I don't know what it's like in the States but there is significantly less high quality stuff on there today than there was 5 years ago - most BBC and Channel 4 stuff has been pulled in the UK for e.g. and is free anyway via BBC iPlayer and All4. There are occasional diamonds among the sea of Netflix produced stuff but much of it is awful.
Netflix...I did turn on the Johnny Manziel thing in the background a while back. That was it. They've had nothing that has interested anyone in the household.
With the content dearth that is going to be ahead given the strike, it's probably time for a lot of people to cancel their Netflix, having nothing at all to do with their crackdown. The crackdown if anything is reminding people that they're paying for a service they seldom use.
The subscriber pays a flat rate for unlimited choice within the catalog. They're not paying for the media they think they like the most. While technically the streamer is on the hook for this, they have competing optimization criteria - churn, hours viewed, etc.
The platform pours money into a lot of experiments. Platforms optimize for revenue and retention, get signals based on hours viewed, etc., yet none of this directly maps to satisfaction. Viewers will often mindlessly play stuff in the background. Expensive content reduces the number of cheap experiments that can be run. Weird stuff is long tail.
The old model of paying for what we think we'll enjoy was a better match that resulted in much higher quality film and prestige television.
I'd pay for House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. I'd probably pay $50 - $100 for each good TV show. I don't want the rest of it.
In my ideal world I pay creators directly with an upfront deposit. If I watch certain percentages of the show or film, they get a percentage of that deposit. I'd gladly pay a lot more for content this way.
New content should be paid for directly, à la carte. Old content should be streamed.
I don't know what it is about these platforms but most people seem to have an odd take on their value - so much that most of the comments in threads like these are people complaining about "there isn't anything good anymore". But each platform has thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours of programming. So when someone complains about their choices, I have a sneaking suspicion that they just aren't looking and are basing their views on the heavily marketed major productions, which only account for a handful of shows or movies each year.
While others complain about cost, or having too many choices, I am quite pleased with the current offerings. I don't have every platform, but the ones I do are more than plenty. I'm worried that it's all gonna go back to a cable-like model in the future with platforms combining and charging $100+ for a super platform.
People just don't know how to enjoy it when something is good.
P.s. you can usually buy episodes of a show on Google or Amazon or elsewhere.. watch an episode at a time and only buy the next one if you like what you see. You'll quickly find that model is much more costly to the consumer.
Plus, their recommendation algorithm turned into garbage a while ago. It suggests a bunch of stuff I sometimes really regret watching.
Which I find endlessly annoying. Already paying for the service, being required to buy ad hoc almost everything I want to watch is a source of repeated annoyance. Our response is to just say "Oh forget this, screw Prime", exit and switch to looking for something on Netflix, PBS, or whatever.
If it was the exception for new hot content, that'd be fine. But it seems to be the rule for the majority of content, even if it's a decade old. So, we hardly go there anymore.
P.S. I may be biased because I just watch Channel 4...
Maybe there's another explanation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66472938
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katieheaney/facebook-kn...
I also remember reading on HN that the system was simplified even if the Netflix Prize [1] competition was supposed to make it better.
So yeah, I dont know if it's because I'm not the target demographic but I haven't missed it since I canceled 1 year ago or so.
Netflix revenue, net income, EPS, operating income, cash on hand and share price are all up quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. They added 6M subscribers last quarter while the password crackdown was in full swing. They are doing just fine.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...
In Canada at least Netflix's library seems to have been gutted with a ton of their non-original content moving to Prime, Disney+, etc. And even a bunch of their own formerly-exclusive content is now available for free on services like Tubi.
(*) In Australia (subscribers are up by 17M globally over roughly the same time period)
(*) For unclear reasons (not necessarily due to the password-sharing crackdown - and these are year-on-year growth numbers while the account sharing change only happened a few months ago)
We all have an easy way to summarize articles but I’m excited for the possibility of ask chat gpt to summarize all articles on Forbes about Netflix, for example. My hunch is chat gpt would describe Forbes’ Netflix coverage as vague or ambiguous.
“Subscription lockdown has been good and bad.”
If I didn’t have a highly subsidized subscription through T-Mobile (a $14.95 discount), I would definitely cancel it.
AppleTV has mostly quality programs. Even ones I don’t personally care for, I can see the appeal of them.
Disney has Marvel and Star Wars.
Paramount has Star Trek and a few other decent shows and movies.
Even Peacock gets a few good movies and day after filler TV from NBC.
Not to mention that both Peacock and Paramount have live TV from the local NBC and CBS affiliates.
We still get HBO Max free from their former deal with AT&T. I’m not sure I will keep it after we sell our house and cancel AT&T.
Of course we get PrimeVideo for free.
Anybody from Netflix please fix
