That graph at the end is brutal. But perhaps not incorrect.
Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
But what if I want a faster horse?
341–350 of 632 posts
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix’s ad-supported tier makes so much more money per user than their ad-free tier that they had to raise the price of the ad-free tier to make it competitive on ARPU.
But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latt…
Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't often watch that service on anything other than our "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very brief black screens were where ads would have been.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#343Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want. I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I ha…
This is the way. If I care about watching something in the future, I buy the Blu-ray and rip it. I already have basically all the music I could ever want in mp3 format. Plex (or Jellyfin if you prefer that) provides a pleasant UI, and I don't need those services any more.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#344Everything is converging on TikTok because it's unregulated addiction. The Chinese hit the sweet spot on how to hook people.
Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god there are countries already banning phones from schools and there's talk of banning minor from social media.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#345For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
Some people have claimed that pure A/B testing is an agent for enshittification, both on a quality and ethical dimension. And I can’t see how those people are particularly wrong.
There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects.
You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don’t know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that’s not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#346Going back to horses sounds so nice.
I see people riding them around the hood here in Philly. There's also pop up stables here and there.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#347For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong. IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0. Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and ev…
Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#348This is pretty much why we are taking this "faster horse" approach when building Volumo, our music download store for pro DJs (an alternative to Beatport - if you know, you know)[1]. Downloads, not streaming (you get FLAC files right into your hands); pay as you go instead of a subscription (why don't you pay a lump sum for this track you want, of which 75% will go straight to the author); gentle human curation instead of the ubiquitous "we make decisions for you" algorithms.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#349Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want. I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I ha…
This. Masterfully written down, by the way. I subscribed to your blog through RSS, because I also want to do 'the algorithm' myself. Interesting story about the intersection of law and tech you have on your blog!
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
> More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.” Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.
What would you call actually ad-free broadcasts then?
Propaganda?