Netflix CEO may have missed the real reason why US subscriber numbers plunged
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Or piracy.
I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's the reason we cut the cord in the first place. People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.
Netflix was worth it because it made accessing so much content easier than piracy, but with everything getting pushed into a walled garden "package" approach again...piracy will be easier again.
I get HD over the air with less than a dozen chanels, and that's often enough to keep me distracted if I'm not feeling up to playing a videogame or watching a movie.
At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.
I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.
Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement.
But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots
Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.
Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.
I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.
Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?
I sold all of my Netflix stock (which wasn't a huge number anyway) the moment I saw that you could no longer see reviews of content on Netflix. It was a clear cut sign that they no longer "get it".
The loss of ratings was a telltale sign it'd gone mainstream and impersonal, but another one was the autoplay, which cannot be turned off. That's incredibly obnoxious, and loud, as previews somehow always seem to be.
Is this all an inevitable consequence of growth and the evolution of mass content or a set of bad decisions?
Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.
Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.
This is absolutely not accurate.
These streaming services lock you into a specific catalogue of their curated material. There is absolutely no way the statement you made about having access to everything is true. It's also especially less true if you're not living in the US. For example if you're a foreigner in a or regoin country, you're access to certain content is often limited.
With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.
Then there are other strange developments, let's take the fact that nearly every good album on Spotify now has only the "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
Who knows, maybe in 40 years will be thanking people who preserved Terrabytes of original content for the world to access?
Of course it isn't, because it is illegal and free.
> "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.
This has nothing to do with Spotify, it is for example when the entire Led Zeppelin original master tapes get remastered in the studio by the label, and they re-release old mono albums or older albums in a better fidelity format then when they were recorded years ago thanks to technological progress.
just interesting to me how the scene has changed.
I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”
For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it.
But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.
I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?
If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.
The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win.
These are the things they MUST do:
* One payment, that's reasonable.
* All the content from FOREVER accessible FOREVER in one place.
* Be DRM free so that it actually works on OSes that respect my privacy.Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in.
Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.
Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.
A flat subscription fee, perhaps with tiered pricing in terms of content resolution and number of concurrent users in a household.
Figure out some fair distribution key for the viewer's contributions. Newer content gets a higher slice of the pie to encourage investing in new content, but older content under copyright (like a 40 year old film) will still bring in some money, and it makes sense to make a back catalogue available.
Allow users to use their own clients if they wish (technically possible if you forget about DRM), and let enthusiasts create a user experience no platform has ever seen that can rival the ease of use of piracy (e.g., Popcorn Time, and similar services).
Start out as a conglomerate of big studios with a clear short to midterm business model, but aim to set up a non-profit custodian in the long term to handle the maintenance and development of the platform, and make it possible to represent any content owner in a fair way — because if you don't, you'll end up the target of anti-trust lawsuits.
This won't happen because of greed of course. Ah well, there is always piracy to supplement a Netflix/Disney/Whatever subscription and just pretend it does exist.
Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
> Now we finally have that
We don't. We still have the one or two things we want packaged in with a ton of stuff we don't.
It's actually worse. Each package (subscription platform) has one or two things we want distributed accross all of them, which a bunch of stuff we don't want packaged in.
Not seeing how this is a good system.
>Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
Why would it be a case for publicly funded infrastructure? We’re talking about entertainment, not highways or clean water.
As a consumer, yes, I would prefer an option to pay only for the shows I want to watch, but I don’t see why your tax dollars should fund my preferred method of entertainment.
No thanks. My paychecks, after state and fed taxes, fica, retirement, insurance, etc are down to literally half of my actual salary.
I don't want another few percent pilfered so I can subsidize my fellow Americans' NCIS and Dog the Bounty Hunter habits.
Well, that's only half of it. The other half is that people became fed up with their bills, not realizing that everyone has a unique subset of channels they liked, and paying for the full bundle was a way to subsidize all the other channels.
Sadly it's rather difficult to balance these two issues.
Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now. You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music. There are stragglers, of course, but they're getting fewer. If this model works for Spotify et al, why can't it work for movies and TV?
Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system. It's what allows music to be played on the radio and so on. I know very little about how it works technically, but it seems to work just fine.
All of this has been great for the consumer since we get cheap music, but if we want to port the same system over to shows/movies then we need to think through the implications of reducing the total amount of revenue that content creators get from people watching their content. Where are the alternative revenue streams? You can't take a TV show on tour.
It's definitely possible, theoretically, but I'm not sure it's possible at a price point that people actually want to pay. Making video content is orders of magnitude more expensive than making music.
Music is still fighting being “like music”.
> Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now.
There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now.
> You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music.
Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up.
> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.
No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners.
But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that.
(generally, obviously there will be exceptions.)
> No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses
At least in Germany we have a single agency (GEMA) that acts on behalf of virtually all artists worldwide. They are responsible for a range of licenses, be it for bands that want to cover a song on their new album, a bar that wants to play music or a music streaming service that wants to get started.
In my experience it is a tremendous help to have a single entity for licensing that even has ready-made rates for most things.
I don't see a reason why this could not exist for movies as well. Cost-intensive productions can easily be reflected by tiered pricing so that it costs more to stream/show Jurassic Park than some independent movie.
It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.
Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.
They're not at all even remotely the same beast.
I for one would totally pay to see that.
The real question is about independents, not blockbusters.
It is quite profitable if you are among the very few popular services. But now it's just a tragedy of the commons situation.
Yet again there is no practical way to watch a given serie/movie. Which is the whole premise of streaming services.
So yet again piracy gives you better quality with less fuss.
I generally agree with that. I don't care about one platform at all. I'll pay up to ~$30 total per month for nearly everything (TV + movies), whether that's on one site or spread across four.
With the way things are going, it looks more likely that I'll just frequently turn subscriptions on and off. That's the routine I've found myself in the last year or so. I might watch some shows on HBO or Showtime, then when they end for the season I kill the subscription. I might maintain one central subscription, such as Prime (which makes it easy to add and remove other 'channel' subscriptions). This seems to be how a lot of consumers are behaving now.
Push the price to more than $30, and I'll just use my antenna and find other things to do. I cut the cable cord years ago, and I lived.
Only when when reasonably priced subscriptions like Prime, Netflix, and maybe HBO or Showtime, often rotated, could be had for $30 / month did I come back to Hollywood.
Exact same for music. I'm old enough to remember making $6 / hour at the grocery store and then taking my paycheck straight to BestBuy to purchase $17 CDs. But ever since I got my first DSL connection about 20 years ago, the music industry hasn't earned a cent off me.
Only recently did Spotify at $10 / month bring me back as a customer. I guarantee you if I start finding songs I want to play are premium priced or missing, or they start raising prices like Netflix, well I guess the music companies won't be getting my $10 anymore either.
The $100 / month for commercial TV that Cox, Comcast, and friends have enjoyed, same as the $17 / CD that the music industry once took for granted, isn't going to work with the next generation like it did with the Boomers. We don't have as much disposable income, and there are too many other options out there.
Compulsory licensing in general, and specifically for radio style plays makes a big difference in the rights landscape. Movies and TV don't have anything like that, so you have to get agreement with content owners to do anything.
Ironic, as a decade ago the complaint was that we need a la cart pricing. Now that it's happening everyone is complaining about it being too expensive. What it seems people really want is the cable all you can eat buffet model, but at a 90% discount.
Or even better would be to pay by the minute at a rate where it ends up that 1h of TV every month is around 10$. But where the selection of shows is the entire catalogue of all shows ever.
And that's kinda what Netflix had set out to do at first, and I'm hoping are still trying to do.
If studios all pooled their IP in a single marketplace under a compulsory, fair licensing scheme, the calculation would be about the same, because currently most streaming services don't overlap much (though in some cases you can find movies on both iTunes and Google Play, for example).
What would change is that the current aggregators' revenue would shrink and their ability to have exclusive content would disappear. A company like Netflix would become just another content provider competing for views in a single marketplace.
Perhaps a better analogy is the movie theater business. Movie theaters generally show movies from all rights holders (though I'm sure studios also compete for the best screens for tentpole launches). Theaters share revenue with studios. In principle, anyone can go to any theater to see a movie of their choice, and theaters can show the movies they want as long as they license them. It's not on-demand, but that's pretty irrelevant. Also, I can start a movie theater and start showing movies, as long as I abide by the licensing rules.
I have hbo/starz/and the big name cable channels for about $140/month with 200gb of cloud dvr.
My only real complaint is that I can’t download content to my phone for flights.
It’s not $12.99/month but when I’m traveling in Asia I can VPN back to my house and watch whatever I want off the cloud DVR.
Bring it down to $60-$80 and I'd consider it.
With "effectively TV" you had to sit down at a certain time and watch it at that time. You had a selection of shows you could watch on a number of channels.
What the person here is talking about is $140 for something that is not "effectively TV." They can watch it pretty much where ever they want. They can watch it without commercials. They aren't limited to the shows or channels available on their provider. They get instant access to movies they want to watch, when they want to watch it, without need of special, single use hardware.
> All of these values are insane to me.
It's a special kind of hubris to to assume that everyone else is insane and you are not when you admittedly don't understand the topic at hand.
Because with music I literally don't care what I'm listening to. If famous artists left Spotify I couldn't care any less - I just want a playlist with "music" and that's good enough for me. With video, I don't want random TV shows - I want specific ones that interest me, and either they are available on Netflix or they aren't, the fact that there is 10k other shows does nothing to justify the subscription.
Just like you apparently care about what you are watching on VoD services, even tho there are also plenty people out there who use VoD as "background noise" and often couldn't care less about the actual shows.
I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.
Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.
As just an example, I was a huge fan of Arrested Development - but continuing that show where it left off after ~10 years of not being on air... it just didn't "have it" anymore...
And... when I search for a movie, it seems about 90% of the time they don't have it. Instead, they recommend a bunch of Netflix Original's that totally aren't what I'm looking for.
The actual Netflix created ones have largely missed the mark for me.
The theme is usually the end of the world, zombies, or the dead coming back to life. Or some horrible phenomena at the edge of a forest, and the once peaceful town is under attack from the supernatural.
What makes it worse is that Netflix now dubs foreign content by default to make it all look English. And they do their best to trick you.
i still much prefer shows without commercials, though.
But yeah, why is everything about "horror forests" nowadays? It's been done to death.
Maybe because so many people nowadays have never seen a tree?
Case in point: I expect ads to arrive (within a decade) to streaming videos, much like they did for cable.
(Cable's main advantage in the early days was the lack of ads - or so I'm led to believe)
Now cable seems like mostly ads with a little bit of ghost hunting sprinkled in.
This is true of pretty much all tv. Because most people want that.
On the other hand, if I turn on my cable box and Dog the Bounty Hunter happens to be on and halfway through an episode, I'll watch it until I'm done eating and be done with it. I don't actually care what going on in the episode, and I'm only half paying attention. It's mostly just noise and moving pictures in the background.
That's "disposable" television, and it's only something that you can get from an always on network.
Netflix requires more effort, and with that effort I feel I should get something good out of that time. Instead I spend 30 minutes looking for something to watch only to give up, switch back to network television, and eat my now cold meal.
I think this comes across as condescending but I really don’t get it.
And Netflix (correctly) abandoned being a movie library service a long time ago. They're pretty much just HBO with a more broad appeal now.
I don't know about anyone else but I'm interested in shows, not channels. I'm not going to sign up to 10 channels - that'd cost too much and some months I'd probably watch nothing on some of them. If I could pick and choose which shows I watched I'd have no problem with a low-friction "sign up via email and pay for what you watch" but that's not the offer. Your suggestion is fine for people who are rich and have loads of time to watch hours of tv every day. That's not the target for these companies though - they recognize it's a zero-sum game and want it to be them you pick over Netflix (or vice versa).
because content companies started holding their content hostage for higher fees or outright refusing to allow netflix to license it. Netflix creating their own content was a matter of survival.
1) I don't want to pay for content I won't watch.
2) I don't want to be required to pay for content I won't watch in order to watch content I want to watch.
3) I want to easily watch the content I want without needing to have dozens of different separate accounts or services. I mean similar to "press button, get bacon" style of easy.
4) I want to pay in money and nothing else. I don't want to pay with my data; I don't want to pay with my viewing history.
5) I want to watch whenever and wherever I choose, no take-backs.
1) No charge, so you're not paying for content you won't watch
2) Same as 1
3) A torrent client speaking RSS + a private torrent site that serves RSS covers this
4) You pay with nothing - no money, no data, and no viewing history
5) Files without DRM can be played on any device and cannot be retroactively deleted by the service provider
Piracy really is most often a services problem.
Some of us don't have that much time anymore (I did run Plex when I was younger, though). I'm either willing to pay about $$25-$30 / month for a few services like HBO and Prime without commercials*, and available in demand, with plenty of quality series to keep my 1 hour / day TV habit satiated, or I'll just take my ball and go home. Cable TV and $100 / month for 30% commercials is something I can and will live without.
Maybe we can get a frequent renter's club. $20/month for 8 movies (two a week) and 20 episodes?
Was trying to find John Wick 3 this weekend and no joy. I would have paid a premium for that.
However, I’m very okay with iTunes’s <$3 per episode. Sure it’s more than most vod subscriptions, but the shows are mine forever, and I can buy just about whatever I want.
If I watched more TV overall, it might get too expensive, but I don’t, so quality over quantity.
> Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for
Erm, no? Don't know about the US but the UK experience of cable and satellite was a basic package with dire content, then every interesting thing was £££ extra. By the time you had a reasonable selection you were at £50-£100 a month. more if you wanted the sport channels. So we didn't cable cut, we never signed up in the first place. Compared to the licence fee it was always appalling value. Netflix want nearly a whole BBC yearly licence fee, and deliver a tiny fraction of the content. Not that I like all the Beeb do. :)
When we cancel Netflix (very soon going on current programmes), it'll be back to terrestrial only as none of the streaming services now have "enough". So whatever comes to the BBC and Channel 4 then. I'd start torrenting again before subscribing to Amazon, Disney or whoever just to watch one interesting series, then hope I remember to cancel timely enough.
In reality people have many preferences and desires, and they pay for streaming services or not for a variety of reasons.
Some people are maybe sick of being stuck with a giant cable company and are happy to pay for many streaming services. Other people likely still have cable and use streaming to supplement that for specific shows. Others have different reasons.
This isn't the alternative reality Netflix and others are fighting. People are just going to pirate it if they can't offer it easily and at a price that the market will accept. There is no escaping that. It is on them to adjust, not the consumers.
I think streaming has incredible value, and broadcast television's value proposition is extremely poor. I hope once people start doing the math, tv commercials is a thing of the past, or at least there is 1 commercial per break.
that being said, netflix does have some deep concerns for me if I were to invest in it. its still never made a profit, subscribers are maxing out, and competition is just getting started.
Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.
I'd say it divides by more than half. I don't want any politics with my entertainment as many other people do. Even if the politics are aligned to my own. It becomes annoying as "preaching to the choir".
Yes, and that is slowly disappearing, as everything is becoming isolated again and bundled with extra crap I don't care about.
Ricky Gervais: $40M
Chappelle: $60M
Eddie Murphy: $70M
$210M for less than 20 hours of programming. Wow.
No. We hated cable for the high prices and bad service which were enabled by physical monopolies.
If the backend was based on open protocols, you could buy an aggregating frontend from Netflix, Hulu, TiVo, etc and then buy whatever content you like from whatever content owner you like.
What we do need is something like the music industry has. Subscribe to Spotify, Deezer, Tidal. They all pretty much have the same stuff, with slight differences in UI and the odd exclusive to differentiate them.
That’s what they need to do - cross license. They can even have a delay before they do so for their own content or whatever.
Just the admin of subscribing to 20 different services is enough to make me subscribe to none.
That's not a mistake they are making; they are all aware of that. They just want the other guys to be the ones that die first.
The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).
If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).
Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?
I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.
To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now!
That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.
I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that.
And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay.
Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.
My problem is that Netflix has taken note that we watch anime a few times a week, which doubtless means we want every single band/carousel/whatever to be about anime. New Anime, Critically Acclaimed Anime, Popular Anime, Watch it Again Anime, Anime Where Characters Wear Hats, Anime Where Characters Float in Hats, and Anime About Hat Making.
For the love of all let me get some other options in the fucking list before I lose my mind. I like comedies, action movies, sci-fi, documentaries, and historical dramatizations or historical fictions too, you know. Not everything has to have a talking cat in it.
These recommendation systems need to be a bit less zealous; I like black pepper, too, but that doesn't mean I want a huge bowl of black peppercorns in cream sauce for dinner.
Recently I’ve found that old actors in mid-budget productions have the best overall quality.
With algorithmic systems it sometimes feels like reading books written by a Markov chain toy.
When life gives you lemons…
Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position.
I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once.
Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful.
Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on.
And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on.
The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.
edit: i could be mistaken though
The metrics shifted. Subscriber retention just isn't that tightly correlated with them identifying hidden gems for you, that may be an externality we've just lost.
There used to be a lot of competition in this space, for a few years you could go on free sites designed only to give you targeted recommendations. I think Jinni was one.
They were just training their engines and became ad networks.
One other factor, not really anyone's fault -- the massive increase in high quality scripted content has made search less critical. If you fail to find hidden gems in 2003, you get Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and miss out on Oldboy or Goodbye Lenin. Today if you pull up any random streaming service you'll probably find something that's good enough, even if not great.
It's a little disappointing, maybe there's room for a p2p ML recommendation engine in this space for people who really want to optimize what they're consuming. I'd be into it.
I don't watch TV or have Netflix, but I listen to streaming music, and I noticed something weird. I used to listen to Pandora, and it recommended a lot of different artists that I liked on hearing them for the first time. It single-handedly gave me a taste for 21st century music. But there wasn't enough music in their catalog, so I switched to Spotify. Now Spotify will play more of the songs by people I already like, but very nearly everything it plays that I didn't find on Pandora I hate and it keep playing the same things over and over no matter how quickly and frequently I skip past them.
It's hard for me to believe that they could be this bad and unresponsive unwittingly, but I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of naive algorithm that is failing.
...you may say, why don't I explicitly mark songs "like" or "dislike", but I mostly listen in my car where I can't do that.
One alternative hypothesis is that different people use Pandora vs. Spotify and the ones on Pandora have better taste, but I can't believe that's all of it.
If you only go by statistics and don’t think through the “what if everyone did this” question then giving you the same old content on repeat will have better metrics.
So if I’m watching a video about TIG welding say, to optimise “next click” I suppose I should be recommended mostly more welding videos, with a smattering of engineering and finally a bit of clickbait mixed in case I’m starting to get distracted.
If services are optimising for “keep going right now”, they might be modelling as something like a markov chain of “clicked on next” and that’s how we get stuck in this kind of short-sighted local optimum.
Google Play Music has been the best for me in terms of variety, but it's buggy as hell. It freezes up if it can't play an ad for some reason, won't automatically play when bluetooth is connected (like Pandora does), and other annoying things. (I ride a motorcycle so I can't mess with my phone if something goes wrong)
If a streaming service didn't order automatically generated genre playlists by popularity (with a little randomness) people would stop listening to them and start saying the playlists are full of rubbish songs they've never heard of.
My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038261936872356908
Now my feed is full of those. I wish Netflix would stop buying those movies.
I've been watching a lot more Youtube recently oddly enough. Youtube does a better job of giving me a mix of videos for my interests, and there are a number of great vloggers out there across a lot of my interests posting weekly+ content.
If Netflix was recommending something that you didn't care about, you could use "Not Interested" to make it not show up in your list anymore.
Now, it just keeps recommending these same content over and over again. There's no way to say "I don't want to watch that". There's also no variety to the suggestions.
I agree that "decision fatigue" is a big deal for me.
That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.
It's almost as if there is a concerted effort at Netflix to force specific content down your throat. They don't want you going beyond what's visible on their idiotic horizontal scrollers, and they don't want you to know what people actually think about the content they are forcing on you.
Seems like they can't see the forest for the trees.
In ML world these metrics require combining DNNs with methods like Q-learning. YouTube learned these lessons and now probably has the most advanced ML among competition in its’ recommendation system.
I imagine Netflix is thinking along these lines. Ratings are performative; engagement metrics tell the truth.
It made it tolerable again for me!
This. I cannot explain in words how much ire that "feature" gives me.
I literally will end up just pressing arrow keys on my remote to move to the next suggestion to avoid the auto play feature.
I often resort to blog articles of "Top 10 new Netflix show" to find new content rather than use Netflix itself.
This was baffling to me. I've rarely had such a stressful user experience as a trailer playing every single time I stop pressing the arrow buttons for a few seconds. Just because I stopped pressing buttons doesn't mean I want to see a trailer for whatever I happened to stop on - it means I'm thinking about something, or reading something, or looking at some other part of the screen, or am not even looking at my TV any more. It's hard to imagine a more malicious UX than one that plays video and audio at you every time you are not giving input. And because it's difficult to even find a state in that UI where you don't have something selected, I found it impossible to "escape" the trailers. It made me feel like I was in an advertising dystopia.
There's a case to be made that this is advertising (for shows on netflix)
This is why all 30 min shows only have a 20-22 min runtime. We have all simply come full circle.
Hulu is going the same way with their commercials on my commercial free sub, and the commercials are always on content I'm paying extra for (HBO, Showtime, Starz).
I'm already setting up my Plex server. I'd rather not this be the case, but it's back to setting up scripts to grab from usenets and torrents.
It shouldn't be surprising to see the same behavior patterns repeated with this new crop of wireless cable companies. I'm sure the irony is lost on them though. We become the thing we try to escape. Stare long enough into the abyss...
If there's anyone who can push back against the marketing department, it's the legal department.
Instead I asked their customer frontline to pass on an appropriately oriented finger.
If there's one collective blind spot on this site, it's treating humanity as though it's a mathematical equation.
Being a dinosaur, I remember when Netflix would let users write reviews for shows/movies they'd seen.
Does anybody know why they discontinued their review system? Did they not want to deal with all the sticky content moderation issues?
When my CC was stolen (and blocked), Netflix was the only company who put my service on hold instead of a small grace period which fits the non-customer centric direction they take nowadays, but also my opportunity to see if I could live without Netflix.
After 2 months, I do not miss Netflix at all. I deleted the apps and I am now on Hulu and Amazon Video.
I've also started a small collection of DVD/Blu-rays with my favorite shows which I lost. You can pick up complete series on eBay for affordable prices.
At the end of the day, they just continue to add features that create short term payoffs and long term failures. Pennywise and pound foolish.
My wife and I recently cancelled Netflix. Partly because we felt content was disappearing and partly because it felt hostile to actually use Netflix. We got absolutely fed up with all of the autoplay crap, UI restrictions, and other BS that clearly drives "some" stat for them.
I mute the TV when browsing.
Maybe if they spent less money on trying to develop their own content and more money licensing the best content to come out over the past 30 years then there would be more engagement. The percentage of the top 1000 or so movies as rated on IMDB or Rotten tomatoes that is NOT on netflix is staggering.
When we all bought into the concept of netflix a decade or so back it was on the premise of all-you-can-eat on demand access to the largest/most inclusive catalog of movies and shows anywhere. They long ago ditched that model and they are suffering as a result.
It's not even that you can't get the latest blockbusters, its that you can't get most highly rated movies from ANY of the last 3-4 decades. But movies rated 5/10 or lower? Seems like they've managed to license just about every one of those. Bleh.
Yes, it defeats the whole point of streaming subscriptions. Yes, it'll drive a large segment of the subscriber base back to piracy. But it's a classic prisoner's dilemma.
As long as I'm speculating about shit i know nothing about, I'll follow up by predicting that the next wave - after things get bad enough - is cross-licensing deals between the bigger surviving players. That'll improve the value proposition to subscribers (great for us!) and also raise barriers to entry, so next will be the price gouging. Oh, and somewhere in there will be the contracts that prevent content creators/distributors from licensing new stuff to anyone else (unless they are one of the surviving streaming services.)
I wouldn't give up Netflix for cable, it's more likely to be Prime only, or something with quality content that I wouldn't watch as often because they don't have as much variety (HBO, Showtime, AMC, CBS)
Stranger things was released and we watched that but I haven't been on Netflix in weeks since; another price hike and the values no longer likely there for me.
Many of the shows it suggests to me are not in english, yet the UX rarely discloses this in the description or (infuriatingly auto-playing) preview. Some people don't mind reading subtitles but I detest it - they could at least tell me the show is in German before wasting my time.
After their $1MM prize years ago, they didn't even bother implementing the winning algorithm.
Then again, nobody really recommends media well. You can't mine the media directly, and people have very different preferences. It's just too many factors that you can't infer from the usage.
Or just dubbed? If so, how do you bear it?
> Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?
Because it's an additional barrier to enjoyment.
Dubs are irritating and often lose cultural context. From your post I think we're in agreement there.
Subs mean I have to watch intently, I can't cook dinner/play a video game/clean the house/fold laundry while I'm listening and glance over at the screen every few seconds. And I don't spend much time doing nothing but watch TV, unless it's a show I really care about. Stranger Things 3 got my uninterrupted attention this last week.
I'm not against watching foreign media, but it's a negative modifier to my chances to watch it. If I get a recommendation from someone I trust, I'm much more likely, but then I have to set aside time to do nothing but watch it.
As a side note, if I get a recommendation from someone with an anime avatar, I'm much less likely to watch it. I don't care that "it's not a 12 year old girl, it's a 500 year old dragon that looks like a 12 year old girl." It's still creepy.
So I agree with your comment except for the anime avatar aside. I personally don't trust 90% of movie recommendations, even from friends. It has to be somebody who I know has good (for me) taste. I don't think avatar-selection would correlate one way or another with movie-selection :)
It's a terrible UX and just wastes everyone's time to not disclose the dubbing/subtitles in any way in the front-matter.
I just wish for dialogue only English subtitles of English language content: I'm not deaf, I just can't always hear the mumbling if I haven't turned my good old Rotel 5.1 system to 11. I have no issues hearing (clears throat), (coughs), (rain falls) and (engine rumbling) .. yet I'm forced to see these using the SDH subs as none other are available. It's great that they are there, but we also need non-SDH subs.
I had cable growing up, but ditched it in my adult life and never looked back so far. Netflix's recommender is some blackbox that I don't ever find useful. If they added some way to channel surf like broadcast television, I assume I'd just be wasting my time wading through that.
Then there are some older shows in their catalogue that I wouldn't even have known existed unless I'd searched for them - I'd even go so far as to say purposely hidden from navigation.
Another personal pet peeve is the lack of subtitles or CCs. I suppose it's some licensing issue, but I can buy a Blu-ray or DVD here that will come with lots of languages, but on Netflix, they started adding a lot of local movies with no subtitles, and "foreign" shows or movies without any English subtitles, which are preferable for me.
Maybe it's because I've never had the pleasure of the US version, but I've only ever sporadically kept a subscription for over almost a decade now, quickly exhausting what I did find interesting. Back when brick n' mortar video stores were still a thing, I didn't feel overwhelmed by having too much decent choice there.
P.S., what's the annoying "are you still watching" prompt interrupting the current show instead of just being in between them? As if the UX wasn't annoying enough already.
I don't understand the dark patterns and general user hostility. I don't need to watch Netflix 20 hours a day to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Do they somehow benefit from me utilizing more of their bandwidth, if I'm already paying?
I don't know of any show on Netflix that I've watched that has an audio dub but doesn't also have the original language available as an alternative audio track. What are you watching?
This, unfortunately, is the ultimate double-edged sword. It would be a very safe and content-less world indeed if fictional media did not in some what appear to address or include something political in nature. Usually when we feel like what we're watching is not political, it's actually because it's simply political in ways that we identify with or do not find offensive.
>you're only objecting to gratuitous gay sex
from
>I still don't want to watch 2 people having VR chat sex
?
You could be in a relationship over IRC in the 90's with a person of the same sex and not know that until you're too deep into it. The VR thing didn't add much to that narrative. The same way 3D movies don't add much (more often than not, they make the experience worse).
That completely misses the point. The episode is about men not being able to connect with each other except through gaming.
Bad- stranger things overly sexist men and the constant putting men down. Detracted from the show, annoying me.
Unbearable- Sabrina
Is this new to the third series? I haven't noticed it in the first two series after binging them over the last two days.
Stranger Things is not a realistic show. Why should its depictions of the men at the newspaper have to be realistic in any case?
Examples: The new show 'Mr Iglesias' where the main character is a history teacher. In one of the first scenes the history of the US is summed up as 'oppression and slavery'. Many jokes about white people that would be considered racist had they been about any other race. And a whole episode about how the word latino is offensive and it should be changed to latinx.
In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
There are many more examples. I'm getting tired of it and leaning towards canceling netflix. I'm European, I want entertainment, not crazy US politics.
[1] https://twitter.com/yascha_mounk/status/1050033177077665795
>In the children sitcom 'No good Nick' a female chef ignores feedback from her employee by accusing him of 'mansplaining'. The daughter accuses the white dad of 'cultural approriation' when he suggests taco Tuesday for the restaurant. And that was only the first minutes of one episode.
These are great examples why I don't watch Netflix. Netflix especially is just TV by the political left and for the political left.
which is absolutely... absurd. latino comes from latin american languages, which are gendered by default. that's basically colonialism -- americans trying to apply their culture into other people's culture.
(sorry for the rant but i find infuriating that americans are trying to change MY language because of their sensitivities wrt gender)
I'd be interested to see a show that has nationalistic/right-wing assumptions. Any good examples?
I admit that it's going to be very difficult to find an explicit white nationalist show, but military/terrorist paranoid-style shows are a dime a dozen.
Is this any different than network shows?
I fear it will get worse because of the vertical integration and monopoly of the entertainment business, they can keep making bad movies and people will keep watching them because there's no other choice, in turn increasing the monopoly.
Anymore, I do not believe this to be true, and feel sort of silly for thinking it ever was true. It's become quite obvious their strategy is create new shows to lure people in, and then cancel them (because they'd have to pay the stars more), rinse repeat, hoping more people stay than leave. They do not care about finishing the stories they're telling, or the stories at all, they don't care about content, they care about growth.
Honestly, anymore, I don't even want to watch Netflix shows because they'll probably get canceled before they end.
Edit: small grammar fix
If they had 1/3 as many shows but those shows were 3 times better. I am sure I would have no problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/at...
Surprisingly, I find myself using Hulu more than all the others combined, including Prime. Hulu's app is so horrendously bad though I consider cancelling as more than 50% of the time it won't load on the first try, and probably 20% of the time it won't load at all on my TV.
I have not tried a "TV series" yet.
It's a relatively small clique of writers, producers, directors and actors that they keep throwing money at despite failure after failure.
What they need to do is stop with the incestuous industry patronage and get fresh blood!
Perhaps we need an "America's Got Talent" equivalent for writers/producers to pitch their show ideas and let people have a crack at it.
Btw, for Netflix I usually just do a trial when a new Stranger Things season comes out, watch it all and maybe a few of their new movies, then cancel.
I have limited time. I try to spend it wisely. I'd rather use my wasted time on something far more enjoyable, like playing my NES or reading a book or movie, or even watch something of higher quality and production value (HBO is pretty reliable for that or a movie on my backlog). Or even just get out and go somewhere to see and meet people.
Right now my only subscription service is Funimation ($5/month). I like watching dubbed anime late at night too chill out before bed. Currently (re)watching Black Lagoon (it's so great!) and the Mix Simuldub. With a side of computer science books on my backlog with some related videos or courses as well as a good book which right now is Snow Crash (embarrassingly I have not read this yet).
One common criticism is that Netflix is worse than regular TV, because having to actively choose a Netflix show is more stressful than regular TV, where you can just turn it on, sit back, and relax.
The second common criticism I read is that Netflix is annoying, because as soon as you turn it on, it starts autoplaying videos at you in obnoxious attempt to grab your interest and attention.
Like, aren't these two criticisms completely opposite? Regular TV always autoplays at full volume. What nuance would help me understand why autoplaying is annoying on Netflix but not annoying on regular TV?
(Disclosure: I work at Netflix, am speaking purely in a personal capacity, but would love to make things better for people to the extent that I can.)
I don't have a regular TV service anymore, but I suspect it's quite easy to flip it on, jump to the guide (which probably isn't blaring loud stuff at you) and scan the currently airing shows for something you're familiar with and you like.
So no contradiction as far as I can tell.
My Netflix experience is one where I often have 2-3 shows that I'm currently watching. I want those shows front and center when I log in, perhaps with recommendations for similar shows alongside. It would be even cooler if two shows I was watching had recommendations that crossed over both of them. I should also be able to "close" a series I've started watching, but decided I don't want to watch anymore.
When I don't have active shows that I'm watching I kind of want Netflix to help me find stuff based on my viewing history, right now I have IMDb and other apps open on my phone so that I can check community scores and reviews of content I don't know about, whatever dumb business strategy decision prohibited that data being in the Netflix app should be rescinded immediately. Heck I should be able to pull up all sci-fi, filter for stuff I haven't seen, filter for TV series, movie or whatever, order by rotten tomatoes score and then filter for stuff that isn't space based or something. You get the gist, there's so much Netflix could be doing to enable discoverability.
To me, the difference is in the degree to which the browsing experience is distracting and aggravating. Neither myself nor, I think, most people are going to “turn it on, sit back, and relax” with broadcast TV. Instead, you generally go to the menu and scroll around looking for something to watch. I will often mute the TV while doing this, but even if you don’t, it generally doesn’t start playing video and audio from a channel as soon as you hover over it. Instead it continues playing the channel you’re currently on until you’ve chosen to switch. That is a fine browsing experience.
I think the other difference is that if you’re flipping channels, you’re tuning into what the channel is actually playing, not an endlessly repeating ad for the channel. It’s getting you to the experience you care about as quickly as possible.
Netflix, on the other hand, the minute you stop scrolling, starts loading a preview. This makes the UI less responsive if you want to start scrolling again, which you often do, but oops, you let it sit on a title for just a millisecond too long. If you stick around, you immediately start in on the preview, at full volume. This combination makes the browsing experience super distracting and frustrating. Sometimes I want to discuss with my wife whether to watch a show, but I can’t, because there’s a full volume trailer playing. So I have to mute the TV. It’s so frustrating to not be able to go into a “thinking” state when the experience of browsing is fundamentally a thoughtful one. And 99% of the time if I stop for a second on something, I don’t want to watch a preview. I want to read the description, maybe, and then move on.
Anyway, I appreciate that interesting analogy you gave, and I could see how the two things seem similar. I don’t think they are, but even if they were, most of us preferred Netflix because it was not like broadcast TV!
Then again, I'm not currently a customer, but that's my recollection of it. For regular TV, I couldn't especially say, since I mostly only ever get a chance to watch it in hotels nowadays, but I don't ever recall something distracting you from channel surfing or using the guide channel and breaking you out of your zone.
As far as regular TV being more relaxing, I suppose there's maybe something meditative about going through all the channels, but I wouldn't say it was a better experience. It's just easier to settle with something mediocre when you're sure you've seen all your choices (assuming no commercials were playing at the time).
Speaking of browsing, on my TV provider, I know exactly where to find all the sorts of content I'm interested in. With Netflix, it's constantly being shuffled.
To the second criticism - Broadcast and cable TV used to be accompanied by programming schedules published in local newspapers. Additionally, TV Guide was a real magazine with programming schedules that people paid real money for. People made effort and spent money to be able to quietly peruse and discover what to watch.
These two responses are entirely correlated. The ability to quietly browse and discover content is the best thing internet TV has going for it. Netflix's abandonment of this concept has driven me back to the TV Guide model. I make my viewing choices off of Netflix, and never open Netflix until I know exactly where I'm going, and only when I know that there are no other less intrusive options.
Look at it this way - Think about movie theater previews, and how much people complain about them. Effectiveness of those previews aside, imagine what that would look like if the preview was for the movie they actually went to see.
I went from watching Netflix almost exclusively to hardly watching at all. I may put it on if I already know exactly what I want to watch and can navigate to it quickly enough that the bullshit autoplay won't make me think differently before my show starts. It causes anxiety trying to browse through content fast enough to see what it is before the trailer starts. If I pause for just a second or two due to some distraction or whatever then I lose the opportunity to read the description and I'm bombarded with a trailer. When that happens I can't click away fast enough. If my wife starts talking to me while I'm browsing I often find myself exiting Netflix so I don't have that garbage in the background. I would have canceled a long time ago if my wife didn't binge watch those Asian novela shows.
I feel like the people making decisions about these things at Netflix are making them based on bad data. I keep paying every month so I must be happy. I'm not. I give more money to your competitors now than I give to you. I wouldn't give you any at all if my wife didn't want to keep Netflix and that's not a debate I'm going to have for $10/mo or whatever it costs. So I keep paying and some data geek gets to look good for the subscription numbers or engagement even though I went from loving your product to loathing it. I would go back to loving it and cancel the other streaming subscriptions if there was an option for me to switch back to the old interface.
Edit:
Someone else who replied to you said something I thought was interesting about the autoplay.
I think the other difference is that if you’re flipping channels, you’re tuning into what the channel is actually playing, not an endlessly repeating ad for the channel. It’s getting you to the experience you care about as quickly as possible.
This. I read this and it clicked. Browsing Netflix with the autoplay trailers is a lot like if you were flipping through the channels on broadcast TV and every single channel was showing a commercial. I experience a similar kind of frustration when I use Netflix.
at LEAST make this something that the users can disable. I'm not always using Netflix for loud action movies. Sometimes I want something quiet and chill. the obnoxious previews are too much.
sensory overload. they're almost startling sometimes.
Please make it optional. Please.
> Research by behavioral psychologists has shown that too many choices can overwhelm consumers, create the unpleasant feeling known as “decision fatigue” and sometimes leading them to shut down and walk away from a potential purchase.
> Television viewers also need to choose what channel to watch. Yet part of the allure might be how television just beams whatever’s on the channel instead presenting viewers with even more options on what to watch.
Maybe Netflix hasn't missed this at all. Maybe this is the functionality they're after with the auto-start/preview of any show you hover over.
I was surprised by this number and assume they were only looking at people who actually have access to both. If that's the case, what is the number among the total universe of streaming video users?
Nielsen drops families who don't watch any broadcast TV. Which is now most households.
Their stats are useless.
It's rather like each streaming service is turning into its own version of a TV channel. It's almost the vision of a'la cart cable pricing, only each channel is too expensive and the UX too cumbersome to subscribe to more than a small handful.
Perhaps in a few years, streaming aggregators will appear and bundle a bunch of services together, and the internet will have reinvented Cable TV.
1. Auto-playing trailers
2. Stop showing me stuff I have already seen (I can search it if I want to). Atleast add a "don't show this again" button
3. Auto-playing stuff I have already seen to rub it in
4. No system of reviews/ratings - I have to manually check IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes
5. "More like this" doesn't really show things that are more like "this". Also, if I like a comedian's special and click "more like this" for their other works, I rarely get more than one or two
I am seriously contemplating to unsubscribe - hardly use it anyway due to lack of quality content.
And there's an option in the right corner to "play from the beginning".
Flip to the next movie, and it's positioned right at its most popular scene.
When I was younger, I would get home from school and watch a few hours of TV. The channel I watched would syndicate sitcoms in blocks, same show at a given time, played in episode order (but a few different shows over the afternoon).
What I'd love from netflix is to be able to put together a list of shows I'm watching right now and have it run a playlist in random order by show, but with the episodes in the correct order per show.
The pendulum has seemingly reached the limits of self-programmed content and has started to swing the other way, and people are starting to realize the value of having a content producer putting on a good show across several programs.
Netflix also feels (by the way they are developing their internal IP) that they are becoming a niche (in genre) service rather than a generic appeal service and losing subscribers feels like an outcome of the catalog they have tried to pursue. The subscribers they retain are likely going to have a higher level of permanence compared to people who are a more general audience.
Why don't Netflix provide this? Because people would quickly realize how little in their catalog is worth watching.
I do experience decision fatigue sometimes when streaming, but my solution is just to have a couple of comfort-sitcoms always on-hand, not to subject myself to an endless pipeline of advertisements and low-budget reality TV.
1. Autoplaying trailers: Netflix straight-up says that's not going away (https://twitter.com/Netflixhelps/status/947587245086859265), and I haven't met a single person who actually likes it. When stopping to talk about a show, my wife just mutes the television on the main screen, and I navigate to the Search screen, which is the only one that doesn't autoplay something. It's almost hostile amount of "HERE LOOK AT THIS SHOW" going on, and I despise it.
2. Removing reviews: If you've been on Netflix long enough, chances are you remember the pages-long reviews left by extremely passionate users on all kinds of films. Netflix just decided one day to throw all that away, probably because negative reviews decreased engagement or some other silly reason. The users added value to your service, and you actively threw it out. This also had the side-effect of tossing aside the count of films I've watched or rated, which I found to be an interesting bit of data.
3. Shuffling algorithms: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I have a difficult time navigating to anything that's not a specific title. Genres, their weird made-up categories ("Comic Book Superhero Movies" or "Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy"), or even foreign films. There's no way to browse this stuff unless the category happens to pop-up on screen. In addition, the "Continue Watching" category moves around randomly. Sometimes it's right at the top, sometimes 3 pages down. Similarly, why is "My List" not always at the top? It used to be a top-level navigation element.
4. Already seen: There's no way to hide anything in the UI. Not things I watched, not things I'm uninterested in, and certainly not things I dislike. I used to be able to signal disinterest in shows; now I can't.
I could go on at length despite having already done so, but I think there's more at play here than Netflix's catalog. They're showing that all they're chasing is more money and bigger deals, and damn what the users think. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe it really is their "content slate drove less growth in paid net adds" this quarter, but I'm willing to bet that (at least in part) it's because even Hulu, owned by a bunch of traditional television media corporations, gives more consideration to its users.
weird but plausible.
edit: btw I'm a huge fan of your work with keydb.
P.s. Thanks for your kind words. I’m always open to feedback/suggestions for KeyDB. Feel free to open a GitHub issue at any time.
My experience has been spotify is great at recommending songs I like, even unpopular songs - I've quickly fallen into the rabbit hole of making a playlist - checking out the playlist recommendations, seeing their artist's other tracks, etc.
Compare early black mirror to what it is now. It's become far less of a "thinking" show, and much more of a "You should accept this, you shouldn't accept this" show.
It's hard for the world to ever admit it, especially the U.S., but maybe we don't actually need to have this many shows?
For me, the biggest problem with Netflix is the user interface. The auto-playing audio and video at every corner is extremely annoying. The used car dealership feel of it is stressful, which is exactly the opposite of what I want when I'm ready to watch a show or movie.
They have some content that I like and I'll watch it when I know exactly what I want to see before I open the app. If not, then I don't go to Netflix anymore, it is just too hostile.
..and because its better for them once they've hooked you to keep you there, the series usually provides a cliff hanger, but many times the series isn't renewed so the risk/investment in time is high. If it is renewed then they really have no new idea so they just rehash the first series and do it again (e.g. the OA, I guess, I stopped after the beginning of the second series). So you never get the closure you get from watching an old school tv series or movie, there's no high's or low's of a good story, there's just time used up.
They are double dipping to increase production of Netflix shows. More power to them. But don’t remove the things people are actually watching the most.
On tech side despite all their tech wizardry I get this feeling that this company is overwhelmed with Java design pattern types. On business side it's full of too clever by half folks who would think every user hostile feature is great if it improves some bullshit metrics.
- Their original content is not terribly appealing to me.
- They lack much of the content I want to watch (and in Germany the selection of content is much, much smaller to begin with).
- They have a horrendous user interface. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I like lists. And even one big list with all the content Netflix offers would be far superior to their interface. I’m not interested in their recommendation algorithms or their peculiar categorization, I want to sift through their metadata on my own terms. Give me a big, filterable list. (That is something that bugs me about every streaming service: you are heavily restricted when it comes to searching and filtering.)
I have found that my local library has actually a very good selection of DVDs and Blu-rays. So they have become a reliable source of content. Other than that I occasionally buy used or new media cheaply. And for special interests (Anime) I have the net.
Would think that most people don't sign up for Netflix for their Netflix Original content and those that do end up disappointed after realizing that Netflix doesn't offer recent or classic movies.
I remember when I could stream on multiple devices and watch classic TV shows which was awesome but now it's more expensive with all the different subscription tiers and they've removed some of my favorite shows.
Spotify subscribers get offered a Hulu subscription for free (comes with ads though). Hulu has the good classic shows that Netflix no longer has.
Now Netflix is a place to watch shows and movies made by Netflix. So it's like HBO, but more quantity and less quality. My favorite "comfort food" shows like The Office, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc are slowly leaving the service.
So I find my Netflix account collecting digital dust most of the time. More and more I find myself liking YouTube TV. It gives me mindless channel flipping, live sports, and the cloud DVR gives me a pseudo-netflix where I have every episode of all my favorite shows ready at a click (I just need to fast-forward recorded commercials).
Now that all the content creators have realized the digital value of their content, it doesn't matter for Netflix whether those networks splinter it out into 20 different subscriptions or hide it behind 1 expensive cable subscription again. Netflix doesn't have that content so they lose either way.
Their only way forward is to become just another content network, OR a cable provider with the same elevated subscription cost. Whichever way they lean, the stock will tumble until they're in line with all their competitors. The gap has been closed.
If Netflix can have 10x the amount of private label hits like House of Cards and Black Mirror, they will do fine.
I only have a Prime Video subscription and a Hotstar subscription (for Live football, tennis etc). Netflix started becoming a place which would have content that I absoultely didn't want to watch and there were gazillion such titles.
I felt that a reduced set of options that Hotstar (which has license to HBO-content) and Prime Video was good enough for me. I felt I had too many options on Netflix and didn't want the overhead to select one.
As for some of the content on Netflix that I do like for e.g. Narcos & Mindhunter, Piracy FTW.
My Netflix was cancelled about 6 months ago. It felt like it was another version of Facebook... great for mindless scrolling but nothing that made me want to stop scrolling and watch. Part of it was the loss of several favorite shows making the service not worth the price plus the price of other subscriptions. I would say the same about Prime Video if it wasn't free with Amazon Prime.
Then they put out substandard SJW shows like Bright and Jessica Jones. That's still okay, not every show is targeted to me and they still weren't conducting shady business practices so they were still a good company in my eyes.
Then they put out 13 Reasons Why. All my goodwill toward them was lost and my subscription was canceled within the month.
I also often want to learn new things, or see something interesting. So I turn to YouTube, with all the creative folks uploading interesting and engaging videos about all sorts.
I think Netflix is missing something by focusing entirely on TV series and movies. Give me something interesting I can watch for 15, 30, 45 minutes that doesn't require the kind of mental investment a TV series does.
Now that every broadcast company has their own streaming service with their own fees, streaming is almost as bad as network TV. (at least with streaming you don't have to watch reruns unless you want)
I've gone full into Plex now. That seems to be the only way to have a watchable selection of stuff in one place now.
That could probably do a better job of satiating the viewer than broadcast channels, which don't know your taste.
Amazon can solve that problem. They makes it easy to bring all those disparate channels into a single UI. For example, we have HBO, Boomerang, CBS all in the one Amazon Prime browsing experience. IE You don't need any other apps other than Amazon Prime.
Makes it super easy, but yeah, all the $10/month start to add up.
Ugh
- rich moms having babies
- black family reunion
- asian family with convenience store
- older gay couples living together
- superhero franchise season 7!
- football players with one last chance to go to college
- people in jail!
I also wonder if Netflix missed an opportunity by not thinking of their product as a streaming platform a couple years ago.
a) It would make them less money b) They don't have rights agreements that would permit it
This is what people want and have been saying so for decades. Don't make me pay for a service I use 2% of. This is the whole anti ala carte thing cable companies have done forever.
I understand they need their own content, but they've already got more than I can watch. I'd prefer more quality and sticking with shows over quantity and higher prices.
If it isn't a Netflix original I feel like I'm scrounging around / fighting Netflix to find something...it feels like there is little to offer.
I remember that netflix sponsored a contest to accurately predict what people wanted to watch, then ignored the winning algorithm.
The Office was a big fallback show and Netflix needs a few of those of their own. Stranger Things probably fits that.
The Witcher might change things for quality on Netflix.
Netflix shows have high production quality in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound, color, sets, on location etc. Writing and big draw actors aren't there just yet, though they have a bunch of that going and started that way with House of Cards. Stranger Things was new actors except a couple like Winona Ryder, the writing was better and it was successful. Maniac and Sabrina are also pretty good in this area. Bojack Horseman has a cult following. Dark is amazing. Black Mirror was a great acquisition. I Am Mother was pretty good and premiering Annihilation was a steal. Russian Doll was excellent. Animation like Death, Love & Robots, Voltron, Castlevania and more are solid. Those are all the model to go for. What is missing in most shows is writing and casting/actors draw to make a staple series that becomes a fallback like the article mentions.
> Consumers turn to a trusted source when they don’t know what to watch on their streaming service
> Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer plenty of critically-acclaimed, award-winning content. But the thing is, viewers have to pick which movies and series they’ll watch, and observers say many are getting burned out from all that decision-making.
Now with The Witcher the writing is based on a really solid book series, they have a big name actor Henry Cavill that has read the series and it looks great. It could be their Game of Thrones.
Amazon is also trying this with Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time.
These shows if they are done right, will get rewatched for a long time and draws in the mega fans that are influencers.
Netflix is doing pretty good with stand up comedy, maybe even the leader now. They paid Dave Chappelle and will forever be thanked for that by comedy content consumers.
Netflix and Amazon need some big hits like the coming epics, and they need some good staple shows like the Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 (Netflix should have bought this), Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Friends, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. When they have that they equal the content competition that has that trusted good quality. They need a few more of these always watchable fallbacks.
They are both still chasing HBO, HBO is still the top in consistently good content and shows.
Personally I love the competition, some real funding and creator freedom is being unleashed, some are big hits, some are average and some not so good, but I like the amount of content and like the vibe of where Netflix is headed. Their new intro splash where the N goes into color bands is even great, matches their really colorful catalog.
The advantage that Amazon offers, is that you only have to learn how to cancel a channel on Amazon, and not on 10 different websites..
I go through cycles of using it and not but every time I'm feeling too much choice-fatigue I pull up my reelgood recs and pick something from there.
As far as I can tell Netflix has no "recommendation engine". I have never noticed any correlation between the kind of show/movie I like and what it displays; it seems completely random, well, with a bias towards self-made content which presumably costs them less in licensing - almost all of which is made-for-TV level garbage of no interest to me in any format. I genuinely think I could write a better recommendation engine. I think sorting by basically anything - budget, popularity in my demographic, most watched until completion, would be better than whatever they have now.
Basically my only use for Netflix now is the occasional standup comedy special (which I have to search for by name), the rare occasion I suddenly think of a movie I want to watch and is actually there (also search by name), or to put other people in front of. I'd try HBO Go but for some idiotic reason it's not available in my area.
Frankly, if they can actually execute, I think Disney is going to clean Netflix's clock.
They'd have paid you for it back in the day :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
Netflix had great technology and business plan and management executed it well for many years.
I reluctantly dumped it all in late May. I'd been watching it carefully after in December they hired an activist executive from ABC who cares more for political correctness than profitability. Dumping at the end of May proved smart and I'm pretty happy with my half million in locked in gains.
Netflix is now going to descend to $190 or so. Maybe it comes back from that. Maybe. Only if they make changes. After it hits rock bottom, if it then comes back up to $300 I'll reinvest.
Those of you who didn't dump your stock yet, fasten your seatbelts and good luck to you. Hopefully I'm just a crank.
Several online offerings offer zilch in the way of true health benefits.
Regarding pricing, yeah rising prices suck but do you really expect prices to remain stable indefinitely?
Subjective, I find lots of things to watch and enjoy.
>produce at least something GoT/Breaking Bad-grade
Again, subjective. I enjoyed Breaking Bad, but did not enjoy GoT. Other people liked the vice-versa. Other people liked neither.
It sounds like you want Netflix to cater specifically to your tastes.
I imagine pricing restructure might happen if the exodus is extreme, but it doesn't seem like it is very extreme. After all, they gained subscribers didn't they? Just not as many as they had thought.
>second-quarter earnings report Wednesday revealed fewer _new_ subscribers than expected
>The company said it _added_ 2.7 million subscribers across the globe in the second quarter
Maybe only House of Cards. HBO just has Netflix beat in terms of content over the last couple years especially.
However, that does not mean that the catalogue of Netflix is "99% unwatchable garbage" which was the point I was refuting. Nor does it mean Netflix isn't allowed to raise their pricing as they see fit.
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
Given that they have the technology to stream any movie ever made to my house, and given the availability of more data about each of us than we probably even know about, is catering specifically to each of our tastes unreasonable? I mean, why do you have the things in your house that you have, if not to cater to your tastes?
Most Netflix originals prioritized a political message first and entertainment a distant second.
I don't need to get my values from entertainers, of all people.
I wonder whether they’d consider that maybe people are just bored and don’t want to pay for the content.