Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that • Hacker News Board

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#311

Post by mst » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

Brybry wrote: post #165

mst wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being English-as-in-UK I often run into situations where my dry/sarcastic humour completely fails to be clear to USians. Then again from the UK POV the leftpondians barely count as native English speakers anyway ;)

Yet you'll find sources that claim spoken American English is closer to historical British English, because of some aspects like rhoticity. [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

Those are all claims about the accent (my understanding of said claims is basically "sounds reasonable but also I have no idea what I'm talking about").

I was more thinking about the words/grammar/idiom etc.

(also as a Lancastrian I find e.g. Deep Somerset barely comprehensible, especially when the speaker is a few pints in, but their wording is still usually closer to mine than the USians' is)

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#312

Post by mst » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #174

mst wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being English-as-in-UK I often run into situations where my dry/sarcastic humour completely fails to be clear to USians. Then again from the UK POV the leftpondians barely count as native English speakers anyway ;)

So strange. As a non-brit, every comment I read uses John Oliver or Diane Morgan as an internal monologue and is incredibly witty and sarcastic. To be fair, I'm probably less informed for doing so.

You would likely be better with, say, Ian Hislop for me in terms of sarcasm, though while he's definitely a wit, no matter how hard I try I only ever seem to get half way.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#313

Post by appreciatorBus » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #304

marcosdumay wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too. Netflix has shows made for really watching too. I don't know if they are rebellious acts from their makers, brought without an option, or actual choices, but Netflix does have them. My impression is that Netflix cornered themselves into the same AAA race to death that the major movie studios are in. Everything is too expensive, so they can't acc…

> Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too. What? No they don't. Film and television are visual art forms that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention. There's already plenty of mediocre television out there you can use as background noise; we don't need to intentionally lower the bar for the media that's being made. As the article mentions, Netflix has already played…

> no they don’t. … > meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention

I think the person choosing to spend a few hours of their one life with some audio/visual media, whether they’re doing their laundry or not, is the one who gets to decide whether or not it’s art, and how much attention it deserves. Anything else leads to some uncomfortable places.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#314

Post by Karrot_Kream » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #292

This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now. In all these kinds…

I think you just wandered into today's HN "Good Old Days" article. It's just nostalgia vibes, not really a space meant for critical thinking.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#315

Post by wglass » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 10:33 PM UTC

Holy moly. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article so angry. Every paragraph has a sensational opinion or put down posing as fact.

There’s some fascinating industry trends here but the analysis in the article is overwhelmed by the cacophony of anecdotes about b movies and bland tv shows all encouraged by the corrupt and evil parent company. Not helpful.

My take on the quality of shows— there’s a huge volume of mediocre stuff but that’s always been the case with TV. (There’s literally hundreds of forgotten sitcoms on broadcast tv from the 70s to 90s). But there have been many gems in the past decade.

A random list of fantastic or innovative shows I saw first on NetFlix. - House of Cards, season 1 and 2 - Russian Doll - Squid Game - Queens Gambit - Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Arcane - Kaos

Only the first was mentioned in the article, and with negative comment.

Overall, a poorly written article and a waste of time to read it.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#316

Post by Uw7yTcf36gTc » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 10:37 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #299

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is the average person's time to watch TV/unwind is also going to be spent doing chores. This was always the case. When I was a kid, we watched shows that could be followed along by whoever was cooking dinner/doing dishes as well as the people sitting in front of the set. People don't have all that much extra free time. Movies were an experience because... they were an experience. They weren't constantly o…

It’s very true this drives watch time, but I doubt it drives subscriptions. My guess is some internal metrics favor watch time over quality and is just quietly killing their business.

As most of their revenue becomes advertising revenue instead of subscriptions then watch time is all they care about. It’s what happened with cable TV.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#317

Post by pastureofplenty » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 10:53 PM UTC

stevage wrote: post #78

raverbashing wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the attention span of a puppy golden retriever The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts

I would love to see movies come in many different flavours. Long, short, dial up the violence, or down, etc etc.

This was actually something that was tried with music in the early 90s, by Philips and Sony with the CD-i. The musician/producer Todd Rundgren made an album specifically for this format called "No World Order" where the songs were all broken up into "modules", so to speak, and the user could configure them however they'd like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_World_Order

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#318

Post by rat87 » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 10:55 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #258

giraffe_lady wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until the end of prominent network TV shows. TV show creators understood and planned for people watching their shows in a…

My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the qu…

Yeah most of those services aren't as popular as Netflix so they have to compete for eyeballs. Also for Apple/Amazon TV is a minor side business. The show you listed for HBO are largely HBO shows developed for HBO some arguably back when watching HBO under a cable subscription was the norm. Breaking Bad was made for tv first.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#319

Post by kasey_junk » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 11:10 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #292

This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now. In all these kinds…

I remember very fondly 2 video stores from my youth, mostly because of the knowledge (and frankly very nerdy) employees.

My breadth of viewing and thus my subsequent taste was extremely impacted by them. And I e yet to find an algorithmic equivalent (nor music or books).

But this is just a bias. Most of the video stores I ever used were garbage.

I presume soda fountains were the same but that didn’t stop my grandfather from bemoaning the loss of the soda jerk.

Re: Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

#320

Post by rat87 » Sat, Dec 28, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #157

mwigdahl wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to note, Solo Leveling is Korean.

Thanks for the correction.

I haven't read/seen it but my understanding is that it's an anime/Japanese show. The original story was a webcomic written by a Korean author on a Korean webtoon platform (with the long scrolling pages of Korean webtoons) but forsome reason Solo Leveling and other popular webcomics were adapted by Japanese animation studios, although they may subcontract some of the work back to Korea.