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.
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?
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly.
Now you could argue that some (much) older works are part of culture, and being exposed to that culture is necessary to function in society. But that then becomes an issue of how long copyright is necessary or reasonable. New works most certainly should be allowed to be monopolized by their creators - even if that means that some potential consumers are priced out of experiencing them.
You don't need to see every Disney movie. In fact, not seeing some of them will raise the bar to make better movies and will cause competition to emerge.
That sounds similar to the 1984 Cable Communications Act (where large cable operators were required to lease channels to others, separating content delivery from content creation) but in reverse! requiring content producers to licence content to distributors
Does the rights to Friends being traded around for the Nth time really benefit anyone?
Having the services fractured just ends up with everyone making less money. Both the streaming services and the IP holders
Its possible Disney just completely overestimates how much they can make on their own - but market forces should correct for that eventually. We aren't privy to the accounting that went in to the decisions. They currently are making some amount of money off of their streaming service. If Netflix could offer substantially more than that amount (and more customers this way), then I don't see why they wouldn't shut it down
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.
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.
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.
Netflix made money by bundling, now others are making money by unbundling.
We'll get another netflix era in the next decade or so
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Greed, “growth”, “shareholder value” —> enshittification?
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.
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.
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 :)
Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.
We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.
I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
It doesn't matter if you only listen to one artist the whole month, your money is still going to Taylor Swift.
There is no point in paying for streaming. Just pirate it and give your money to your favourite artists by buying merchandise or vinyl.
The ui is surprisingly good and polished (especially for the users who don't have to manage the library), video quality is amazing (with bd source files, who would have thought, but even DVD is often better than what modern streaming provides), and I can cache the movies on my phone when needed.
It works in ANY browser under ANY os, doesn't have ads, doesn't track me, and has all the content that I could ever desire (and wouldn't be able to find in any one service. In some cases, IN ANY service).
I can have any combination of a subtitle language and a voiceover.
Overall cost was only 500 for a used m1 air and a 16TB external storage.
It just looks to me that Plex (as a company) isn't really as reliable for self-hosting in the long run. So even though Plex has a better client support (for example, on xbox and playstation), I decided against it in favor of something that only I am in control of.
Initially intended to buy a license for Emby, but it doesn't support hardware transcoding on Apple Silicon yet, so Jellyfin it is then.
If you are happy with Plex, there's no reason to switch, IMO. If something goes wrong, it likely won't take you long to connect an alternative to the same media library
We had our power and internet go out for an extended amount of time earlier this year and shortly after I converted us over to Jellyfin vs Plex. Quite easy and painless setup. Mostly just recreated my libraries in Jellyfin and good to go.
Some of us have quite a few DVD/Blurays that we could rip. A lot of good stuff can be found in bargain bins and closing down sales (I got all the 9 series of the X-files for next to nothing). I am personally not bothering to rip them and download them instead, but I am not paying like 5 times for the same movie/tv series that I have already paid for.
A lot of films have been re-released now like on different media formats, with several different "cuts" which normally have maybe a few extra minutes of dialogue.
However, they keep raising prices every year.
In the past Netflix 4K cost like $22 and with family sharing it was about $5 - totally acceptable.
Now they cracked down on family sharing in different households and charge $37. No way.
Spotify: they increased prices again last month to $20 USD for the individual subscription. I bought a 12 month Colombian gift card for $40 USD and activated via VPN. Should this stop working, I will unsubscribe entirely.
YT Premium: it's at $23 per month now. Considering they aren't producing movies themselves, I consider that one the most egregious pricing out of all three. They can absolutely forget it - I am unwilling to pay any more than $10 for it.
However, what they're not clear about is how the Premium fees actually land on the YT channels which is an irksome point. Premium views generate more income than unpaid views, that much I know. But I don't know if my subscription fees will benefit only the channels I watch or whether I my subscription is helping the big, popular shows that I never watch.
It has a social media style layer on top of it to entice people to keep watching, as well as creators to keep creating horrifyingly misleading titles/thumbnails, it captured a massive user base without utilizing ads and then removed the training wheels and went full steam ahead on ads and added a paid model.
they added shorts which is all the things i mentioned on steroids, and its owned by google.
I'm a strong advocate for turning youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for. Imo, if something gets through all the noise and finds its way to me, its maybe worth watching, if its their social media style layer suggesting it to me? its a low % chance its worth watching a minute of.
I'm not willing to pay $20 a month for watching like an hour or two of mediocre homemade content Google did not even produce.
With Kagi, I think I've gone back to Google a couple of times in the early period. Then not once, since last winter. On browsers where I'm not logged onto Kagi I've gone from Google to my primary browser with Kagi multiple times. I can't really tell if Kagi is good or bad, objectively, but in relative terms it's very good. Most importantly, it's quite invisible, doesn't have irritating things to fight with, and the first two pagefuls aren't sponsored ads. It's tool-like and it certainly gives the feel of 2000's Google Search.
I don't know if I'm a fan but I still also have no reason to stop using Kagi. I like the simple concept. And I think paying for search is a good proposition because it turns the odds to my favour: the company can succeed by making me happy instead of using me to make advertisers happy.
I guess it's down to you how much you value web search. Kagi does have an AI tool as well, but I didn't use this and don't use AI search anyway, so can't comment on how it compares.
The search results are much more relevant, there are no ads or hallucinated BS AI summaries at the top, and you're not giving Google your data (and money) to further enshittify the world.
There are features I haven't tried yet so can't speak to them, but that's my very general take on the default kagi experience.
obviously neither of us have peeked under the hood at google and kati’s source code, so hard to tell for certain at face value.
I get annoyed with the Netflix button on my TV remote. It wastes a minute when press it by mistake.
Good value for your money rather than rewarding enshittification, spyware, and slop.
To be fair, I used to smoke cigs, and drink heavily, which are both very expensive habits. I've since quit those (they weren't bringing me joy) but the benchmark is the same.
Also, family. I can understand not wanting to be the IT for all your non-tech family media needs.
love that
$30 a month makes a hell of a lot more of a dent in entertainment affordability than it does in healthcare. No clue on how accurate these estimates are but it seems like the combined budget of most shows and movies in a given year is somewhere around the 40-50 Billion range which in the context of all the other shit in the federal budget is kind of nothing.
I am learning Hebrew but I find that many Hebrew Netflix shows do not offer English subtitles. It's really frustrating.
Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.
After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.
Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.
- the UI is deliberately crap
- the library is deliberately incomplete
- accessing content is deliberately complicated
I had an experience recently where my phone provider bundles 20+ OTT services in a single plan within a single app that runs on your TV/phone/browser. The kicker: you can add stuff to a watch list, but the watch list is never exposed anywhere. While they want you to pay for stuff, they do not want you to be choosy about it.
YT has, to my mind, the best user interface of all the services I have tried.