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The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

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Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#701

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.

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#702
post #675
post #662

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 succes…

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.

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#703
post #662

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 succes…

What stops you buying on iTunes for example? And did anyone ever use those UltraViolet codes? I never tried them. What did they even do? I guess streaming won out because consumers prefer it - I know I do.

> What stops you buying on iTunes for example?

DRM. If it's DRM your still don't own anything

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops you buying on iTunes for example? And did anyone ever use those UltraViolet codes? I never tried them. What did they even do? I guess streaming won out because consumers prefer it - I know I do.

> What stops you buying on iTunes for example? DRM. If it's DRM your still don't own anything

You never ‘owned’ any copy - you only had a licence.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#705
post #675
post #662

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 succes…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#707
post #671
post #662

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 succes…

I have been rebuilding my DVD collection through thrift stores. It’s incredibly cheap to do so now, and pretty fun to see what you find.

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#708
post #662

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 succes…

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…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> canceling all of its best shows 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.

The Dark Crystal, Travelers

Travelers was great! I would have loved another couple seasons!

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#710

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.

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.

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