7 ms·

For me this future has already arrived. Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to

• neilv 7y ago
  > Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.
  • asdff 7y ago
    My public library even has video streaming for tons of titles
• wmf 7y ago
  I wonder where the idea that Netflix (streaming) should or used to have everything came from.
  • serf 7y ago
    it came from the concept that they sought to replace : in-person rental companies. Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.
    • flukus 7y ago
      > Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.
      • runevault 7y ago
        If the govt was going to nail Disney for anti-trust they wouldn't have let them buy Fox. Disney + was being talked about before the deal was approved.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      Blockbuster could stock anything it wanted without the studio’s blessing by just buying DVDs at retail (even though they had special deals with the studio to get reduced prices). Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.
    • cannonedhamster 7y ago
      It's well past time for there to be a mechanical license for streaming copyrighted video content. This lock down garbage is just that. Copyright is a joke that provides zero benefit to the public, little benefit to the starving artist, and almost all the benefit to the mega corporations. Sonny Bono is a plague on creativity and his law was even worse.
  • jhbadger 7y ago
    In the DVD-by-mail days it really did. Even obscure movies made in communist East Germany! Maybe it still does (I like most people who were early Netflix customers, haven't subscribed to the DVD option in nearly a decade).
    • WalterBright 7y ago
      I'm glad I watched my bucket list of movies from Netflix before they shrank the DVD selection. It seems worse now than that of the local public library.
    • hkmurakami 7y ago
      Friend worked in operations in those days and explained to me how they had 3 levels of storage including "deep" storage. Parallels to data warehousing.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    you're right. netflix never had a comprehensive selection of movies or tv to stream. it seems to have even less now, which must be disappointing for subscribers (I canceled my subscription years ago so I'm just going off what I hear). they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!). frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.
  • asdff 7y ago
    It had all the DVDs, and for a while the catalog really was expanding into major titles and releases. Everyone assumed that eventually the DVD catalog would be entirely available digitally, but that never happened because of greed.
• mrbonner 7y ago
  I am planning to cancel Netflix depending on how good the contents on Disney Plus is and how much ads it has. I have found myself spending more time looking for things to watch in Netflix comparing to watching them. Recently, I discovered the Roku channel. It has limited selections including decent family titles, too. It has ads but is limited to 1 or 2 15-second ads that are kid-friendly (like Goldfish cracker) when I watched Rango yesterday with my daughter. It’s sad that the promising land of digital streaming platform is deteriorating to what cable has become.
• d1zzy 7y ago
  And Plex is just getting better and better: - Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc - support for many devices and TV players/dongles - unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth) - remote access from any location/country
  • jammygit 7y ago
    According to one of Jaron Lanier's books, the 'musician as a middle class job' has pretty much vanished because of all the piracy and streaming services. Plex is wonderful, but its nice that people can make a good living making the content too.
    • jessriedel 7y ago
      Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.
      • jammygit 7y ago
        He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found: > Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01/04/nashville-musical-middle-class-collapses-new-dylans/21236245/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01... > According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir... > At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry > For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees. http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ also relevant for the TV industry: > According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mdesq 7y ago
  I watch Stranger Things and The Office re-runs on business trips. Once The Office is gone I'll be gone as well.
• scarface74 7y ago
  It also doesn’t cost $100 million to make an album.
  • mantap 7y ago
    There's reason to believe that a shared catalog would be more profitable for the non-Netflix streaming services, not less. It's not like it's hard to track who watched whose IP and distribute the revenue appropriately. The current system benefits Netflix who try to convince people to watch Netflix originals and dump everything else. It's not just a competition for subscribers, it's a competition for screen time too. There's a lot of good content on the other streaming services but it's too fragmented to pay for.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      Being a third party distributor for other people’s content has never been profitable. Look no further than money losing Spotify. No company wants to be completely dependent on the whims of its suppliers. Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Who cares when the investment was recouped 3x at the box office alone. Hollywood makes money hand over fist at the box office and clammoring about lost DVD sales is clammoring about icing on the cake. Movies like infinity war make several orders of magnitude more money at the box office than home release.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      That’s not true. Movie studios have been making more money from non theatre sources since the 90s.
    • P_I_Staker 7y ago
      Not all movies do well at the box office, there's plenty of flops as well.
• dehrmann 7y ago
  It's more like record labels aren't vertically integrated. Sony used to be, but piracy and the iPod made that less relevant just as streaming became viable. I'm an ex-Spotifier. The story we got was that piracy had disrupted the music industry so much it brought the majors to the bargaining table. This is completely different than the state of movies and TV shows. Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.
  • dahtguy 7y ago
    Which is a total shame, because those labels are the best discovery engines! If you want a great source of new content, that's effectively their full time job. The distribution and content quality of Tiny Engines, Topshelf Records, Polyvinyl is so so much better than anything Spotify will try to algorithm up for me. (typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)
    • asdff 7y ago
      You can still look at those releases and use spotify. No one is forcing you to look at their half baked playlists. Personally, I think the user playlists are the best part of the entire service.
    • dehrmann 7y ago
      I can't seem to find it, but in the past year, I read an article on how cheap compilations (could have been Fat Music) were a really effective way to promote bands in that genre. Bands would talk about doing shows, and once they play the song on the compilation CD, everyone sings along.
• DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it. What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?
  • fragsworth 7y ago
    I don't pirate anything, but maybe one reason people do is that getting things spoiled before you watch it can be a serious problem.
  • whermans 7y ago
    The choice is not between Netflix and piracy. I can't speak for the original poster, but for me Netflix' appeal was that I had a wide selection of content available for a single price in a single subscription, making it an attractive competitor to buying and/or renting single movies and series. With the fragmentation of the streaming landscape they have lost that competitive edge, and if it wasn't for the Netflix-exclusive series that justify the monthly price for me, I would probably have cancelled too. A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Personally, I have no qualms avoiding paying 3.99 or whatever to rent a digital file that made its money back thrice over before it left theaters.
    • dwrowe 7y ago
      “You wouldn’t download a car” arguments aside - what is the ethical boundary for “They’ve made enough money - I’m entitled to enjoy it for free” ?
• rolltiide 7y ago
  and this was after 5 years of hearing your friends tell you the same thing right I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely
• blue_devil 7y ago
  Remember the good old days of Netflix when you could rent quality movies on DVDs in addition to streaming? Quality has been going down for years now. I'm intermittently subbed but less and less frequently. Oh well.
• dwild 7y ago
  > By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time. You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play. For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.
• retpirato 7y ago
  I agree multiple services is crazy & inconvenient. that isn't an excuse to do something illegal.