This is a great offering for people like my dad: he’s a smart guy who would love TED talks, and he uses Netflix daily. But he would never go out of his way to discover content such as this on his own, in part because it’s not centralised, but mostly because he really dislikes using computers. Getting this kind of stuff on Netflix is a huge boost to discoverability, and I look forward to seeing what else they will offer next—online learning, perhaps?
IMHO, no. Centralized is where I go to get more than one type or source of content. Hence, the rise of aggregators, which are now the most popular sites online.
Netflix is also an aggregator; we just don't normally think of it that way because we consume it as a service which offers content unavailable, for the most part, elsewhere online. With the decline in movies, however, I am seeing lots of content that replicates other sources (lots of TV shows), but it's still nice to have it all in one "place".
I'm actually quite pleased to be able to have TED videos in my queue. I'd prefer they get a few more, you know, "flix", but in the meantime, this opens up TED content to some whole new audiences.
(Of course, the next logical step is for Netflix to go straight downhill and start offering video "podcasts" by annoying youtube "stars" and become a youtube junior. I hope not, but we'll see...)
Out of curiosity, what device does your father use for Netflix? My elderly relatives have significant difficulties using any of the Netflix clients other than the iPad app.
My grandfather likes watching YouTube videos, but even the simple Apple TV interface was too difficult for him (remembering all the remote buttons, mostly). I know it's very simple, but it was just too much for him.
However, he knows how to use his iPhone to play music and use AirPlay to stream it to a stereo (Airport Express). So I showed him how to AirPlay to an Apple TV and now he doesn't need to know anything about how to work the Apple TV (as long as he changes the input, the Apple TV will automatically wake up as soon as it receives an AirPlay stream).
Basically, if your relatives like the iPad app, just have them continue to use that and then send the video to an Apple TV via AirPlay.
He used to use a Wii, but has since switched to a PC that sits in the living room. Neither interface presents much trouble, though the inconsistency can be irritating. He does occasionally search for car and machine parts, but other than that, his Internet is basically three bookmarks: Netflix, Hulu, and (occasionally) CBS.
For me, it's simply that I can easily watch TED content on my TV without having to airplay it from my iphone / ipad.
While the free TED talks would never be a reason to subscribe to netflix in the first point, they do increase the value of the platform by providing ease of access.
It's nice when all of your content (free or paid) is available in one place.
Agreed. Though it should not become a youtube, where you can find anything. The reason I like Netflix is because its a great place to watch a few things well. I too feel TED is a welcome addition.
A surprising number of lay people have never heard of TED. I am planning a TEDx event and you'd be surprised how many people give me blank stares when I mention TED. It breaks my heart.
Really, I'm not this positive in my outlook. But I find it ironic -- if perhaps a bit naive -- to think that Hollywood's rampant, myopic self-interest might end up "forcing" the public into the arms of better quality content.
All those "History" and "How Things Work" and the like shows on cable have proven quite popular. (And "Mythbusters", with its enhanced entertainment factor.) Maybe not just Netflix, but aggregate culture, is onto something, here.
I don’t think it’s naive. Many people are getting fed up with the substandard crap that mostly comes from the studios anymore and are demanding something better. Hollywood does not have a monopoly on talent. Spend a little time on Vimeo and you can see that there are some terrific filmmakers and storytellers out there.
This is great. I've seen nearly all of them already but it should widen it up to a lot of people. It's really interesting to see what was exclusively web based content moving onto Netflix. Also netflix seems like the one of the least evil content delivery companies out there right now and I'm glad to see TED endorse them.
This site[1] seems pretty reliable about finding new items as they're added to Netflix, and I find it easier than using Netflix's own "new" page. If you're in the US (I know you aren't, TheCapn, but it's good info), you can replace "can" in the URL with "us". I don't think there's a UK version (yet?).
Thanks for the link xatax... that's definitely easier for sure.
It's just a shame that the Dirty Deeds movie that the site is linking to on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes is another movie with the same name, that's apparently nowhere near as good as the actual one that is 'now available'. Well, I thought it was pretty good at least :)
Interestingly enough, I noticed the same thing regarding a movie called "Project X" recently. The cover (and Netflix link) were to a Matthew Broderick movie from the 80s, but the rest of the information shown was for a movie from last year with a 25% RT rating.
I sent an email to the guy behind the website telling him of the error and suggesting that maybe there need to be a few sanity checks (release year +/- 1, cast, etc.).
He responded pretty quickly, and lamented that the problems are due to the limited information he gets from Netflix Canada:
> When I get new releases from Netflix, I actually don't even get the release year, just the movie name, summary, and box art, and then I try to extrapolate as much as I can from that. I usually just keep a close eye on it and fix the errors as I see them.
His email did state that he's found another way to get more information, but that he's had to rewrite a lot of the site because of it. He's beta testing now, and hopefully it will be live relatively soon.
For now, I just try to be mindful of the limitations of the site, and if a movie looks vaguely interesting, I'll check it out on Netflix and/or directly on RT myself.
You've actually just accidentally save me from falling victim to this trap again, since I saw Dirty Deeds on the feed today, but dismissed it based on the extremely low RT rating. I guess even knowing about the problem doesn't always save you from being influenced by it. Either that, or it had a lot to do with looking when I got up at 7am today, and was still too groggy to think.
That's good to hear that he's working on a better solution. I had a really quick look and couldn't see a way to email him so I didn't bother.
To be honest I wouldn't have noticed either except for the fact that I remember seeing Dirty Deeds as new last night on the actual Netflix app and exclaimed "Awesome! I have to watch that again!", then started to second guess myself when I saw the rating...
Thanks again for the link, though: I'll use it more for the information than the ratings.
> I had a really quick look and couldn't see a way to email him so I didn't bother.
It's at the very bottom of the page, under all the ratings:
> Questions / comments can be directed to aaron@andcuriouser.com.
It's sort of a footnote, so it's probably easy to miss.
> I'll use it more for the information than the ratings.
The ratings, from what I can tell, are correct more often than they're not. If the ratings look good, and you're interested in the movie, I'd say go for it.
A coworker once told me he doesn't pay attention to bad ratings anyway. He said that if a movie gets a good review, then it's probably at least worth watching because people were finding good things to say about it. If it gets negative reviews, it could just be that it wasn't what the reviewer was expecting or wasn't up to their particular standards. Think of Watchmen: that movie was heavily advertised as an explosive action superhero movie, but those bits are a very brief tangent on an otherwise slow moving character study. It's a good movie, but a lot of people were probably pissed off when they saw it. Still more were probably pissed off because it didn't live up to the book in their minds.
Either way, I've been using that site since before the RT integration, and it was always useful. I check it every couple of days and add interesting things to my list/instant queue. It's nicer, to me, to have a textual list of new movies in chronological order than it is to have graphical listings by genre where new things get drown out by less recent, but still "newish" listings in the genre.
It is funny that Netflix doesn't seem to be serving up relevant content to me. Discovery is just not that good yet. Everytime I visit the site, I have to go digging. Maybe (and I'm hoping) its just this selection problem. I hope they add more (good) titles to streaming, and fix this discovery issue.
I wonder how much licensing fees factor into them hiding good content vs. playing it up to show that they are still relevant.
"Still relevant"? What is threatening Netflix right now? Hulu maybe, I guess. If you really like TV shows, and paying to see ads.
I'm also an Amazon Prime member, but their streaming catalog is abysmal -- I mean, it borders on embarrassing. I check it every now and again when Amazon uses the home page to tell me all of the 'great' new content they've added, but going back to the Netflix comparison, by that benchmark, it doesn't even come close.
I've never run into an issue with them hiding content. I'm not sure to what you're referring. They didn't plaster Iron Man 2 all over the landing page when it became available?
You can more or less watch the views flood in on instantwatcher.com anytime a 'modern' movie is released on streaming. It shoots to the top right away, which makes me think that, for most people, finding the 'good' content is not an issue.
Hostile rights holders who are forcing their catalog to shrink. Continually whittling away the streaming catalog's value is Netflix's biggest problem, not competing services.
I have tried to watch TED talks on my Roku, but the quality is terrible. Many of the videos (especially the older ones) freeze, cannot be rewound, and have audio sync problems. According to the Roku support forums, the TED channel is an unofficial hobby project maintained by a Roku engineer in his spare time. He says the video problems started after ted.com changed their video formats. He can't afford to pay for transcoding/serving of Roku-friendly videos.
Thanks for the link! I didn't know an official TED channel had been released.
Note that most of the comments on that Roku blog post describe the same audio sync and video freezing problems I experienced (and that have been reported in the Roku forums since early 2011).
Here is a (May 2011) Roku forum post from Dylan Doxey, the developer of the unofficial TED channel. And I was mistaken: he is neither a Roku nor TED employee.
The previous TED channel was based on the TED RSS feed and assumed that all the
videos would be Roku compatible. Sadly, starting some time in April 2011 TED
stopped publishing videos in Roku friendly encoding. After being flooded with
support requests, the TED people contacted me and asked me to make it clear on
the channel description that the TEDTalks Roku channel is not built or
supported by TED. They also said, "We're working on the encoding issues that
are causing the poor performance on Roku; this platform just wasn't on our
radar when we built our encoder."*
Just to be clear, TED is no longer publishing videos in a Roku friendly format.
If some long period of time goes by, I may consider downloading the videos,
re-encoding them, and re-hosting them. However, I'm not sure my humble server
will support hosting video files for some 55K+ channel subscribers. The TED
servers are much more capable of handling that kind of demand.*
