I cancelled after the Dave Chappelle fiasco and intended to resubscribe after a month or so if I couldn't live without it. It's been a bit longer than that and frankly, getting the shows I want in...
I cancelled after the Dave Chappelle fiasco and intended to resubscribe after a month or so if I couldn't live without it. It's been a bit longer than that and frankly, getting the shows I want in other ways is just easier.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been getting increasingly burned out by the amount of “CONTENT” that is being pumped out by all these streaming services. It’s causing a paralysis of choice for me and...
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been getting increasingly burned out by the amount of “CONTENT” that is being pumped out by all these streaming services. It’s causing a paralysis of choice for me and I don’t see it getting any better. The early days of Netflix were pretty glorious but we knew it could not stay that way.
I don’t know where we go from here but it’s definitely not this “a la carte” streaming situation. I think I spend more time on YouTube and twitch than I do on any streaming platform out there. I also know I am in the minority with this.
That is certainly a problem, but eventually you gotta make a choice. When I was younger I could watch everything that was worth it and have a more or less complete notion of the current state of...
That is certainly a problem, but eventually you gotta make a choice. When I was younger I could watch everything that was worth it and have a more or less complete notion of the current state of prime TV. Nowadays I'm used to the fact that even if I spend entire days glued to the TV, I'll only get to know a small portion of everything good that is on.
Honestly there is just too much to scroll through. They've replicated everything bad about cable (too much bloat I have to sift through to find anything I'm potentially interested in, costs like...
Honestly there is just too much to scroll through. They've replicated everything bad about cable (too much bloat I have to sift through to find anything I'm potentially interested in, costs like $200/mo to have access to everything, soon to include ads even though I'm already paying) and added a couple of extra bad things (loud ass trailers that autoplay, creepy tracking of activity and data).
Part of the appeal of cord cutting was also just having a smaller, curated set of stuff to watch instead of "empty calories" viewing. But the "empty calories" seems to be where Netflix is putting its production money towards now. I guess it is what people want since many of the TV/culture mag write-ups I see now are for various reality and dating shows.
Netflix's strategy of flooding the service with "empty calories" content seems to be backfiring, seeing as they are losing customers. There is clearly a market for that kind of content, Netflix's...
Netflix's strategy of flooding the service with "empty calories" content seems to be backfiring, seeing as they are losing customers. There is clearly a market for that kind of content, Netflix's mistake is pricing. People aren't going to pay $20/mo for endless reality TV when Discovery+ offers the same kind of crap for a quarter the price.
If the new Discovery/Warner leadership is smart, they will keep Hobomax and Discovery+ separate. Hobomax should continue to exist as an outlet for high quality scripted content, and not cheapen it by rolling Discovery+ content into its library. I think where the good services are succeeding is in finding their niche, rather than trying to satisfy everyone all at once like Netflix.
It would be great if Netflix had genre categories. And I'm not sure why streaming services don't allow multiple personalized playlists besides the single "watch later" list. That would be a game...
It would be great if Netflix had genre categories. And I'm not sure why streaming services don't allow multiple personalized playlists besides the single "watch later" list. That would be a game changer for me.
They do. You can browse them by clicking the Genre dropdown menu at the top of the Movies or TV Shows sections, and you can also even click on the sub-genre tags on the individual movies/shows...
It would be great if Netflix had genre categories
They do. You can browse them by clicking the Genre dropdown menu at the top of the Movies or TV Shows sections, and you can also even click on the sub-genre tags on the individual movies/shows listings to browse by those as well. It's a bit clunky browsing by sub-genres on the site though, so I prefer to use third-party sites, e.g. https://www.netflix-codes.com/
Oh there really is, how could I have missed that? Lol There's no crime category though. But there's a "Global Accessibility Awareness" category, that's pretty cool.
Oh there really is, how could I have missed that? Lol
There's no crime category though.
But there's a "Global Accessibility Awareness" category, that's pretty cool.
To be fair, the Netflix UI is pretty garbage, IMO, so it's not surprising you never noticed the genres before. ;) And while there may not be a top-level Crime genre, there are a bunch of crime...
To be fair, the Netflix UI is pretty garbage, IMO, so it's not surprising you never noticed the genres before. ;)
I disagree. Some amount of consolidation might be good, but shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry onto a single service a la Spotify would result in either an extremely expensive...
but it’s definitely not this “a la carte” streaming situation.
I disagree. Some amount of consolidation might be good, but shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry onto a single service a la Spotify would result in either an extremely expensive service, or a lot less new content getting made. There is simply no feasible way for every movie and TV show getting made right now to be funded from a single $15-20/mo subscription service.
I think the hope would be that we say most of that stuff shouldn't be getting made. But I think the grim reality is that in such a world we'd be seeing a lot more of the lowest common denominator...
I think the hope would be that we say most of that stuff shouldn't be getting made.
But I think the grim reality is that in such a world we'd be seeing a lot more of the lowest common denominator "junk food" than the higher quality stuff we presumably want.
I've had a Netflix subscription for nearly 20 years. I remember when they first introduced streaming, it was included in your disc-based plan price and you only got one hour of streaming per $1...
I've had a Netflix subscription for nearly 20 years. I remember when they first introduced streaming, it was included in your disc-based plan price and you only got one hour of streaming per $1 you paid (so if your disc plan was $15, you got 15 hours of streaming). The first movie I ever watched on the site was The Jerk.
As @Nivlak said, it was obvious that Netflix's model of charging $9.99 per month and having access to everyone's old content was never going to last if it became a success. Other studios realized there was money to be made off their old content, so as deals with studios expired, they lost most of their content.
It's hard for Netflix to compete because their back catalog is relatively small compared to studios like Disney, MGM or Warner Bros., who have been around for nearly 100 years. So they have to keep turning out or buying new content to keep viewers reeled in. And since they need to cast a wide net, a lot of that content is lowest common denominator.
Recently, they've been purchasing a lot of foreign content and using that as a draw, but the same thing will happen again. Once those content companies realize there's more of a market for that content than they realized, they'll start asking higher prices or move to a dedicated K-Drama or South American TV show focused streaming platform.
We're slowly moving back toward the cable-ization of content, where it's all bundled together into packages. Just look at the way Disney is bundling Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN together. Except that instead of the cable company controlling the content, it's directly from the content creation companies. You can't just get one subscription that gets you everything like Netflix did a decade ago.
We had a good few years where Netflix was the end all be all of content and the only online video subscription you'd need, but those days are long gone.
Honestly, Netflix would be the first to go if I had to cancel a streaming service. The price is significantly higher than Hi-Yah!, Paramount+ or Shudder and it doesn't come with the perks of free delivery like Amazon Prime does.
This may be a good time to wax nostalgic, again. I was a regular subscriber going back 20-ish years, when it was all-DVD and their main competitor was Blockbuster. I quit almost a decade ago, not...
This may be a good time to wax nostalgic, again.
I was a regular subscriber going back 20-ish years, when it was all-DVD and their main competitor was Blockbuster. I quit almost a decade ago, not because the content quality declined, but because the UI/UX did.
Netflix didn't just have a good recommendation algorithm ... it was amazing, psychic. They had a dual-tiered star-based rating system, that showed both, how popular something was for the entire user-base, and also, Netflix's best guess for how much you, specifically, would like it. The absolute best "hidden gems" were those titles that the world gave 2 stars to, but which Netflix predicted you would rate 4 or 5 stars.
There also used to be an extensive, very popular user comment system, with comment rating. Everyone was an armchair critic, so you could not only see the ratings, but why people did/didn't like a title.
And the search functions were wonderful, intuitive, well-designed to actually help you find those hidden gems, instead of inventing new-and-improved ways to throw the same 8 crappy titles in front of you, over and over again.
One by one, step by step, they downgraded, redesigned and threw out every good feature they invented, presumably in anticipation of the day when they could no longer maintain a large enough library of quality titles to justify the features.
Not sure, but I think I quit when they deleted the massive, beautiful database of user-comments and critiques.
Those user comments were gold. You could also look at what people who liked what you liked had also watched. That bit of discovery unearthed so many hidden gems for us. I made the mistake early on...
Those user comments were gold. You could also look at what people who liked what you liked had also watched. That bit of discovery unearthed so many hidden gems for us.
I made the mistake early on of "liking" the movie Harold and Maude. The algorithm never knew what to do with that and recommended awful movies that were nothing like it. I had to unlike one of my favorite movies of all time because of that!
I miss the old star rating system, but I understand why they replaced with something easier to understand. I suspect the vast majority of users never understood it and never used it correctly. It...
I miss the old star rating system, but I understand why they replaced with something easier to understand. I suspect the vast majority of users never understood it and never used it correctly.
It was also unintentionally funny in that it would recommend things based on what you'd previously watched, but rate them based on an estimate of how much you would like them. So for me at least, it would often recommend films it thought I was going to rate 1 or 2 stars, and that always amused me. It was like being friends with a person who is really into bad B-movies. "KapteinB, you have to watch this, you are going to hate it!"
There are things that work when your customer base is small or medium sized that just stop working when they go mainstream. Once you hit the mainstream and have to continue growing your design...
I suspect the vast majority of users never understood it and never used it correctly.
There are things that work when your customer base is small or medium sized that just stop working when they go mainstream.
Once you hit the mainstream and have to continue growing your design considerations will skew hard to meeting an ever stupider, ever lazier target audience where they're at.
You must be hate watching these crappy films all the way to the end. Netflix optimizes for things you watch. I've only seen this with really crappy horror/thrillers. My wife likes them. So we...
"KapteinB, you have to watch this, you are going to hate it!"
You must be hate watching these crappy films all the way to the end. Netflix optimizes for things you watch.
I've only seen this with really crappy horror/thrillers. My wife likes them. So we watch them all the way through. I rate them. So they usually got really low stars. Netflix is pretty good at guessing how much I will loathe the crappy horror movie but end up watching it anyway. Knowing how crappy it would be, actually caused slight marital tension. I would suggest an equally crappy martial arts movie and that would always get completely shot down. Then things would naturally devolve into a debate over why she refused to watch crappy martial arts movies. I would suggest that she was too ethnocentric, she would ridicule my favorite crappy arts movies, I would ridicule her choice in movies... So I was kinda bummed when they took the stars away, but I can see why they did it.
Incidentally, DVD.com still has 5 star ratings and "top picks for you", none of which are under 4 stars for me. I think with DVD's, because they don't know if you watched it all the way through, they optimize purely based on your past ratings.
I find the fixation on netflix in this somewhat puzzling. Of course I recognize the position netflix has held but to me it's no different than when I had to pay for different cable channels. You...
I find the fixation on netflix in this somewhat puzzling. Of course I recognize the position netflix has held but to me it's no different than when I had to pay for different cable channels. You choose what you want and every channel had their own content maybe with some overlap. Netflix is now on bar with most of the rest of the streaming services and it seems like their content just isn't good enough any more for a lot of people. They are going "Blockbuster" but they don't owe us anything...and we sure as hell don't owe them anything either.
I'm somewhat baffled by the kurfluffle as well. Well not really, stock price needs to go up and as soon as it doesn't abandon ship. But really, why isn't it totally normal for companies to figure...
I'm somewhat baffled by the kurfluffle as well. Well not really, stock price needs to go up and as soon as it doesn't abandon ship.
But really, why isn't it totally normal for companies to figure out "well it looks like we're about to hit our maximum possible revenue, let's plan out how to transition from growth to steady-state". Which isn't to suggest they become stagnant, companies should still innovate and invent. However even if a company was the most magical thing on earth and 100% of humans were customers..... you can't keep growing. In fact the ONLY option at that point would be losing some amount of customers.
Try telling that to shareholders... It really does seem that in the corporate world, not only is growth mandatory, but the growth of your growth is required, as well. Its certainly a sorry state...
Try telling that to shareholders... It really does seem that in the corporate world, not only is growth mandatory, but the growth of your growth is required, as well. Its certainly a sorry state to live in....
Growth on the stock market is not mandatory. When hitting a ceiling, a company can transition from focusing on rapid growth to paying dividends. Part of the problem with tech companies is that...
Growth on the stock market is not mandatory. When hitting a ceiling, a company can transition from focusing on rapid growth to paying dividends.
Part of the problem with tech companies is that they seem bad at judging how much they can grow, and then transitioning from growing their customer base to profiting off them. If you aren't pulling in enough profit to pay attractive dividends to your stockholders, and you have exhausted your capacity for further growth, then there is not much reason for people to invest in you. I see this being a serious problem for companies like Uber that rarely post a profitable quarter and have seemingly no plan to rectify that beyond "find more customers".
Their pivot is going to be jockeying for municipal governments to throw them subsidies in lieu of funding public transit. It's going to be a massive, heavily funded lobbying effort. They might be...
I see this being a serious problem for companies like Uber that rarely post a profitable quarter and have seemingly no plan to rectify that beyond "find more customers".
Their pivot is going to be jockeying for municipal governments to throw them subsidies in lieu of funding public transit. It's going to be a massive, heavily funded lobbying effort. They might be successful. It will be horrible if they are.
My bet is it will begin with a push around minimizing DUIs. That's the easiest, broadly agreeable, "think of the children" justification to get some subsidies.
Another way to look at it is that Netflix didn't know how much they could grow, and both the company and stockholders were very optimistic. Stock prices are all about hopes for the future. Now...
Another way to look at it is that Netflix didn't know how much they could grow, and both the company and stockholders were very optimistic. Stock prices are all about hopes for the future.
Now that they've run into limits, the stock price will adjust and they will need cut to spending on content, which was unsustainable. That means layoffs and that's bad. But they will still probably be fine. They have a big library. Old subscribers may leave, but a new subscriber gets a lot to watch.
Because of its leadership position and questionable changes, it is easy to forget Netflix's strong points. To start of, Tildes' demographics is probably not representative of the general...
Because of its leadership position and questionable changes, it is easy to forget Netflix's strong points. To start of, Tildes' demographics is probably not representative of the general population. Tilderinos seem to have an ultracurrent, sophisticated, even avant-garde taste sometimes, with a clear preference for certain genres and formats. I also don't see a lot of interest for reality TV, documentaries, and comedy specials, which Netflix has a lot of.
For those who aren't that concerned with the cutting edge, a group in which I believe I'm included, Netflix has tons of enjoyable concent.
Netflix also has the best UX by far, it is very simple and accessible, and it will play uninterrupted even in crappiest connection. Unlike apps such as Disney+ and HBOMax, Netflix is extremely stable, reliable, and fast. The UI is snappy, it loads very quickly in pretty much any device, and almost always works without incident. Netflix could run on a potato. That is extremely important for a lot of people.
As the recent owner of a potato (a decade old Roku stick that I refused to upgrade), I would contest this solely on the basis of the autoplay previews (which probably could be disabled, but it was...
Netflix could run on a potato.
As the recent owner of a potato (a decade old Roku stick that I refused to upgrade), I would contest this solely on the basis of the autoplay previews (which probably could be disabled, but it was my parents account). Netflix would take minutes to load the browsing page, and it was imperative to keep moving through titles before autoplay had a chance to kick in (typically Search was the best choice because of this).
To your point, it did run, it was just painful. I didn’t have any Disney+ or HBO experience on the potato, but I’ll easily believe it would have been worse.
Weirdly, Hulu was one of the better choices because of the static UI. And Plex, which was the potato’s primary purpose in life.
You're absolutely right and I haven't thought of that. As someone married to a UX designer this does not go unnoticed and by god HBO/Disney/Prime are terrible. Very strong points BUT I would argue...
Netflix also has the best UX by far, it is very simple and accessible, and it will play uninterrupted even in crappiest connection. Unlike apps such as Disney+ and HBOMax, Netflix is extremely stable, reliable, and fast. The UI is snappy, it loads very quickly in pretty much any device, and almost always works without incident. Netflix could run on a potato. That is extremely important for a lot of people.
You're absolutely right and I haven't thought of that. As someone married to a UX designer this does not go unnoticed and by god HBO/Disney/Prime are terrible. Very strong points BUT I would argue that most users don't consciously think about that when deciding and content will overrule everything when it comes down to it.
Your first point is just about taste and preferences to me and I don't see how people here would like netflix less than other services based on our demographic.
I hear a lot of people talk about Netflix having the best UI, but really what got me to cancel is that their horrendous recommendations algorithms make browsing actively annoying (combined with...
I hear a lot of people talk about Netflix having the best UI, but really what got me to cancel is that their horrendous recommendations algorithms make browsing actively annoying (combined with the constant price increases that is). I watched nothing but indie movies and dramas on there and yet keep getting recommended "Is It Cake" and their latest "most expensive Netflix movie yet" garbage, and have to find anything I'm interested in, including Netflix Originals, from "most overlooked movies" lists at the end of the year. HBO or Criterion's borderline total lack of recommendations has proven itself far superior to any service's personalization imo.
I actually think their UI on TV is absolutely awful. It took over a decade to get them to let you disable autoplay (which is one of the worst UI trends of all time). Half the time it hides the "My...
I actually think their UI on TV is absolutely awful. It took over a decade to get them to let you disable autoplay (which is one of the worst UI trends of all time). Half the time it hides the "My List" section below the first screen, so you have to scroll to get to it. I get why they do it, because then you have to scroll through all the other bad recommendations they give you and maybe you'll click on those instead. But it's bad UI design.
Most of the time, when you open the app, it's just a full page ad for whatever their new movie/series is.
Netflix quite often gets it right with me, possibly because I have a very predictable taste that is not all that unique. Regardless, I don't care much about algorithms, any of them. I find things...
Netflix quite often gets it right with me, possibly because I have a very predictable taste that is not all that unique. Regardless, I don't care much about algorithms, any of them. I find things my own way, so I would never even consider algorithms as a strong reason for me to like or dislike a platform. With the possible exception of YouTube.
I don't care about algorithms on most other services, the trouble with Netflix is that the entire service itself is nothing but algorithms. There's no option to see their entire catalogue...
I don't care about algorithms on most other services, the trouble with Netflix is that the entire service itself is nothing but algorithms. There's no option to see their entire catalogue alphabetically, odd omissions in their genre labels, and constant shuffling around of categories on the homescreen. Even the search and watchlist seem to shift around and show differing results. The only way to see the catalogue properly is outside the service itself, and one wonders at that point if it's really any more convenient that piracy, given that the highest tier plan (Netflix is the only major service to put resolution options on tiers btw, and the base plan is still 480p) is as much as HBO Max and Apple TV+ combined.
I've seen multiple theories about why that is, the most prominent of which is that they avoid doing that because they don't want people to see just how small their catalog is. People think of...
There's no option to see their entire catalogue alphabetically
I've seen multiple theories about why that is, the most prominent of which is that they avoid doing that because they don't want people to see just how small their catalog is. People think of Netflix as having endless content, but they actually seem to have a relatively small library. JustWatch claims it's around 3,600. That might sound like a lot, but consider that is across dozens of different geographic locations and languages. Most of that content won't be available worldwide.
For example, HBO Max lets you see everything alphabetically and there really aren't that many movies on there.
No streaming service save Prime Video actually has that many titles (and Prime's catalogue is 99% garbage so obscure it makes every single Netflix original look like Citizen Kane). I'm...
No streaming service save Prime Video actually has that many titles (and Prime's catalogue is 99% garbage so obscure it makes every single Netflix original look like Citizen Kane). I'm consistently pretty shocked by how barren Disney+ in particular is.
Yeah... I honestly don't think Netflix is any worse than any service I used, and it manages to be better than quite a few as well. Edit: Now that I think of it, I have used a bunch of services,...
Yeah... I honestly don't think Netflix is any worse than any service I used, and it manages to be better than quite a few as well.
Edit: Now that I think of it, I have used a bunch of services, and Netflix really is by far the best one for me. Mostly because the UI is so much faster.
I am one of them. I had a Netflix subscription even before they were available in my country and I canceled it last month. It just wasn't worth it anymore. They keep increasing the prices, which I...
I am one of them. I had a Netflix subscription even before they were available in my country and I canceled it last month. It just wasn't worth it anymore. They keep increasing the prices, which I understand from a business sense, but as a customer I feel like I have to get something worth watching in return. What I get instead is mostly junk and I don't have time to sort through the junk.
There's just not enough time in the world to consume all the content out there, and so it doesn't make sense for me to have a subscription to almost anything. If the BF asks me "Hey, do you wanna...
There's just not enough time in the world to consume all the content out there, and so it doesn't make sense for me to have a subscription to almost anything. If the BF asks me "Hey, do you wanna watch Heartstopper or Beastars?", then sure, but I'm rarely interested in browsing and I don't keep up with what's out, so it really does take someone else's recommendations. Plus, Netflix hasn't done themselves any favours by pumping out low-quality fodder to try and fill the service with stuff. "Netflix movie" doesn't inspire high expectations.
I'd like to cancel my Netflix subscription one day. I have to find a place that has access to consistent subs for Korean and Chinese TV shows first but after that I think that's the only real...
I'd like to cancel my Netflix subscription one day. I have to find a place that has access to consistent subs for Korean and Chinese TV shows first but after that I think that's the only real thing left holding me to Netflix.
I cancelled after the Dave Chappelle fiasco and intended to resubscribe after a month or so if I couldn't live without it. It's been a bit longer than that and frankly, getting the shows I want in other ways is just easier.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been getting increasingly burned out by the amount of “CONTENT” that is being pumped out by all these streaming services. It’s causing a paralysis of choice for me and I don’t see it getting any better. The early days of Netflix were pretty glorious but we knew it could not stay that way.
I don’t know where we go from here but it’s definitely not this “a la carte” streaming situation. I think I spend more time on YouTube and twitch than I do on any streaming platform out there. I also know I am in the minority with this.
That is certainly a problem, but eventually you gotta make a choice. When I was younger I could watch everything that was worth it and have a more or less complete notion of the current state of prime TV. Nowadays I'm used to the fact that even if I spend entire days glued to the TV, I'll only get to know a small portion of everything good that is on.
Honestly there is just too much to scroll through. They've replicated everything bad about cable (too much bloat I have to sift through to find anything I'm potentially interested in, costs like $200/mo to have access to everything, soon to include ads even though I'm already paying) and added a couple of extra bad things (loud ass trailers that autoplay, creepy tracking of activity and data).
Part of the appeal of cord cutting was also just having a smaller, curated set of stuff to watch instead of "empty calories" viewing. But the "empty calories" seems to be where Netflix is putting its production money towards now. I guess it is what people want since many of the TV/culture mag write-ups I see now are for various reality and dating shows.
Netflix's strategy of flooding the service with "empty calories" content seems to be backfiring, seeing as they are losing customers. There is clearly a market for that kind of content, Netflix's mistake is pricing. People aren't going to pay $20/mo for endless reality TV when Discovery+ offers the same kind of crap for a quarter the price.
If the new Discovery/Warner leadership is smart, they will keep Hobomax and Discovery+ separate. Hobomax should continue to exist as an outlet for high quality scripted content, and not cheapen it by rolling Discovery+ content into its library. I think where the good services are succeeding is in finding their niche, rather than trying to satisfy everyone all at once like Netflix.
It would be great if Netflix had genre categories. And I'm not sure why streaming services don't allow multiple personalized playlists besides the single "watch later" list. That would be a game changer for me.
They do. You can browse them by clicking the Genre dropdown menu at the top of the Movies or TV Shows sections, and you can also even click on the sub-genre tags on the individual movies/shows listings to browse by those as well. It's a bit clunky browsing by sub-genres on the site though, so I prefer to use third-party sites, e.g. https://www.netflix-codes.com/
Oh there really is, how could I have missed that? Lol
There's no crime category though.
But there's a "Global Accessibility Awareness" category, that's pretty cool.
To be fair, the Netflix UI is pretty garbage, IMO, so it's not surprising you never noticed the genres before. ;)
And while there may not be a top-level Crime genre, there are a bunch of crime related sub-genres:
Crime Action & Adventure - https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/9584
Crime Documentaries - https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/9875
Crime Dramas - https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/6889
Crime TV Shows - https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/26146
Crime Thrillers - https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/10499
Cool!
I disagree. Some amount of consolidation might be good, but shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry onto a single service a la Spotify would result in either an extremely expensive service, or a lot less new content getting made. There is simply no feasible way for every movie and TV show getting made right now to be funded from a single $15-20/mo subscription service.
I think the hope would be that we say most of that stuff shouldn't be getting made.
But I think the grim reality is that in such a world we'd be seeing a lot more of the lowest common denominator "junk food" than the higher quality stuff we presumably want.
I've had a Netflix subscription for nearly 20 years. I remember when they first introduced streaming, it was included in your disc-based plan price and you only got one hour of streaming per $1 you paid (so if your disc plan was $15, you got 15 hours of streaming). The first movie I ever watched on the site was The Jerk.
As @Nivlak said, it was obvious that Netflix's model of charging $9.99 per month and having access to everyone's old content was never going to last if it became a success. Other studios realized there was money to be made off their old content, so as deals with studios expired, they lost most of their content.
It's hard for Netflix to compete because their back catalog is relatively small compared to studios like Disney, MGM or Warner Bros., who have been around for nearly 100 years. So they have to keep turning out or buying new content to keep viewers reeled in. And since they need to cast a wide net, a lot of that content is lowest common denominator.
Recently, they've been purchasing a lot of foreign content and using that as a draw, but the same thing will happen again. Once those content companies realize there's more of a market for that content than they realized, they'll start asking higher prices or move to a dedicated K-Drama or South American TV show focused streaming platform.
We're slowly moving back toward the cable-ization of content, where it's all bundled together into packages. Just look at the way Disney is bundling Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN together. Except that instead of the cable company controlling the content, it's directly from the content creation companies. You can't just get one subscription that gets you everything like Netflix did a decade ago.
We had a good few years where Netflix was the end all be all of content and the only online video subscription you'd need, but those days are long gone.
Honestly, Netflix would be the first to go if I had to cancel a streaming service. The price is significantly higher than Hi-Yah!, Paramount+ or Shudder and it doesn't come with the perks of free delivery like Amazon Prime does.
This may be a good time to wax nostalgic, again.
I was a regular subscriber going back 20-ish years, when it was all-DVD and their main competitor was Blockbuster. I quit almost a decade ago, not because the content quality declined, but because the UI/UX did.
Netflix didn't just have a good recommendation algorithm ... it was amazing, psychic. They had a dual-tiered star-based rating system, that showed both, how popular something was for the entire user-base, and also, Netflix's best guess for how much you, specifically, would like it. The absolute best "hidden gems" were those titles that the world gave 2 stars to, but which Netflix predicted you would rate 4 or 5 stars.
There also used to be an extensive, very popular user comment system, with comment rating. Everyone was an armchair critic, so you could not only see the ratings, but why people did/didn't like a title.
And the search functions were wonderful, intuitive, well-designed to actually help you find those hidden gems, instead of inventing new-and-improved ways to throw the same 8 crappy titles in front of you, over and over again.
One by one, step by step, they downgraded, redesigned and threw out every good feature they invented, presumably in anticipation of the day when they could no longer maintain a large enough library of quality titles to justify the features.
Not sure, but I think I quit when they deleted the massive, beautiful database of user-comments and critiques.
Those user comments were gold. You could also look at what people who liked what you liked had also watched. That bit of discovery unearthed so many hidden gems for us.
I made the mistake early on of "liking" the movie Harold and Maude. The algorithm never knew what to do with that and recommended awful movies that were nothing like it. I had to unlike one of my favorite movies of all time because of that!
I miss the old star rating system, but I understand why they replaced with something easier to understand. I suspect the vast majority of users never understood it and never used it correctly.
It was also unintentionally funny in that it would recommend things based on what you'd previously watched, but rate them based on an estimate of how much you would like them. So for me at least, it would often recommend films it thought I was going to rate 1 or 2 stars, and that always amused me. It was like being friends with a person who is really into bad B-movies. "KapteinB, you have to watch this, you are going to hate it!"
There are things that work when your customer base is small or medium sized that just stop working when they go mainstream.
Once you hit the mainstream and have to continue growing your design considerations will skew hard to meeting an ever stupider, ever lazier target audience where they're at.
You must be hate watching these crappy films all the way to the end. Netflix optimizes for things you watch.
I've only seen this with really crappy horror/thrillers. My wife likes them. So we watch them all the way through. I rate them. So they usually got really low stars. Netflix is pretty good at guessing how much I will loathe the crappy horror movie but end up watching it anyway. Knowing how crappy it would be, actually caused slight marital tension. I would suggest an equally crappy martial arts movie and that would always get completely shot down. Then things would naturally devolve into a debate over why she refused to watch crappy martial arts movies. I would suggest that she was too ethnocentric, she would ridicule my favorite crappy arts movies, I would ridicule her choice in movies... So I was kinda bummed when they took the stars away, but I can see why they did it.
Incidentally, DVD.com still has 5 star ratings and "top picks for you", none of which are under 4 stars for me. I think with DVD's, because they don't know if you watched it all the way through, they optimize purely based on your past ratings.
I find the fixation on netflix in this somewhat puzzling. Of course I recognize the position netflix has held but to me it's no different than when I had to pay for different cable channels. You choose what you want and every channel had their own content maybe with some overlap. Netflix is now on bar with most of the rest of the streaming services and it seems like their content just isn't good enough any more for a lot of people. They are going "Blockbuster" but they don't owe us anything...and we sure as hell don't owe them anything either.
I'm somewhat baffled by the kurfluffle as well. Well not really, stock price needs to go up and as soon as it doesn't abandon ship.
But really, why isn't it totally normal for companies to figure out "well it looks like we're about to hit our maximum possible revenue, let's plan out how to transition from growth to steady-state". Which isn't to suggest they become stagnant, companies should still innovate and invent. However even if a company was the most magical thing on earth and 100% of humans were customers..... you can't keep growing. In fact the ONLY option at that point would be losing some amount of customers.
Try telling that to shareholders... It really does seem that in the corporate world, not only is growth mandatory, but the growth of your growth is required, as well. Its certainly a sorry state to live in....
Growth on the stock market is not mandatory. When hitting a ceiling, a company can transition from focusing on rapid growth to paying dividends.
Part of the problem with tech companies is that they seem bad at judging how much they can grow, and then transitioning from growing their customer base to profiting off them. If you aren't pulling in enough profit to pay attractive dividends to your stockholders, and you have exhausted your capacity for further growth, then there is not much reason for people to invest in you. I see this being a serious problem for companies like Uber that rarely post a profitable quarter and have seemingly no plan to rectify that beyond "find more customers".
Their pivot is going to be jockeying for municipal governments to throw them subsidies in lieu of funding public transit. It's going to be a massive, heavily funded lobbying effort. They might be successful. It will be horrible if they are.
My bet is it will begin with a push around minimizing DUIs. That's the easiest, broadly agreeable, "think of the children" justification to get some subsidies.
Another way to look at it is that Netflix didn't know how much they could grow, and both the company and stockholders were very optimistic. Stock prices are all about hopes for the future.
Now that they've run into limits, the stock price will adjust and they will need cut to spending on content, which was unsustainable. That means layoffs and that's bad. But they will still probably be fine. They have a big library. Old subscribers may leave, but a new subscriber gets a lot to watch.
Because of its leadership position and questionable changes, it is easy to forget Netflix's strong points. To start of, Tildes' demographics is probably not representative of the general population. Tilderinos seem to have an ultracurrent, sophisticated, even avant-garde taste sometimes, with a clear preference for certain genres and formats. I also don't see a lot of interest for reality TV, documentaries, and comedy specials, which Netflix has a lot of.
For those who aren't that concerned with the cutting edge, a group in which I believe I'm included, Netflix has tons of enjoyable concent.
Netflix also has the best UX by far, it is very simple and accessible, and it will play uninterrupted even in crappiest connection. Unlike apps such as Disney+ and HBOMax, Netflix is extremely stable, reliable, and fast. The UI is snappy, it loads very quickly in pretty much any device, and almost always works without incident. Netflix could run on a potato. That is extremely important for a lot of people.
As the recent owner of a potato (a decade old Roku stick that I refused to upgrade), I would contest this solely on the basis of the autoplay previews (which probably could be disabled, but it was my parents account). Netflix would take minutes to load the browsing page, and it was imperative to keep moving through titles before autoplay had a chance to kick in (typically Search was the best choice because of this).
To your point, it did run, it was just painful. I didn’t have any Disney+ or HBO experience on the potato, but I’ll easily believe it would have been worse.
Weirdly, Hulu was one of the better choices because of the static UI. And Plex, which was the potato’s primary purpose in life.
You're absolutely right and I haven't thought of that. As someone married to a UX designer this does not go unnoticed and by god HBO/Disney/Prime are terrible. Very strong points BUT I would argue that most users don't consciously think about that when deciding and content will overrule everything when it comes down to it.
Your first point is just about taste and preferences to me and I don't see how people here would like netflix less than other services based on our demographic.
I hear a lot of people talk about Netflix having the best UI, but really what got me to cancel is that their horrendous recommendations algorithms make browsing actively annoying (combined with the constant price increases that is). I watched nothing but indie movies and dramas on there and yet keep getting recommended "Is It Cake" and their latest "most expensive Netflix movie yet" garbage, and have to find anything I'm interested in, including Netflix Originals, from "most overlooked movies" lists at the end of the year. HBO or Criterion's borderline total lack of recommendations has proven itself far superior to any service's personalization imo.
I actually think their UI on TV is absolutely awful. It took over a decade to get them to let you disable autoplay (which is one of the worst UI trends of all time). Half the time it hides the "My List" section below the first screen, so you have to scroll to get to it. I get why they do it, because then you have to scroll through all the other bad recommendations they give you and maybe you'll click on those instead. But it's bad UI design.
Most of the time, when you open the app, it's just a full page ad for whatever their new movie/series is.
Netflix quite often gets it right with me, possibly because I have a very predictable taste that is not all that unique. Regardless, I don't care much about algorithms, any of them. I find things my own way, so I would never even consider algorithms as a strong reason for me to like or dislike a platform. With the possible exception of YouTube.
I don't care about algorithms on most other services, the trouble with Netflix is that the entire service itself is nothing but algorithms. There's no option to see their entire catalogue alphabetically, odd omissions in their genre labels, and constant shuffling around of categories on the homescreen. Even the search and watchlist seem to shift around and show differing results. The only way to see the catalogue properly is outside the service itself, and one wonders at that point if it's really any more convenient that piracy, given that the highest tier plan (Netflix is the only major service to put resolution options on tiers btw, and the base plan is still 480p) is as much as HBO Max and Apple TV+ combined.
I've seen multiple theories about why that is, the most prominent of which is that they avoid doing that because they don't want people to see just how small their catalog is. People think of Netflix as having endless content, but they actually seem to have a relatively small library. JustWatch claims it's around 3,600. That might sound like a lot, but consider that is across dozens of different geographic locations and languages. Most of that content won't be available worldwide.
For example, HBO Max lets you see everything alphabetically and there really aren't that many movies on there.
No streaming service save Prime Video actually has that many titles (and Prime's catalogue is 99% garbage so obscure it makes every single Netflix original look like Citizen Kane). I'm consistently pretty shocked by how barren Disney+ in particular is.
Yeah... I honestly don't think Netflix is any worse than any service I used, and it manages to be better than quite a few as well.
Edit: Now that I think of it, I have used a bunch of services, and Netflix really is by far the best one for me. Mostly because the UI is so much faster.
I am one of them. I had a Netflix subscription even before they were available in my country and I canceled it last month. It just wasn't worth it anymore. They keep increasing the prices, which I understand from a business sense, but as a customer I feel like I have to get something worth watching in return. What I get instead is mostly junk and I don't have time to sort through the junk.
There's just not enough time in the world to
consumeall the content out there, and so it doesn't make sense for me to have a subscription to almost anything. If the BF asks me "Hey, do you wanna watch Heartstopper or Beastars?", then sure, but I'm rarely interested in browsing and I don't keep up with what's out, so it really does take someone else's recommendations. Plus, Netflix hasn't done themselves any favours by pumping out low-quality fodder to try and fill the service with stuff. "Netflix movie" doesn't inspire high expectations.I'd like to cancel my Netflix subscription one day. I have to find a place that has access to consistent subs for Korean and Chinese TV shows first but after that I think that's the only real thing left holding me to Netflix.