongst a sea of subscriptions that products are sold as.
This is anecdotal but this is my experience. I used to love Netflix and though maybe they didn't have the most shows they had shows I realllllly wanted to watch. Now? There is so little that I care about and the positive brand sentiment is gone. Great shows that I became attached to were canceled so regularly that I am truly not interested in investing time into their shows. Not all shows should go on forever but then you might as well commit to making everything a limited 2 season series and be honest about it.
I actually canceled Netflix and had not had it for a year before the pandemic (where I gave in) but I think many people in this economic environment are finding it easier to give up a TV subscription to a company that produces _mostly_, mediocrity.
It truly has been interesting to watch a giant brand so committed to their own internal analytics that they've lost so much of their brand reputation.
Care to list? Most of the loss of shows I see are from studios pulling them off Netflix to make them exclusive to their own streaming service - a bunch of Disney stuff is now Hulu or D+ only for instance.
Ozark, Stranger Things, Grace and Frankie are all wrapping up. Archive 51 was great and very well received and cancelled immediately.
Right now there's kind of a shortage of Netflix-unique good shows. I'm not spending money that I worked for in exchange for... a nature documentary narrated by Obama.
Derry Girls is great but you can watch it months in advance on All4 with a dirt cheap VPN. There is a similar situation for Bodyguard.
They are expecting people to actually sign up (instead of sharing passwords lmao) and watch ads for the off chance that in a year or two maybe Squid Game season 2 is as good as season 1, or that they need to not miss out on Red Notice 2 and 3. It feels like they are literally betting that people need forgettable Gal Gadot movies in the same way that they need cigarettes.
I'm mostly bitter about Santa Clarita Diet being cancelled, but these were some other shows I enjoyed that were also cancelled: The OA, GLOW, I Am Not Okay with This, Teenage Bounty Hunters, Daybreak.
Canceling GLOW was one of the first indicators that nobody in charge at Netflix appears to actually watch Netflix shows.
Did they ever clarify exactly why it was cancelled? I remember reading that the cast and crew wanted one more season to finally wrap up the story, and the fans DEFINITELY wanted another season so... ?
I agree with your point that Netflix UX is terrible. But what do you mean "canceling all of its best shows"? It's not Netflix's fault if the studios pulled their licenses for their content, for their own streaming services.
I'd been looking for reason to get rid of Netflix once they made it impossible to adequately curate the user experience — they kept shoving content I didn't want to see at me, as well as content I'd already seen, and gave me no way to exclude shows or types of shows from being presented to me. Netflix is amazingly anti-user, and anti-user choice. The autoplay of short clips they introduced made it actively anti-user.
The straw that broke the camel's back for us was the disappearance of a deep catalog and only one or two new shows which were worth attention — if we really want to see them, we'll sign on for a month next year and binge-watch through them, then drop the service again. This is the model we're going to be going forward with any such service.
One of the most overlooked trends of the 21st century is we have too much entertainment. When I was growing up, when a movie came out, you went and saw it because it wasn't going to be on TV for at least 8 months and then you could get a VHS like years afterward if you were lucky. When it came on TV it was a big deal. Everyone got home in time to watch it. Now entertainment is everywhere. It's in massive and overwhelmingly cheap quantities. The point of diminishing marginal returns has been reached and now quality becomes paramount. Netflix just doesn't have the quality, so they are going to slowly bleed off attention and subscribers because people just don't have the time to watch everything. When Netflix came out, sure it was incredible, watch as much as you want for free, but now that's not as enticing.
> One of the most overlooked trends of the 21st century is we have too much entertainment.
That's some deep insight right there.
I used to watch netflix while eating alone only. I unsubscribed Jan 2022, and now I read a book on an ereader on a stand at eye level. Much more value for me and as entertaining if not more.
It's not entertainment, it's education.
The challenge now is to find and filter 'useful books' (most are not, and don't deliver on the promise on the cover).
Well it's simple.. The movie industry almost killed itself, and now it's getting greedy again. More and more people are simply downloading again. Not because they refuse to pay, but because they refuse to pay for 6 platforms, and get annoyed by not being able to find where they can watch things.
I'm not even against piracy but this comment smacks of entitlement and lack of nuance. The "movie industry" isn't some monolithic thing and no one needs 6 platforms. Pirate content if you want, but don't pretend you're entitled to tv or movies.
I very recently downloaded because I just couldn't manage to acquire the movie I wanted to watch in any other way.
I looked for it in all platforms, Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, Play Store, and it wasn't available in my country. I then connected to the US through a VPN and tried to buy it or rent it but my PayPal account didn't work because it isn't associated to the US. I finally found it in YouTube posted by a page that seemed official! But it had no captions... argh!
I wasted 2 hours trying to have anyone accept money to let me watch it, but got nothing. Then I tried torrenting and 3 min after I had the movie ready to watch and a captions file ready to add. In the end I couldn't finish watching the movie because it had already taken too long.
At this point, you would think a branch of the media industry realized establishing a unified platform before a 3rd party inevitably does it and then also wants to be cut in (Steam for games, Spotify and Apple Music for music) is the only move. You would think.
I'd be careful to make a claim as big as "the bottom is dropping out," but Netflix is facing a few headwinds.
- Lots of competition, some more serious (Disney+) than others (Amazon)
- Nearing the top of the streaming adoption curve
- End of the stay-at-home covid bump
The covid impact is noise in the long (5+ years) term.
Reaching full adoption is a sign of maturity overtaking growth. You run the company differently, but it's not "the bottom dropping out."
Competition is rough. The competitors have deep pockets and back catalogs, but consumers have no appetite for 6 separate services. This is where I'd be worried.
I empathize with the recommendation and UI gripes, but I doubt they're driving Netflix's woes.
Moving from a growth company to a stable company just implies it deserves a much lower valuation multiple, which is what the market is adjusting to.
My question is, how did people not expect this given that a huge XX% of the first world already uses it, and there are tons of viable competing streaming services popping up like weeds? They had a first mover advantage, and that was pretty much it, but streaming is a solved technology now. Competition took much longer to mobilize than it should have, but it's finally here now.
At the end of the day the only differentiator for Netflix is as a production company. Up to you to decide what their moat is there
2. Their recommendation algorithms didn't solve 1.
The root cause of it all is their odd focus on expensive originals over third party content. Their catalogue is just not deep enough if you remove all the subpar content. Before using Netflix I engaged in massive piracy for over ten years, and I'm considering it again - this time in smaller amounts, because I don't have that much free time anymore.
In addition to these things: the way the force us to browse content is awful and it's been copied by all of the vendors. Netflix and Prime are particularly terrible because of the volume of content, much of it absolute garbage, they have online.
1. I want to find my own shit with filters, not by scrolling through endless reams of D- grade cable TV quality shows.
2. I want major efforts from networks and studios, not homemade content. I know I may be in the minority here, but I strongly prefer HBOMax right now (which I get for 'free' with my phone plan) because the content is aligned here coupled with their own solid content, not D+ grade self-created content.
Came here to say the same. I cancelled two months back and I really don't miss it. On the other hand if HBOMax hiked their prices to $30/mo I wouldn't blink.
For me I associate the big red "N" with bad content. So when I open Netflix and see the red "N" plastered on every thumbnail the algo serves up, I immediately wanted to close the app. I eventually felt tired of batting away their originals to find good content so I unsubscribed.
I don't know how many other people actually feel the same way, but it seems pretty clear to me that their subscriber base doesn't like Netflix's original content as much as Netflix does.
On bad quarter for subscription losses-- driven by dropping out of the Russian marked-- (they'd be up 500k subscribers if not for that) and people are jumping on the "Netflix is doomed" bandwagon.
That seems very premature to me. Subscription growth has slowed and they may still lose some more, but saying the bottom is dropping out is hyperbole at best & clickbait at worst. (though why not both?). They're facing more competition, and coming out of COVID lockdowns probably means people aren't home as much to binge watch shows. Not enough to doom them unless they start hitting a bunch of own goals.
I guess it depends on how they react now, and who the price increase hits.
For now subscription loss is a one-off event, so it's a bit early to call it a cycle. They project to lose subscribers this quarter as well, so it could be the start but I'd guess that a base price increase is at least a year in the future since they just bumped it up. If they do it sooner, that would be a key sign of the cycle you're talking about.
They have hinted at a price increase for accounts that are sharing passwords. On the other hand they've also hinted at a cheaper ad-supported plan. If they go ahead with an increase for shared accounts that could get messy. There's a lot of potential for angry customers here. Get it right and people will be frustrated at higher prices, maybe cancel, maybe share the cost, but probably not be outraged. Get it wrong and they've got a million or more customers essentially getting fined for sharing an account that they're not actually sharing.
It will be interesting to follow along, I just think it's too soon to project any particular path. They could pull it together (maybe?) or they could proceed to botch things up with customer-unfriendly punitive policies and lower quality content as they try to cut costs, and maybe two years from now we'll be looking at a Disney(+) buy out at a steep discount. (more likely, at least the part about screwing things up. A buyout... I don't know. Maybe just stagnation.)
> Instead of producing two mediocre shows and an algorithmically designed movie every single week
I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise.
Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productions, but especially their foreign stuff sometimes proves that less is more. They tell interesting stories in "good enough" settings for them to be enjoyable.
nothing precludes Netflix from having great content, their quantity over quality model is annoying. The "stars" or "match" of recommended content has no basing on the enjoyment by other users as it is purely algorithmic while having the visual component of looking like reviews. They try to induce fear-of-missing-out with their trending list, which I also don't trust due to the likelihood of it not involving any humans at all like their other feature. People catch on and walk away.
Algorithmically designed movies are pretty good though.
Every Pixar movie is exactly the same, and they're all great. It's a good formula. My problem with movies is that they're built for two many audiences. Pick China xor America, and the will be more enjoyable to watch
These suggestions are pretty weak. Mostly boil down to making better stuff for cheaper. Which is obvious and something everyone is trying.
IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
Since Netflix is sticking with the binge-watch release model they pioneered, I wish they would provide a 1 or 2 week-long "binge" one-time payment option. They could charge as much as for a month's subscription, but you wouldn't have to deal with canceling your subscription when you're done watching the 2 or 3 shows you actually signed up to watch. $20 for a limited time, no hassle binge is a pretty good deal; it's cheaper than buying a single movie on Prime Video and much cheaper than buying movie tickets for me and my partner.
If you sign up and cancel right away, your subscription lasts for the rest of the month (and they charge you accordingly). It is a couple extra clicks but basically what you are asking for
It seems like that would hurt their business, not help it.
They don't want to to get in and get out. They need subscribers and the revenue flow they bring. I think they should stop the binge model for new, original content. That is, release new seasons one episode at a time rather than drop them all at once.
Altered Carbon was an amazing ride before it hit the wall. Really a shame how it couldn’t maintain that magic for longer but happy to have enjoyed it however short lived.
There's a lot of new competition in Disney+, Discovery+, Paramount+, and Peacock. Why now?
> 71% of TV households nationwide have some form of pay-TV service. The percentage of TV households that have a live pay-TV service (via cable, satellite, Telco, or Internet-delivered vMVPD) is down from 82% in 2016, 87% in 2011, and 86% in 2006.
Combined with the decline of movie theaters, it's an existential crisis for everyone in the media world. Can they replace lost cable/theater revenues with streaming subscriptions?
I expect we'll end up with a 2 or 3 major media companies and a couple small premium services bolted onto unrelated products like Prime and Apple TV. Netflix has some short term headwinds with this new competition but is the only company that's a shoe-in for making it.
I'm paying for a Netflix account that's shared between 4 of my friends. If they crack down on account sharing, I certainly won't continue subscribing and I doubt my friends would either.
I mean, it is against the terms of use. With that being said, you also pay for a certain number of "screens" so it seems like the terms would enforce themselves.
Netflix is old enough now that a lot of subscribers now have children that are in college or have graduated. My daughter is in college, and she definitely uses my netflix credentials. At what point does Netflix feel it is required for her to have her own subscription?
I hate to tell you this, but anything besides their basic plan is already in that range and includes 2 to 4 "screens" (concurrent streams), depending on the plan.
It really feels like this is already a "family plan", given the number of concurrent streams permitted. I don't think that there's much fruit to be gathered by shaking this tree.
But they say all the users must be in the same “household”. I assume this means people living together, and excludes offspring off at university. But I hope I’m wrong!
That certainly looks like it’s about to tell us what a household is, but then doesn’t, except circularly.
But it does say that people can use their Netflix account while travelling, as long as they can verify that the device is “authorized”. So the bottom line seems to be that you’re a member of my household if I say you are, no matter where you are.
The problem with this analysis is that it assume everyone has the same tastes, and stuff you don't personally like is "garbage." The reality is that people have a lot of different tastes. I don't think you should judge Netflix by what you don't like; only by whether it has enough of the things that you do like.
For example, I've been enjoying "Handsome Siblings," a Chinese wuxia show that's pretty shallow. It's not going to win any awards for writing or acting, but it's beautifully produced and good mindless fun.
To some people, it's filler junk (worse—subtitled junk). To me, it's perfect for passing the time on a long plane ride.
Yes, I didn't like any of the shows the person you are replying to listed. Although Netflix still doesn't have any shows I like, I've only been enjoying Apple+/Hulu, hell even Amazon.
Netflix stuff has just come to feel so...sanitary. It's like they have an enforced style of wardrobe and cinematography or something. It all just feels kindof the same.
Even shows like Ozark have this very "netflixy" feel to them.
The sense I got when Netflix started going original content was that it was the place for creatives to go and flex their muscles. They could do really weird stuff like Sense8 or The OA (both absolutely top tier stories in my opinion).
But now, I have come to expect that no shows will ever go anywhere (story wise) that is interesting. No boundries will be pushed, just bland kindof all the same background stuff. It's too bad, because some of the early stuff was really cool.
Anecdotal evidence, but I hear similar complaints from friends, and I think that the "netflixy" feel is going to be the single biggest downfall for the company. Netflix requires all original content must be filmed with a true 4K UHD sensor, and because these productions are all using the same powerful digital camera, these shows are all filmed with cheap low lighting setups, since these powerful new cameras require a lot less light to capture a scene (think of the newer iphone cameras and how they perform much better in low light). Whereas older non-netflix shows filmed on different cameras with much more powerful stage lighting setups.
The result is that all these new netflix-produced shows like Ozarks all look super flat and similar. Most scenes are very poorly lit, which leads to a really poor experience when watching on a laptop or tablet. I don't think all viewers are consciously realizing it, but I think this is why many people are getting "bored" of netflix shows.
This is a case of disruption being too disruptive. They stuck with their disruptive models instead of adopting the parts of the older model that were working. Binging is great but it's hell on getting people to come back every week and continue to build the buzz for shows.
Squid game was huge and should have been a monster pole to hammock off of for months. The conversation about Squid Game should still be goin on...
Killing off shows because they're not bringing in new users is a terrible idea.
Their tech is great but the running a network aspect was pretty terrible.
I think it would have been interesting if Netflix had shopped around its tech stack, kind of how companies that make games can also sell game-making engines.
Maybe they could have had a huge windfall by offering to be the “AWS” behind every “$CHANNEL+” streaming service. In other words, instead of having 14 kludgey apps that all suck in at least one way, we get 14 services but with a smooth implementation.
I don’t see how content is a long-term win for them.
Many seem to have forgotten that Netflix stated about four months after the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 that they were at peak subscription, and wouldn't be expecting more growth there.
The customers they lost are likely ones they would lose no matter what now that the pandemic is waning.
Separately, the disdain for bringing in advertisers, saying it's bad for customers: advertisers are their customers, too.
I get Netflix through my cell phone carrier, otherwise I would drop it. I don't watch a lot of content, and I find myself watching HBO Max more often when I do.
With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
I love HBOMax content but the technology is a nightmare. Constant buffering that makes shows almost unwatchable, which I cannot understand since I have no problem with Netflix, Prime, Hulu and Disney.
Not saying you're right or wrong, but the landscape during the Qwikster fiasco was so dramatically different, it may as well have been a different market.
What has gone wrong with our world that making a 6 billion dollar a year profit is considered a problem?
Because it is a problem.
Firstly, it's a problem because stock prices are a measure of predicted future value. The profit today is mostly irrelevant. In order to make a profit on shares the business has to be in a position to do better in the future. If it doesn't then people won't believe it'll do better even farther in to the future, so they won't bid more for the shares than they're worth today. That means investors can't make a profit. If you bought Netflix shares in the past you'll lose money. That's a problem.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, Netflix (and every other tech unicorn) use their shares as a hiring incentive. If the shares are going the wrong way then good hires will refuse offers and go elsewhere. A big chunk of renumeration in tech is predicated on people getting stock instead of cash because that's worth more to the individual and cheaper for the business. If that fails then the business has to start dipping in to that $6bn profit to replace people who leave, or to acquire businesses, or just to maintain the status quo.
It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where a $6bn profit turns into a loss within a decade or less. The driving force behind people saying Netflix has a problem is that they're predicting that the future of the company isn't good.
I mean, they might be wrong and Netflix might be fine, and ultimately even if things go badly Netflix is never going to "fail" because it'll get bought long before that happens, but if you hold Netflix stock it's entirely reasonable to be worried despite the healthy profit they make.
What's supposed to happen is that profitable companies start paying dividends to their shareholders. If you're getting dividends, then you don't mind if the value of your shares is staying flat or even dropping a little. The original purpose of owning shares in a company wasn't only that the value of the shares themselves would increase, but that they'd pay dividends so shareholders can make a profit over the life of a company.
As far as I know, Netflix shares, much like shares in many other tech companies, do not pay any dividend. Perhaps it's time they begin.
> The original purpose of owning shares in a company wasn't only that the value of the shares themselves would increase, but that they'd pay dividends so shareholders can make a profit over the life of a company.
I do not want dividends if I think the business can invest the money with a higher probability of better ROI than I can. If shareholders want dividends, they can vote for them.
With a dividend, you have to pay taxes now. Without the dividend, the stock price remains higher so you sit on higher unrealized gains. But assuming you can sell it anytime (it is liquid), the ROI is still there without the dividend.
Borrowing is not free. Other owners of the company may not have the same cash flow objectives. If you have enough votes on the board to make that the objective, then it is possible, but longer term stakeholders will probably object to being saddled with debt so some can cash out now.
As of a few years ago, they paid all cash, gave you an additional 5% of your salary in options, and you could purchase more options if you want. I don't believe they allow 100% allocation any more (but they once did, feel like that ended around 2015 or so)
That's not quite true. It means investors can't plan to make a profit by selling future shares based on the price growth beating inflation.
But...investors can still make a profit from dividends. There are plenty of large companies that are much less growth focused, and much more dividend focused.
Nothing, theyre just Attempting to price the shares correctly now.
Its $6bn in profit still at a $96bn valuation. Down from $150bn. Quite high if only looking at profit. But I definitely like the revenues under the idea they can reduce overhead
I suppose the assumption of many investors is that competition is increasing and with that profitability will decline as well.
Still the markets are crazy right now.
the moment earnings dropped, yes. by now its just people getting stopped out, cutting losses, shorts and put buyers piling on. there is that idea of a death spiral where Netflix has to spend even more on content and licensing again while raising prices for users and pissing users off more, but that model was resilient for cable - although cable does not command such revenue multiples from traders.
I can see the business being fine, definitely watching for lower prices. netflix has always been a fun casino, super leveraged rocket.
I think Netflix has taken the right strategy by diversifying into more international content (Better Than Us, Squid Games, Alice)
Expand to casual games and interactive content.
As a consumer, the company will still provide real economic value
Facebook also still makes insane profits each year. And the stocks drop like hell. There is a lot of uncertainty in the market with many smaller growth stock of the Russel 2000 being completely oversold.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-small-cap-stocks...
Stocks got valuations into the hundreds and lower thousands times revenue. This is only sane if there is space for the business to grow a hundred times, what for those large companies is obviously not true.
Now that the US money hose decreased it's flow a little bit, the insanity of those valuations is hurting.
Most US publicly traded companies are valued off future growth, not off profitability. We have no shortage of profitable companies in the US, so investment gravitates towards those that have the next best thing.
wow they make that much revenue? probably would buy this dip then. $30bn ARR trading at a $96bn marketcap/valuation and they’re profitable!? uhhh say less!
What actually happened is that Netflix is one of relatively few companies who have put out honest assessments in a time of severe economic stress. Also their competition has been growing for years. That's it.
People are so used to having smoke blown up their asses that when someone tells them honestly about slightly negative news, they get confused.
Frankly, they shouldn't have increased their subscriber fees recently. It's not the time. They could've done it closer to the beginning of the pandemic, when it wouldn't have really affected the amount of subscribers, as people would've kept subscribed anyway - but to do it now was suicide. I know at least 5 people - personally - who quit Netflix after that.
The password sharing thing is also huge, as due to the insanity of the fragmentation that the ludicrous number of streaming services has caused, a lot of friends and families cope by subscribing to one service apiece and sharing them among each other.
As soon as these little tricks stop working and it becomes more expensive, people will just drop it. It's not like Netflix has actually worked on any value adds recently - tbh I feel their content offerings have gotten so poor recently it's next on the chopping block for me, too.
Lots of people are complaining about terrible content on Netflix. Years ago, Netflix was praised for its "long tail"--basically it could have content that appealed to people with diverse interests. But it seems like people now see the long tail as useless junk and would prefer a shorter tail with more concentrated quality.
Netflix had a long tail, when it was a DVD rental service. Netflix streaming has never had a long tail and definitely don't now. They presently have less than 4000 movies, including all their 'originals' (which should probably be called 'derivatives'.) This is scarcely a long tail as far as I'm concerned. I cancelled my account years ago because there was nothing I wanted to watch. I realized I spent two or three times as much time browsing the catalogue as actually watching something, and half the time I was settling for something I'd already seen. Nothing I've seen or heard even remotely tempts me to come back.
If Netflix would make it more obvious what is junk vs not I think it would be a more enjoyable experience. Right now I have to keep switching from their app to cast and IMDB/Google/Rotten Tomatoes to figure out if something just has a rough start or is just bad.
Long tail works as long as the people in the tail can find the content relevant to them. If browsing and search is bad enough that it doesn't seem to be there, it might as well not be.
Their UI, or the service itself, is also flaky. It's fairly common for us to start watching a series and the next day Netflix will show us as having already watched all of the episodes, despite our changing to a complex password and also not enough hours passing for us to have watched them all. I wonder if they are juicing the numbers for some reason or if it's just an error.
I suppose it's possible that their auto-play feature is doing it. Most of our Netflix use is on a laptop so if the browser tab isn't closed maybe it keeps streaming the auto-play, although I haven't checked for that.
Netflix lost a lot of good long tail content when networks pulled their old content to form the foundations of their own streaming platforms. For example, The Office.
The long tail I want: movies/shows made in the 80s, your friends might recognize the name. The long tail netflix has: made last year in Romania, nobody has ever heard of it.
Apple TV seems to do this well. Too many choices appears to be just as bad as no choices. I don’t go to Netflix because there’s just too much. It literally makes my anxiety rise just being in there.
This may be country-specific but here the Netflix catalogue is really bad. It’s basically only good if you’re really bored and happy to watch whatever they recommend (usually their originals). If you have something in mind and search for it, it’s almost never available.
They consider emplacing password locks for their users.
These things say to me "we no longer want your business and will blame our decline on what YOU'RE doing rather than our policies that aren't keeping up with the real world."
Netflix throws new series shows and movies up without any description or even a trailer. They are lazy promoting both their own content and others. Waste my time jumping between news and blog review sites to get even a simple plot summary.
The elephant in the room is that the quality has been plummeting. I used to watch Netflix for MCU content. Guess where I get that now. There were also shows like Adventure Time, My Little Pony, Schindler's List, none of which are on Netflix now.
Netflix content is mediocre. I loved Squid Game and The Queen's Gambit, but they felt padded and I fast forwarded through them. A lot of their other other content is shock and sex, which I presume gets people to binge.
But there's only so long you can keep dropping quality before people leave.
I thought I was alone when I unsubbed. I couldn't believe everyone was watching the trash Netflix was churning out. I take their decline as a positive statement about humanity.
I'm aware that Netflix offers a tiered plan structure, but it seems pretty lackluster to me. Really the only differentiator between plans is the availability of HD or Ultra HD [1]. That isn't much of a value proposition to a viewer like me, since I only watch Netflix on my laptop. I'd be curious to see what other tiered models Netflix has considered, if any.
One would think there's room for a Netflix equivalent of Amazon Prime, where you pay a yearly fee instead of a monthly fee (as the author mentions), for which you get a discount off the monthly rate for essentially "buying in bulk", as well as early access to original content, and maybe even get access to content that non-Prime subscribers can't access at all.
Netflix's strategy contains several apparent contradictions that I'm unable to make sense of. For example, charging by the month seems to conflict with releasing an entire season of content at once. If you're going to charge per-month, then as the author mentioned, switching to a weekly-release model seems like the smart move, so you can squeeze more months out of a viewer who sees that content as "appointment viewing". If you're going with a "binge-release" model, I would think you'd charge per-year instead.
Another contradiction- simultaneously raising subscription rates and cracking down on password sharing seem to conflict with each other. The more you raise your prices, the more you incentivize people to share passwords.
I think I would pay for all these services for content if I could be assured of watching the content how I want. I don't like the monthly fees, but Ill put up with it, I prefer the rental model and I'm willing to wait (like we used to for rentals). That said the way I want to watch content is downloaded for offline viewing, on our projector, with the sound split since my wife is hard of hearing and likes the sound going directly to her hearing aids. The content providers see that as pirating and disable it. Its frustrating to find that out, when you are no longer anywhere with service (the reason for the downloading the first place) and can't do anything about it. Netflix has worked like that for a while and the problem is finding good content. Amazon Prime "works" and is the rental model and I like that the best. Disney does not work at all. And I cant be bothered to try every service to see if it works like that. I would love an aggregator and would be happy to pay monthly if they could provide EVERYTHING. In the meantime, Ill often even pay for the content somehow and then pirate it to watch it how I want.
The reason I cancelled was a combination of not being particularly interested in most of the content (I liked Bridgerton though) and the fact that while they were boasting record profits, they hiked their price up. I remember back when their streaming service was new it seemed like they had every movie under the sun (or at least a lot more than they do now) but since every studio has decided to have their own streaming service, it's mostly Netfilx's own movies/shows. Some are good but they miss way more than they hit.
On top of that, raising the price in the same month that they announce record profits left a really bad taste in my mouth. I know they're a business, and businesses love to chase infinite growth, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or give them my money.
The best streaming service for my particular usecase, which is primarily watching wide release movies, has been hbo max/go/whateverthey'recallingitthisweek. They get most of the wide release movies I'm interested in, and for the older weirder niche stuff that they don't get, I just buy the dvd/blu-ray and throw it on plex.
Honestly I think a bit mistake Netflix makes which others don't as much is reminding people they exist so damn frequently. The #1 rule of subscription services is to let people forget they are subscribed.
I'm also surprised Netflix doesn't have a yearly bundle... that's how Prime gets me, by the time I get charged for a year, it's already too late. Less frequent bills means less chance for someone to reconsider their subscription.
But yes, the constant email they send me about things changing and the price increasing, every email is a chance for someone to realize they don't use Netflix and would rather unsubscribe.
I haven't thought about it that way but you're definitely right. I assume it's because while things like prime and gym memberships all the value comes from people signing up and not using it, but seems like Netflix likes to place their value on stream numbers and active users, which makes a little more sense as to why they'd want to constantly remind users that they have an active subscription. I'm not sure on the business end how that results in money for Netflix but I've also never looked into it.
I just saw via a post on Reddit [0] that Netflix IS going to adding ads, or at least offering a lower/cheaper tier that has ads. But we all know where this ends and even if ads don't creep into full-price subscriptions I'm about done. I'm struggling to point to a Netflix show that I couldn't live without, or couldn't binge in less than 1 month if needed. The main reason I still have my account, and why I kept it through the price increase, is I have at least 4 friends mooching off my account. Looking at watch histories they all use it more than I do by a long shot, my last watched show was in January, they all have multiple in the last few days. If they crack down on password sharing this I'm out as well. Really it feels like just a matter of time, sharing crackdowns, another price increase, or ads and I'll cancel.
Well in your situation, it's good for Netflix if you cancel. You have multiple friends using the service via your account (by your own admission) that could potentially convert into paying customers on their own.
> a year-long subscription at a discount — 10 months for the price of 12, for instance
That doesn't sound like very good deal to me, I'd prefer 12 months for the price of 10 or pay as you go for minutes/hours of actually watched content. Though Netflix has so much trash it's not really worth paying for. Had it for many months and hardly watched anything there.
There's one part of the article that I think deserves more attention. I see Netflix in a big disjointed mess of entertainment.
I've got Netflix and then someone will tell me about something very interesting on Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, or Showtime. I'm not gonna sign up for Hulu just to watch 1 movie or a series. I'm not gonna give Comcast more money just so that I can get HBO and a whole lot of other channels that I don't want.
And the marketplace is so complicated. I can pay Comcast to get the History Channel (and a lot of channels that I don't want) or, I could go to another steaming service and get History Channel, but you've gotta look into the details to discover that the "new" episodes are actually 1 season behind.
So, when I think about dropping Netflix, it's not because Netflix in and of itself is lacking or too expensive. It's more about throwing up my hands and quitting the madness of the whole marketplace.
>Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Since then NFLX: -40.90%, SP500: +51.14%, DBX: -10.08%
>Almost all Netflix competitors (Disney, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple ... ) will have other sources of revenue besides streaming so they can afford to keep loosing money to gain market share. Netflix can't cut prices too much.
I agree re: Netflix and Dropbox. Salesforce acquired Slack though.
The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
IRC still exists even. I was recently told that it's basically Dischord for old people and I can't really disagree with that perspective from the eyes of a kid today.
Netflix, at least compared to Dropbox, had the opportunity to transition to producing 1st party content which they could use to continue to generate revenue even after all the 3rd party content went proprietary. My gut instinct is that Netflix has failed to succeed on that front, but there was an attempt.
Curious where on your crystal ball you see the likes of Spotify and the music (and podcast I guess) industry in 10 years.
Unfortunately it was data-driven. This meant that if a new show didn't catch on within a season or two, it was cancelled. They've killed so many great shows chasing the lowest common denominator.
The formula they settled on was: big name star in a generic designed-by-committee (or AI) show.
I'm really disappointed that creators didn't catch on to this and design their shows to run for one or two seasons. Not everything needs to be a decade long odyssey, and in fact a great many TV shows that were great at first were IMO destroyed by trying to keep running for as long as possible, long past the point where they ran out of things to say.
I think you're spot on about this. Oddly, Netflix has seen some success by reviving shows that were discontinued on major networks. You'd think they'd know better than to cancel shows like The OA before completion.
> continue to generate revenue even after all the 3rd party content went proprietary.
They did and they do. They put all their money into the 1st party content. They produce huge number of bulk mediocre content and also some really good shows. I can't see how they could do anything different. It's not enough. They have no competitive edge in 1st party content creation except size. That edge is in danger.
The competition has either deeper pockets, more content, or other income sources.
I have no idea about music streaming. I assume its similar network externalities, economies of size business.
---
edit:
As an infrequent investor, the company must do better than relevant index fund (SP500, NASDAQ composite, and so on) over the next 5-10 years to make sense to me. Netflix may establish itself as a good blue-chip company, but that's not enough a reason to buy it.
That they almost always cancel after two seasons regardless of popularity or story progression. As a result, lots of people are wary of starting to watch anything new on Netflix since it's almost guaranteed to be cancelled prematurely.
Not OP, but I don't see why anyone would invest in Spotify - there's many other options out there for great music. Spotify doesn't have sole rights to really any music as far as I know, plus music is far easier to make than movies & series. If you cut me off from established artists, I can still get great joy in a multitude of music being developed today. Beyond that, there's always the option of just giving money to the artists I like directly. The only thing Spotify has going for it is convenience, and I still would rather use Google/Youtube music. I pay for Youtube premium and get music for free with it, as does my entire family. Furthermore, it doesn't matter to the artists where their listeners get their music, there is no extra cost to them licensing it out to 2 or 1000 Spotifys, although there's an argument to be made that just 1 legal license would benefit them, but with pirating I don't there's much to that argument.
What's the realistic Dropbox competitor, with partial file sync, selective sync, share links and the like? Have tried Google Drive, Mega.nz, iCloud, OneDrive, Jottacloud and others and none has really impressed.
I think one of the main reasons for netflix troubles is competition catching up. With such a huge historical library Disney is killing Netflix at one extreme, and HBO max and prime on another. There is nothing unique that netflix offers. Occasionally few good shows but no lasting property.
Good movies and TV series won't probably be produced any more, ever. High budget productions just won't make a difference to their bottom line. There is so much content produced already that it's more profitable for streaming services to just keep rerunning everything.
I can tell you why i cancelled my subscription. Everytime i would access Netflix from another device, they would reset my password and i couldn't create a new one without contacting customer service. They basically kicked me out. When i said i don't want to go through this process for the third time, and since your algorithms kicked me out, i want my money back, at least whatever is left of my subscription. They said no, i either go through the manual process with them to reset my password, or my subscription will automatically renew (because i can't even log in to cancel it). Thankfully they were very happy to cancel my subscription on my behalf.
The reason you used to have Netflix was that you could binge watch old shows.
As Netflix lost the license to these many seasons deep shows and replaced them with single seasons of just a handful of episodes people got less and less out of it, but it became much more expensive for Netflix and so they raised their price.
We need a 'must-license' system for TV-shows and movies, so that any movie that is available on one streaming service must be available to any other streaming service for the same terms. No doubt this will not mean that all movies are available on all streaming services, but it will mean that there will be actual competition.
Netflix is kind of stuck. They don't have expansion revenue and therefore growth prospects are limited to increasing subscriptions against now a very competitive, and almost commoditized market.
The writing was on the wall that Disney+, HBO Max, etc would be attacking them and taking away customers.
Those legacy businesses have other sources of revenue and streaming is their future. They have the means to keep their prices low for many years to fuel growth.
Not sure what Netflix can do to continue growing. Then again, they managed to switch from DVD to streaming years ago. It was rough, they made mistakes but overcame them. Looking forward to see what they do.
The only think that keeps me subscribed is my partners addiction to Asian dramas (K-dramas, J-dramas, C-dramas, etc). Yes, we also have several other dedicated Asian Drama streaming services, but Netflix has some exclusives.
For those trying to justify piracy (and, yes, I have been and probably will be an occasional pirate myself) would you consider it acceptable to sneak into a theater without buying a ticket if there were empty seats?
The biggest issue is there is too much competition and too many streaming services. When Netflix was the only game in town it was a no brainer. However I'm currently paying HBO, Hulu, Disney, Apple and Amazon along with Netflix. each platform has something worth watching, but not all are worth paying for. I should cancel Apple+ and I most of whats on Amazon is terrible but it comes with Prime already. I still think Netflix is worth keeping compared to some of the other services but they keep raising the price.
The biggest problem Netflix has is content. When it first came out, it enjoyed a near monopoly and had access to content from every single major network. But as networks have started to roll out their own subscription services, Netflix is suddenly finding itself in a position where it lacks content. It has tried to become a content machine, but hasn’t been very successful at it. Netflix is a tech company and not a media company, and as streaming tech becomes commonplace, Netflix is losing its edge.
Netflix feels like a case of trying to “A/B testing as substitution for a strategy”
Being overly focused on engagement optimizes what’s easy to measure. It doesn’t always optimize what’s important. In the case of Netflix what’s important is brand strength and month over month subscriber retention. Engagement optimization leads to click-baity crappy reality TV instead of shows that actually drive retention
Meanwhile other services (notably Apple TV+) simply focuses on quality over quantity and starting to do rather well.
Perhaps a more appropriate question: Why did NFLX jump from 363 at the beginning of the pandemic to 690 at the peak of the tech "boom". Was it really worth that much more?
Serious question. Why is Netflix software engineering comp so high? Is it a small team working on all technical problems?
It seems that every other content provider built a decent enough streaming service and from anecdotal experience they offer between 60-70% in TC of what Netflix offers.
Is Netflix on more devices? Does Netflix have technology that make content distribution more efficient compared to other streaming services? Is it the location of the team, CA? I am genuinely interested.
“ Instead of producing two mediocre shows and an algorithmically designed movie every single week, they could make three excellent series and three much-talked-about movies every two months and scale back on spending from $17 billion to $10 billion a year and actually grow — and maintain — their subscriber base.”
I think it’s inevitable that Netflix will sell to one of the media behemoths. They simply don’t have the time that it will take to make the kind of major pivot mentioned above.
One thing that's missing is a single-ticket subscription that encompasses many streaming services. SV types are smart and can probably squeeze a profit while still keeping attractive pricing.
Fragmentation is becoming annoying and unsustainable. I see some streamers as better content producers than tech companies, so they will probably shift towards that over time. Also all these services are upkeeping parallel streaming tech. All this will be consolidated sooner or later.
I went and quit most of my subscriptions, just because I literally don't have enough time .
It's at a point where I'll probably resubscribe for maybe the next season of Squid Game, like I'll resubscribe to HBO Max if they do another season of Righteous Gemstones.
The streaming market is so over saturated, it makes more sense to cancel all your subs, get your entertainment from YouTube, and then subscribe just for a month to binge your favorite shows.
Saw a comment on another Netflix post recently along the same lines as this article. It makes me think that the next logical step for Netflix is to move into a different type of media Ex: Spotify, music → podcasts. I think there's a lot of potential for Netflix to go into music, although smarter minds than me will have to figure out how to monetize in a way that makes any sense in a world where Spotify already exists.
Netflix suggestions are not good. It takes a long time to find something decent to watch.
I have enjoyed Narcos, Tiger King, Stranger Things, Queen's Gambit and others.
But there are so many bad shows, that are formulaic, unoriginal and overall, lame.
Then, I have nothing against noble causes such as social justice and such. But compare a good movie, such as Men of honor, or the Green Book, with the unoriginal content on Netflix. It is just not watchable.
> Then again, if you’re borrowing someone else’s password, Netflix may not be valuable enough to warrant a subscription in the first place
Exactly. Same false argument as for torrenting entertainment content. Most people who get it for free will just go without if they're prevented from getting it.
As for Netflix specifically, I don't watch it but I believe the missus is finding fewer and fewer shows worth watching.
Too many foreign dramas tbh. Don't get me wrong, I don't object to their existence on the platform and even watch a lot of them. But if your goal is to retain US subscribers, it's absolutely the wrong play to spend so much of your licensing budget acquiring another mediocre K-Drama. Especially when so many good foreign dramas remain trapped in their home markets.
IMHO it's mostly about high prices in exchange of mediocre content. With all the competition, the quantity of available shows is now higher but the average quality is lower. Personally I often think to drop Netflix as well, there's really little that I feel like watching in it.
I think many just pirate those show they are interested in or subscribe just 2-3 months a year to binge watch.
ITT: Developers, who are so normally concerned about copyright and licensing, making excuses as to why they should be able to ignore copyright and licensing for things they want.
Next time HN pops up with a licensing thread, it would be helpful to reuse arguments here as to why any company or person should be able to freely do what they want with source code, art, graphics, etc.
They raise their prices, add ads, crack down on account sharing, add games nobody asked for, have min/maxed shows that include suggestive programming, and people are wondering why their stock dropped?
Netflix is being run by MBAs. It could benefit much more if it actually listened to their customers instead of doubling down each week on yet another terrible idea.
This is the second article that I've seen on the front page of HN. Both had comment counts in the high hundreds. I have to say, for all Netflix's foibles, that certainly shows a lot of interest in the product. In a sense having a product where people write multi-paragraph comments on everything they dislike about your design is a compliment.
Netflix used to offer movies that were previously shown in theaters. You could get a DVD in the mail, and watch a movie you hadn't seen otherwise. When streaming became a thing years later, you could again watch a movie you hadn't seen otherwise.
We used to watch five to ten movies a month via Netflix. We haven't used it in two or three years now.
> the binge model, churn rate, and rising subscription prices.
Missing option: woke partisan programming
Putting the face of a divisive politician like Obama on a show? Guaranteed to lose 30% - 50% of potential viewers who won't watch it no matter how awesome it is.
More than half of the most watched shows are not shows that Netflix produced. Shows like Better Call Saul.
Readers here love to crap all over Netflix, but it's still the service I use most. Yes, the movie selection is lackluster and yes, they make a lot of mediocre shows (though often for niches where fans of that content may have few other options). But they also make some of my favorite shows of all time like Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and Sex Education. And they've revived some of my favorite content of all time like Arrested Development, W/ Bob & David and Wet Hot American Summer (with mixed results, but still). Not to mention a lot of fringy comedy that may have otherwise never been produced, like I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna and Middleditch and Schwartz.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
I haven't had netflix subscription for years now since they stopped carrying movies and TV shows other networks had and shifted towards producing their own shows. I'm not interested in any of their original series / movies and just used it to avoid going to the movie theater and watching TV ads.
I love Netflix because they have so much non Hollywood dumb content but many foreign European good quality things. I'm always surprised when people say they don't have quality content. Do you really want that dumb latest marvel film? No how about a good British drama that is why I love Netflix
Netflix is something I subscribe to during Christmas but ignored all other times. I quickly canceled when they hiked up their rate recently.
I have and will keep Disney Plus and HBO Max even when I watch them infrequently cause of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Pixar and other big tentpole IP properties that Netflix has none of!
Cowboy Bebop and Archive 81 are oly the latest examples where Netflix cancelled a series I intended to watch before I was even able to watch one episode. So why should I keep my subscription at all?
I can come back in a few years and see what I missed in the mean time.
I think Netflix should do a web3 option for their subscription model, issue nfts that are just "generic subscriptions", family can transfer around the nft, there could be a market for netflix subscriptions, it could be neat.
it has nothing I want...they seem to think their algos work which they do not....the political Tinge was a tad too much to stomach after a while, and when they no longer supported deep searching and reduced their catalogue and trimmed out almost all value....it was not a hard decision to cancel.
And....nothing seems to be changing...
TIP. wanna survive. give me a build my own tv service.....with timeslots and my own show cycles that I put together from the content.........that would fix binging and would allow me to have a real value add......simple easy fixes....but they are going to try and market their stuff to look better rather than fix it....
I just want to buy the shows I want to watch, and permanently own them under my Netflix account. I don't mind buying them for $30 a season. Just like Steam.
Hey you know what? I think Steam should probably do just that!
It's funny they talk about the binge model and how Netflix has to change. I don't engage in the weekly drops on other providers I just wait the 12 weeks anyway. FOMO and WFH cancel each other out.
I've found the second netflix production takes over, the shows instantly add additional swearing, nudity, violence, and a political narrative. Its a key reason why I won't be resubscribing.
The huge thing that's causing this is the fact that they just nuked all Russian subscribers. They had been heavily expanding into that market and competing pretty well, but now, well. Yeah.
I would have kept Netflix but I got tired of being up charged for 4k content and because they are unable to make dark areas look like anything other than a blocky mess.
I like to watch Youtube channels like FranLab or Matthias Wandel. Sometimes an extremely well written show might appear, like Mad Men, but well written shows are rare.
how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy do you think all this news about subscribers dropping off is for Netflix? I feel there a danger that, much like when people join something because in part other people were joining it (a big factor in me joining in 2011), it becomes something people are doing because they've heard others are; I know I'm definitely consciously evaluating how much I watch it now, but perhaps I'm just a sheep.
I think Netflix can pull out of this current situation if they build a live-streaming, social media platform and start directly competing with Youtube and Twitch.
The idea that it would grow for infinity time was the real problem here. We should expect ups in downs in a business. Economics is supposed to work like that.
I hope this is a signal that, after the experience of lockdowns and isolation, people have a greater appreciation for the value of other peoples company.
shouldn't there be some scale at which we can just be happy with the value an organization is providing? how many more movies and tv shows do we need for netflix to achieves the same level of credibility as TBS or the CW?
capitalism has always been about infinite growth but seems to have gone wild since everything starting going service-based
people who are freaking out over netflix subscriber drop seem to ignore that they abruptly dropped 700k russian subscribers all at once (for well known and good reasons), which would cause a big dip in a subscriber count chart no matter how good the otherwise incremental global growth is.
"the blue bus travels over denmark"
rnd0, April 2022. Also gibberish.
I mean, as long as we're going to be spewing content-free sentences I might as well get mine in.
"Woke" isn't a useful term because today in 2022 it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like". "Woke mind virus" is particularly egregious -that's pure hyperbole without even a pretense of meaning.
The problem with Netflix in the main isn't that they show too many people who are white, or show two many people who are LGBTQ+. The problem with Netflix IN THE MAIN is that they are cracking down on a subscription policy no one wants while increasing prices beyond what people believe are reasonable while at the same time hemmoraging content. It doesn't help that they have demonstrated over the last decade that you cannot rely on their own content to actually tell a full story (because it will get cancelled prematurely).
None of that has anything to do with the "woke" bugbear -it would be equally true if Netflix's political stance matched OAN.
The "woke" all have the same opinions and aggressively attack any deviation. It acts like a parasite or virus that contains a payload of dogma replicating itself from host to host. It turns rational people into zombies, so mind virus describes it very well. Challenges to the dogma are considered dangerous as it threatens the ability for the virus to spread.
You're right that the virus could be a different variant, like the anti-woke variant, and it'd be a problem too if it parasitized as many brains.
It may not be unfair to claim that it's "everything conservatives don't agree with." While that may or may not be true, it more specifically refers to a type of hivemind.
>While that may or may not be true, it more specifically refers to a type of hivemind.
It sounds to me like you meant "colliqually" -as in "in informal or slang usage", not "specifically"?
In every conversation I've had on the subject where I've tried to nail down a definition of the term, the intended meaning is always different. Unless I'm very mistaken (please correct me if I am) there isn't an objective universally-agreed upon definition of what Woke means.
It's used the way "liberal" was in the 1990's or "SJW" was in the 2010's -an empty pejorative that ultimately only adds noise to any conversation it's unironically used in.
Saying that "woke" means anything conservatives don't like is a very woke thing to say. Woke is post modernist far left garbage which ends at center-left. Not at "far right".
Since you assert that "woke" isn't a useful term because today in 2022 it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like" and Elon Musk uses the term liberally, do you agree that Elon is not a conservative?
The comments in this thread are 100 times more insightful and interesting and accurate that the author of the linked article. The article itself read like it has an agenda and its full of logical holes. Why are internet authors so bad?
I can buy a DVD, and loan that DVD out to 1000 friends. Everyone enjoys the movie without paying a dime. The movie studio only makes money of that first DVD sale to me.
--> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone.
Governments around the world can do the same as a public service with libraries that lend out all sorts of media. And, once again, the media right holders only get paid that first sale.
---> This is legal and considered moral and normal by ~everyone; and is democratically approved, government sanctions, public good.
Blockbuster and OG Netflix (DVD-by-mail) can buy 1000s of DVDs. Rent them out for profit. Once again, the media companies only profit off those first sales. No pay for view, pay for rental, etc royalty or extra cost.
---> Again, legal, moral, the way things were for decades.
---> More so, Netflix could buy and rent out whatever movies they wanted. Media companies couldn't deny them, no negotiations needed. Thus, Netflix had a fantastic movie catalog, the world was happy.
---> Heck, Netflix could even resale many of these DVDs months later on the used market to make-up costs. Eg. stock up for blockbuster launches, downsize later. Again, zero additional cut given to the media companies.
**
- Netflix the DVD-by-mail company was built on first sale doctrine.
- Netflix the "DVD-by-email" (streaming) company normalized a model that bypasses it, let media companies re-write the rules under the specter of piracy, and ultimately disrupted themselves.
- Sure, their value skyrocketed as the harbinger of the streaming era, but likely sealed their long-term fate in the process.
**
Steaming being "different" is kinda just an accident of history too. Imagine a timeline that turned out different and treated streaming as an evolution of renting tapes -> DVDs -> Blu-rays.
A hypothetical world where Netflix:
- Buys N digital copies of some show, and can only stream to N people at once.
- If I'm N+1, Netflix tells me "All copies are currently being streamed. We estimate a copy being available in 10 minutes. Would you like to join the queue? Feel free to watch Y (recommended by your viewing history!) while you wait. We'll notify you once available and you have up to 30 minutes to start watching before your reservation expires."
- All in all, basically the same as the old Netflix DVD era, where we had queues, multiple DVDs in the mail so we always had something to watch every night, etc. Just faster.
This alternate timeline would lead to multiple competing ventures, no way for media holders to pick/choose services (eg. no "only on X" nonsense) and everyone competing on price, quality, catalog (eg. blockbusters vs all-the-things vs speciality, etc)
It's a shame that simply using a faster postal service (eg. Internet) reclassifies the entire venture into something completely different, and gave media right holders more power over end-user-distribution than all proceeding home viewing formats.
**
Addendum
If someone ever invents a teleportation device (yeah, I know...let me dream), I'll happily pour all my money into a "DVD by Portal" business to recorrect history and get us to a world that is both consumer friendly + convenient.
Such a same that digital teleportation vs physical teleportation forces us to pit convenience vs everything else.
Higher prices, lower quality content. That's the sum of my current gripes with Netflix. I'm considering pausing my subscription until there's enough for me to watch again. Netflix is sacrificing content for profit and squeezing people harder for the same reason: the completely unsurprising result: people vote with their feet. Publicly pondering adding ads to the mix is not going to improve things.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
I doubt most of the subscription loss is attributable to reasons that most HN types go on about (the rants about wokeness, not enough scifi, carousel UI, pirating etc...).
What's probably going on is after after a few years of pandemic isolation and Netflix binging, the arrival of pandemic triggered inflation, and overall higher employment rates, people just have less interest, time, and money to binge watch longer form content. Many are probably consuming shorter form content (like TikTok), or enjoying more time in public.
We economize by scrutinizing our spending of both money and time. When we feel we have less of both of those, streaming services are an obvious "nice to have" for a lot of people that can be cut from their lives with minimal feeling of loss, especially since it can be substituted with fulfilling time spent with other people.
Also, if you're paying an extra $150 a month for energy utilities and gasoline, it kind of makes sense that you might cancel a streaming service that you watch once or twice a week.
These days the time I spent on streaming services during the pandemic is more likely than ever to be spent having a beer on a neighbor's porch (with them of course!).
- I recently realized I had only turned on my TV just about 4 - 5 times in about 6 months and yet I was paying close to $140 per month, so I downgraded my cable subscription to the minimal (combined cable & internet is cheaper than only internet).
- Also realized I rarely watched Netflix (hadn't watched in months) cos I no longer found shows that I liked and I was paying $15.49 per month. And then I saw HBO Max was $9.99 a month. So I canceled Netflix and signed on to HBO Max. There's also the psychological part that HBO Max allows me to pay for the whole year upfront (Netflix doesn't) so I can close my eyes and just pay them $100 and be done with it.
- I also realized I rarely have time to watch long form content except for weekends. This is one advantage that Amazon Prime has - apart from it being 'free' to me since I already paid for prime, I can rent movies for $2.99 for those few times that I need to be 'entertained'. Maybe I spend $6 in one month and $0 in others. It's still better than $15.49 (or $140) without watching at all.
- It's possible that lots of people have a variation of these reasons. I understand that Netflix had to raise their prices given how much they were spending on content. It looks to me like they 'overspent' on content without taking into consideration that they would have to recoup the cost from increased subscription fees and this might not be palatable to their members given that there are now multiple alternatives
> There's also the psychological part that HBO Max allows me to pay for the whole year upfront (Netflix doesn't) so I can close my eyes and just pay them $100 and be done with it.
Interesting. My behavior has been that when someone recommends a show on Netflix and I decide I want to watch it it subscribe and cancel which means I pay for 1 month. I watch the show. I've tried browsing for others but hate browsing on Netflix. I'm happy that "I'm done with it" immediately and that I'm not billed anymore. Netflix makes it super easy to start again, and to cancel and also like that having it cancelled provides a tiny hurdle against binging random stuff.
> I've tried browsing for others but hate browsing on Netflix.
Is this Netflix or do you hate browsing on other streaming services as well?
Regarding UI IMO Netflix is still top. Disney+ is somewhat close in handling but noticeably slower and you notice its focus on movies. Series are not as easily navigatable as on Netflix.
Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.
I don't understand how anyone can say the netflix UI is anything other than trash.
Part of people's problem with netflix is that it shows them maybe 100 different shows out of the couple thousand they have at any given time, for the rest you basically have to use a 3rd party to discover them. Sure its prettier than it was back when they put everything in a giant tree/list, but now its a dozen or so vertical categories with 20 or so horizontal items and it doesn't even bother to deduplicate shows out of multiple similar rows.
The best netflixy way for me to discover new shows is to log into my wife's profile where she has a 100 different romance/etc movies. Otherwise "whats-on-netflix.com" for example does a better job than netflix itself, including showing a complete list of new additions, and removals, etc.
Netflix is faster, reliable, and works every time, even on slow and unreliable WIFI. I can fast forward, go back, pause, and resume without delay. Netflix is simple, it works, and I don't need more than that. It could certainly be better, but it's not any worse than other streaming services. Netflix is by far the better user experience of all services I use.
If I know what I want to watch, the Netflix UI is perfect. Every other service's UI makes it surprisingly difficult to find and watch the next episode of "thing I've been watching every night for the past few weeks". Also the other services make it harder to pause/resume/fast-forward, let alone achieve "advanced" things like toggling subtitles.
When I first had the thought that the UI was trash, it occurred to me that the point of the UI is to drive the user's behavior and not the other way around. I think there's an "In Soviet Russia..." joke around here somewhere.
Can’t agree more, the difference in watching Netflix on Xbox one and Apple TV is noticeable (also the fact that there isn’t integration with the Apple TV app is the solo reason I’m most likely to finish my tv show from Amazon prime compared to Netflix (because let’s face it it’s not Netflix and chill anymore now we have to check more than a sub. app to find what to watch
Huh? It’s pretty obvious Netflix uses the same UI across all of its platforms. It might be condensed slightly on smaller screens, but it’s the exact same interface.
I also do not like browsing for content on Netflix because whenever I pause on a title it starts playing trailer with sound when what I really want to do is look at the average user rating and read the premise blurb.
If you open Netflix in browser, go to account settings, then select specific profiles dropdown, there are playback settings at the end. You can disable automatic playback during browsing.
Its really useful with kids.
The Netflix decision that is causing me the most aggravation is that they are the only service I use that doesn't integrate with the watch next bar on Apple TV. I forget that I'm watching something, especially if they are doing weekly episode drops, and then lose interest if I've forgotten what's going on. Everybody else is able to add their new episode to that bar so I can work through my backlog, and even pop new seasons in there if I've watched the show in the past.
It feels like they're making decisions to suit themselves rather than me and it winds me up considering they are the more expensive subscription.
That's huge pain. I love my Apple TV and I'm much more likely to cancel netflix than not use the ATV. I also really love the TV app and Watch next, for apps that work with it it's such a great UI IMO.
However it is irritating that shows I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store occasionally lose their blessed status§ and I can neither put them in up next nor even have the show’s page open to the episode I last watched. Unless I binge the whole show in one sitting I’m gonna be scrolling horizontally past a lot of episodes every time I sit down to watch.
§ my hypothesis is that it is when the package I bought them in gets taken off iTunes (e.g. I got the complete Downton Abbey, but for a few weeks they were doing a every episode and the movie package and you couldn’t buy just all the seasons together, that one even lost its blessed status while I was watching the show, which was a mystifying experience)
> Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.
I haven't noticed this in France. For a given series, there's a "season" dropdown that has all the seasons, even some which may be unavailable.
However, I hate dubbed movies and series, and I hate that I can't filter out those titles that, for some reason, only offer a French dubbed version.
Yeah in Spain too.."the user is in Spain so will want Spanish dubbing". Uhhh.
The dubbing is also horribly done with bored voices that don't match the actors at all. Yet native language (+ subs if native is not English) is often unavailable. Especially on prime
Yea HBO's app is incredibly broken. I don't understand how the rewind button is still broken. At least 20% of the time when I rewind the app crashes, how is that even possible in 2022? Seems like they're doing it on purpose to try to get you to pay attention.
The state of media Apps in General is REALLY low. Paramount+ makes me turn on subtitles for EVERY episode and ignores the system settings, HBO Max's app is a dumpster fire, Netflix doesn't integrate with Apple TV or the algo driven listings are terrible, Hulu is a broken mess all around. In fact the only media app I enjoy using is Apple TV+/TV.app.
Amazon prime UI and search is kinda shit, but if I found an interesting show to watch (to be honest I’m using tiktok as my recommandation engine) I search for it then continue watching from the Apple TV app
Not the OP, but I hate browsing on most/all the platforms. But Netflix seems to be worse than average and that's an already low bar.
Things that rustle me...
- recommending movies/shows I've already watched. There are very few shows I want to rewatch.
- recommending trash reality shows. I rarely watch them.
- recommending too many shows that are in a foreign language. I will watch foreign shows, but most of my viewing it's just background noise while I workout or something else where I can't easily watch subtitles.
- Auto-playing trailers. It's annoying and loud.
That's how Americans view Europe, yes. "The user lives in Switzerland so they speak both" :) in reality there's German-speaking Swiss and French-speaking ones. In fact there's even Italian-speaking ones but they don't usually make the cut for services like this. The division is pretty much divided by region and heritage. They will technically speak both but will not prefer to. Also besides the languages there's also a cultural difference. And Swiss-German is quite different from German/Austrian German too but let's not get into that.
Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.
It is a bit yes. I've not been to Switzerland but I know that in Belgium this is totally not done. Flemish speakers often despise French culture and vice versa. And have their own TV channels, shows, media personalities etc. I'm Dutch myself and am often viewed as Flemish by the French speakers when I try to speak French, and I can feel the hate (it's quite uncomfortable so I don't usually go to their parts).
Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.
In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.
Huh—I never saw Netflix' British content as accommodating UK culture, but as accommodating American Anglophilia. Same reason they have a ton of Japanese content.
Some local productions yes. They do that in every EU country too because it's in fact an EU requirement to do so. But the UK is culturally much more similar to America than the rest of Europe.
For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.
> It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.
Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.
My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.
Imagine half of them would be all Asian and not just the big bucks international focused ones like Squid Game. But local ones not tailored for it. You'll tune out soon. It's like going for a regular cinema but getting an arthouse collection.
I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.
It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.
Region locked content is usually enforced by the provider of the content, not the distributer. So don't blame Netflix, blame the studio who licensed the content. I'm sure Netflix would prefer to work with blanket international licenses rather that have to negotiate different terms for different content in each individual country.
Deducing language preferences by the country TLD is just plain wrong. Especially in a country where about 25% of the population is from abroad.
My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.
The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.
> If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.
Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?
I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.
Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.
> Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?
I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.
For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.
I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.
Prime is better than Netflix on desktop. They worked hard to get there, but they finally ruined the website enough that both my Android TVs Netflix app and prime are better. It took me a while to even figure out how to show some minimal information about a show that was more than name and thumb.
Not OP, but Netfix UI is uniquely bad. It looks good ... and make it impossible to find shows you might like and be at mood for ... despite them actually being there.
yes, that makes sense for your use case i.e. you're not 'interested' in subscribing in general but you only want to watch a specific show.
For me, if I want to get the package (in general and not for a specific instance), I'd rather pay upfront (so far as it's not expensive) than the monthly subscription. Psychologically, I feel like - 'I just eat the cost and I'm done'. So I'd rather just pay you $100 for the entire year or say $60 for the entire year of Sirius XM than a monthly thing.
I think a lot of people have become conditioned to monthly subscriptions that they don't need to think about. But, especially if you're more into films than TV shows, there's something to be said for cutting back on subscriptions and buying/renting a la carte. Netflix still even has their DVD by mail option although the back catalog isn't nearly as good as it used to be.
Also if you look for sales on Slickdeals for 4K movies (digital as well as physical), you can OWN (albeit another discussion exists for what owning digital content actually means for the buyer) a 4K movie for as little as $4-5 dollars when sales slide down that low.
I agree that it would be best for consumers if we could pay for as much as we consume at an all-inclusive buffet of content. This isn't what providers want, they don't want their utility to be commoditized. But it could work for a first mover providing such a platform.
What if Amazon instead of Prime Video had an open content marketplace? Sure there would be a lot of rubbish, but with a good recommendation system could outdo Netflix in matching content with consumers, which was Netflix's core competency until they decided otherwise.
I cancelled because it’s not worth the time investment. Good shows are not only difficult to find, but Netflix will release a season or two and unreasonably no longer continue on, without closing out the story. They try to cater to a mass audience and use a large net, but then due to capital costs or whatever reasons, they force their customer to feel stupid for getting invested into a show in the first place.
I miss the days where I could binge watch a series on release date. Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
All the qualities that drew me into streaming have slowly faded away.
I recall hearing a discussion on the extreme desire humans have to hear a story's ending, even when they aren't that interested in the story. There is simply a need to know how it ends. I've caught myself to often watching something I think is a waste of time but needing to know how it ends. This is as much of a weakness as the reciprocity rule.
Netflix burned me to many times on this. It's bad taste to re-use the same story time & time again to pump out tons of content. It's unforgiveable to not finish the story though.
"It's unforgiveable to not finish the story though."
Not to repeat myself, but we all clearly need a little perspective, because for several generations the norm has been television shows being cancelled without closure. To have an expectation that all shows, or even most shows, should have proper conclusions is completely out of line with reality.
Those shows tended to be episodic with only weak overall story in. You had ending for each story. The writing is much different now (and better then used to be, but abrupt end is annoying people more).
If there aren't more than 2 seasons worth of episodes, I don't watch it.* It doesn't guarantee a conclusion, but it cuts down on that sense of abandonment when a great show gets chopped too early.
*exceptions for shows, mainly anime, where a season is a self contained story. And Firefly, cause it's Firefly.
Entire seasons being released at once was such a massive positive for streaming. The fact that they're moving away from that just to boost numbers is very disappointing.
I actually find it tends to split groups between those that watch episode drops and those that wait to binge later. Not to mention the spoilers that people drop when they assume someone is watching along.
I watch primarily for my own enjoyment. Binging "dumb" sci-fi or fantasy (Witcher, etc) on a cold Sunday afternoon is the best (well, skiing would be better, but it doesn't snow much in DC).
I do find weekly drops for 30 minute comedies sort of annoying but I'm fine with weekly releases of serialized dramas which mean that you can discuss things/read discussions only with other people watching along at the same pace.
That said, I mostly don't binge watch and maybe it would bug me more if I did.
I much prefer to binge it’s cheaper and easier to fit into your life. Finished a project and have a break? Turn Netflix back on, binge, cancel. I guess I don’t watch TV to talk about it with friends though.
It's exhausting to find good content on Netflix. I found myself dreading opening the app because it would take 10+ minutes to find something decent to watch. So I stopped using it.
>I miss the days where I could binge watch a series on release date. Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
Haha this just means that I have to wait longer to resubscribe.
I cancelled it when they raised their prices, it made me think about how much I watch things on there. Which was rarely - my guess was around 1 show/month on average.
> Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.
Yeah, screw that noise. Torrents are still their primary competitor, and the operative issue is not cost, it is convenience.
To be fair, that was the fate of almost every television show ever made. In fact, your entire first paragraph is just describing what we used to call "television".
I haven't canceled yet but am considering it. They have a few problems for me -
They don't make it easy to discover content. They still have quite a lot of good original content that isn't promoted and a slew of third party things that aren't promoted or discoverable at all unless they happen to make the trending list
The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal.
For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers". Leaving a bunch of stories half told doesn't give me the confidence that it's worth the investment to start on their new content. This is especially problematic because it is a vicious cycle where since they aggressively cancel stuff that isn't performing, people don't invest their time in new stuff because of the expectation it gets canceled, means more new stuff underperforms, leading to more cancelations, and further eroding the trust of viewers. It's also negatively impacted by poor discoverability.
Their UI is seemingly optimized to shove their latest broad appeal stuff in my face and seems to deliberately make it hard to find anything else.
The Netflix UI is so unfortunate. I KNOW they have the ability to recommend me interesting content, but instead they just peddle whatever their latest original content. Also the browsing experience is hellish. It's barely possible to even search by genre.
the worst crime, is suggesting series which I just finished watching. wtf. I know that its technically good for their bottom line if I watch same thing twice (twice the revenue for the same cost), but that ia so frustrating, when trying to find something to watch.
> The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal.
this has 100% been the reason my time spent on Netflix has gone down. seems like everything they make is algo-optimizing shlock designed to appeal to the average consumer.
> For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers".
Or they make a second season so atrocious that they lose the entire audience. For example, the first season of Altered Carbon is one of the best "hard" sci-fi I've ever seen in a TV show. The second season was supposed to have a much bigger budget and had an A-list lead. But it was so horrible that I couldn't even finish watching it.
I have been a Netflix customer for 5+ years, and I've switched services to Disney+ for two reasons:
- Netflix with 4K and 4 streaming devices costs 17.99€ here ($19.50), while Disney+ only costs €8.99 with the same features.
- Netflix made and continues to make good content, but since major producers have been removing their content from Netflix and into their own services, Netflix here almost survives on old local shows and new in-house content. Feels like there's almost nothing new to watch. I have rewatched Gilmore Girls 4 times. Disney+ gets you Marvel, Disney, Pixar, FOX, NatGeo, StarWars, Star (lots of ABC content)
-Netflix decided to crackdown on password-sharing: my brother moved away some months ago and has been using our Netflix account, and we don't want him to pay Netflix for himself.
-There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue. Hell to the no.
>There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue. Hell to the no.
oh geez, that would be the death knell for netflix. that was one of the big benefits they had over cable ten years ago when streaming was still new. i cant imagine paying $18 a month and still being forced to watch ads.
on a side note, im extremely pissed at paramount because their "ad-free" plan was updated to force viewers to watch a 30 second spot at the beginning of every show. if star trek strange new worlds doesnt turn out to be a million times better than picard and discovery i just might cancel because im so pissed i have to watch ads on the premium plan.
>There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue.
It's been stated elsewhere here but worth reiterating: the current description of this idea is to give customers the option to have ads in exchange for a lower overall subscription cost and not just shoehorn them into the existing plans.
At least that's the stated intent. I can definitely see where it can lead to a slippery slope where it's easier to just give ads to everyone when they need another revenue bump.
theres also a high probability of misinformed (or well-informed but adversarial) twitter users getting #CancelNetflix to trend because people will only read the headlines and not understand that they wont be seeing ads unless they want to save money.
I appreciate that you're being positive but with media companies I'm much more cynical.
I think we're going to see a price increase to stay ad free or an option to have the same price with advertising. So it will be a price increase to keep your same service ad free.
> Netflix decided to crackdown on password-sharing: my brother moved away some months ago and has been using our Netflix account, and we don't want him to pay Netflix for himself
So you're upset that you are no longer able to freely breach a conract you agreed to, and have to pay for services you consume?
Yes I’m upset because even Netflix’s exec Reed Hastings said some time ago that account-sharing is “a good thing”. They are well within their rights to change their policy from looking the other way to actually prevent password-sharing, and I as the customer I’m well within my rights to cancel my subscription when the company changes a policy.
except the company haven't changed their policy, which is stated in their terms; contract; conditions of carriage and small print inter alia, which has always been that: account sharing is not allowed.
now, they may have previously ignored breaches of this contract, but that didn't stop them being breaches. you are well within your rights to cancel your contract, all i point out is that it is unreasonable of you to be upset. this is business as usual, and to be expected, therefore a good thing.
The 4k pricing was always a sore spot for me. Netflix’s content was never worth $20, so for a long time I was subscribed for mediocre standard def content. I regret not unsubscribing sooner.
I had been a Netflix for customer for 10 years. For me personally, it's a combination of several of the reasons you cast doubt on. While I may not be in the majority, I am real and those reasons (which I shall not list, to avoid HN wrath) were attributed to my cancellation.
The real reasons are almost certainly economic and structural, and not a result of silly culture war wedge issues.
1) Netflix has much more streaming competition now.
2) Availability of good content has gone down as networks reserve it for their own new platforms, and as production was halted by covid.
3) Greater scarcity gives studios pricing power to increase Netflix's cost to acquire the few good shows available.
4) Netflix tried to counter (2) and (3) by making their own shows, but a lot of it is trash.
5) Netflix raised customer prices aggressively, while there's not much on their platform to justify the higher prices.
6) Customers are increasingly savvy about binge-watching what good shows there are on one platform, then cancelling it and rotating through other platforms.
Not having a large part of the world's populating confined to their couches probably plays a large part of this. People are doing other things with their discretionary money; eating out, drinking out, traveling, buying new clothes that they haven't had to for 2+ years.
The issue isn't necessarily that they lost users this time, even though that's what all the headlines are about. They projected continued losses of subscribers, even after the one time event with russia is through.
You're probably right. For what it's worth, I'm like the parent and for me at least that stuff isn't why I cancelled, it's what pushed me over the edge. I don't watch Netflix much (poor catalog, maybe lack of discoverability), but I don't notice $20 going away either and would keep the service if it provided much value at all. Cancelling had been on my list for years.
I finally cancelled when I realized that whenever I did go look at it to see what's available it felt like there was more agenda pushing than entertainment, which itself made me check for content less often in the first place. Netflix won't miss my money, I may be in a small minority. It may be they get more subscribers for their politics than they lose (I'm sure they think so).
Until we have publicly available statistics, speculation is irresponsible. We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had, nor their commonalities.
It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.
> Until we have publicly available statistics, speculation is irresponsible.
> We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had
Speculation on the causes of major changes for which we have no hard data is the basis of the original article and pretty much every comment on this thread. Nobody here is giving investment advice, so I don't know how it's irresponsible.
> It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.
My personal guess (also note the use of 'probably' in my original comment) is when it comes to things like paid streaming services, personal economics is the biggest factor in the decision to subscribe/cancel for most people, and other rationales are mostly tangential. In my experience, the bottom line is what matters in the end.
We have publicly available stats for their competitors. (And actually we do "know" the reason for this quarter's loss for Netflix: shutting down and losing 700K subs in Russia.)
Is Netflix more "woke" or "less scifi" or "prone to pirating" or "annoying about UI and recommendations" than Disney+ or HBO Max? (Ok, HBO Max has had a lot of cinema-quality sci-fi and similar genre content land recently, so maybe on that one?)
Those services are gaining subscribers faster so any backlash seems less likely, compared to "there is a lot more serious competition than their used to be, Netflix costs the most, and has a far less proven content model."
Netflix is increasingly only worth it for their originals, and now those are head to head against Disney and HBO+Warner cinema originals.
I loved NFLX when they had a 4-CD plan. All the HBO shows from the golden age of TV 10 years ago .. I know that I cannot blame them for losing streaming rights. But I definitely can for pushing the government ideology in their original content. The last few seasons of Longmire is the last show for normal people I can remember NFLX to produce.
I'd have no problem paying for the kind of TV we had with Mad Men or Breaking Bad. I'm not aware of any streaming service of that kind.
I think the demise of Netflix has been greatly overstated (although growth is slowing down)
The biggest change last quarter is that Netflix went from having 700,000 customers in Russia down to 0. In other words, they actually had a net gain of 500,000 subscribers in the parts of the world where they still operate.
A net gain of 500,000 against an expected gain of 2.5M is horrible. Don't think analysts are ignoring the Russia situation, they just realize that Netflix has much bigger problems.
I didn't cancel Netflix yet (have been thinking about it as I find that sometimes I just watch it for hours, and it's kind of a waste of life). I can say for sure, if they introduce ads, I'm leaving, I won't pay for watching ads, sorry.
I believe ads are fundamentally immoral. (Moral ads are theoretically possible, but in practice I almost never see ads which have the purpose of informing rather than emotionally manipulating. Ads destroy culture, make viewers less happy, and waste time).
The fact that they drew a line in the sand is why I have brand loyalty. If they cross that line, I'll no longer be "supporting a company bringing a moral perspective on content delivery" and turn off autorenew: just pick up a month or two a year.
I generally avoid any service that even has an ad-supported tier because in my experience it starts out as "ads are to subsidize the cost for people who can't afford or don't want to pay for the premium service." Then it becomes, "We're contractually obligated to have ads in certain shows regardless of which tier the viewer is, but they won't show up in others, and they'll be short and unobtrusive." Then it's "We're keeping rates low by having ads in all show, but they're ads that are relevant and very short, and only at the beginning and/or end of the show." Then it becomes "We're removing the premium tier because not enough people signed up for it. Also the ads are going to be longer and more intrusive now." Forget it. I can just skip the whole thing and lose nothing. If you even have an ad-supported tier, I'm out.
Yep, Youtube to chromecast is practically unwatchable these days. 1-2 stupid 5 second ads interrupt the program every few minutes. Many are so short I'm perplexed why the brand thinks they are getting any value out of them: they do little but annoy me and make me think the brand is bad with money.
I would not be surprised if the ads are placed at the current price tier, honestly. It wouldn't technically be lying; they're delivering a cheaper tier with ads, and a more costly tier without ads, just like they said they would! It's just that "cheaper" in this case would mean "cheaper than the new higher subscription tier", not "cheaper than the previous model".
Absolutely agree… ads would be the death blow for me. Have cancelled a few times in the past because just don’t have a lot of time to watch TV. Ads and would never go back
Especially if the streaming service tells you it's going to raise prices and crack down on password sharing. It's bringing the customer's attention to the subscription service at exactly the wrong time.
Best thing a subscription service can do is not remind me that I'm subscribed. The constant price increases were poorly planned, against the lack of good content - since Stranger Things and House of Cards can't recall much attaining that level of vitality (besides maybe Squid Games)
My SO and I as well as some friends of ours (we were talking to them about it) are just subscriptioned out. We can afford it, it's not the money (though we do hate to waste money, we're not foolish). But we keep track and it's just, why do we have so many, so we decided to pare down and see what we miss and see what sticks.
I do think that fierce competition from competing services with way more IP's to leverage is a big factor. But yes, I think in some extent the world is simply starting to open back up slowly, and this will naturally affect any industry which surged due to the pandemic. Whatever restaurants remaining will surge, indoor entertainment will deflate down a bit.
And I also agree that the internet sentiment of "omg too many services, I'm just gonna pirate" is such a minor part of the equation. Social media loves overrepresenting its just world fallacy and thinking that everyone is as invested to screw over companies as they are on twitter or whatnot.
My wife keeps throwing out “wokeness” as the reason and I don’t buy it. Yes, that shit is obnoxious, but I don’t care. If your content is good, be as “woke” as you like. I just want good shows.
Bottom line is Netflix has too much competition from cheaper platforms with better content.
I don't know that I can come up with the best example, but let's say a 1800's period piece that tries to weave in some LGBT themes, racial equity, etc. There's ways to do that well, but it's easy to push it hard enough that it's going to make it hard to believe. Hard to believe some of the depicted events would have happened in that timeframe, in that manner, etc. Badly researched, written or performed, it would be hard to stay immersed in a story that's highly improbable.
I think you misunderstand what was the point of Bridgerton. It wasn’t meant to be a new period drama like Downton Abbey. It’s a whole new world in itself, it’s not meant to be a realistic representation of what the 1800s would have been.
I find the alternative universe quite interesting in itself.
I have not dropped Netflix but I admit the virtue-signaling in the suggested content has made me stop giving the interface as much attention. The suggestions are crap across the board, and I assume in Netflix's interest more than my own, so I just search, and when I can't find what I want, I go someplace else.
Instead of increasing every one's pricing they should have added a FOMO tier giving people early access to new content before anyone else.
Additionally to get people to think twice before unsubscribing increase the price for new subscribers but keep existing subs at the lower rate. You cancel you can't get that rate back.
FOMO vs resolution would have been brilliant, and grandfathering in is a great way to keep people around (even if you do something like bump them up in cost later, but still cheaper than everyone new).
Especially since there is not even enough good content on Netflix to fill 1-2 hours per week. The article nails the central issue: the shows on Netflix are not good.
Yes, that's largely it. Many of the shows, especially newer ones, are actually just kinda trash. Why pay for trash? Not to mention the raised prices and cracking down on password sharing.
It's a minor thing but Netflix is also most annoying to use from many services now because they are strict on device approval. For instance most home projectors do not support Netflix. I was close to cancelling Netflix because it just does not want to work on my projector and it really is bloody annoying to use the workarounds.
I think pandemic rebound is probably part of it, but honestly I just think Netflix has gotten cheap. Whether it's in-house or licensed, "woke" or not, whatever, the quality of in-house content and the availability of outside content has really gone downhill.
I've realized I have a problem, and the solution might be me cutting off Netflix? The problem? I've slowly accumulated ten streaming subscriptions. Some might be included in cable, some are stand alone and some just house purchased Blu_ray. I would see a show I would like, I would subscribe, binge, then forget to unsubscribe or be lured by the promise of a show. I think many people are just looking at their overall spend, and cutting based on how much they watch. The explosion of streaming services had to have victims, and Netflix is just paying for being one of the pack, not something unique.
They are;
HBOMax, Discovery+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Peacock, Vudu, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Espn+
I canceled because they were raising my subscription to $19.99 (I had the UHD subscription), and I really don't watch it enough to make it worth $20/month to me.
I still have Hulu, HBOMax and Disney, so in 6 months or so I'll probably drop one of those and return to Netflix to look for new content before they delete my viewing history. I've been with Netflix since when they were DVD-only, so they have a lot of history on me.
I imagine that before long, the streaming providers will get tired of people rotating through and will require 1 year contracts.
Since Netflix launched in India couple of years ago I've been a subscriber. The content is strictly average. Amazon Prime and Disney + Hotstar have significantly larger, relevant, and better content. Amazon Prime gets you free shipping as well so that's there.
However, I don't know to what extent Netflix are relying on India for growth. At INR 650/month it's definitely not cheap. Disney + Hotstar, at INR 1499/year is, five times less expensive.
A lot of the "pandemic stocks" have taken a real pounding.
For me, Netflix content is "OK" overall. But so is content on most of the other streaming services. And I don't really watch a huge amount of video so it makes sense for me to pick a few services and maybe dip in and out. Netflix is probably the one delivering the least bang for the buck to me right now so I'll probably watch a few things and drop it at some point.
We are in the process of doing something similar. My wife watches a lot of Netflix so we will be keeping that (for now). But between us there is only a single product on Google TV we watch regularly and it is going from 5 days a week to 1. And it even has a free "highlights" post on Youtube a day after broadcast. We will be cancelling next month...
I would tend to agree. Another factor is that people have choices now. There are other public streaming companies which gives investors something to compare to. When you are out there on your own the sky is the limit for stock price. Now it's why should more for a premium for X when Y is growing faster etc.
I think complaining about wokeness with "Cuties" is completely reasonable reason to cancel. A few people I know cancelled. I also know once they start cracking down on password sharing they will also cancel.
Don't sugar coat a poorly run company with equally opinionated reasoning.
A key point here is TikTok and the attention economy. At a high level, the entertainment/social media industries are based on a finite resource: attention. Netflix is losing the attention of users, especially younger users, to other platforms. Then there is attention loss due to other rising streaming services.
But yeah, the rate hikes are also hitting hard. Targeting account sharing more aggressively than they already do will lead to more cancellations. And the day Netflix shows me an ad, I will never use it again.
Netflix says it lost 200k subscribers--but I have to wonder, is that 200k people who were paying for a subscription, or is some percentage of that number actually people who were sharing an account, stopped watching when Netflix started threatening people who share accounts, and are now being counted as "lost subscribers" (because Netflix expected them to start a new account)?
It's fewer total subscribers. The real number is the entirety of the miss (predicted 2.5m higher subscriber numbers - 700k loss to Russia + 200k actual drop = 2m less than expected).
It means new subscribers are now outnumbered by cancelling subscribers for the first time.
Even introducing the the pandemic and inflation into it at all seems off base to me. There simply isn't an infinite number of people in the world who have the time, money, and broadband access to watch Netflix. They're nearing or have reached the peak of people who can use their product. That makes sense to me.
Changes in post-pandemic behavior, prices increases, more competition, arguably decrease in quality, and no long-term contracts. Doesn't seem like rocket science why they're loosing customers.
As a non-white person, I get tired of hearing people blame white people for every other ill. Or if it’s not blame, it’s an attempt to shoehorn white supremacy as some prevailing ideology into every discussion.
Netflix does this constantly in their originals. They just can’t help themselves. And the usual suspects play coy about it when anyone complains. Go see a therapist, etc. for daring to notice the constant browbeating in Netflix programming and saying anything about it. If I watch tv, it’s to escape reality, including to not get proselytized to for thirty minutes of my life.
The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.