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The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

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Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#961

Post by 1123581321 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #820
rdtsc wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they raised their prices - significantly Yeah, and I was right on the edge, not really watching it enough to justify the previous, cheaper, price. When they raised the price it served as a motivation to cancel it. In a 6 months I might join for a bit to watch some newer shows, then probably cancel again. Raising prices works well perhaps if people are in love with the product or there is just no other alternative.…

Yeah I’m surprised at how little I’m seeing about this. I canceled last month because of the price increase, and I would not have canceled if they hadn’t raised prices. At $9-$14 it’s fine if I only watch it once a month. But at $20 it’s no longer worth it.

If you were paying $9 or $14, your new price would have been $10 or $15.50. The people paying $20 were previously paying $18.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#962

Post by adave »

chii wrote: post #944
abandonliberty wrote: post #920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everything was bundled together, we complained about paying for things we didn't use. Unbundling was initially cheaper because it was just extra profit on the side. Now, it's becoming the primary business model and has to stand on its own. It turns out economy of scale is real, and we've lost it. Other people were paying for our content before, but not watching it. How does real public educational content get fu…

> a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers. Those loyal subscribers don't get anything in return for that loyalty. the nash equilibrium is therefore to not be a loyal subscriber, but only subscribe for the shortest period of time and consume the maximum possible. Hence, eventually the service would lose all loyal subscribers.

actually Nash Equilibrium would suggest loyal subscribers to be loyal unless the rules of the Game change for the service to exist at all i.e. someone has to keep not watching and paying for someone to keep watching in short busts and not pay for rest of the time to avoid catastrophic changes.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#963

Post by Lammy »

lostgame wrote: post #707
j4yav wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been rebuilding my DVD collection through thrift stores. It’s incredibly cheap to do so now, and pretty fun to see what you find.

I think an issue for me that prevents me from collecting DVD’s, to; say - collecting CD’s - is that while a CD from the 1980’s is pretty much the best quality of audio you can still get today, DVD’s unfortunately suffer from an issue where the SD quality has aged very poorly, and the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s. Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio…

> the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s

It's possible to make them look a lot better, but you're right that it's a huge amount of work to do so. There's basically nothing out there tagged "DVDRip" that's worth a damn IMO, because almost all encoders (both human and software) treat the DVD like encoding a CD where making the most exact copy of what's on the disc is the goal.

Encoding a DVD for modern screens on the other hand requires some art direction all its own. DVDs have a huge amount of legacy hidden in them, not only in the interlaced NTSC/PAL systems but in Sony's D-1 tape system as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)

A good modern DVD rip will be:

- Deinterlaced to 60FPS (technically 60000/1001 fields-per-second) using a temporal-smoothing filter like QTGMC. Handbrake will not do this. Almost all DVD rips are 30FPS and just look gross and feel gross from all the lost motion information.

- Cropped to avoid the black bars on the left and right of the D-1 resolution and to make circles into circles instead of slight ovals. This is really noticeable in cartoons with circle-guides for eyes like The Simpsons.

- Stretched to 960x540 (16:9) or 720x540 (4:3) at encode-time with a quality resize filter. This is probably the part nerds have the most internalized opposition to (I sure did) since the raw NTSC DVD res is 720x480 and expanding it feels kind of like encoding a FLAC out of an MP3. All DVDs are anamorphic (704x486 is a 3:2 res, stretched equally for both 16:9 and 4:3 DAR!), so the alternative is that the display performs the stretch in real-time using the container PAR/DAR flags. Most displays do a terrible job.

The vertical 540px is the EDTV resolution and still part of the ATSC spec to this day, technically as 544px with four dead pixel rows on the bottom for 8px block size. I've yet to meet a decoder fail with 4px blocks though so I prefer the panel-accurate res. It pixel-doubles in exact multiples to 1080, 2160, etc, so it looks way better on modern screens.

- Color-corrected from the oldschool D-1 colorspace to the newer HDTV or 4K colorspaces, or at least tagged as such if not converted. This doesn't undo the lossy nature of subsampled chroma but still looks a lot better, especially in the greens. This is another thing that cheap displays are terrible at doing in realtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601

- Rip the raster-based DVD subtitles to a modern format like SRT/ASS. I usually use SubtitleEdit and correct the few OCR errors by hand: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/

- Encode AC3 audio to AAC, preferably with something nicer than FAAC. I include all languages because why not. I like FDK-AAC and will use VBR-4 or VBR-5 if I want low-pass or not based on the source waveform: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...

- MKV container, take the time to fill the container metadata fields, tag audio track languages so the player picks the correct one, attach a `cover.jpg` for Explorer/Finder thumbnail, name all the chapter stops, etc. This is actually grueling some times. My precious metadata.

Totally huge pain. Worth it though for things worth having :)

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#964

Post by urlwolf »

narrator wrote: post #889

One of the most overlooked trends of the 21st century is we have too much entertainment. When I was growing up, when a movie came out, you went and saw it because it wasn't going to be on TV for at least 8 months and then you could get a VHS like years afterward if you were lucky. When it came on TV it was a big deal. Everyone got home in time to watch it. Now entertainment is everywhere. It's in massive and overwhel…

> One of the most overlooked trends of the 21st century is we have too much entertainment. That's some deep insight right there. I used to watch netflix while eating alone only. I unsubscribed Jan 2022, and now I read a book on an ereader on a stand at eye level. Much more value for me and as entertaining if not more.

It's not entertainment, it's education.

The challenge now is to find and filter 'useful books' (most are not, and don't deliver on the promise on the cover).

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#965

Post by oblio »

mgh2 wrote: post #956
RajT88 wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume". So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it! Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to…

Same symptom happens with addiction: just because you see short term engagement because the product is designed to get users hooked, does not mean that they will not switch once better options are available. You can't retain long term loyalty with bad quality products - same thing happened with Facebook.

Social media is cyclical, like fashion. When your parents start wearing bell bottoms they stop being cool so you stop doing it.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#966

Post by soneil »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #879
zmmmmm wrote: post #775

All the handwringing over Netflix subscriber loss seems to be overlooking the fact that they raised their prices - significantly. Of course they could lose subscribers from doing that. But 200k subscribers out of 150 million? Combined with the end of the pandemic and sky high inflation meaning many people have less opportunity to watch and less money to spend. The fact they raised their prices something like 20% and…

> raised their prices - significantly https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 $9.99, $15.49, and $19.99/mo What did their prices used to be?

I just took a search through my email to see what I've been paying in the past:

2013 joined at 7eur/month. Can't find the email from when it went from 7 to 9. May 2016 increased from 9 to 10. August 2019 from 10 to 12. March 2021 from 12 to 13. April 2022 from 13 to 15. (All prices euro and rounded up one penny).

I cancelled the day the last hike arrived - it's the least amount of time between raises, as was the previous raise before it. At the same time, their offer is getting more and more disappointing, and they're talking publicly about reducing their content spend and the possibility of adverts.

I feel like they're hooked on a growth bubble, and now that they're reaching market saturation the only way they can maintain that bubble is to squeeze it out of us - charge more, deliver less - which as a user is the complete opposite of value for money, so I'm out.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#967

Post by bawolff »

RajT88 wrote: post #861
bobitsaboy wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a part of it for some. Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.

They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume". So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it! Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to…

Seems like a short term vs long term thing.

Short term that makes sense... long term i dont know if its true.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#968

Post by ss108 »

jurassic wrote: post #780
zmmmmm wrote: post #775

All the handwringing over Netflix subscriber loss seems to be overlooking the fact that they raised their prices - significantly. Of course they could lose subscribers from doing that. But 200k subscribers out of 150 million? Combined with the end of the pandemic and sky high inflation meaning many people have less opportunity to watch and less money to spend. The fact they raised their prices something like 20% and…

I completely agree. I was only lightly using Netflix so when they last raised prices it was the push I needed to actually cancel. The recent content they've rolled out doesn't justify the heftier price tag compared to competitors. I love the UX of Netflix, but content rules and they're losing that battle. I don't even want to try new shows because of their reputation for cancelling things unceremoniously.

Cancelling and putting on pause for no reason, such as Mindhunter.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#969

Post by snowwrestler »

jmyeet wrote: post #776
ripe wrote: post #662

It's sad that we cannot own titles but are forced to rent them from these streaming services that can't seem to get their shit together. (Not blaming Netflix per se; this is a pox on all their houses). Used to be nice in the DVD days. I built myself a nice collection then. This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its succes…

What people don't realize is that part of the pricing model for various physical media is that the media wouldn't last. VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc all age, get lost, break, get scratches, whatever. They're not "forever". Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable. A cloud copy of somet…

I have friends who work in media archiving. Properly stored physical media can last a LONG time, like hundreds of years.

And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.

The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.

Re: The bottom is dropping out of Netflix

#970

Post by Veen »

edgyquant wrote: post #902
bobitsaboy wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a part of it for some. Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.

Seems like most content is dubbed foreign stuff now days, which I’m not at all into watching. The only thing they have at the moment I watch is Ozark and that’s ending on the 29th.

Watch it with subtitles instead then—most non-English content has English subtitles in my experience. Many of many favorite shows of recent years have been non-English Netflix shows that I watch with subtitles: Fauda, Dogs of Berlin, A Very Secret Service, Lupin, etc.
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