7 ms·

Things Are Going Great at Netflix, So It's Raising Prices

31 points by pg_1234 3y ago

sen 3y ago
Pretty much everyone I know (admittedly mostly techies) have gone back to pirating. It’s ridiculous how many streaming services you need, and how much each costs, to get access to the popular shows of the season. It doesn’t matter if I use Apple Music and my friend uses Spotify, we can both listen to the same new albums, but we can’t watch shows each other recommend because we regularly have (now “had”) different video streaming services.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  Paradoxically netflix et al made pirating even better because now we don't have to wait for the DVD release to get good video and audio quality.
- stackedinserter 3y ago
  Also, I'm in full control of what I downloaded ("pirated" in disneyspeak). That Peppa.pig.2003.eng.subs.m0tiv8.mkv is mine, won't disappear from my catalog, and I can push it to children's iPad before flight or share with a friend.
- lethologica 3y ago
  Yep, I certainly have. With just two trackers I’ve got access to pretty much every TV show and movie in existence.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  My experience has been different. While I have myself gone back a bit I really do not see that happening in my circle. You see, most of the people I knew didn't really want or need specific or high quality content - I reckon they only needed something they could fix their eyes to and spend hours and days. Netlix and the ilk gives them that and probably they are happy just doing that.
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    My normie male/coupled friends are mostly doing churn and burn. Disney for The Bear, churn, HBO for Succession, churn, repeat. The actual quality shows are few and far between so it has to be done if you aren't pirating. For my women friends though, Netflix just has them dialed for reality stuff. Selling Sunset, Below Deck, Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, Queer Eye. Educated women with serious jobs, they love to escape with this stuff, IME.
- l72 3y ago
  I have done this too. I set up a jellyfin, and re-ripped all my old dvds and blu-rays. I am also renting and ripping blu-rays from my library a lot too. It isn't just the lack of content, content suddenly being removed, or even the expense and hassle of dealing with 5+ different services; it is that the overall experience has really degraded. I find jellyfin with the content I want to be a superior experience in every single way. IF content providers would offer a digital version DRM free, I would purchase a ton of TV shows and movies directly.
autoexec 3y ago
Netflix has only offered less and less yet they keep charging more and more. Their service is increasingly annoying to use and they refuse to address complaints users have had since the streaming service started (for example, the lack of an A-Z listing of all titles, or the countless times the same shows are repeated across the totally random and ever-changing categories they force on us. Now Netflix seems to be perfectly happy to price out their poorer customers (or sell them out to advertisers) so long as enough people are still willing to pay to get screwed over and over again. I've had an account from their early days mailing DVDs, and I loved supporting them when they were ad free, but at this point if it weren't for the others who still depend on my account, I'd have canceled already.
- racked 3y ago
  I wish Netflix had a way to filter out Netflix Originals, because 90% of the time, they are just 'filler', stretched-out garbage.
  - bippihippi1 3y ago
    if the best way to find stuff on a platform is google + title search, something ain't right
- akomtu 3y ago
  Netflix doesn't have many movies and any reasonable search interface would reveal this.
  - mainpassathome 3y ago
    I don’t use streaming services, so i might be misunderstanding: why is A-Z listing and Originals filtering needed? is new content discovery actually a major use of netflix? i was under the impression most people would just search for what they want
    - autoexec 3y ago
      You can search, but that defeats the entire purpose of browsing. I can't know about everything there is out there. Every once in a while I'll go into search and enter random three letter combinations like "Sta", "Tho", "Mon" etc. When I do, I often find things in the search results that I add to my list and would have done sooner, except I never knew they existed because netflix refused to show them to me. I've also been to other people's houses and seen how different the things netflix shows them are. It seems like all netflix ever shows you is what they want you to see. My guess is that they intentionally hide certain older content to try and drive viewers to newer content so that they can collect metrics. Newer things end up being pushed over and over again in category after category. I'm not interested in giving them metrics showing how well people like whatever their newest releases are though. I want to watch whatever I want to watch whenever I want to watch it. That was the promise of streaming that netflix never quite delivered on, but for a little while it was pretty close. Now it seems like netflix wants to turn into cable TV. They don't even always release entire seasons to let you binge anymore (they can control the conversation on social media and keep the ad hype up longer if they don't give users the freedom to watch shows on their own schedule) It really sucks to see so clearly what cable TV always should have been, to come so close to having that, and then have it slowly killed off in front of you.
jerojero 3y ago
I'm pretty happy with my jellyfin solution. It's not perfect, but I have a pretty good workflow that works well for me. Anime support could be a bit better. But oh well.
- l72 3y ago
  It is interesting that even some of my non-technical (capable, but not tech-geeks) have started to move to jellyfin or plex. My age group is 35-45, so it isn't like we are broke college students that need to pirate movies, but we've just gotten fed up with how terrible everything has become.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
Netflix is an interesting example of a substandard product becoming mainstream just because of some kind of a social momentum (it certainly is not the right term; so whatever that is called) it received. I don't know who is the target audience. I do see younger generations i.e mine - the 30s and 20s considering this as some sort of entertainment utility and they must have a connection err subscription. It has probably the most insipid content and what many even fail to notice and hence do not acknowledge that it has probably one of the shallow most catalogues, yes even after including its really pathetic quality N-formula content. It is so user hostile and their intentional dark-pattern interface is not the only problem and yet apparently they are doing well. The interface is literally an ad dashboard. Still people spend more and more time on there Why is that? I don't even think it's like Apple's growth who actually do few things right and offer better hardware and a streamline non-all-over-your-face software. So what is Netflix's secret? Just being the first game in the town? Or good old addiction? Or both, or all of it little by little?
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I mean if you think marvel is the high end of quality then I guess Disney is better. I find the variety of Netflix programs much more interesting than Disney. But that only explains their global strength (where normal user wants to see Korean and local dramas)
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    That's funny because I don't think Netflix is that different from Disney in terms of content and preventing their creators from going outside the box.
    - wodenokoto 3y ago
      Maybe not for American/western content. I think they have some of the best anime and their Korean dramas are totally a guilty pleasure of mine. But more to my point, many of my friends from places like Thailand or Philipines swear to Netflix exactly because it has high(ish) quality local programming and American and Korean shows. They also have a lot of Bollywood outside western markets (so does Amazon) and these are things that seem completely overlooked on HBO/Disney/Apple. So yes, if you’re into American content, Netflix is a so-so contender, but internationally it just seems way stronger to me than any other (unless you mainly consume local content)
matteoraso 3y ago
From a post that was recently posted here[0]: >While we're here, I just want to rant about Netflix, which is an odd case of starting off with a really good recommendation algorithm and then making it worse on purpose. Once upon a time, there was the Netflix prize, which granted $1 million to the best team that could predict people's movie ratings, based on their past ratings, with better accuracy than Netflix could themselves. (This not-so-shockingly resulted in a privacy fiasco when it turned out you could de-anonymize the data set that they publicly released, oops. Well, that's what you get when you long-term store people's personal information in a database.) Netflix believed their business depended on a good recommendation algorithm. It was already pretty good: I remember using Netflix around 10 years ago and getting several recommendations for things I would never have discovered, but which I turned out to like. That hasn't happened to me on Netflix in a long, long time. As the story goes, once upon a time Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. DVD-by-mail is really slow, so it was absolutely essential that at least one of this week's DVDs was good enough to entertain you for your Friday night movie. Too many Fridays with only bad movies, and you'd surely unsubscribe. A good recommendation system was key. (I guess there was also some interesting math around trying to make sure to rent out as much of the inventory as possible each week, since having a zillion copies of the most recent blockbuster, which would be popular this month and then die out next month, was not really viable.) Eventually though, Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less: just stop watching and switch to a new movie. Moreover, it was perfectly fine if everyone watched the same blockbuster. In fact, it was better, because they could cache it at your ISP and caches always work better if people are boring and average. Worse, as the story goes, Netflix noticed a pattern: the more hours people watch, the less likely they are to cancel. (This makes sense: the more hours you spend on Netflix, the more you feel like you "need" it.) And with new people trying the service at a fixed or proportional rate, higher retention translates directly to faster growth. When I heard this was also when I learned the word "satisficing," which essentially means searching through sludge not for the best option, but for a good enough option. Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business. The thing is, you don't need a risky, privacy-invading profile to recommend a mainstream movie. Mainstream movies are specially designed to be inoffensive to just about everyone. My Netflix recommendations screen is no longer "Recommended for you," it's "New Releases," and then "Trending Now," and "Watch it again." As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away. Some very expensive A/B testers determined that this is what makes me watch the most hours of mindless TV. Their revenues keep going up. And they don't even need to invade my privacy to do it. Who am I to say they're wrong? Netflix may be doing well in the sense that they have lots of revenue, but they're doing awful in justifying why they're worth the cost. I'm convinced that Netflix has less than 200 offerings in total, at least here in Canada. Most of those are going to be things that I would never want to watch, leaving me with 50 offerings. That's just not enough to justify using the service for more than a year, and I think a lot of people are starting to catch on to the fact that Netflix isn't what it used to be. [0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Where are we going to be left as far as FAANG...or MANGA..or whatever we're at... if Netflix which has lost a lot of relevancy in that acronym and say....F/Meta also.....drop out. I'd say Microsoft becomes the M... So it's.... AGAM....or gosh, MAGA? haha
- croes 3y ago
  G-MAFIA BAT https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/03/big-nine-g-mafia-bat/ https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/03/big-nine-g-m...

31 points by pg_1234 3y ago

sen 3y ago

Pretty much everyone I know (admittedly mostly techies) have gone back to pirating. It’s ridiculous how many streaming services you need, and how much each costs, to get access to the popular shows of the season. It doesn’t matter if I use Apple Music and my friend uses Spotify, we can both listen to the same new albums, but we can’t watch shows each other recommend because we regularly have (now “had”) different video streaming services.

reportgunner 3y ago
Paradoxically netflix et al made pirating even better because now we don't have to wait for the DVD release to get good video and audio quality.
stackedinserter 3y ago
Also, I'm in full control of what I downloaded ("pirated" in disneyspeak). That Peppa.pig.2003.eng.subs.m0tiv8.mkv is mine, won't disappear from my catalog, and I can push it to children's iPad before flight or share with a friend.
lethologica 3y ago
Yep, I certainly have. With just two trackers I’ve got access to pretty much every TV show and movie in existence.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
My experience has been different. While I have myself gone back a bit I really do not see that happening in my circle. You see, most of the people I knew didn't really want or need specific or high quality content - I reckon they only needed something they could fix their eyes to and spend hours and days. Netlix and the ilk gives them that and probably they are happy just doing that.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  My normie male/coupled friends are mostly doing churn and burn. Disney for The Bear, churn, HBO for Succession, churn, repeat. The actual quality shows are few and far between so it has to be done if you aren't pirating. For my women friends though, Netflix just has them dialed for reality stuff. Selling Sunset, Below Deck, Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, Queer Eye. Educated women with serious jobs, they love to escape with this stuff, IME.
l72 3y ago
I have done this too. I set up a jellyfin, and re-ripped all my old dvds and blu-rays. I am also renting and ripping blu-rays from my library a lot too. It isn't just the lack of content, content suddenly being removed, or even the expense and hassle of dealing with 5+ different services; it is that the overall experience has really degraded. I find jellyfin with the content I want to be a superior experience in every single way. IF content providers would offer a digital version DRM free, I would purchase a ton of TV shows and movies directly.

autoexec 3y ago

Netflix has only offered less and less yet they keep charging more and more. Their service is increasingly annoying to use and they refuse to address complaints users have had since the streaming service started (for example, the lack of an A-Z listing of all titles, or the countless times the same shows are repeated across the totally random and ever-changing categories they force on us. Now Netflix seems to be perfectly happy to price out their poorer customers (or sell them out to advertisers) so long as enough people are still willing to pay to get screwed over and over again. I've had an account from their early days mailing DVDs, and I loved supporting them when they were ad free, but at this point if it weren't for the others who still depend on my account, I'd have canceled already.

racked 3y ago
I wish Netflix had a way to filter out Netflix Originals, because 90% of the time, they are just 'filler', stretched-out garbage.
- bippihippi1 3y ago
  if the best way to find stuff on a platform is google + title search, something ain't right
akomtu 3y ago
Netflix doesn't have many movies and any reasonable search interface would reveal this.
- mainpassathome 3y ago
  I don’t use streaming services, so i might be misunderstanding: why is A-Z listing and Originals filtering needed? is new content discovery actually a major use of netflix? i was under the impression most people would just search for what they want
  - autoexec 3y ago
    You can search, but that defeats the entire purpose of browsing. I can't know about everything there is out there. Every once in a while I'll go into search and enter random three letter combinations like "Sta", "Tho", "Mon" etc. When I do, I often find things in the search results that I add to my list and would have done sooner, except I never knew they existed because netflix refused to show them to me. I've also been to other people's houses and seen how different the things netflix shows them are. It seems like all netflix ever shows you is what they want you to see. My guess is that they intentionally hide certain older content to try and drive viewers to newer content so that they can collect metrics. Newer things end up being pushed over and over again in category after category. I'm not interested in giving them metrics showing how well people like whatever their newest releases are though. I want to watch whatever I want to watch whenever I want to watch it. That was the promise of streaming that netflix never quite delivered on, but for a little while it was pretty close. Now it seems like netflix wants to turn into cable TV. They don't even always release entire seasons to let you binge anymore (they can control the conversation on social media and keep the ad hype up longer if they don't give users the freedom to watch shows on their own schedule) It really sucks to see so clearly what cable TV always should have been, to come so close to having that, and then have it slowly killed off in front of you.

jerojero 3y ago

I'm pretty happy with my jellyfin solution. It's not perfect, but I have a pretty good workflow that works well for me. Anime support could be a bit better. But oh well.

l72 3y ago
It is interesting that even some of my non-technical (capable, but not tech-geeks) have started to move to jellyfin or plex. My age group is 35-45, so it isn't like we are broke college students that need to pirate movies, but we've just gotten fed up with how terrible everything has become.

crossroadsguy 3y ago

Netflix is an interesting example of a substandard product becoming mainstream just because of some kind of a social momentum (it certainly is not the right term; so whatever that is called) it received. I don't know who is the target audience. I do see younger generations i.e mine - the 30s and 20s considering this as some sort of entertainment utility and they must have a connection err subscription. It has probably the most insipid content and what many even fail to notice and hence do not acknowledge that it has probably one of the shallow most catalogues, yes even after including its really pathetic quality N-formula content. It is so user hostile and their intentional dark-pattern interface is not the only problem and yet apparently they are doing well. The interface is literally an ad dashboard. Still people spend more and more time on there Why is that? I don't even think it's like Apple's growth who actually do few things right and offer better hardware and a streamline non-all-over-your-face software. So what is Netflix's secret? Just being the first game in the town? Or good old addiction? Or both, or all of it little by little?

wodenokoto 3y ago
I mean if you think marvel is the high end of quality then I guess Disney is better. I find the variety of Netflix programs much more interesting than Disney. But that only explains their global strength (where normal user wants to see Korean and local dramas)
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  That's funny because I don't think Netflix is that different from Disney in terms of content and preventing their creators from going outside the box.
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    Maybe not for American/western content. I think they have some of the best anime and their Korean dramas are totally a guilty pleasure of mine. But more to my point, many of my friends from places like Thailand or Philipines swear to Netflix exactly because it has high(ish) quality local programming and American and Korean shows. They also have a lot of Bollywood outside western markets (so does Amazon) and these are things that seem completely overlooked on HBO/Disney/Apple. So yes, if you’re into American content, Netflix is a so-so contender, but internationally it just seems way stronger to me than any other (unless you mainly consume local content)

matteoraso 3y ago

From a post that was recently posted here[0]: >While we're here, I just want to rant about Netflix, which is an odd case of starting off with a really good recommendation algorithm and then making it worse on purpose. Once upon a time, there was the Netflix prize, which granted $1 million to the best team that could predict people's movie ratings, based on their past ratings, with better accuracy than Netflix could themselves. (This not-so-shockingly resulted in a privacy fiasco when it turned out you could de-anonymize the data set that they publicly released, oops. Well, that's what you get when you long-term store people's personal information in a database.) Netflix believed their business depended on a good recommendation algorithm. It was already pretty good: I remember using Netflix around 10 years ago and getting several recommendations for things I would never have discovered, but which I turned out to like. That hasn't happened to me on Netflix in a long, long time. As the story goes, once upon a time Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. DVD-by-mail is really slow, so it was absolutely essential that at least one of this week's DVDs was good enough to entertain you for your Friday night movie. Too many Fridays with only bad movies, and you'd surely unsubscribe. A good recommendation system was key. (I guess there was also some interesting math around trying to make sure to rent out as much of the inventory as possible each week, since having a zillion copies of the most recent blockbuster, which would be popular this month and then die out next month, was not really viable.) Eventually though, Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less: just stop watching and switch to a new movie. Moreover, it was perfectly fine if everyone watched the same blockbuster. In fact, it was better, because they could cache it at your ISP and caches always work better if people are boring and average. Worse, as the story goes, Netflix noticed a pattern: the more hours people watch, the less likely they are to cancel. (This makes sense: the more hours you spend on Netflix, the more you feel like you "need" it.) And with new people trying the service at a fixed or proportional rate, higher retention translates directly to faster growth. When I heard this was also when I learned the word "satisficing," which essentially means searching through sludge not for the best option, but for a good enough option. Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business. The thing is, you don't need a risky, privacy-invading profile to recommend a mainstream movie. Mainstream movies are specially designed to be inoffensive to just about everyone. My Netflix recommendations screen is no longer "Recommended for you," it's "New Releases," and then "Trending Now," and "Watch it again." As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away. Some very expensive A/B testers determined that this is what makes me watch the most hours of mindless TV. Their revenues keep going up. And they don't even need to invade my privacy to do it. Who am I to say they're wrong? Netflix may be doing well in the sense that they have lots of revenue, but they're doing awful in justifying why they're worth the cost. I'm convinced that Netflix has less than 200 offerings in total, at least here in Canada. Most of those are going to be things that I would never want to watch, leaving me with 50 offerings. That's just not enough to justify using the service for more than a year, and I think a lot of people are starting to catch on to the fact that Netflix isn't what it used to be. [0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Where are we going to be left as far as FAANG...or MANGA..or whatever we're at... if Netflix which has lost a lot of relevancy in that acronym and say....F/Meta also.....drop out. I'd say Microsoft becomes the M... So it's.... AGAM....or gosh, MAGA? haha

croes 3y ago
G-MAFIA BAT https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/03/big-nine-g-mafia-bat/ https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/03/big-nine-g-m...