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Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

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Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#191

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Are box sets still batshit insane? It didn't make sense to me to pay $120 for a week of binge watching.

Resell it for $100 and you paid $20 for a week of binge watching. Buy it used for $100 and resell it for $100 and you watched for free.

There's a antagonism towards resale amongst content producers that makes this difficult and the resale prices low.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#192

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I'm curious to understand what you're describing. Can you give an example of a Netflix show, the season and political trope, and how it detracted from the show's quality? And I'm definitely curious what you're imagining as you write out "repulsive".

Good Example: Black Mirror episode where man has sex with his friend in Mortal Kombat. Is this really an interesting addition to the Black Mirror world? Accept gay people, alright, whatever; I still don't want to watch 2 people having VR chat sex.

If you're only objecting to gratuitous gay sex, that's just homophobia. And come on, gratuitous straight sexual content has been on TV for a long time.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#193

My problem with Netflix isn't the slate of shows and movies it has in its catalog. It's definitely not as nice as it used to be, but there are a jillion and a half shows and movies out there. My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch i…

This is the classic article on that problem:

My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#194

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Netflix and HBO don't have advertisers (well, except as providers, but not as customers).

That is just wrong. The amount of product placement in Netflix original content is staggering.

I'd be surprised if it rivaled subscription revenue, though. My point is indeed questionable in the context of original content. HBO's kinda proves my point - their original content is much higher quality IMO. There's some old quote about how Netflix needed to become HBO faster than HBO could become Netflix, and I think they're close to losing that one.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#195

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>political pandering instead of offering good quality entertainment This, unfortunately, is the ultimate double-edged sword. It would be a very safe and content-less world indeed if fictional media did not in some what appear to address or include something political in nature. Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or…

>Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or do not find offensive. I'd be interested to see a show that has nationalistic/right-wing assumptions. Any good examples?

Every military show or show about terrorists? The Six is a Seal Team 6 show. Anne Heche just had a show called The Brave that got cancelled. The Last Ship is military science fiction.

I admit that it's going to be very difficult to find an explicit white nationalist show, but military/terrorist paranoid-style shows are a dime a dozen.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#196
They lost all their content because everyone else wanted to hoard it for their own services. That's fine, I'm a faithful consumer and I'll do my part against shady practices.

Then they put out substandard SJW shows like Bright and Jessica Jones. That's still okay, not every show is targeted to me and they still weren't conducting shady business practices so they were still a good company in my eyes.

Then they put out 13 Reasons Why. All my goodwill toward them was lost and my subscription was canceled within the month.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#197

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It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want. I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t…

The fact that 15+ year old tech developed by some hobbyists (over asymmetrical networks not optimized for it mind you) provides a better service than anything modern corporations can deliver really is amazing to me.

Free is always going to be more attractive and excuses made by folks who don't want to pay for services.

Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.

Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#198
post #159

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I've recently started using ReelGood more often. (Not affiliated just a happy user.) You tell it which streaming services you have, what shows you've liked, etc and it gives you decent-ish recommendations from across all your services. More importantly it also shows the IMDB score, the Rotten Tomatoes score, and usually provides a trailer, and then they deep-link to the actual content so you can avoid all the Netflix…

Just tried this out for the first time. Am I missing something? I linked services, marked some movies as watched, but don't see any way to _rate_ movies I've watched. So it doesn't have any kind of (useful) signal from me for recommendations?

You just mark movies/shows as seen it or want to see it and it gives you recommendations based on that. There's no "I've seen it and I hated it" option...I wish it would take a star-rating into account but it does not. Despite this the recommendations are still pretty good. It's a much better content-discovery experience than any content provider's native experience, especially that of Netflix.

Re: Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged

#199
post #75

Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming platforms that I refuse to pay for - I'll probably eventually just cancel Netflix as well going back to the tried and true method of just buying bluray box-sets of the content I want to watch. Or piracy. I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are…

People don't like the proliferation of streaming services because of the cost. Buying "just NBC" or "just CBS" is still preferable to the old model of "if you want ESPN you have to get dozens of other channels at the same time". But buying just a single network's content only works if the price is such that you can subscribe to all of your networks and not end up paying more than the old cable model cost you.

The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).

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