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You didn't mention how profitable the business is - thats the only metric that really matters. All those happy employees have to be paid. The 1M fiercely lyal

• usefulcat 3y ago
  Not even profitability, but growth. Even if it wasn't profitable now it could be worth doing for a growing market, but surely the market for physical discs is shrinking and will continue to do so.
  • walteweiss 3y ago
    It baffles me so much when people put ecology out of the question. Great Netflix is shutting down the business that produces so much unneeded plastic. Sad others would gladly keep that business forever when it makes money. Fuck the planet, hell yeah.
    • squokko 3y ago
      LOL. Imagine the amount of plastic created by Netflix DVD. How many people you can rent one DVD to and how much plastic is in one DVD compared to the packaging in your trash can right now.
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        I assume it all delivered by bicycles.
        • Dylan16807 3y ago
          You said plastic specifically. And the postal service, to a rough approximation, already goes by every mailbox every day. Adding an envelope has a smaller impact than a bicycle delivery.
          • walteweiss 3y ago
            It’s still not free to deliver, as something other can be delivered by that car. You’re right, saying ‘plastic’ was slightly incorrect, as it’s not just the plastic involved. But also the management of the disk itself, its delivery and the people involved. I agree that we have other wasteful things to care about. They just don’t make that extra disk also free (ecology wise), we’re just so immersed in the waste that it’s truly a tiny drop into the ocean.
            • Dylan16807 3y ago
              There has to be a certain point where the cost is okay and sustainable, compared to the amount of entertainment people get out of it. Would a bicycle delivery have been okay? How about 1/10th of the impact of a bicycle delivery? It takes a lot of people to make internet connections work too.
    • wbl 3y ago
      The physical disks let you access far more movies than are showing on streaming because there are no rights issues.
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        Valid. I never thought about it, but the problem not in the medium here. It’s more in the laws/contracts. It could be done differently, I assume.
        • pyuser583 3y ago
          Not really. When you (or Netflix) buys a disk, you own it. It’s yours. When you license a show via a streaming service, you don’t own anything. This is the problem with the tech economy. The consumers don’t own anything. They just rent.
          • walteweiss 3y ago
            Well, many of us know that popular phrase ‘piracy, it just works.’ When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. Same as I own a DVD disk. It’s just the medium that is different. E.g. I have a collection of Friends on disks, which is legal, I own it. But when it’s ripped as files and stored on an old hdd so I could rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB. I assume it is likely to be illegal. The thing is, copyright holders think it’s wrong, and they want us to rent the content, not own it. I mean it could be done other way technologically, avoiding physical medium and still making it legal somehow. It could be done if the party was interested in it. The problem is not in the physical medium itself.
            • phlo 3y ago
              > [Piracy:] When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright). > Same as I own a DVD disk. That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.) > [...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.
    • usr1106 3y ago
      Data centers / the internet are not ecological either: Similar energy consumption as the airline sector. (And that a significant part is wasted on running ads doesn't make it any better.)
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        This is valid statement. But I assume that will get much better over time, as computers are getting more energy efficient, which could change a lot en masse. Delivery of disks is harder to optimise, as you cannot just teleport them as easily.
        • developer93 3y ago
          In practice it doesn't though. Greater efficiency just leads to higher usage, if you look into it. Total emissions go up, this is why we can't just technology our way out of this thing. We need to actually reduce total emissions not just per unit.
          • mighmi 3y ago
            This is called Jevon's paradox.
          • rightbyte 3y ago
            I guess the fundamental problem is that there is money in showing webpages for the sake of it, due to ads. It is like litter. Paper ads are somewhat limited due to consumer complaining about having their mailboxes filled with them and someone has to go there and put it in and can't avoid a homeowner guarding the mailbox if they would force the issue. Using e.g. uBlock Origin might be the most impact for no effort environmentally friendly thing you could possibly do.
          • Brybry 3y ago
            US residential electricity usage per capita has been relatively flat for a decade or two[1] so I think efficiency increases can offset higher usage. In regards to Netflix I suspect there's a streaming bandwidth plateau we will hit (if we have not already): there are only so many hours per day people can watch content, population growth isn't that strong (and can't increase forever), and video resolution then becomes the driver of increased data use (and that probably can't increase forever either). [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036
    • developer93 3y ago
      Streaming is also bad for the planet, it needs a ton of servers which all need energy to run and produce emissions. I don't have figures to mind right now but it wasn't nothing. I'm not sure how it compares to distribution though.
      • Matthias247 3y ago
        It is much cheaper. A server can easily handle hundreds to thousands of simultaneous streams. Even if the server is requiring 1kW of power for that, it makes a worst case of 10W per client. Maybe double it if you want to count in the datacenter overhead (like AC), but realistically Netflix is doing more like 4 digits of concurrent streams than 3 digits, so 10W as an upper bound feel wrong. That's less than an end users TV will utilize, and it's probably also less than a standalone DVD player requires.
        • bzzzt 3y ago
          You're not counting the energy costs of producing the DVD's, shipping, storage and all the people involved who have to travel to work etc.
          • necovek 3y ago
            Or energy costs of producing hardware to serve from, buildings to house those servers, ship them around, replace and fix them, cool them down... It is likely still more efficient to stream than ship on DVDs (I wonder how much it changes with eg. USB flash drives, SD cards or other rewriteable media), but have upfront energy costs that are harder to estimate.
    • patrec 3y ago
      > Great Netflix is shutting down the business that produces so much unneeded plastic. I'm baffled to see such an innumerate take on HackerNews of all places. Yearly US per capita plastic consumption is a few hundred kg. How much do you think a netflix subscription adds to that?
      • Sankozi 3y ago
        You are calling it innumerate while forgetting those plastic consumption number consists of lots of tiny things like the Netflix DVD consumption. Almost every problem can be divided into many tiny ones, and solution to each tiny problem can be ridiculed that it solves only tiny bit of a problem.
        • tfgg 3y ago
          Honestly this sort of climate & environment tokenism frustrates me - spending a lot of energy trying to reduce and elimate things that barely matter (or even actually make things worse by displacement), while ignoring the big ticket items. At best it's innumerate, at worst it's greenwashing.
          • Sankozi 3y ago
            But nobody was doing that in this thread. Walteweiss was just pointing that Netflix DVD service closing has a significant positive side - less trash generated. Pointing it was called as "innumerate". There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).
            • FeepingCreature 3y ago
              The disagreement is precisely over whether the positive side is significant.
            • im_z 3y ago
              Again, ignoring the data centre side. It's not from thin air that you can stream.
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Netflix is when I stopped buying plastic discs because I could rent them.
    • sph 3y ago
      Such a flame bait hot take. While you are right in a vacuum, it is completely off topic: if this was a growing market, like the person you are replying to was saying, Netflix would give a rat's arse about ecology and happily ship its plastic.
      • decremental 3y ago
        [dead]
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        I’m sad to say that it feels like you are right. I didn’t mean that Netflix is all good, I just meant that we also have an ecology question here that’s involved, not just the money. If it generates tons of money but also generates tons of waste— do we really need it? I know it’s some naïve idealism, but I would love to see the world where we, as human race, choose to do nothing rather than trash our planet even more. I may sound like a crazy ecology fanatic (I’m not yet), yet I’m becoming more and more worried over all this. While the other commenter legitimately pointed out that servers aren’t free (ecology wise) either, I think they can be optimised over time. Shipping physical disks, I don’t see as rational these days. Even when it gets you money, discard half of your customers and the other half would switch to subscription anyway, you just push them to do that earlier.
        • robertlagrant 3y ago
          We don't need it - that's why it's closing. It's been replaced by digital services. I don't understand this comment - it might make sense as a (bad) pitch for digitising Netflix in the 2000s, but the millions of FTE days to do that have already been pitched, paid for and worked. What is this adding?
          • im_z 3y ago
            So Netflix has 100k titles like Netflix DVD had? Thought so. Not a replacement then.
    • m463 3y ago
      Streaming video is completely controlled and customers have to hunt down each specific movie - if available - from specific streaming services. Meanwhile DVDs are relatively democratic and unencumbered way of distributing video. Netflix can make any movie available via dvd without licensing or asking permission. I found it to be a very good way of getting high quality movies from the largest selection. But your complaint seems to sidestep all this, sort of like complaining that paper money wastes so many unneeded trees without acknowledging the huge benefits.
      • pilsetnieks 3y ago
        Going off on a tangent, it's actually not that much trees wasted on paper money. Some of it is made of plastic but a lot of it should be called rather cloth money - at least the US dollar and euro are made of cotton and linen fiber instead of cellulose from wood pulp.
        • TeMPOraL 3y ago
          Neither is much plastic wasted on DVDs.
    • paganel 3y ago
      On the other hand those data centers don't run on "normal" air, they need lots of cooling and lots of electricity. Plus, a stagnating movie/TV shows market based on physical disks only (and on previous theatrical releases) is surely a lot more friendly to the environment compared to a always-going-up movie/TV shows market, a market which has to create a lot more content compared to past times. Creating that content is not friendly to the environment, those film crews don't live based on air alone.
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        Agree, that’s another thing to worry about. We opened a Pandora’s box with the advancement of the Internet. (And I’m not being sarcastic!) But that won’t go anywhere, so at least physical disks would.
    • atemerev 3y ago
      The planet is our lab. We have to keep the lab clean, ordered and well-functioning; it doesn’t mean we have to refrain from doing anything there.
      • walteweiss 3y ago
        I prefer many devastating events rather not happening at all.
        • atemerev 3y ago
          This is what I mean by "ordered and well-functioning". Geoengineering and climate engineering should be improved. We worked in our lab for too long without cleaning up our mess.
    • tass 3y ago
      The planet is helped if this shutdown actually does reduce plastic and/or gasoline use. For many people the alternative to Netflix dvd/bluray rental is buying their own copies of discs instead. In my case I have a very good video rental store nearby but now I need to drive somewhere I wasn’t driving before.
    • layer8 3y ago
      It’s much more ecological than every customer buying their own discs. It’s keeping that plastic in circulation instead of being trashed, and Netflix can ensure that defective discs are properly recycled, which consumers often won’t do. Streaming unfortunately is not a replacement, mostly due to the limited selection of titles and, in the case of Blu-ray/UHD discs, reduced quality.
    • rakoo 3y ago
      Netflix requires high bandwidth, ever new high performance servers and routers and all the jazz, and thanks to DRM requires newer equipment to watch content. The pollution created by the digital Netflix is WAY higher than the physical one, it's not even a comparison.
    • im_z 3y ago
      Terrible argument. First stop pretending data centres have no impact on the environment. They do. Second, this is a great use of discs. They are being reused. They aren't just plastic that goes into a dump, it's something people rent and return for others. Plastic in of itself is not a bad material, it's that it's being mismanaged. One use plastics are the biggest offenders, and the amount people use those dwarfs the amount they get from reused rented discs. It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.
      • octacat 3y ago
        Transportation of the disc to the house would probably use more resources than streaming it from a datacenter. But yea, disks could be reused. Spent gas - not. > The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020. > New passenger cars generally emit from 90 (smaller cars) to 150 (larger cars) grams of CO2 (yes, it's the weight of the whole carbon dioxide, not just the carbon in it) per kilometer. Disks could be still better, if you rent 20 of them at once.
    • behringer 3y ago
      Every penny you redirect from ownership to renting will be treated with contempt by your new owner. And the only thing your new owner hates more than you is the planet.
    • Merad 3y ago
      We're only talking about the discs, right? Maybe they've changed in the last 10 years but IIRC the envelopes were all paper. One disc probably contains less plastic than the average Chinese takeout order, and surely even at Netflix the lifetime of that disc is measured in years. That's downright eco-friendly compared to all the disposable plastic consumed by our society.
• cc81 3y ago
  Yeah, and it can be still be profitable right now but have continuously falling margins that they don't see that they can reverse.
• modeless 3y ago
  Even given all that it seems totally possible to make profits for years to come. Managing a shrinking business might not be as sexy as managing a growing one but there's still money in it.
  • shawabawa3 3y ago
    There might be money in it, or there might not and there might be opportunity cost to not redirecting resources to other things.
• rasz 3y ago
  Nothing is stopping them from negotiating shorter lease.
• tiffanyh 3y ago
  To support your point … Just 3-years ago, the DVD business was generating $200M in revenue. Today, it’s only $120m. That means total revenues are down 66% in just 3-years. You can’t fault Netflix for wanting to divest a business that is rapidly declining. And that doesn’t even speak to the profitably of that business unit which is fair to assume to be losing money when you have such rapid revenue decline. https://www.mediaplaynews.com/netflix-indifference-to-disc-rentals-not-surprising/ https://www.mediaplaynews.com/netflix-indifference-to-disc-r...
  • im_z 3y ago
    It's not a natural death. They've done nothing to maintain it. They reduced distribution centres (thus increasing wait times) and they haven't replaced many of the titles that have become damaged, so they are unavailable. It's no wonder people are leaving in large rates, because what they used to offer was unparalleled access to films and TV. 100k titles. No streamer has that.
    • alephnerd 3y ago
      Companies have a finite amount of money. If the DVD and Blu-ray rental userbase is dropping, I could cut that division's budget in half and move it to another division that is generating much stronger traction (eg. Netflix Korea and their KDrama acquisitions making Netflix a market leader in Asia). The TAM of the DVD/Blu-Ray rental market has fallen, so as a company, it's best for me to fire those customers - either by slowly degrading the service so they change to the mainstream service, or deprecating the entire service. > 100k titles. No streamer has that. But 1. Do does a large enough userbase actually want that? 2. Can that large enough userbase spend enough margins on that service to generate a healthy profit? 3. Are my operating costs for that division rising faster than the revenue from that division? If all 3 of those answers aren't satisfactory, you end up shutting down an initiative. Also, there's always FMovies or Pirating for those who really really want it.
      • rtkwe 3y ago
        It's a chicken and egg argument, we don't have access to the internal metrics to really know which came first, sliding users or diversion of resources to quietly kill the project.