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Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

joe-steel.com

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Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#171

Post by usefulcat »

kaibee wrote: post #125
jprete wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3. So it’s hard for me to give that statistic any weight.

> This was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3. This isn't the only reason I stopped watching shows, but its certainly a contributing factor. Kinda gets old seeing some cool first season setup a bunch of interesting story arcs, great show, etc and then cancelled.

cough 1899 cough

I'd been a Netflix streaming subscriber since.. I don't know when? As long as the service has existed, most likely, and DVDs before that. Even so, by earlier this year I'd already been thinking about cancelling for a while. Much of their content seems pretty mediocre these days, and there's just so much of it. When they cancelled a well executed first season show that was so clearly an introduction to a bigger story.. that really made the decision to cancel a no brainer.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#172

Post by nostromo »

poink wrote: post #147
wand3r wrote: post #15

Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by 4. Then they doubled the price. So now for a worse discovery experience you are effectively paying 8x the price.

The thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely devalued the engineering of Netflix. It was "FAANG" for a reason. Viscerally, Netflix doesn't feel like it belongs alongside Google, but it did, because it was good. How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech c…

Netflix's tech is unremarkable now, though it was impressive 10 years ago.

The tech difference from a user's perspective between HBO, Disney, Hulu, and Netflix today is nil.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#173

Post by codetrotter »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #161
codetrotter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes down to personal taste. I could likewise see someone say that 80% of all soccer matches are the same. That once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And then on the opposite end you have people enjoying soccer who will be happy to tell you about the nuances between different matches, different players, different teams, etc.

Ah yes, https://xkcd.com/915/

There are only two certainties in life:

1. There’s an xkcd for that

2. Simpsons did it

https://thomaspark.co/2017/01/relevant-xkcd/

https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/The_Simpsons_Already_Did_I...

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#174

Post by jmye »

john-radio wrote: post #160
throwaway2037 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think it is OK to steal media? I never understand it. After university, I reduced my media stealing habits by 99+%. During/before uni, I was broke and could not afford to buy media. (Not an excuse, but just the reality.) After uni, I had a job so I could afford to buy some media.

I think a lot of people intuitively understand that there's a difference between pirating the works of JRR Tolkein, him being wildly successful and not alive anymore, and doing the same to an up-and-coming author who's eating ramen a lot. There's no difference legally, though, which is a great object lesson in how there are sharp topological differences between the world of ethics and the world of human law. If you p…

> If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right? Paying someone a millionth of a dollar to stream their music seems to me like kind of an insult, actually, and recording their song to a cassette from the radio like kind of a compliment.

This is absurd. One is paying them, the other isn’t. It’s not a “compliment” to not receive income, even if you think the income received is meaningless.

Further, the radio argument is flawed - the radio station paid to play that music for people who might record it. Johnny Torrent didn’t.

I dunno, every one of these arguments always comes down to “but I want it” and other nonsense to try to pretend that it’s ok to steal from artists. It’s the same justification I used when I was twelve and stole a pack of gum from 7-11, and it’s no less lame when the people making it are ostensibly adults.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#175

Post by siquick »

jwrallie wrote: post #94
wand3r wrote: post #15

Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by 4. Then they doubled the price. So now for a worse discovery experience you are effectively paying 8x the price.

Does anyone has experience with cancelling and switching services periodically so that you can access all the content, but not at the same time?

We cancel each service as soon as we subscribe (easy through Apple subscriptions.

Most of the time we don’t even realise the month has passed and the service has cancelled until we want to watch something on the service, then it takes 15 seconds to resubscribe.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#176

Post by harimau777 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150
codetrotter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes down to personal taste. I could likewise see someone say that 80% of all soccer matches are the same. That once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And then on the opposite end you have people enjoying soccer who will be happy to tell you about the nuances between different matches, different players, different teams, etc.

Isn't the issue there that some people basically just don't like soccer so they can't appreciate the differences? I would put myself in that camp - watching soccer just doesn't appeal to me that much, so it all kind of seems the same. But I can very much appreciate the differences to people that enjoy watching the sport, and I think this could be said about nearly any endeavor.

I think that soccer has a problem where the goalies are so effective that the game often comes down to attempting to shoot on the goal as many times as possible in the hope that eventually the goalie makes a mistake. Things are made worse by the fact that when the goalie gets the ball they generally throw it most of the way down the field; effectively resetting the state of the gameplay.

As a result, any given segment of the game is not particularly relevant to the outcome; what's relevant is basically the overall time of possession/goal attempts across the various segments of the game.

Compare that to something like football where the outcome of a given play depends much more overtly on the play the QB decides to run, the skills of the players, how the strengths & weaknesses of the two teams match up, etc. In addition, there's a greater degree to which the plays in a possession build upon each other in order to contribute or take away from a team's ability to score during that possession.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#177

Post by jrmg »

poink wrote: post #147
wand3r wrote: post #15

Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by 4. Then they doubled the price. So now for a worse discovery experience you are effectively paying 8x the price.

The thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely devalued the engineering of Netflix. It was "FAANG" for a reason. Viscerally, Netflix doesn't feel like it belongs alongside Google, but it did, because it was good. How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech c…

I can’t square your comment with the fact that my experience of the other big name streaming services has been just as good as my experience with Netflix. They basically all just work almost all the time.

If Netflix has more valuable technical excellence it should show in the customer experience of the product.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#178

Post by [deleted] »

NoodleDerek wrote: post #146
wackget wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just a regular aspect ratio issue? If the content is filmed in 1:2.4 and you're trying to watch it on a 16:10 screen, it's always going to be letterboxed. In that case, if it doesn't look letterboxed then it's either stretched (deformed) or parts of the video are cropped/lost.

People expect black bats on the top or the sides but not both.

[deleted]

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#179

Post by stevenwoo »

metal_am wrote: post #134
alisson_dover wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libby and Hoopla: free books, audio books, movies. Just to add: Kanopy gives you 15 free movies per month. Not enough for binging TV shows but certainly enough for 15 quality movie watching sessions per month.

Must be library dependent. I only get 5 movies per month.

It's retro but my local library lets people checkout 30 DVD/Blurays at a time and the selection of more recent stuff is pretty good, though popular stuff may take a while to waitlist.

Re: Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

#180

Post by dudul »

cortesoft wrote: post #60
geph2021 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kids love repeat content This is very true, to a certain age. My kids would watch some things over and over again, until they reached a certain age when there was an abrupt change. Once that change happens it's polar opposite, they could not fathom watching something a second time.

My roommate in college watched Gladiator every single night for like a full year.

We should all do this.
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