No but the supply of content keeps going up and the demand can't keep growing. At some point, the price for a generic hour of entertainment has to drop. The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant.
> The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant. How is this irrelevant? Everything about making the product costs money and if there is no ad revenue they have to charge for it elsewhere.
I suddenly find myself wondering how successful a Game of Thrones season kickstarter would be. ;)
Does anyone else find this a really bad metric? This list is relatively static if princess bride is still on there. What about the top 10 by year? Most people want to see the best and latest movie not the best older movie.
> We really, really tried to do it the legal way and pay money for the content we wanted to watch, but it was far too complicated to even find a place to watch it, let alone actually successfully watch it. Hey @Google, @Amazon, @etc., you have UX designers (tons of them). If this problem isn't fixed soon, more will do the same.
Robotguy12 did not describe a UI problem. First there was a licensing problem, then there was a technical playback problem. The movie was nominally legally available, but it might as well not have been, for how hard it was to find and then playback. The technical problem is relatively easily fixed and probably just an isolated local issue. The licensing problem is a bigger one. For rentals, you have the problem of ha…
> The technical problem is relatively easily fixed
except it's not. When content has to flow through umpteen layers of draconian DRM software and hardware, the chances of things going badly are very high. Will the DRM layer in your 2010 tv work with 2020 DRM "standards"? Will some 2016 proprietary DRM solution work on your 2014 OSX that you can't upgrade on your 2009 MacBook Pro?
> The licensing problem is a bigger one.
The licensing problem is the original one from where all the madness flows, but it's actually the simplest one to fix from a technical standpoint: Hollywood just has to write simpler contracts and poof, everything else fixes itself.
I know; I have to keep bringing it up because people keep pretending they're owed entertainment. This entitled generation is just disappointing.
You seem to be missing the point that you continually bringing it up does not make it accurate or even relevant. You wouldn't download a car! This is a dumb argument.
I know this: the subject is complex and many varied and valid arguments are made on all sides.
But amazingly, folks accept whatever argument gives them free entertainment. Objections are suddenly 'irrelevant' when watching their favorite TV show is at stake.
Folks who wouldn't go in the back window of a bar to avoid the cover charge, will gladly go in the back way online to hear their favorite band. And they rely on the (pretty indirect) argument about how the source is generated to rationalize it.
Surely I'm not the only person who isn't interested in watching IMDB's favourite content. Give me the 6 outta 10s, that's my bread and butter. I'd rather be surprised and discover a personal favourite or have something on the TV that I won't be expected to dissect with the nerds at work.
I'm not sure I understand. Is it "I prefer movies that aren't especially good so that I don't have to listen to other people talk about them"?
> Now, we wanted to Chromecast it, and Amazon (to the best of my knowledge) does not allow you to do that, presumably because they want you to buy their Fire TV instead. It works on a phone or tablet if you cast the whole screen. Might work on a laptop the same way.
Does it play OK like that? I vaguely remember it dropped frames or the sync was out or something that made me go 'ugh'.
It "works", but it can be really flaky. I've used it to watch at least 2 movies, but at that point it feels really shitty to be jumping through so many hoops, most likely breaking some law somewhere in the process anyway, just to give someone money for something all the while they actively fight me.
Last weekend my wife and I wanted to watch the movie Goat. It was pretty recently in theaters, so we didn't expect it to be on Netflix. We searched HBO Now, Hulu, Starz, and all of the other video streaming services that we have (and pay money for!). We found two options - rent it on Google Play Movies, or rent it through Amazon Prime. Now, we wanted to Chromecast it, and Amazon (to the best of my knowledge) does not…
Yeah I'm not sympathetic. The alternative to finding (and failing to find) a service to watch the show could possibly be - not watching it? The conclusion 'naturally we then had to steal it' isn't entirely justified. Shoplifting is easy and convenient too. Next time you forget your wallet at the corner store. Just sayin.
Piracy and larceny are entirely different crimes. Nobody "stole" anything, in this particular situation. In order for something to be "stolen", the victim must lose something that they already had. You might try to argue that streaming services lost a sale, but they never had the sale and they make the process so arduous that they would never get the sale.
To be clear, I am not promoting piracy, it does pose ethical problems. The metaphor to stealing simply fails to illuminate any of them.
I'm glad for Netflix original content. It's been high in quality, and I've already seen all the top 250 IMDB movies I want to see. What Netflix could do to prove its love of movies, and which would probably make good business sense, is unearth movies that have never been shown on TV, or never been digitized to DVD or even transferred to VHS. There are websites devoted to those lost treasures, and movie lovers who would bow and genuflect to Netflix if those movies were ever aired. Consider that eBay does big business selling VHS tapes to people who don't even own VHS players, but who buy and send those tapes to services that will rip them to DVD. (My latest is "We're Talkin' Serious Money" with Dennis Farina - a 6.0 IMDB rated movie I just HAD to see again.) Who else has the power to deal with rights holders who control rights to old movies not deemed worthy of a VHS or DVD release? I type this hoping that someone from Netflix understands and agrees with me. They could make it a big event, build excitement, even though those movies are not high rated. They're just unobtainable rarities, like the 1998 movie with Molly Ringwald, Twice Upon A Time, that I've wanted to see again for 15 years... Great movie, too bad you can't watch it.
It sucks that Netflix is pushing their own content as a solution. Don't get me wrong, some of their own content is great, but I don't want to subscribe to 10 different streaming services that all have their own original content, I want to subscribe to one. Netflix--and others, like Amazon Prime--are becoming less and less worthwhile, and piracy is becoming more and more convenient again.
> I don't want to subscribe to 10 different streaming services that all have their own original content Funny how so many people screamed for al la care programming and now that it's happening everyone is realizing it's actually worse. I know people hated it, but there is something to be said about traditional TV and how it's consumed. Having a centralized menu/guide of all the content you can view makes it much easi…
The really funny thing is that people seem to assume a la carte would be cheaper, but there's no economic reason it should be. I get 200 channels from Xfinity, and I watch about 5 of them. My neighbor also watches 5, though a different 5.
That is, I've already proven to Xfinity that I'm willing to pay my monthly cable bill for those 5 channels, so if they offer them a la carte, those 5 will cost about what my monthly cable bill costs.