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Netflix really had a value proposition a few years ago before all the other players came in. A good selection of rotating movies and shows, sharing accounts wit

by harha 4y ago

Netflix really had a value proposition a few years ago before all the other players came in. A good selection of rotating movies and shows, sharing accounts with a good model (# of simultaneously running screens). This was way better than cable TV and more convenient than torrent. Now it’s mostly quite mediocre content across services that easily cost $100+ a month, so we’re back to the old cable days in terms of cost and content and instead of switching channels we’re endlessly browsing the library for something interesting. The consumers just aren’t complete idiots. - lower quality productions (not the necessarily the cost, just not interesting) - less good external content - at the same time constantly increasing prices and/or charging for things that were free at a given tier If you keep charging more for less, people eventually will get off their lazy asses and cancel the subscription. One other thing that may have contributed: trying to keep users on the platform for long makes it more difficult to have good content left that hasn’t been watched. Edit: formatting

bumper_crop 4y ago
>The consumers just aren’t complete idiots. The consumers kinda are the idiots here. They know what they like, but they have no idea why the content is getting worse. Why shows are being pulled. Companies that had their content on Netflix realized they were facing an existential crisis. Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances. It's the same with Netflix. All other studios realized at some point Netflix would become so strong, even the royalties Netflix pays for their content would put them out of business permanently. There is no amount of money Netflix can pay for other studios content. Consumers only see the net effect of good shows going away, and imagining reasons why.
- Guthur 4y ago
  That's not stupid consumers that's people not rightly giving a f what nonsense licensing setups requested by ip owners and enforced by a government monopoly on force. The consumer just wanted to watch the media, which is fair because they probably just spent 8 hours at some nonsense unnecessary job and would like to switch off... again. No vote no power.
  - bumper_crop 4y ago
    Stupid is probably the wrong word here; "clueless"? I personally think consumers are on the verge of reinventing TV channels, with each streaming service acting like a channel. Consumers, who liked that Netflix had so much content in one place, are slowly pushing time to go backward.
    - ntoskrnl 4y ago
      I still don't see how it's the consumers' fault. Say there was one single person out there who wasn't an idiot or clueless, and just wanted to watch some TV after work. What should this person have done?
      - bumper_crop 4y ago
        Consumers want high quality, entertaining content, at low cost, with little commitment, at any time. Prior to Netflix, there wasn't such an intersecting product. Now, Netflix has low quality content, but still has all the other stuff. Consumers see this, forget what life was like back in the early 2000s, and switch/sign up for several other services. It's where consumers spend their money that will result in this regression. You ask what this person should have done? Not sign up for other services. The other providers are better quality, but regresses on all the rest of the experience. Youtube TV is more than $60 a month. Disney+ great content, but an extremely narrow content offering ("few but ripe"). HBO lagged like crazy when the season finale of GOT came out. When the regular person you asked about spends money on these other services, it encourages them to grow. The content is great, but the bad-experience, price, and schism is what they will get in return. They are unknowingly demanding it.
        ThatPlayer 4y ago
        The issue is Netflix as it was is not sustainable. It's like plenty of VC startups, build the market at a cost, and then go down in quality so you can make a profit. Or sell the company. But they can't do that because it's already public. In fact that means earning reports and they've just recently turned cash flow positive. Like you say, consumers want high quality content. That costs money to make, and when Netflix first started streaming, the cost of shows was subsidized by cable TV. Cable TV is declining or dead now, so who is going to pay for those shows? Look at how Netflix's prices continue to rise, but their originals are mediocre for most people. Not signing up for other services would just encourage Netflix to keep doing that.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it, but some how screwed it all up. There’s at best 1 or 2 good show and no good movie Netflix has made in years. And anything half decent they cancel mercilessly without giving it a chance. This is not just in the US. The comparison of original content quality between Netflix and other services in India for example is even more laughable. In the end, Netflix is a company that used to be great and kinda made some of the most genius ideas to fight the Goliath but was undone by a single dude leading a team making poor choices on what content to make. 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? I’m assuming this is as big or a bigger blunder than Zillow, and was powered by stupid data science ideas as well, probably.
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    - afavour 4y ago
      The idea that Netflix is failing because of identity politics is just ridiculous and doesn’t hold up to even the slightest examination. It’s just another reactionary talking point that feels right enough for people to not examine it.
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        I know multiple people which complained about it and made them unsubscribe (none from the USA, so these topics are neither interesting nor on topic for any of us) It was definitely a contributing factory that's for sure.
        femiagbabiaka 4y ago
        The number of people who care about this kind of stuff is very low. Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That’s only relevant in the bubble of malcontent that is mostly made up of twitter users.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  If only there was a way to what whatever soap 2 day you wanted.
- ipiz0618 4y ago
  >Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances This is why my group of friends stopped playing Catan after a while..
- stdgy 4y ago
  Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix. The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts." Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform. The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site. As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Netflix is the one that got greedy and over estimated their position. Serving video is an absolute commodity. They should have been getting pennies on the dollar if that. A simple distribution service for studios who should have been thought of as their customers. But no, making a steady, useful, profitable business is not enough. Taking a big cut from an easily replaced service, and using the money to fund a direct competitor to their customers sure was something. Took a lot of chutzpah, is about the best I'll say for it.
walrus01 4y ago
I know a number of people who have just gone back to torrenting everything they care about (such as For All Mankind or Foundation) and are very unlikely to ever subscribe to a 2nd, 3rd, 4th streaming service. They either picked netflix and have stayed with it at $22/mo or have changed from netflix to 1 other service like paramount+ or whatever, but the idea of paying $50-60-80 a month for more services on top of their residential broadband connection at $55-85 is a non-starter. https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd
- MauroIksem 4y ago
  This is basically me. I have the 15 dollar tier of Netflix and then my friends and i share a Plex hosted at a buddy's house where we get whatever content we want.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Interesting to call out Netflix for high price and then the examples for torrenting are Apple shows which is much cheaper.
  - avh02 4y ago
    My assumption with appletv is that you need half their ecosystem to even have the honour of giving them money to watch content.
    - dan1234 4y ago
      Appletv+ is available on android, web, and quite a few smart tvs so you can subscribe without having any other connection with their ecosystem. It’s more likely they pirate because apple’s library is pretty small, compared to others, so it’s easier to just torrent than pay for the couple of programmes they want to watch. It’s also more difficult to share logins with appletv (no profiles etc), so you’ll get less of the account sharing that Netflix is now trying to crack down on.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I'm seeing that a lot too. Netflix killed piracy with price and more importantly convenience. But the extreme fragmentation of the streaming market is driving people back to the torrents. They don't want to sign up somewhere for every new show that they hear about. The industry is killing itself this way. Netflix is just the first to take the hit because they have the largest market saturation.
ajmurmann 4y ago
I keep hearing this $100+ argument all the time, but do you really need all the services simultaneously? As you point out, there isn't that much to watch. So just unsubscribe for a few months, let the new content build up and safe money in the meantime.
- harha 4y ago
  Well no, but I also don’t want to constantly be switching just to watch one or two shows. The original benefit of Netflix was that you could have a service with a decent selection, no hassle. If I click unsubscribe, that’s more or less final.
  - psyc 4y ago
    That wouldn’t work for me at all. I’ve been rotating around all the services, one at a time, since sometime last year. I quit Netflix for the first time since ~2007, last September. Nothing watchable that I hadn’t seen. I resubscribed for the last season of Ozark. When that was over, I looked around for what good stuff they’d added in the last 7 months and found squat. Promptly canceled again. I’m fast approaching the time when I won’t be subscribed to anything most of the time, and occasionally sign up for one to watch one show.
- chihuahua 4y ago
  Yeah, this is not rocket science. Subscribe to one service at a time. Switch to another service when you want to watch something different. It's not like the old days where switching from cable to satellite TV was a huge hassle.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  While that makes a lot of sense, that's a difficult sell when you have multiple people in a household.
mdasen 4y ago
I don't think you're wrong, but to over-simplify what you're saying: "Netflix took my $100/mo cable bill and $40/mo Blockbuster habit and turned it into a $10/mo fee. Now I'm not getting all that entertainment for the now $15.50/mo fee." Again, you're right: before the other players came to streaming, Netflix had an amazing value proposition. Why? Because "the other players" didn't realize that streaming would displace cable, DVD purchases, and Blockbuster rentals so they licensed their content to Netflix a lot cheaper than they would have if they'd realized that. Yes, there was a golden era of Netflix before "the other players" realized that streaming was the future. Over the long run, it's logical to think that they weren't going to just want less money while you got the same quality content. I would disagree that it's mediocre content across the streaming services. I do think Netflix has invested too much in mediocre content and that's biting them (as the article notes). However, we have so much amazing content being produced. I also think that "across services that easily cost $100+ a month" is a bit unfair too. $15.50 Netflix, $8 Disney+, $6 Hulu, $15 HBO Max, $5 Apple TV+, Paramount+ $5. That's $55. "Oh, I don't want ads so it's $13 for Hulu and $10 for Paramount+." Fair, but it's not like cable TV was cheaper, it had practically zero content compared to these streaming services, and more than 25% of its time was ads. I think a lot of people don't really remember how there was almost nothing to watch back then. I think people's memory of the earlier days of Netflix streaming is colored by the fact that they went from "there's nothing on TV" to "OMG, Netflix has so much to stream! This is amazing!" Part of the issue is that we've gotten really accustomed to having so much to watch available. Even if Netflix were giving us just as much quality as they were when they were a "good value", people's perception of what is a good value has changed. Netflix is still way better than cable in most ways (live sports being a big exception). It's also way cheaper. But it's also not unique anymore. When Netflix launched (and for many years after), we were all thrilled that we could watch 20-25% of the content we wanted via this one service. That was amazing. However, I think our expectations have changed: we think we should have access to all the content we want - and for cheap. For ages, people complained "why do I have to pay for a cable package that includes X which I don't watch! I should be able to select services a-la-carte!" Now that we're offering services a-la-carte, it's becoming clear that the real complaint was that people just wanted to pay less money for the same content. I think that Netflix launched and was such a huge jump from the old experience of cable TV and people expected that $10-15 to keep jumping from 20% to 40% to 70% to 90% of what they wanted to watch for one low price. I do think Netflix has had missteps along the way including pouring money into a lot of stuff that ends up being background noise rather than great television. However, with others entering streaming, they were going to keep their own shows for their services more often than not and there would be more competition for high-quality content. Disney explicitly went after Star Wars and Marvel to build a content portfolio they could leverage and bought Fox and its huge library of TV and movie productions (both the historical library and ongoing) as well as Hulu (pending them buying out Comcast's 33% which they're entitled to do). I guess I wonder: if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently (with the caveat that you do need to create a business that will make money)? My suggestions would be things like: don't keep throwing money at low-quality content that people "watch" but don't really watch. Just because you can measure streaming hours of a program doesn't mean that people like it. I might suggest buying a content company, but that seems like it would be a hard thing to do. It'd give them owner-economics over a large back catalogue, but even in 2016 Netflix was a $40-70B company. Who could you buy without giving away half (or almost all) of your company? 2016 you're talking $40B for Viacom without CBS. Disney would be $150B+. In 2016, AT&T made its deal for Time Warner for $85B. Disney bought Fox for $71B in 2017 - minus the US stations and Sky. If you go before 2016, Netflix is a $25-30B company in 2014 and a $5B company in 2012. They don't have the money. Do you try to negotiate even longer-term third-party content deals for streaming in 2007-2010 before third-parties realize that you're going to be cannibalizing their business? Get Time Warner to give you their catalogue for a 20-year run - giving you a very long time before they can compete with HBO streaming? Do the same to others? To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours", but isn't quality viewing hours that keep customers loving your product. It's more like settling hours. Beyond that, I think a lot of it is just that people want access to everything for less money and realistically that wasn't going to happen. But maybe you have other ways they could have gone - without saying "keep spending more money, keep losing it, die a hero."
pcurve 4y ago
I could be in the minority, but I'm perfectly content with just having Netflix. There's a long backlog of shows that I haven't had a chance to watch, and they keep adding new ones. Sure it would be nice if I had HBO max, hulu, disney, apple, but honestly I don't think I'd have time for them. How many hours of streaming video can a person possibly watch that one would find stuff on Netflix not adequate? Or is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch?
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  > is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch? Yeah. I love discussing shows with friends and family and I’ve been finding it harder and harder to watch shows together or watch them later on our own time to discuss them later. For example, I recently watched Pachinko and would highly recommend it but none of my friends have Apple TV so they can’t watch it (unless they pirate it)
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Apple TV+ is $5/month. People used to pay $100+/month for cable and satellite TV. If people do not want to pay, then it must not be about the money. They even have the choice of easily just paying for one streaming service per month, and not spending more than $15 per month.
    - creakingstairs 4y ago
      Like you said, all my friends and family can afford it, but there is a psychological barrier to adding yet another subscription service when they already have multiple. You could switch around, but that is also a hassle.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        It is far less of a hassle than it was with cable/satellite companies. For example, I go to TV app on my phone or laptop or Apple TV. Search for what I want. Pay for it, and if it is a subscription, then go back to list of subscriptions and then cancel. If it is Netflix, then you might have to do this in a browser since they do not cooperate with Apple. Not sure how much easier people want it to get. I will gladly take this method of paying and watching for media than anything I experienced in previous years.
rinze 4y ago
I ditched my Netflix suscription and have found a much better replacement combo: - Criterion Channel for the good stuff (cheaper than Netflix, too.) - Tubi for guilty crap... and some good movies here and there too (ad-supported.) For a while I tried Mubi but it was clear I'm not the target audience. I was watching 1-2 movies a month, tops.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
Netflix is doing what they can to survive in the face of the mob. They're the outsider compared to all these old boys studios and copyright holders. The old boys are literally the mob. And when the mob saw how much cake Netflix was taking, they said "Nope". Given this, I feel like Netflix has less and less of a choice when it comes to what externally-produced movies/shows they offer. They're just trying to survive. And keep their kneecaps.
- native_samples 4y ago
  Given Netflix comp levels, "trying to survive" might be overplaying it. The reason for the schadenfreude mentioned in the article is the massive cost inflation Netflix spending levels created. I think a lot of the discussion in this thread could be summed up as, maybe Netflix should have been content to be a low margin tech supplier to the studios rather than try and spend it's way to becoming a new Disney. A lot of tech firms are built off the back of the fact that it seems to be harder for other industries to learn how to be a tech firm than the other way around. Streaming video is clearly one of those cases where it's the opposite and that fact had been hidden for a long time by the flood of QE funny money.
alaricus 4y ago
I never understood why Netflix is assumed to be more convenient. There are illegal streaming websites with better UI and user experience than Netflix.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
[flagged]

by harha 4y ago

bumper_crop 4y ago

>The consumers just aren’t complete idiots. The consumers kinda are the idiots here. They know what they like, but they have no idea why the content is getting worse. Why shows are being pulled. Companies that had their content on Netflix realized they were facing an existential crisis. Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances. It's the same with Netflix. All other studios realized at some point Netflix would become so strong, even the royalties Netflix pays for their content would put them out of business permanently. There is no amount of money Netflix can pay for other studios content. Consumers only see the net effect of good shows going away, and imagining reasons why.

Guthur 4y ago
That's not stupid consumers that's people not rightly giving a f what nonsense licensing setups requested by ip owners and enforced by a government monopoly on force. The consumer just wanted to watch the media, which is fair because they probably just spent 8 hours at some nonsense unnecessary job and would like to switch off... again. No vote no power.
- bumper_crop 4y ago
  Stupid is probably the wrong word here; "clueless"? I personally think consumers are on the verge of reinventing TV channels, with each streaming service acting like a channel. Consumers, who liked that Netflix had so much content in one place, are slowly pushing time to go backward.
  - ntoskrnl 4y ago
    I still don't see how it's the consumers' fault. Say there was one single person out there who wasn't an idiot or clueless, and just wanted to watch some TV after work. What should this person have done?
    - bumper_crop 4y ago
      Consumers want high quality, entertaining content, at low cost, with little commitment, at any time. Prior to Netflix, there wasn't such an intersecting product. Now, Netflix has low quality content, but still has all the other stuff. Consumers see this, forget what life was like back in the early 2000s, and switch/sign up for several other services. It's where consumers spend their money that will result in this regression. You ask what this person should have done? Not sign up for other services. The other providers are better quality, but regresses on all the rest of the experience. Youtube TV is more than $60 a month. Disney+ great content, but an extremely narrow content offering ("few but ripe"). HBO lagged like crazy when the season finale of GOT came out. When the regular person you asked about spends money on these other services, it encourages them to grow. The content is great, but the bad-experience, price, and schism is what they will get in return. They are unknowingly demanding it.
      - ThatPlayer 4y ago
        The issue is Netflix as it was is not sustainable. It's like plenty of VC startups, build the market at a cost, and then go down in quality so you can make a profit. Or sell the company. But they can't do that because it's already public. In fact that means earning reports and they've just recently turned cash flow positive. Like you say, consumers want high quality content. That costs money to make, and when Netflix first started streaming, the cost of shows was subsidized by cable TV. Cable TV is declining or dead now, so who is going to pay for those shows? Look at how Netflix's prices continue to rise, but their originals are mediocre for most people. Not signing up for other services would just encourage Netflix to keep doing that.
ramraj07 4y ago
While it is a valid point, Id argue that Netflix could have survived this - they had billions of dollars to create original content, and then they did create it, but some how screwed it all up. There’s at best 1 or 2 good show and no good movie Netflix has made in years. And anything half decent they cancel mercilessly without giving it a chance. This is not just in the US. The comparison of original content quality between Netflix and other services in India for example is even more laughable. In the end, Netflix is a company that used to be great and kinda made some of the most genius ideas to fight the Goliath but was undone by a single dude leading a team making poor choices on what content to make. 3 Adam Sandler movies for half a billion dollars? I’m assuming this is as big or a bigger blunder than Zillow, and was powered by stupid data science ideas as well, probably.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  - afavour 4y ago
    The idea that Netflix is failing because of identity politics is just ridiculous and doesn’t hold up to even the slightest examination. It’s just another reactionary talking point that feels right enough for people to not examine it.
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      I know multiple people which complained about it and made them unsubscribe (none from the USA, so these topics are neither interesting nor on topic for any of us) It was definitely a contributing factory that's for sure.
      - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
        The number of people who care about this kind of stuff is very low. Most people just want to watch movies, laugh, cry. They don’t even know about the culture war. That’s only relevant in the bubble of malcontent that is mostly made up of twitter users.
anothernewdude 4y ago
If only there was a way to what whatever soap 2 day you wanted.
ipiz0618 4y ago
>Ever played Settlers of Catan and find out another player had 9/10 victory points? Everyone does everything in their power to not trade with that player, send the robber, and limit their chances This is why my group of friends stopped playing Catan after a while..
stdgy 4y ago
Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix. The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts." Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform. The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site. As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Netflix is the one that got greedy and over estimated their position. Serving video is an absolute commodity. They should have been getting pennies on the dollar if that. A simple distribution service for studios who should have been thought of as their customers. But no, making a steady, useful, profitable business is not enough. Taking a big cut from an easily replaced service, and using the money to fund a direct competitor to their customers sure was something. Took a lot of chutzpah, is about the best I'll say for it.

walrus01 4y ago

I know a number of people who have just gone back to torrenting everything they care about (such as For All Mankind or Foundation) and are very unlikely to ever subscribe to a 2nd, 3rd, 4th streaming service. They either picked netflix and have stayed with it at $22/mo or have changed from netflix to 1 other service like paramount+ or whatever, but the idea of paying $50-60-80 a month for more services on top of their residential broadband connection at $55-85 is a non-starter. https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd https://imgur.com/gallery/axPwdMd

MauroIksem 4y ago
This is basically me. I have the 15 dollar tier of Netflix and then my friends and i share a Plex hosted at a buddy's house where we get whatever content we want.
ajmurmann 4y ago
Interesting to call out Netflix for high price and then the examples for torrenting are Apple shows which is much cheaper.
- avh02 4y ago
  My assumption with appletv is that you need half their ecosystem to even have the honour of giving them money to watch content.
  - dan1234 4y ago
    Appletv+ is available on android, web, and quite a few smart tvs so you can subscribe without having any other connection with their ecosystem. It’s more likely they pirate because apple’s library is pretty small, compared to others, so it’s easier to just torrent than pay for the couple of programmes they want to watch. It’s also more difficult to share logins with appletv (no profiles etc), so you’ll get less of the account sharing that Netflix is now trying to crack down on.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I'm seeing that a lot too. Netflix killed piracy with price and more importantly convenience. But the extreme fragmentation of the streaming market is driving people back to the torrents. They don't want to sign up somewhere for every new show that they hear about. The industry is killing itself this way. Netflix is just the first to take the hit because they have the largest market saturation.

ajmurmann 4y ago

I keep hearing this $100+ argument all the time, but do you really need all the services simultaneously? As you point out, there isn't that much to watch. So just unsubscribe for a few months, let the new content build up and safe money in the meantime.

harha 4y ago
Well no, but I also don’t want to constantly be switching just to watch one or two shows. The original benefit of Netflix was that you could have a service with a decent selection, no hassle. If I click unsubscribe, that’s more or less final.
- psyc 4y ago
  That wouldn’t work for me at all. I’ve been rotating around all the services, one at a time, since sometime last year. I quit Netflix for the first time since ~2007, last September. Nothing watchable that I hadn’t seen. I resubscribed for the last season of Ozark. When that was over, I looked around for what good stuff they’d added in the last 7 months and found squat. Promptly canceled again. I’m fast approaching the time when I won’t be subscribed to anything most of the time, and occasionally sign up for one to watch one show.
chihuahua 4y ago
Yeah, this is not rocket science. Subscribe to one service at a time. Switch to another service when you want to watch something different. It's not like the old days where switching from cable to satellite TV was a huge hassle.
bentcorner 4y ago
While that makes a lot of sense, that's a difficult sell when you have multiple people in a household.

mdasen 4y ago

I don't think you're wrong, but to over-simplify what you're saying: "Netflix took my $100/mo cable bill and $40/mo Blockbuster habit and turned it into a $10/mo fee. Now I'm not getting all that entertainment for the now $15.50/mo fee." Again, you're right: before the other players came to streaming, Netflix had an amazing value proposition. Why? Because "the other players" didn't realize that streaming would displace cable, DVD purchases, and Blockbuster rentals so they licensed their content to Netflix a lot cheaper than they would have if they'd realized that. Yes, there was a golden era of Netflix before "the other players" realized that streaming was the future. Over the long run, it's logical to think that they weren't going to just want less money while you got the same quality content. I would disagree that it's mediocre content across the streaming services. I do think Netflix has invested too much in mediocre content and that's biting them (as the article notes). However, we have so much amazing content being produced. I also think that "across services that easily cost $100+ a month" is a bit unfair too. $15.50 Netflix, $8 Disney+, $6 Hulu, $15 HBO Max, $5 Apple TV+, Paramount+ $5. That's $55. "Oh, I don't want ads so it's $13 for Hulu and $10 for Paramount+." Fair, but it's not like cable TV was cheaper, it had practically zero content compared to these streaming services, and more than 25% of its time was ads. I think a lot of people don't really remember how there was almost nothing to watch back then. I think people's memory of the earlier days of Netflix streaming is colored by the fact that they went from "there's nothing on TV" to "OMG, Netflix has so much to stream! This is amazing!" Part of the issue is that we've gotten really accustomed to having so much to watch available. Even if Netflix were giving us just as much quality as they were when they were a "good value", people's perception of what is a good value has changed. Netflix is still way better than cable in most ways (live sports being a big exception). It's also way cheaper. But it's also not unique anymore. When Netflix launched (and for many years after), we were all thrilled that we could watch 20-25% of the content we wanted via this one service. That was amazing. However, I think our expectations have changed: we think we should have access to all the content we want - and for cheap. For ages, people complained "why do I have to pay for a cable package that includes X which I don't watch! I should be able to select services a-la-carte!" Now that we're offering services a-la-carte, it's becoming clear that the real complaint was that people just wanted to pay less money for the same content. I think that Netflix launched and was such a huge jump from the old experience of cable TV and people expected that $10-15 to keep jumping from 20% to 40% to 70% to 90% of what they wanted to watch for one low price. I do think Netflix has had missteps along the way including pouring money into a lot of stuff that ends up being background noise rather than great television. However, with others entering streaming, they were going to keep their own shows for their services more often than not and there would be more competition for high-quality content. Disney explicitly went after Star Wars and Marvel to build a content portfolio they could leverage and bought Fox and its huge library of TV and movie productions (both the historical library and ongoing) as well as Hulu (pending them buying out Comcast's 33% which they're entitled to do). I guess I wonder: if you could go back in time (knowing what you know now) and take control of Reed Hastings, what would you do differently (with the caveat that you do need to create a business that will make money)? My suggestions would be things like: don't keep throwing money at low-quality content that people "watch" but don't really watch. Just because you can measure streaming hours of a program doesn't mean that people like it. I might suggest buying a content company, but that seems like it would be a hard thing to do. It'd give them owner-economics over a large back catalogue, but even in 2016 Netflix was a $40-70B company. Who could you buy without giving away half (or almost all) of your company? 2016 you're talking $40B for Viacom without CBS. Disney would be $150B+. In 2016, AT&T made its deal for Time Warner for $85B. Disney bought Fox for $71B in 2017 - minus the US stations and Sky. If you go before 2016, Netflix is a $25-30B company in 2014 and a $5B company in 2012. They don't have the money. Do you try to negotiate even longer-term third-party content deals for streaming in 2007-2010 before third-parties realize that you're going to be cannibalizing their business? Get Time Warner to give you their catalogue for a 20-year run - giving you a very long time before they can compete with HBO streaming? Do the same to others? To me, the big misstep seems to be that Netflix invested too much in low-quality filler that shows up as "viewing hours", but isn't quality viewing hours that keep customers loving your product. It's more like settling hours. Beyond that, I think a lot of it is just that people want access to everything for less money and realistically that wasn't going to happen. But maybe you have other ways they could have gone - without saying "keep spending more money, keep losing it, die a hero."

pcurve 4y ago

I could be in the minority, but I'm perfectly content with just having Netflix. There's a long backlog of shows that I haven't had a chance to watch, and they keep adding new ones. Sure it would be nice if I had HBO max, hulu, disney, apple, but honestly I don't think I'd have time for them. How many hours of streaming video can a person possibly watch that one would find stuff on Netflix not adequate? Or is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch?

creakingstairs 4y ago
> is this more about keeping up with friends and families and what they watch? Yeah. I love discussing shows with friends and family and I’ve been finding it harder and harder to watch shows together or watch them later on our own time to discuss them later. For example, I recently watched Pachinko and would highly recommend it but none of my friends have Apple TV so they can’t watch it (unless they pirate it)
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Apple TV+ is $5/month. People used to pay $100+/month for cable and satellite TV. If people do not want to pay, then it must not be about the money. They even have the choice of easily just paying for one streaming service per month, and not spending more than $15 per month.
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    Like you said, all my friends and family can afford it, but there is a psychological barrier to adding yet another subscription service when they already have multiple. You could switch around, but that is also a hassle.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      It is far less of a hassle than it was with cable/satellite companies. For example, I go to TV app on my phone or laptop or Apple TV. Search for what I want. Pay for it, and if it is a subscription, then go back to list of subscriptions and then cancel. If it is Netflix, then you might have to do this in a browser since they do not cooperate with Apple. Not sure how much easier people want it to get. I will gladly take this method of paying and watching for media than anything I experienced in previous years.

rinze 4y ago

I ditched my Netflix suscription and have found a much better replacement combo: - Criterion Channel for the good stuff (cheaper than Netflix, too.) - Tubi for guilty crap... and some good movies here and there too (ad-supported.) For a while I tried Mubi but it was clear I'm not the target audience. I was watching 1-2 movies a month, tops.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

Netflix is doing what they can to survive in the face of the mob. They're the outsider compared to all these old boys studios and copyright holders. The old boys are literally the mob. And when the mob saw how much cake Netflix was taking, they said "Nope". Given this, I feel like Netflix has less and less of a choice when it comes to what externally-produced movies/shows they offer. They're just trying to survive. And keep their kneecaps.

native_samples 4y ago
Given Netflix comp levels, "trying to survive" might be overplaying it. The reason for the schadenfreude mentioned in the article is the massive cost inflation Netflix spending levels created. I think a lot of the discussion in this thread could be summed up as, maybe Netflix should have been content to be a low margin tech supplier to the studios rather than try and spend it's way to becoming a new Disney. A lot of tech firms are built off the back of the fact that it seems to be harder for other industries to learn how to be a tech firm than the other way around. Streaming video is clearly one of those cases where it's the opposite and that fact had been hidden for a long time by the flood of QE funny money.

alaricus 4y ago

I never understood why Netflix is assumed to be more convenient. There are illegal streaming websites with better UI and user experience than Netflix.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

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