Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for starting to stream a show/movie you don't like are much smaller; you can back out and immediately start something else. You don't have to wait days to return your unsatisfying DVD and get a different one in the mail.

Netflix has ~6,000 items to recommend to streaming customers in the US [1]. This is about 6% as much content to recommend as the DVD-by-mail service has. Their streaming catalog size is actually shrinking over time [2]. Fine grained rating systems and better recommenders aren't going to move the needle much for Netflix's current business, because they now have a content availability problem much more than a discovery problem.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1013571/netflix-library-...

[2] https://www.streamingobserver.com/netflix-movie-library-shri...

You are certainly right about Netflix's catalog decreasing, but that doesn't explain why Netflix's recommendations have been downgraded over time.

I am reminded of the show Tuca & Bertie. It was a new Netflix original from the same people who created BoJack Horseman. You would think it would be obvious to surface the new show to anyone who watched the old show. Except that never happened. The show's creator even commented that Netflix's algorithm never recommended her her own show. She had to manually search to find it.

The only real explanation is that Netflix believes it is more important for customers to think the catalog is large rather than the catalog is good. Netflix wants people to spend 10 minutes scrolling through crap to find something to watch instead of simply listing all the recommended content at the top and for people to notice that there are only a few good options.

Netflix’s recommended content has become so terrible outside things I want like Better Call Saul or Mindhunter, that I’ve cancelled the sub. Most of what they push to the top is straight garbage. Really badly written stuff.

Meanwhile I can pay the same for amazon and get more Picard, Mr Robot, The Expanse... and if the TV sucks there are plenty of movies on rotation.

I reached the same conclusion today. When I logged back in to disable the autoplay-previews, it occurred to me that the only reason I have a subscription still is to catch the remaining Sherlock (with Cumberbatch) episodes that I haven't yet seen.

But I realized they might also be found elsewhere, and it turns out they're carried by Amazon Prime Video. That was the last straw for my Netflix subscription.

I'm amazed by how thoroughly Netflix has changed me from a lover to a hater of their service and company in recent years. It's not just a matter of cancelling because they don't have a catalog I care about. It's that I feel lied to and manipulated as well.

What I hate about Netflix’s recommendations is how if you watch any standup comedy special, Netflix decides that you’re a huge, undiscerning standup fan and recommends all standup comedy to you, forever.

Not sure of that. I have never watched standup and Netflix still recommends lots of standup comedy

Netflix is all-in on comedy, esp standup.

But I have the same problem with the music services -- I listen to a lot of "quiet" music playlists for sleep and work. And so, all the playlists Spotify build for me are quiet. But I also follow and listen to a lot of rock/noise/loud music. But the "made for you" formulas won't budge.

I jokingly believe I need two services -- one where I listen to ambient/quiet/etc, and another where I never listen to it.

But the probability is I'll stop caring about music services and live without them. I don't need to curate my relationship with services like they're tomagachi's. I pay for Youtube Premium, but when I subscribe to a certain number of music artists, it chokes my video subscription feeds.

Moving to willfully not caring for content, music and videos alike.

There’s definitely a big difference once you’ve actually watched one. You can create a new profile and see it for yourself. Or at least, this was the case the last time I attempted to verify.

I'm sure there was a narrow window when you could stream seemingly every film, ancient and modern, legitimately. Then the studios twigged and had to kill it.

I don't even mind paying on demand to stream a film. It's annoying and economically baffling when you can't stream a film even if you have your credit card in hand, ready to pay.

Last weekend I tried to find To Live and Die in L.A. -- from the 1980s but hardly obscure. I couldn't find it legitimately available to stream anywhere, for any amount of money.

I even tried Kanopy, which has been my go-to source for films I can't find on paid streaming services, but they didn't have it either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_and_Die_in_L.A._(film)

And you sometimes can't even rent movies that you saw on Netflix as recently as a couple of years ago.

"Page Eight" was a great little spy movie with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz on Netflix. Now you can't rent from anywhere, for any price afaict.

How does this optimize revenues for the studios?

The only thing I can think of is a mind share argument: they want you to watch the latest blockbuster instead. The Disney Vault is the cynical endpoint of this line of thinking.

Howso?

This movie may be available through Hoopla in association with your local library.[0] It appears to be distributed in the US by PBS which doesn't have the best streaming availability.

[0] https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/10085700

It’s on Amazon, in the US at least, free with Prime.

Two films that I can't get on streaming or DVD are

* The Name of the Rose * The Draughtmans Contract

I spose I'll have to find them at an old fashioned DVD store, eg. https://filmclub.com.au/

These appear to be available at dvd.netflix.com:

The Name of the Rose (2019 series): https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Name-of-the-Rose/81093444

The Name of the Rose (1986 movie): https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Name-of-the-Rose/70000552

The Draughtsman's Contract: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Draughtsman-s-Contract/459...

Your spelling of "Draught[s]man" might have misled you for that one. It's a little sad that Netflix's search returned no results for such a close spelling. I'm not sure why you didn't see Name of the Rose.

(although maybe from your example link you are in Australia and thus don't have access to Netflix DVD?)

This best is when it is temporarily no longer available to rent digitally because it has rotated back to HBO or SHOW.

I think they have both. Super anecdotal, but just last week I randomly discovered Altered Carbon through an online "best of decade" list. It's exactly in my wheelhouse. I watched it and loved every minute. It's been out for ~2 YEARS, and don't recall Netflix ever recommending it to me -- certainly not recently, when I've actively been looking for new things to watch.

This makes me wonder just how much other content they do have that would really appeal to me. It feels like rather than perhaps not spend _quite as much_ time on perfecting their recommendation algorithm, they've just completely given up. For a while now, the only real content that Netflix successfully "recommends" to me are things that I've already started watching.

Extremely interesting. Thanks for the reply and sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com