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"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Gabe Newell, 10+ years ago Once upon a time, Netflix itself was considered the case in

• mc32 4y ago
  I think that's a bit unfair. Businesses go through business cycles. I never worked there, nor have insight (obviously) but you know the business climate changes, your competitors change and you have to adjust or experience consequences. Sometimes you need to grow subscriptions, sometimes you need to grow revenue, sometimes you have more flexibility, and sometimes less (Netflix has to re-enter agreements with content owners and creators and those can change and they have to adjust and also business changes). However, it seems people only envision greedy accountants and Executives rubbing hands at the prospect.
  • nscalf 4y ago
    Once you go public you have no option other than to just grow at all costs. The cost of Netflix pushing growth is turning consumer sentiment against them by cracking down on account sharing and pushing ads into the service. Netflix had a gross profit of $12.44B in 2022. Why not preserve the large, successful business that consumers have a high opinion of instead of push for further profits? The truth is that Netflix could continue profiting billions per year more or less indefinitely without risking the company by shifting focus from growth, and the only people who would be upset about it would be shareholders. And the only reason they'd be upset is because of greed. They could stop trying to grow and be a strong dividend company overnight.
    • mc32 4y ago
      It's not that simple. Their "greed" affords "those" investors the ability to invest those earnings in other up and comers --some of which may fail and some of which may succeed. If everyone was just happy with going an even course, at scale, the economy would stagnate.
      • autoexec 4y ago
        The stagnated economy means lots of popular services that consistently pull in large profits, and are well like by consumers, and which are careful not to screw over their users at every opportunity I'd be just fine with that.
    • BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      > Once you go public you have no option other than to just grow at all costs. Nothing grows forever, so in fact this "grow at all costs" mentality forces many otherwise healthy companies that could maintain a nice break-even with some dividend to pay into doing stupid short-term thinking and desperate financial engineering and then in time collapse and go into bankruptcy.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    Sure, here's a typical business cycle these days: > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. "Tiktok's enshittification", by Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
• tomjen3 4y ago
  The problem for Netflix is that they can't really negotiate rates. Netflix as a business makes sense only when most of what one wants is available. At this point, all they can do is increase rates, lose subs and make as much money on the decline as possible.
• tzs 4y ago
  > "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Gabe Newell, 10+ years ago Yet nearly everyone complaining here today about Netflix is complaining about the price.
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    The additional context needed is how fragmented the content library has become. Netflix has so much less popular content compared to 10 years ago.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Still just complaining about price. It is trivial to search the content you want to watch, and pay for it. A couple extra taps is not sufficient friction to claim that “service” is the problem.
      • brokenmachine 4y ago
        It's significantly more than "a couple extra taps". There's mental overhead from having multiple services, as well as the price. At some point you just decide it's not worth the hassle.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          Sure, but 20 years ago, you had to go to a physical store, rent or buy physical media, put it into a physical device, and then play it. Or call up a cable or satellite TV company and had to have equipment installed and pay equipment rental fees, and watch whatever was on without any control. It is, objectively, pretty easy and convenient to watch what you want, when you want (assuming you are in the right jurisdiction). The only question remains is, are you willing to pay the amount the seller asks?
          • brokenmachine 4y ago
            >It is, objectively, pretty easy and convenient to watch what you want, when you want Sure, between Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, etc, etc, etc... all with their own "exclusives". So to watch what you want, when you want, you would need to pay multiple monthly fees and deal with the aforementioned mental overhead of multiple subscriptions to manage. At least in the old video store days, one only had to go to a single video store. Now they're even differentiating by the quality of the stream. That's more consumer-hostile arbitrary garbage that the video store never had. Who in their right mind would pay for blurry SD streaming nowadays, when even phones are 4k? But of course there's no single HD stream plan available. Piracy is unfortunately relatively easier and more convenient, and that's a failure of the entertainment industry. Not to mention the terrible quality of the average show... and the fact that shows that you've "purchased" go missing from streaming sites randomly... and now they're putting ads in there. The downward spiral is now.
• xhkkffbf 4y ago
  The anti-artists love to suggest that this is true, but all payment includes some kind of speed bump. Are shoplifters not thieves, but merely protesters against the drag of waiting for a checkout lane? Are rapists just men who are experiencing a "service problem" from women? Pretty much every crime can be rationalized with this pro-privacy cant. If you want artists in this world, you must support them. If you don't, be honest and don't complain about service.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Leaving aside your ridiculous comparison between rape and filesharing, artists existed long before netflix and other subscription services. A lot of art was created without financial incentive. In fact, financial incentive ruins art in a lot of ways.
  • dartharva 4y ago
    I have subscribed to eight different streaming services for movies, music, audiobooks and books, and I have a large game library in Steam and Epic. I still prefer to use pirated copies of the same things that I can access legitimately through these subscriptions; they just provide a vastly superior experience. Games are much better in pirate releases where you are not riddled with bullshit launchers and online "services". Music, Audiobooks and Movie rips shared on the high seas are of much superior quality and high-efficiency encodings than those provided by Netflix and Spotify. And don't even get me started on Book DRMs. Not to mention the things you paid for can be taken away without consequence at any time in these services. So keep your "anti-artist" rhetoric to yourself, most of those scared of piracy are often just scared of losing out on their cheap income in fears that more people will realise the actual quality of the "art" before buying than they would have.