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IME Netflix keeps finding ways to fuck up. Movie not available at your location. Movie available at your location but not with English subtitles. Movie plays bu

by tomp 5y ago

IME Netflix keeps finding ways to fuck up. Movie not available at your location. Movie available at your location but not with English subtitles. Movie plays but the image on TV is corrupted (weird green-ish colors). I'm not saying that torrented .mkv files "just work". But the point is, if there are problems, they can be diagnosed and solved. Netflix (and Amazon etc.) is literally just "computer says no", better luck next time!

rocketbop 5y ago
I haven't had the last problem but gte first two are largely not their fault, but related to regional licensing
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  It might not be their fault, but as long as they operate within a framework that allows that, it's their problem.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  If I purport to offer you a service, knowing that the quality of that service is subject to a mosaic of laws and regulations that I am aware will fluctuate over time, then that variable quality is arguably not my fault; but, if I do everything in my power in all my advertising and messaging to hide or deny that variability, then it seems that that is my fault. We're outraged if Amazon yanks books from our Kindles, even if it's not technically their fault—we're outraged that they're even able to do so. The same should apply here. (Or, what rhn_mk1 said more eloquently and briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 .)
- jhgb 5y ago
  And despite that, they're still not ashamed to extract the full price of the service even from those people to whom they can't offer 80% of the content.
salamandersauce 5y ago
It's a distributor/rights holder problem. Netflix is very good with subtitles with stuff they make and a lot of what they license. For example in North America the DVDs/Blu-rays of Anime never ever come with Japanese subtitles in my experience (sometimes you can't even disable English subtitles if watching Japanese audio), services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, Amazon Prime etc. never have them but if Netflix makes it or licenses it worldwide they do. Movie not being available in your location is the same problem, rights holders sell the streaming rights to different distributors in different territories. Or maybe they let Netflix have it because their own streaming service in country Y isn't set up yet. I'm sure Netflix wishes it could be Spotify for movies/TV with basically everything.
- ygjb 5y ago
  We know it's a distributor/rights problem, but the core of that problem is the drive to extract as much value as possible. Casual piracy of content drops off a cliff when there is an opportunity to cheaply, and easily access content. We saw this with the emergence of early streaming service with broad catalogues. Now each distributor, or sufficiently large rightsholder wants to capture as much of that value as possible by both restricting catalog access and demanding ownership of the relationship with the end user, without any sort of federation across services (with a few exceptions like Apple TV that have used market dominance to assert the ability to search across content subscriptions). The end result has been a rapidly accellerating decline in the quality of the user experience for accessing streaming content. Couple that with a shift away from series releases to weekly releases (better for customer retention as customers won't subscribe for a month to binge a series when it drops, and increasing 'user engagement' on platforms for however each platform collects those metrics) The response has been an increase in piracy, and vilification of users who are frustrated because we had an awesome era of rich content libraries, but a bunch of accountants and MBAs focused on short term profit increases have destroyed the good will that the entire industry built with the emergence of streaming.

by tomp 5y ago

rocketbop 5y ago

I haven't had the last problem but gte first two are largely not their fault, but related to regional licensing

rhn_mk1 5y ago
It might not be their fault, but as long as they operate within a framework that allows that, it's their problem.
JadeNB 5y ago
If I purport to offer you a service, knowing that the quality of that service is subject to a mosaic of laws and regulations that I am aware will fluctuate over time, then that variable quality is arguably not my fault; but, if I do everything in my power in all my advertising and messaging to hide or deny that variability, then it seems that that is my fault. We're outraged if Amazon yanks books from our Kindles, even if it's not technically their fault—we're outraged that they're even able to do so. The same should apply here. (Or, what rhn_mk1 said more eloquently and briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 .)
jhgb 5y ago
And despite that, they're still not ashamed to extract the full price of the service even from those people to whom they can't offer 80% of the content.

salamandersauce 5y ago

It's a distributor/rights holder problem. Netflix is very good with subtitles with stuff they make and a lot of what they license. For example in North America the DVDs/Blu-rays of Anime never ever come with Japanese subtitles in my experience (sometimes you can't even disable English subtitles if watching Japanese audio), services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, Amazon Prime etc. never have them but if Netflix makes it or licenses it worldwide they do. Movie not being available in your location is the same problem, rights holders sell the streaming rights to different distributors in different territories. Or maybe they let Netflix have it because their own streaming service in country Y isn't set up yet. I'm sure Netflix wishes it could be Spotify for movies/TV with basically everything.

ygjb 5y ago
We know it's a distributor/rights problem, but the core of that problem is the drive to extract as much value as possible. Casual piracy of content drops off a cliff when there is an opportunity to cheaply, and easily access content. We saw this with the emergence of early streaming service with broad catalogues. Now each distributor, or sufficiently large rightsholder wants to capture as much of that value as possible by both restricting catalog access and demanding ownership of the relationship with the end user, without any sort of federation across services (with a few exceptions like Apple TV that have used market dominance to assert the ability to search across content subscriptions). The end result has been a rapidly accellerating decline in the quality of the user experience for accessing streaming content. Couple that with a shift away from series releases to weekly releases (better for customer retention as customers won't subscribe for a month to binge a series when it drops, and increasing 'user engagement' on platforms for however each platform collects those metrics) The response has been an increase in piracy, and vilification of users who are frustrated because we had an awesome era of rich content libraries, but a bunch of accountants and MBAs focused on short term profit increases have destroyed the good will that the entire industry built with the emergence of streaming.