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The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

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Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#601

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? Why or why not?

Fun thought experiment.

Clear violation of private REAL property. I think a lot think INTELLECTUAL property is rent seeking.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#602
post #322

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 f…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#603
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally not the job of consumers to provide for your income. That may be a harsh lesson, but it's true.

It's literally the job of consumers to pay for the things they consume.

That's the expectation perhaps, but that's not what "job" means.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#604
post #322

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 f…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#605
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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a joke right? Kind of like rioters looting local businesses and then saying “society stole from us first”?

Never rioted nor looted nor seen either, so can't comment. Joke, it is not.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gro…

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 di…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#608

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 typ…

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 gro…

> 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?

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#609
post #322

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 f…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#610
post #322

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 f…

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.
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