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The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

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Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#711

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…

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.

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#713

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…

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.

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

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#714
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.

That works until UMG etc start their own streaming services and take their content off spotify for this or any other reason.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've said they are introducing a reduced subscription fee with ads, not adding ads.

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".

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#716

This has been amazing to watch unfold. 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 s…

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#717

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.

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#718
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 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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#719
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 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.

One of many, many examples: https://screenrant.com/its-always-sunny-blackface-episodes-m...

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.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#720

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.

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…

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.
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