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Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by
by wand3r 3y ago
Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by 4. Then they doubled the price. So now for a worse discovery experience you are effectively paying 8x the price.
- readthenotes1 3y agoThere is a finite but for viewing purposes infinite amount of content. Goodness, there are 13 seasons of Gunsmoke on paramount+.
- jayd16 3y agoWhy do you say it's a fixed amount of content? Finite, sure, but it's not fixed.
- kiba 3y agoOnce you see a detective show, you basically seen 80% of all detective shows. That's why it seems that there can be nothing to watch, because 80% is basically a rehash, just with different characters and slightly different plots.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoYeah, you're right, I watched one season of Law and Order and thought "Great, I've seen 80% of all detective shows, no need to watch any more." /s
- codetrotter 3y agoI think it comes down to personal taste. I could likewise see someone say that 80% of all soccer matches are the same. That once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And then on the opposite end you have people enjoying soccer who will be happy to tell you about the nuances between different matches, different players, different teams, etc.
- gpspake 3y agoThat's actually a pretty good analogy.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoIsn't the issue there that some people basically just don't like soccer so they can't appreciate the differences? I would put myself in that camp - watching soccer just doesn't appeal to me that much, so it all kind of seems the same. But I can very much appreciate the differences to people that enjoy watching the sport, and I think this could be said about nearly any endeavor.
- codetrotter 3y ago> Isn't the issue there that some people basically just don't like soccer so they can't appreciate the differences? Yep, hence the first sentence of my comment: “I think it comes down to personal taste.” :D
- harimau777 3y agoI think that soccer has a problem where the goalies are so effective that the game often comes down to attempting to shoot on the goal as many times as possible in the hope that eventually the goalie makes a mistake. Things are made worse by the fact that when the goalie gets the ball they generally throw it most of the way down the field; effectively resetting the state of the gameplay. As a result, any given segment of the game is not particularly relevant to the outcome; what's relevant is basically the overall time of possession/goal attempts across the various segments of the game. Compare that to something like football where the outcome of a given play depends much more overtly on the play the QB decides to run, the skills of the players, how the strengths & weaknesses of the two teams match up, etc. In addition, there's a greater degree to which the plays in a possession build upon each other in order to contribute or take away from a team's ability to score during that possession.
- cool_dude85 3y agoI dont have stats on hand but I promise you a relatively small proportion of goals are scored on keeper errors, even if you expand the category to "shouldn't be beaten from that angle" type stuff instead of an explicit error. I suspect you do not watch much soccer.
- coryrc 3y agoIf you've seen one episode of Law & Order or House you've seen every episode in the series.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoAnd at some point, you'll feed all that stuff into GPT-(N+1) and get as many new shows as you want.
- wddkcs 3y agoThat will be too much work, most will subscribe to a few curators with matching taste that fulfill all your content needs. Can we eventually do away with other people entirely? Idk
- gumby 3y agoto make streaming economically viable there will need to be Gpt-x that watches the content too.
- r00fus 3y agoYou don't understand how people (especially kids) work.
- labster 3y agoHonestly detective fiction is perhaps the worst format you could give for your example, because the structure of the story allows you to essentially tell a different short story with different characters every time. Moody Twin Peaks has almost nothing in common with the goofball Psych (except the one tribute episode). Inspector Lewis plots are complex and intellectual, while Castle is fluffy and predictable. Recipes for Love and Murder, Brokenwood, Midsomer Murders, and Murdoch Mysteries are more about life among the varied settings than the murders; the murders give us an excuse to explore the characters around them. Though maybe the most important point of that is that watching TV from different countries will make your viewing more interesting.
- the_af 3y agoAgreed. Police fiction is a good format. You can vary it by focusing on a realistic procedural, or the mystery, or ditch the mystery and just focus on characters. And police shows vary a lot by country; shows from the US, the UK or Norway will be wildly different.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoSo you must like detective fiction, eh? You’ve won me over and to your point you can have a Fr. Brown (1950s Catholic priest detective) and a Dexter (blood splatter analysis turned serial killer). Now of course the basic premise is always the same good (but conflicted) guy sees bad thing done, investigates, finds bad guys and reconciles one small aspect of world and maybe one small aspect of self discovery. Heck, most shows have this arc now that I think about it from Sherlock to dr house to those criminal lawyer/police shows.
- jprete 3y agoNit: Basically all stories have a form like that. (I _think_ detective stories specifically choose for the protagonist to want societally-sanctioned retribution. The protagonist then has to publicly demonstrate that the antagonist deserves retribution, rather than take retribution on their own. And the stories also assume that society can and will inflict retribution on the antagonist once the society's rules are satisfied.)
- gumby 3y agoThere was a show I watched every episode of, not because I particularly liked it but it starred one particular actor that I really wanted to watch. I'm rather embarrassed to admit this, but there it is.
- the_af 3y agoWhy embarrassing? I also do this on occasion. Sometimes I acknowledge the show isn't very good but I really like the actor or actress.
- LTL_FTC 3y agoWas the show Gumby? Haha sorry, I had to!
- gumby 3y agoNo need to apologise! TTTT I have never seen that show though I know what the character looks like. Nowadays I suppose it's on youtube but I don't even care.
- nl 3y agoOnce you've read one HN comment you've basically read 80% of all comments.
- labster 3y agoDoes your comment scale? And is it written in a memory-safe language?
- wand3r 3y agoWell, Netflix was licensing a lot of the content that HBO and Disney were making. Of course more content is now being made but between covid and the writers strike as indicated in the article, there certainly isn't 4X as much content being made. Apple is making content that definitely wouldnt have existed but again, as budgets get constrained as these services seek profitability there really isn't an explosion of new content. I am only a casual consumer of media, so not an expert.
- fbdab103 3y agoHowever, I doubt just because there are 4x streaming platforms there are suddenly 4x studios capable of producing even a low budget show. Knowing nothing of media production, but I assume there are a large number of technical roles which are advisable if trying to produce mainstream content.
- forrestthewoods 3y agoThe number of scripted shows tripled from 2009 to 2022. From 210 to 599. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-2022-count-599-scripted-shows-1235298139/# https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-2022-co...!
- jprete 3y agoThis was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3. So it’s hard for me to give that statistic any weight.
- kaibee 3y ago> This was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3. This isn't the only reason I stopped watching shows, but its certainly a contributing factor. Kinda gets old seeing some cool first season setup a bunch of interesting story arcs, great show, etc and then cancelled.
- greiskul 3y agoYeah, if Netflix wants to do short shows, they should follow the British model of TV series. Short series but with a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Not this bunch of half started stories that just stop.
- starttoaster 3y ago
- jwrallie 3y agoDoes anyone has experience with cancelling and switching services periodically so that you can access all the content, but not at the same time?
- chunkymilk 3y agoI don't but know folks who do. They keep track of things they want to watch until they get to the point where subscribing for a month makes sense then cancel at the end of the month. The hard part is keeping track of what you want to watch and what service it's on and whether it's still there when you want to watch.
- rubslopes 3y agojustwatch.com helps a lot with this. For each show, it tells you in which steaming service it is available. You can also track and wishlist everything.
- therealdrag0 3y agoI use Reelgood app/site for this.
- pests 3y agoThat sounds like a lot of work. I just subscribe every few months to each platform and see what they have new.
- alistairSH 3y agoI do this. Don’t track as closely as I should, but do periodically subscribe/unsubscribe from HBO, Peacock, and Netflix.
- bee_rider 3y agoThis is basically incompatible (or at least really difficult) with password sharing, but then the streaming companies are trying to erode that bit of their moat.
- 3y ago
- lathiat 3y agoI also enjoy every streaming service solving many technical problems the others have already solved. The most painful one for me right now is that Paramount+ has all their videos rendered with black bars top and bottom. So when I watch the latest Star Trek New Worlds and Star Trek Discovery on my 34" 1440p ultrawide, it literally has a black border all the way around the edge. Watching the same episode on Prime Video, it entirely fills my screen. I've reported this to them a couple times over a year and they haven't done anything about it. I imagine, most likely, this is possibly some kind of combination of compatability with some devices that need videos rendered at a certain resolution and not wanting to have too many different encodes of videos. But it is quite annoying not to be able to have the video fill my screen.
- wackget 3y agoIsn't that just a regular aspect ratio issue? If the content is filmed in 1:2.4 and you're trying to watch it on a 16:10 screen, it's always going to be letterboxed. In that case, if it doesn't look letterboxed then it's either stretched (deformed) or parts of the video are cropped/lost.
- scubbo 3y agoI think they're saying that the base content _itself_ has the letterbox "burned in", so that when they watch it on their TV (with an wider ratio) it has black borders on all four sides - at the sides because of ratio mismatch, and at the top and bottom because they're present in the base media.
- lathiat 3y agoThis is correct. There’s a total black border on all 4 sides. Because the black bars are rendered into the top and bottom of the video. On a 1080p display it full screens fine but with a display with the native wide screen aspect of the actual video I can’t actually have it fill the screen. But only on paramount+ This used to be a problem with VHS/DVDs when widescreen TVs first came out. TVs often (and maybe still do) had a mode to zoom in to cut them off.
- poink 3y agoThe thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely devalued the engineering of Netflix. It was "FAANG" for a reason. Viscerally, Netflix doesn't feel like it belongs alongside Google, but it did, because it was good. How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts. They had to have it all, and they played themselves.
- evilfred 3y agothis is factually incorrect. Disney bought a very successful sports streamer BAMTech to power Disney+
- poink 3y agoOh, Jesus! BAMTech! How could I have forgotten a member of the vaunted FAANGB
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- schneems 3y agoCan you tell me how that changes the story for you?
- evilfred 3y agoit discounts the entire parent post. BAMTech wasn't a shitty in-house development, it was a billion dollar buyout of the widely acclaimed MLB streamer.
- jrockway 3y agoDisney is also a huge tech company, and has been one for a while. They didn't buy a system for managing theme parks off the shelf.
- Aerbil313 3y agoI'm waiting for Freenet 2023 to reach 1.0, then someone can build our P2P piracy websites.