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Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming p

Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming platforms that I refuse to pay for - I'll probably eventually just cancel Netflix as well going back to the tried and true method of just buying bluray box-sets of the content I want to watch. Or piracy. I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's the reason we cut the cord in the first place. People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money. Netflix was worth it because it made accessing so much content easier than piracy, but with everything getting pushed into a walled garden "package" approach again...piracy will be easier again. I get HD over the air with less than a dozen chanels, and that's often enough to keep me distracted if I'm not feeling up to playing a videogame or watching a movie.

JTbane 7y ago
>People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money. At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.
- quicklyfrozen 7y ago
  It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to not have to think about where to find your favorites. And once it's downloaded there are (almost) never any playback issues.
  - bamboozled 7y ago
    It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want. I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.
    - thatguy0900 7y ago
      I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original
      - afiori 7y ago
        except if you publish it properly yourself, a company that would embrace torrents as distribution method and took care of putting it on the relevant site would effectively solve the trust problem that is inherent in choosing a torrent between many.
        ianai 7y ago
        Why not just edit the video codecs to support calling out to advertisements? Maybe offer people the option to watch the ads at start, end, or usual positioning, too. There would be abuse, but if it were done correctly the abuse wouldn’t be more than current.
        afiori 7y ago
        My first reaction would be video player support. You would almost need to force a plugin for that. Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement. But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots
      - NullPrefix 7y ago
        Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie? That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.
      - pessimizer 7y ago
        > one person cutting out ads and reuploading it Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too. Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives. I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with. Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?
- tzakrajs 7y ago
  If you don't have private tracker access, usenet is probably best for speed and content availability since usenet providers have insane amounts of bandwidth to spare and there are publicly available nzb sites for searching usenet.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Or better yet: just don't watch them. There's plenty of entertaining content on YouTube, twitch, dailymotion etc.
- eikenberry 7y ago
  But there is a difference in that you aren't locked into things the same way you were locked into cable, where it was all or nothing. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to different services at different times as you wish. Given you get all the content available during your subscription why would you stay subscribed to all of them all the time. Just subscribe to the ones that have the shows you want to watch at that time and cancel all the rest.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    Sure. So I subscribe to Amazon for The Grand Tour, the girlfriend subscribes to Netflix for Marie Kondo, the kids subscribe to NBC for THe Office and Disney for Disney stuff, and Mom subscribes to CBS for Star Trek and now I’m back to basically paying for cable for the five shows we want to watch right now, with the added convenience of worrying about dropping and adding subscriptions for as long as it takes these services to figure out a mechanism to prevent this behavior.
devoply 7y ago
People hate it but it obviously works, otherwise they would not be doing it. What you need is a religion (or some other sort of huge corporation or union of people) around consuming content that everyone religiously follows that forces the corporations hands. Individually all you can do is pirate or buy.
- frankbreetz 7y ago
  People hated cable and they are now struggling, people are always looking for something better
nilkn 7y ago
What’s most interesting to me is the rise of YouTube. Increasingly for movies I just rent one, for TV shows again I just rent or buy a whole season unless it’s a show I’m really into, and for “open the app and try to find something randomly” moments I go to YouTube, not Netflix anymore.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Are box sets still batshit insane? It didn't make sense to me to pay $120 for a week of binge watching.
- cglace 7y ago
  Some people watch the same show over and over.
- thebigspacefuck 7y ago
  Resell it for $100 and you paid $20 for a week of binge watching. Buy it used for $100 and resell it for $100 and you watched for free.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    There's a antagonism towards resale amongst content producers that makes this difficult and the resale prices low.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Whatever the resale price is, if you buy and sell used then you shouldn’t care, right? I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”
- remarkEon 7y ago
  I own The Sporanos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad in box set. I have The X-Files somewhere on DVD, too. For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it. But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.
noelsusman 7y ago
Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why? If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.
- mjevans 7y ago
  The Industry can't get this simple message in to it's collective head: The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win. These are the things they MUST do: * One payment, that's reasonable. * All the content from FOREVER accessible FOREVER in one place. Honestly, that's it for most people. For me they also need to... * Be DRM free so that it actually works on OSes that respect my privacy.
  - icelancer 7y ago
    >> The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win. Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in. Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.
    - edanm 7y ago
      It kind of sounds like you're getting your history backwards here. Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's not a mistake they are making; they are all aware of that. They just want the other guys to be the ones that die first.
eridius 7y ago
People don't like the proliferation of streaming services because of the cost. Buying "just NBC" or "just CBS" is still preferable to the old model of "if you want ESPN you have to get dozens of other channels at the same time". But buying just a single network's content only works if the price is such that you can subscribe to all of your networks and not end up paying more than the old cable model cost you. The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).
- kelnos 7y ago
  The issue with "buy NBC" or "buy CBS" is that I don't care at all about networks. I care about particular shows. If I could pay $1/mo each for 20 different shows, I'd be fine with that.
  - eridius 7y ago
    $1/mo each doesn't pay for the show though. If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).
mc32 7y ago
Why does Netflix need to make big budget shows? Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?
tolmasky 7y ago
I am fine paying everyone is whatever convoluted ways, but I'm not OK with this translating to a miserable UI experience. At least TV had a single interface. I don't want to manage apps for shows, and have to search within apps or learn different menu trees for each different app, etc. I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.
dontbenebby 7y ago
I just went to download a movie - legally. I have streaming access, but apparently I can't download it for offline viewing (not even within Netflix's DRM'd app). To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now! That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.
Gravityloss 7y ago
With movies you can rent or even buy individual ones online. No subscription required. No packages. Why not for series too?
edanm 7y ago
> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that. And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay. Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.

JTbane 7y ago

>People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money. At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.

quicklyfrozen 7y ago
It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to not have to think about where to find your favorites. And once it's downloaded there are (almost) never any playback issues.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want. I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.
  - thatguy0900 7y ago
    I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original
    - afiori 7y ago
      except if you publish it properly yourself, a company that would embrace torrents as distribution method and took care of putting it on the relevant site would effectively solve the trust problem that is inherent in choosing a torrent between many.
      - ianai 7y ago
        Why not just edit the video codecs to support calling out to advertisements? Maybe offer people the option to watch the ads at start, end, or usual positioning, too. There would be abuse, but if it were done correctly the abuse wouldn’t be more than current.
        afiori 7y ago
        My first reaction would be video player support. You would almost need to force a plugin for that. Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement. But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots
    - NullPrefix 7y ago
      Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie? That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      > one person cutting out ads and reuploading it Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too. Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives. I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with. Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?
tzakrajs 7y ago
If you don't have private tracker access, usenet is probably best for speed and content availability since usenet providers have insane amounts of bandwidth to spare and there are publicly available nzb sites for searching usenet.
Mirioron 7y ago
Or better yet: just don't watch them. There's plenty of entertaining content on YouTube, twitch, dailymotion etc.
eikenberry 7y ago
But there is a difference in that you aren't locked into things the same way you were locked into cable, where it was all or nothing. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to different services at different times as you wish. Given you get all the content available during your subscription why would you stay subscribed to all of them all the time. Just subscribe to the ones that have the shows you want to watch at that time and cancel all the rest.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  Sure. So I subscribe to Amazon for The Grand Tour, the girlfriend subscribes to Netflix for Marie Kondo, the kids subscribe to NBC for THe Office and Disney for Disney stuff, and Mom subscribes to CBS for Star Trek and now I’m back to basically paying for cable for the five shows we want to watch right now, with the added convenience of worrying about dropping and adding subscriptions for as long as it takes these services to figure out a mechanism to prevent this behavior.

devoply 7y ago

People hate it but it obviously works, otherwise they would not be doing it. What you need is a religion (or some other sort of huge corporation or union of people) around consuming content that everyone religiously follows that forces the corporations hands. Individually all you can do is pirate or buy.

frankbreetz 7y ago
People hated cable and they are now struggling, people are always looking for something better

nilkn 7y ago

What’s most interesting to me is the rise of YouTube. Increasingly for movies I just rent one, for TV shows again I just rent or buy a whole season unless it’s a show I’m really into, and for “open the app and try to find something randomly” moments I go to YouTube, not Netflix anymore.

Waterluvian 7y ago

Are box sets still batshit insane? It didn't make sense to me to pay $120 for a week of binge watching.

cglace 7y ago
Some people watch the same show over and over.
thebigspacefuck 7y ago
Resell it for $100 and you paid $20 for a week of binge watching. Buy it used for $100 and resell it for $100 and you watched for free.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  There's a antagonism towards resale amongst content producers that makes this difficult and the resale prices low.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Whatever the resale price is, if you buy and sell used then you shouldn’t care, right? I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”
remarkEon 7y ago
I own The Sporanos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad in box set. I have The X-Files somewhere on DVD, too. For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it. But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.

noelsusman 7y ago

Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base. I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why? If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.

mjevans 7y ago
The Industry can't get this simple message in to it's collective head: The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win. These are the things they MUST do: * One payment, that's reasonable. * All the content from FOREVER accessible FOREVER in one place. Honestly, that's it for most people. For me they also need to... * Be DRM free so that it actually works on OSes that respect my privacy.
- icelancer 7y ago
  >> The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win. Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in. Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.
  - edanm 7y ago
    It kind of sounds like you're getting your history backwards here. Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's not a mistake they are making; they are all aware of that. They just want the other guys to be the ones that die first.

eridius 7y ago

People don't like the proliferation of streaming services because of the cost. Buying "just NBC" or "just CBS" is still preferable to the old model of "if you want ESPN you have to get dozens of other channels at the same time". But buying just a single network's content only works if the price is such that you can subscribe to all of your networks and not end up paying more than the old cable model cost you. The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).

kelnos 7y ago
The issue with "buy NBC" or "buy CBS" is that I don't care at all about networks. I care about particular shows. If I could pay $1/mo each for 20 different shows, I'd be fine with that.
- eridius 7y ago
  $1/mo each doesn't pay for the show though. If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).

mc32 7y ago

Why does Netflix need to make big budget shows? Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?

tolmasky 7y ago

I am fine paying everyone is whatever convoluted ways, but I'm not OK with this translating to a miserable UI experience. At least TV had a single interface. I don't want to manage apps for shows, and have to search within apps or learn different menu trees for each different app, etc. I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.

dontbenebby 7y ago

I just went to download a movie - legally. I have streaming access, but apparently I can't download it for offline viewing (not even within Netflix's DRM'd app). To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now! That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.

Gravityloss 7y ago

With movies you can rent or even buy individual ones online. No subscription required. No packages. Why not for series too?

edanm 7y ago

> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that. And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay. Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.