Now that it’s about eyeballs and ad buys, streaming will shed the narrowcasting and will run back to broadcasting and a more modern monoculture.
Netflix is turning into cable TV
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#72“Live long enough to become the villain.” I guess we should all be more cynical
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#73It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It's a pretty unremarkable movie, but I remembered liking it as a kid for whatever reason and wanted to see it again. Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to…
This is exactly why I miss the old, neighborhood, mom-and-pop DVD-rental store. The place near my apartment back in the early-2000s pretty much never removed anything from the shelves, so you could find almost any movie ever made. You just had to wipe the dust off some of them.
Same, except the one in my hometown hadn't even thrown out the VHS tapes yet. There were still aisles full of early 80s movies in their faded, original edition boxes that had probably been there since the store first opened.
I remember finding "Breakin'" (the original, not Electric Boogaloo) in like 2003 when I was still in high school.
The owner was a pretty cool dude, I remember apologizing for returning some cheesy sci-fi flick really late after forgetting I had it. He capped my late fees to one day and said "Don't worry about it, you're the only one who ever rents that."
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know it. I won't watch a Netflix series until the series finale. I don't need any more rugs pulled out from under me.
I feel the same way, but at this point, I have extended the same policy to Disney and Amazon to at least some degree. If I can't verify that the show has a decent conclusion at the end of what is already released, I avoid it.
Fair point, and I'm with you on that. If a season is truly a self-contained plot, like "Fargo" or "Reacher" or "True Detective", fine. I'll start watching once the whole season's available. If each season is an act of a larger story, no way.
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#75> a graveyard of prematurely canceled originals This is the crux of the issue for me. I lost interest in even trying new Netflix shows because they developed a reputation for cancelling lots of good, not great, shows with loyal followings because they weren't pulling in blockbuster viewership numbers on the level of Stranger Things. This spray and pray strategy is fundamentally disrespectful to the audience.
I feel like mainstream TV wasn't much better at that. The vast majority of TV shows I got into seemed to get cancelled after 1-2 seasons. While they seem to have a bad track record by public opinion, it's unclear how much worse Netflix was at this. I did a quick google to see if I could find any statistics, I got bored looking for some better data but did find this article claiming that from 2009-2012 "on average, 65…
Could be, I'm not really old enough to remember how linear TV dealt with new television series. Perhaps it is mainly a problem of perception. When you turn on the hotel TV and see a Law & Order rerun playing for the umpeenth time you aren't really thinking about all the other shows that never got beyond a pilot because they couldn't outperform a juggernaut like Law & Order and earn a slot in the schedule.
The way Netflix seems to drive every season into a cliffhanger ending and then cancel seems pretty short-sighted though. If they just let stories be a little more self-contained, then these one-season shows (dare I say "miniseries"?) would accumulate into a catalog of stories that are actually worth a damn for the audiences that find them later. Every piece of content in the library that they don't have to pay to license can earn back an ROI from a niche audience over a much longer period of time since they don't have to optimize the limited number of hours in the schedule like linear TV.
I think there is an emotional difference also that plays a role here. With traditional TV, people I think were maybe more accustomed to the idea of "you get what you get". Don't like what's on? You can change the channel, but you can't pick out exactly what you want, so you have to get used to settling for "good enough". So you leave Law & Order playing in the background even if, really, police procedurals aren't something that inspire passion in you. But with streaming, there is the illusion of infinite choice. The magic of it is getting exactly what you want exactly when you want it, and the magic fizzles the moment the thing you like and very much want to continue watching gets unceremoniously cancelled. It feels like having a choice taken away.
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#76Related today:
Netflix adds 13.1M subscribers, tops revenue estimates
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#77I just want a 4K Originals Plan with 1 screen. Features: - Only Netflix Original content (in 4K) - 1 screen, since password sharing isn’t allowed anyways - No ads - No WWE - No smartphone games - No licensed content (which seems to be mostly 1080p anyways), since I can watch that elsewhere I will offer $14/mo, at most. Why should I be forced to pay for a bunch of stuff I don’t want or can’t use? This is why I don’t h…
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There was a beautiful period before the fragmentation happened where there was good content on Netflix, discovery was still solid, and competitors hadn't caught up yet so lots of studios were licensing to Netflix. That is when I paid for it. But now every network has their own streaming service for $20/m and we don't subscribe to any of them.
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly why I miss the old, neighborhood, mom-and-pop DVD-rental store. The place near my apartment back in the early-2000s pretty much never removed anything from the shelves, so you could find almost any movie ever made. You just had to wipe the dust off some of them.
If you can erase the past, you can control the population by influencing their collective memory.
are you implying that the collapse of mom and pop DVD rental stores is part of a plot to manipulate society?
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#79It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It's a pretty unremarkable movie, but I remembered liking it as a kid for whatever reason and wanted to see it again. Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to…
> Why is the studio hoarding access to this film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it? Just wanted to say that's it's surreal to be making a comment in more time than it probably takes to search for and start watching that movie on the Web. There should be a version of the bible where Jesus gets taken to Pilate immediate after…
Oh, I already found it and watched it. It's just silly it wasn't possible to do that with any of the services I pay for.
Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV
#80It's not even doing a good job of that, though. The other day someone mentioned the 1990 movie "Taking Care of Business" with Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin. It's a pretty unremarkable movie, but I remembered liking it as a kid for whatever reason and wanted to see it again. Of course, it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access to…
>it's not on any of the four streaming services I pay for (I'm outside the US so ymmv). And why? Why is the studio hoarding access It's not the studio, it's whatever local rightsholder owns it for your country. Where I am (Canada) it tends to be Bell, which is a content creator, ISP, and cable providing monopsonist. If they don't want to sell the rights, or put the price too high, the streaming services won't have it…
Don't even get me started on the absurdity that is region-locked content in the age of the Internet.