6 ms·

It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was

by silisili 11mo ago

It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was glad to. Fast forward a while, and now Netflix seems to be an undiscoverable mess of old and foreign content while charging twice as much. Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. And now, more than ever, the high seas seem so enticing again. I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.

mft_ 11mo ago
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented Greed, “growth”, “shareholder value” —> enshittification?
- gabrielgio 11mo ago
  And in this case, the enshittification of the whole streaming industry. In the same fashion as USA's "publisher can't own a venue", publisher shouldn't be allowed to own a stream service as well.
chii 11mo ago
> how they ruined the opportunity presented netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service. I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content). Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?
- bambax 11mo ago
  Yes there should be something like a "mechanical license". Content owners would set their own price but it would be the same for everyone and they shouldn't have the power to pick their licensees.
  - mcny 11mo ago
    The idea of a mechanical license sounds perfect. Sorry to go off a tangent but my mind immediately went to healthcare as I have never heard of a mechanical license before. can the same idea be applied to healthcare? for example, hospitals and doctors can set their own rates but these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
    - dpark 11mo ago
      > these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone. The problem with this is that it takes away only half of the negotiation. Doctors are now obliged to charge $X consistently but insurance is not obliged to pay it. So the negotiation process seems broken, and seems like it would cause a lot of bad faith negotiations from the insurers. “Eh, we’ll pay you minimum wage. Don’t like it? We’ll just wait until someone else finds your actual minimum and then you can pay us that.” It’s also not clear what happens if Doctor A charges 10% more than Doctor B at the same medical facility. If you see Doctor A, can your insurance decline that even though they would have paid Doctor B’s rate? Of course the current process is broken too.
  - mcintyre1994 11mo ago
    Wouldn’t Disney just set an insanely high license fee in this case though? If they’re just paying it to themselves then they can make it high enough that nobody else can justify paying it.
    - rusk 11mo ago
sixhobbits 11mo ago
The only way to make money from business is by bundling or unbundling. Netflix made money by bundling, now others are making money by unbundling. We'll get another netflix era in the next decade or so
bolobo 11mo ago
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition. I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful. They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.
freetime2 11mo ago
I think I actually enjoyed Netflix more when they used to send DVDs in the mail. The library of movies felt much more complete, and getting stuff in the mail is fun. And it’s probably a healthier way to watch than binging 3 seasons of some mediocre show in a weekend just to see how it ends.
- turnsout 11mo ago
  Yeah, I think younger people don't realize how limiting Netflix's library is today. They used to have absolutely everything. If it was released on DVD, they had it. Now if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I need to consult an aggregator [0] to figure out where it's streaming. As a nerd, I was so excited about the early days of streaming, as it felt like the inevitable path for a company like Netflix. Now though, I'm way past subscription fatigue. I've seen movies I "purchased" on iTunes be silently swapped out for other versions as the licensing changed. So I recently bought a Blu-ray player for the first time, and I'm assembling a library of plastic discs. This might be the last physical media format for video, so I want to support it and grab some of these titles while they're available. [0]: https://www.justwatch.com https://www.justwatch.com
jasode 11mo ago
>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue. Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform." Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform. E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's. Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own. To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.
anal_reactor 11mo ago
First you attract customers by offering (potentially unsustainably) good deals. Then you become the default option. Then you extract money from customers by enshittifying your service. Most famous digital services follow this path.
gwd 11mo ago
There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio. What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35% [EDIT and even people who won't, will still pay one £20 subscription for 35% of the content]; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction. EDIT: And as someone else has pointed out, this is not something that any Netflix -- or any potential replacement -- can unilaterally do something about. In fact it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation: If MGM and Universal Studios and Paramount and WB all license their content to Netflix (under the £20 umbrella), and Disney doesn't, then Disney gets to keep a massive amount of money for themselves, while the other rights-owners have to divide up the rest. It only takes one or two "defectors" to basically force everyone to do the same thing.
- jbstack 11mo ago
  Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content. I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work. This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM. All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.
bji9jhff 11mo ago
Being put in contact with foreign contents? Disgusting! /s More seriously, before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has issues? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.
- troupo 11mo ago
  > before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. The only reason Netflix brought them in is because the big copyright holders (Disney etc.) pulled most of their content from Netflix. There were a few years when Netflix was a desert. So, silver lining to every cloud I guess :)
- watwut 11mo ago
  Yeah, same here. Foreign content is good thing about Netflix, the thing I enjoyed the most when I randomly run into it. Sure, novelty will wear off after a while, but at least it is not the same thing over and over and over.
jlengrand 11mo ago
And worse, when you search they KNOW what you want to watch and will show you EVERYTHING they have that is NOT what you want. Infuriating, I reverted back to the old ways a year back and haven't regretted it. Same with Spotify, who has a solid catalog that I was happy to pay for. Now I pay double, for podcasts, shows, and now even freaking videos that I have never wanted or asked for and have no choice to not take. And now they also the audacity to show me ads on PAID PLANS. They don't deserve our money, customer focus is long gone.
- matips 11mo ago
  I am thinking of cancelling my Spotify Premium subscription because they introduce extra paid channels on top on paid Premium subscription.
  - jlengrand 11mo ago
    Really? Darn, that is such BS. I was already looking out to be fair, only reason I'm still there is because of my family plan and older parents who will struggle to switch. That being said, I don't mind additional plans to be fair. Let me pay for what I use, not what you force down my throat. What I mind is the constant enshittification.
2WSSd-JzVM 11mo ago
At the very beginning Netflix was able to get licences for very cheap, as owners didn't think of it as serious service and it was not impacting their sales on other channels. That isn't going to happen again.
matips 11mo ago
Corporations care primarily about their position relative to other corporations; you and piracy is not concerns for them. Disney, Warner Bross and similar media corporations fears monopoly of Netflix. You cannot harm them thru piracy, Netflix can.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >you and piracy is not concerns for them. Sure it does. It's just that piracy is still pretty low right now compared to 20 years ago. Most people are boiling in the pot still. It'll work or a while, until the frog evaporates. Then it'll all fall apart quickly.
benterix 11mo ago
> old and foreign content I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts). What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it. Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.
herunan 11mo ago
It was inevitable. Netflix rose thanks to studios and distributors selling them rights to content for peanuts. Streaming wasn’t taken seriously as it wasn’t a main source of revenue. Some years later and it’s a completely different story. Demand for streaming sky-rocketed, digital rights value increased and now every studio wants to create their own walled gardens.
throw0101c 11mo ago
> Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. I wonder how hard—technically/legally, not 'politically'—it would be to create a 'neutral' streaming service where all the major studios and IP holders could become a part of as a part of a co-op (?). After costs are taken care of, the holder of the IP would get the leftover profits proportional to the number of minutes their content was viewed in any given pay period.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
greed, as always. It's an interesting Tragedy of the Commons. Though "commons" is a weird word to use for private corporations. They could have charged $50 a month if everything were truly in one place and always available. Instead they had to cut here and there to dodge residuals. Then cut more here and there to optimize slop over prestige, then cut more here and there to try and save money on licenses, then cut more here and there to try and become the middleman themselves. the cut more here and there to "maximize engagement" and compete with an entirely different business model and medium. Ultimately the shareholders ruin everything with their short term mentality of companies. They keep rewarding hype over substance and overall health. And of course the consumers suffer in teh end.
timonofathens 11mo ago
[dead]

mft_ 11mo ago

> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented Greed, “growth”, “shareholder value” —> enshittification?

gabrielgio 11mo ago
And in this case, the enshittification of the whole streaming industry. In the same fashion as USA's "publisher can't own a venue", publisher shouldn't be allowed to own a stream service as well.

chii 11mo ago

> how they ruined the opportunity presented netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service. I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content). Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?

bambax 11mo ago
Yes there should be something like a "mechanical license". Content owners would set their own price but it would be the same for everyone and they shouldn't have the power to pick their licensees.
- mcny 11mo ago
  The idea of a mechanical license sounds perfect. Sorry to go off a tangent but my mind immediately went to healthcare as I have never heard of a mechanical license before. can the same idea be applied to healthcare? for example, hospitals and doctors can set their own rates but these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
  - dpark 11mo ago
    > these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone. The problem with this is that it takes away only half of the negotiation. Doctors are now obliged to charge $X consistently but insurance is not obliged to pay it. So the negotiation process seems broken, and seems like it would cause a lot of bad faith negotiations from the insurers. “Eh, we’ll pay you minimum wage. Don’t like it? We’ll just wait until someone else finds your actual minimum and then you can pay us that.” It’s also not clear what happens if Doctor A charges 10% more than Doctor B at the same medical facility. If you see Doctor A, can your insurance decline that even though they would have paid Doctor B’s rate? Of course the current process is broken too.
- mcintyre1994 11mo ago
  Wouldn’t Disney just set an insanely high license fee in this case though? If they’re just paying it to themselves then they can make it high enough that nobody else can justify paying it.
  - rusk 11mo ago

sixhobbits 11mo ago

The only way to make money from business is by bundling or unbundling. Netflix made money by bundling, now others are making money by unbundling. We'll get another netflix era in the next decade or so

bolobo 11mo ago

> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition. I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful. They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.

freetime2 11mo ago

I think I actually enjoyed Netflix more when they used to send DVDs in the mail. The library of movies felt much more complete, and getting stuff in the mail is fun. And it’s probably a healthier way to watch than binging 3 seasons of some mediocre show in a weekend just to see how it ends.

turnsout 11mo ago
Yeah, I think younger people don't realize how limiting Netflix's library is today. They used to have absolutely everything. If it was released on DVD, they had it. Now if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I need to consult an aggregator [0] to figure out where it's streaming. As a nerd, I was so excited about the early days of streaming, as it felt like the inevitable path for a company like Netflix. Now though, I'm way past subscription fatigue. I've seen movies I "purchased" on iTunes be silently swapped out for other versions as the licensing changed. So I recently bought a Blu-ray player for the first time, and I'm assembling a library of plastic discs. This might be the last physical media format for video, so I want to support it and grab some of these titles while they're available. [0]: https://www.justwatch.com https://www.justwatch.com

jasode 11mo ago

>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue. Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform." Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform. E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's. Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own. To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.

anal_reactor 11mo ago

First you attract customers by offering (potentially unsustainably) good deals. Then you become the default option. Then you extract money from customers by enshittifying your service. Most famous digital services follow this path.

gwd 11mo ago

There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio. What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35% [EDIT and even people who won't, will still pay one £20 subscription for 35% of the content]; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction. EDIT: And as someone else has pointed out, this is not something that any Netflix -- or any potential replacement -- can unilaterally do something about. In fact it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation: If MGM and Universal Studios and Paramount and WB all license their content to Netflix (under the £20 umbrella), and Disney doesn't, then Disney gets to keep a massive amount of money for themselves, while the other rights-owners have to divide up the rest. It only takes one or two "defectors" to basically force everyone to do the same thing.

jbstack 11mo ago
Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content. I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work. This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM. All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.

bji9jhff 11mo ago

Being put in contact with foreign contents? Disgusting! /s More seriously, before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has issues? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.

troupo 11mo ago
> before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. The only reason Netflix brought them in is because the big copyright holders (Disney etc.) pulled most of their content from Netflix. There were a few years when Netflix was a desert. So, silver lining to every cloud I guess :)
watwut 11mo ago
Yeah, same here. Foreign content is good thing about Netflix, the thing I enjoyed the most when I randomly run into it. Sure, novelty will wear off after a while, but at least it is not the same thing over and over and over.

jlengrand 11mo ago

And worse, when you search they KNOW what you want to watch and will show you EVERYTHING they have that is NOT what you want. Infuriating, I reverted back to the old ways a year back and haven't regretted it. Same with Spotify, who has a solid catalog that I was happy to pay for. Now I pay double, for podcasts, shows, and now even freaking videos that I have never wanted or asked for and have no choice to not take. And now they also the audacity to show me ads on PAID PLANS. They don't deserve our money, customer focus is long gone.

matips 11mo ago
I am thinking of cancelling my Spotify Premium subscription because they introduce extra paid channels on top on paid Premium subscription.
- jlengrand 11mo ago
  Really? Darn, that is such BS. I was already looking out to be fair, only reason I'm still there is because of my family plan and older parents who will struggle to switch. That being said, I don't mind additional plans to be fair. Let me pay for what I use, not what you force down my throat. What I mind is the constant enshittification.

2WSSd-JzVM 11mo ago

At the very beginning Netflix was able to get licences for very cheap, as owners didn't think of it as serious service and it was not impacting their sales on other channels. That isn't going to happen again.

matips 11mo ago

Corporations care primarily about their position relative to other corporations; you and piracy is not concerns for them. Disney, Warner Bross and similar media corporations fears monopoly of Netflix. You cannot harm them thru piracy, Netflix can.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>you and piracy is not concerns for them. Sure it does. It's just that piracy is still pretty low right now compared to 20 years ago. Most people are boiling in the pot still. It'll work or a while, until the frog evaporates. Then it'll all fall apart quickly.

benterix 11mo ago

> old and foreign content I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts). What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it. Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.

herunan 11mo ago

It was inevitable. Netflix rose thanks to studios and distributors selling them rights to content for peanuts. Streaming wasn’t taken seriously as it wasn’t a main source of revenue. Some years later and it’s a completely different story. Demand for streaming sky-rocketed, digital rights value increased and now every studio wants to create their own walled gardens.

throw0101c 11mo ago

> Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. I wonder how hard—technically/legally, not 'politically'—it would be to create a 'neutral' streaming service where all the major studios and IP holders could become a part of as a part of a co-op (?). After costs are taken care of, the holder of the IP would get the leftover profits proportional to the number of minutes their content was viewed in any given pay period.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago

greed, as always. It's an interesting Tragedy of the Commons. Though "commons" is a weird word to use for private corporations. They could have charged $50 a month if everything were truly in one place and always available. Instead they had to cut here and there to dodge residuals. Then cut more here and there to optimize slop over prestige, then cut more here and there to try and save money on licenses, then cut more here and there to try and become the middleman themselves. the cut more here and there to "maximize engagement" and compete with an entirely different business model and medium. Ultimately the shareholders ruin everything with their short term mentality of companies. They keep rewarding hype over substance and overall health. And of course the consumers suffer in teh end.

timonofathens 11mo ago

[dead]