Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix is turning into cable TV

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 103 posts

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#91

Post by Mindwipe »

imgabe wrote: post #7

It'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…

> 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 film that probably stopped making them money decades ago when they could just lease out the streaming rights and make something of it?

It will be available to any of those streaming services that the studio deals to take if they want to.

But those services buy x number of titles for y amount of money and your film is very obscure and would not get watched enough to justify a streaming service selecting it.

It is trivially available for an individual transaction, where the economics of making it available make more sense (but not infinite sense, listing/encoding/ingesting etc are not free, and people assume even the most obscure film generates more revenue than it actually does).

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#92

Post by Mindwipe »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #90
coder543 wrote: post #14

I 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…

It's insanity. I can't even watch 1080p content from most streaming providers on my desktop. It's always capped to 720p on Chrome/Win11. And even when a service offers 4K, the bitrate is abysmal. Trying to watch Dune via HBOMax you can see color banding and blocking throughout the entire movie.

> It's always capped to 720p on Chrome/Win11.

Netflix appear to be testing 1080p in Chrome for Windows, and support it in Chrome for Mac now.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#93

Post by Mindwipe »

rozap wrote: post #77
mvdtnz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

> 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.

"I am only willing to subscribe to you on terms where the company was having to borrow billions of dollars a year to stay afloat" does not make you very valuable as a customer, and you shouldn't be surprised nobody makes what you want on that basis.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#94

Post by cudgy »

Mindwipe wrote: post #93
rozap wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. "I am only willing to subscribe to you on terms where the company was hav…

True. That is not a good customer, but what if that customer is representative of most customers? All those billions of dollars “loss-leading” customers may not pay off in the end as the company tries to raise prices while providing less for more money.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#95

Post by cudgy »

passwordoops wrote: post #64
paxys wrote: post #45

"Netflix is shit". "No one watches Netflix anymore". "They cancel all the good shows". "There's nothing worth watching anyways". "Banning account sharing was a boneheaded move and everyone is going to cancel because of it". "Netflix is worse than cable now". Also: > Netflix tops Wall Street revenue estimates and adds a record 13.1 million subscribers in the last quarter. At some point all the terminally online people…

You have to be nuanced about those numbers. My parents, who are definitely not Redditors and were concerned that I frequent news page for Hackers, have gotten into the habit of cycling through the streamers every few months. How many of those 13.1 M are genuinely new versus returning subs who will cancel in 3-6 months and contribute to Disney+/Prime/Paramount/etc "growth" (again)?

25% of Netflix subscribers churn every year, so they have to reacquire all their customers every 4 years. Other streaming services like Starz have 100% customer churn per year! Tough business.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#96

Post by red-iron-pine »

imgabe wrote: post #7

It'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…

Hulu streaming + a couple of other crappy channels. lots of mid-to-low tier media there, but also some gems.

sometimes you just want a sloppy cheeseburger, and same idea in the TV context.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#97

Post by Mindwipe »

cudgy wrote: post #94
Mindwipe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. "I am only willing to subscribe to you on terms where the company was hav…

True. That is not a good customer, but what if that customer is representative of most customers? All those billions of dollars “loss-leading” customers may not pay off in the end as the company tries to raise prices while providing less for more money.

> That is not a good customer, but what if that customer is representative of most customers?

Then streaming is unsustainable and we go back to cable as the streaming providers go bust.

But it's not representative of most customers. https://deadline.com/2024/01/netflix-earnings-q4-2023-stream...

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#98

Post by iwontberude »

jeromegv wrote: post #37
iwontberude wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pivoted over ten years ago to literally “become HBO” and while that was a pretty weak vision, I think they succeeded.

They didn't really have a choice. They knew everyone else would eventually create their own streaming service for their own content, so they needed content of their own.

They did have a choice to create a platform to commoditize other streaming services by creating a hardware platform for the living room, but instead they figured they had a better chance at playing in the smaller content creation market. Netflix could have kept and built Roku and at this point been in a better long term position with more categories of entertainment.

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#99

Post by jeeeb »

jimt1234 wrote: post #13
imgabe wrote: post #7

It'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.

You can rent movies online though. Steaming catalogs are a moving target but online rental catalogs usually have most stuff available. You also don’t need to drive down to the store and risk getting a scratched up disk that skips over a key scene when renting online.

To go back to the OP’s example, Prime has Taking Care of Business available for rental for about $5: https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Business-James-Belushi/dp...

Re: Netflix is turning into cable TV

#100

Post by readthenotes1 »

edgyquant wrote: post #56
readthenotes1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of big tech's innovation was just doing this: skirting laws and agreements and cutting people out of the gains." Interesting cuz the vast majority of any tech innovation is cutting people out and using fast and reliable machines to do work instead...

Ah yes, because Uber and Airbnb definitely cut people out of the mix

You think taxis and room renting are innovations of uber and Airbnb??
Post reply on HN