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Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

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Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#121

Post by scarface74 »

boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on

People said the same thing in the 60s when Star Trek had the nerve to have a representative crew aboard the Enterprise and when they showed an interracial kiss.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#122

Post by rchaud »

Spivak wrote: post #120
boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on :( I know this is a tangent but it’s always sad to see representation treated as inherently political. Like this is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen mainstream shows portray wlw relationships. Or shows portray the reality of how common and casual sexual assault is. Or characters that that struggle with depression as more than just an…

The implication being that anything outside of the anodyne mainstream of cable TV must be a concerted effort to brainwash the public.

Netflix has many problems, the big ones being that they lost old shows like The Office and Friends, which hurts retention. And they also kill off promising new shows after 2 seasons to save money on renegotiating cast contracts.

If you read comment sections however, you'll get a very different idea. The problem is that Netflix is "too woke" and consumers are revolting. Never mind the fact that Netflix is a global network with millions of customers around the world, and thousands of shows from multiple countries.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#123

Post by vitus »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #88
autoexec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, netflix might be too embarrassed by their catalogue to show people a simple A-Z listing of everything they have, but I'd absolutely watch netflix more often if they did. Scrolling through the same shows I'm not interested in over and over across their multiple random/useless categories takes up way too much time. Every so often I'll go to search and enter random 2-3 letter combinations because I usually find…

I have to wonder how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage. That is, if a bunch of people are streaming a show, it's easier to add a few more and reuse the edge cache. Most viewers won't go beyond the recommendations, so the back-catalog pulls are less frequent, and less pressure on the infrastructure. Total speculation, though.

> how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage.

Netflix's catalog historically has been small enough that it can fit within a single rack.

With 8Mbps [0] bitrates for 4k (okay, add 50% for transcoding to lower resolutions, so let's call it 12Mbps), we get about 5.4GB per hour of video. At 360TB for a single 2U Open Connect storage device [1], that translates to 67k hours of 4k video.

This article from 2020 [2] indicated that US Netflix's catalog was about 36k hours. Even at 50% growth since then it would still comfortably fit on a single machine.

[0] "The highest 4K bitrate on average is 8 Mbps which is also a 50% reduction compared to 16 Mbps of the fixed-bitrate ladder." https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for...

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/#the-hardware

[2] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#124

Post by charcircuit »

scarface74 wrote: post #121
boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on People said the same thing in the 60s when Star Trek had the nerve to have a representative crew aboard the Enterprise and when they showed an interracial kiss.

From what I can tell Netflix's catalog includes Stal Trek so you are just backing up his point.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#125

Post by gniv »

All these discussions are very US-centric. Netflix made more money from outside US than US (4477M vs 3350M) and membership went up in Asia.

I agree that the US-made content on Netflix is not as good as it used to be, but the foreign content is quite good. Plus virtually every country except US is used to read subtitles, so shows have a big audience. For example a lot of great shows nowadays come from Korea, and I assume they are much cheaper to buy than the US-made shows.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#126

Post by somat »

omegalulw wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #6

This chart [1] was making the rounds a while back. Whether you totally agree with its methodology or not, it certainly suggests that many people consider a huge swath of Netflix' content average at best. And for someone like me who doesn't watch a huge amount of video, that's not a great look. Tastes differ of course but my tastes aren't that out of the mainstream. And I'd rather a streaming service had a modest numb…

I don't know about other people, but finding something to watch on Netflix is frustrating, there's so much poor quality shows. The recommendations are not good (tbf that's most streaming services) and there's no option for granular filtering. For example, I hate dubs, I would like to pick shows where the original audio is some particular language, I don't get why that isn't there? In contrast, on HBO Max / Disney+, u…

Netflix was doing fine as a dvd rental platform, hell netflix was doing great, they then made a jump to a streaming platform and did well there. The movie production studios saw how well netflix was doing and so started making their own streaming platforms preventing netflix from streaming their movies. so netflix in a desperation move said "fine" then we will make our own movies.

And so here we are, despite living in the post movie scarcity future you can never watch the movie you want to because it is on a different streaming service.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#127

Post by colinmhayes »

boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

> Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting

I can not stand how every "documentary" on netflix is actually an extremely opinionated political piece or true crime. And I usually agree with the political opinion, it's just incredibly annoying and divisive, and really it mostly feels dishonest.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#128

Post by breadov »

scarface74 wrote: post #121
boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

> Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on People said the same thing in the 60s when Star Trek had the nerve to have a representative crew aboard the Enterprise and when they showed an interracial kiss.

It's different these days though. Much more emphasis on whatever fresh sexual and gender identities happen to be in vogue right now, apparently for no purpose other than to preach about them to the viewer.

Whereas in Star Trek, it made sense that a future spacefaring crew would be made up of people with origins from all different parts of the world. This was entirely consistent with the overall storyline.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#129

Post by spanktheuser »

boredumb wrote: post #72

A pile of mid tier content that i'd flick through before exiting out after an episode Automatic previews Increasing pop politics seemingly shoe horned into everything I'd turn on Horrible comedians that were akin to ted talks/lectures or made for people who don't actually enjoy stand up comedy. Documentaries that were more ideological than interesting Signing and hiring ex politicians Searching is a chore and recomme…

No post body was provided.

Re: Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash

#130

Post by colinmhayes »

jandrese wrote: post #55
ghaff wrote: post #6

This chart [1] was making the rounds a while back. Whether you totally agree with its methodology or not, it certainly suggests that many people consider a huge swath of Netflix' content average at best. And for someone like me who doesn't watch a huge amount of video, that's not a great look. Tastes differ of course but my tastes aren't that out of the mainstream. And I'd rather a streaming service had a modest numb…

Eyeballing the chart it looks like the percentages for each section are roughly the same for each service, Netflix just has a lot more shows so they fill in the "just average" box more than the other services.

The HBO section only includes the "max" shows. All their best shows are "hbo originals" so they're actually doing much better than it looks.
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