Why You’re Angry at Netflix
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
So when the soft benefit of social sharing is now penalized (risk being SOL if trying to watch Netflix in a hotel room while on the road) and monetized the users are annoyed. On top of this Netflix is somewhat of the ideal scapegoat for another frustration, media fragmentation. I think that one is a bit unfair but I know a few people who sort of blame Netflix as the kingpin of the streaming industry for the fact they need 7 different streaming services that each ramp up the advertising dials every year despite starting out ad-free.
When streaming came online, I was excited.
Everything since is a blur. All I know is, now, I spend 10 minutes scrolling stuff that is not even remotely a match for me - you don't need to be Pappa Google to know I won't like Marvel or various woke-y movies. I have esoteric tastes, but more importantly I want to discover more.
But the entire 'Silicon Valley content' culture appears to be: get stuff TO the customer, don't let the customer get stuff on their own. Which, if you recall, television used to be. Broadcast television you had to wait til 8pm for your show, and sit through endless commercials every 8 or 10 minutes. Then there was a solution: Remember TiVo?
HBO isn't any better, it just has better content. I was looking for "Stand-up comedy" and I couldn't really get that as a category, just UNSORTABLE search results. So stuff from years ago is mixed in with stuff that is recent. God forbid I look for RECENT stand-up comedy.
It's pathetic and it's a "conspiracy" in the sense that it's clearly intentional: it's a disempowering of the consumer with some vague promise of customization, AI, so forth and so on.
God, I am angry at Netflix after all.
Sounds like what most people expect and prefer (outside of regions like US and France where people have been trained to expect dubbing)
I'll take original voice actors and subs over any dub.
Netflix gets reputation from good content, not the number of shows, the primary marketing has switched from size of library to range. 1000 TV shows mean less than one Seinfeld or The Office.
It's not padding just because you don't know the language they're speaking.
Also Dark, Casa de Papel and Squid Game were huge. I will agree on one point though, the dubbing is criminal.
> Most of it isn't even -good- content, and they're all either poorly dubbed, or not dubbed at all.
Watch them with subtitles, then? Dubbing is usually awful and changes the actual dialog so it can match the lip movements. I'm not going to down anyone who watches dubs, but if your complaint is that the dubs are bad, the only way to get around that is to use the subs.
This is a truly ludicrous markup on something that costs them literally pennies in terms of infrastructure and network bandwidth each month. It's roughly akin to back when phone companies charged ridiculous amounts each month for Caller ID or SMS messages, even though the network was designed to carry those at virtually no cost.
My other streaming services don't charge extra for 4K, and it's quite obvious that it costs Netflix virtually nothing compared with the other plans, and so it's an obviously bad-faith pricing strategy that just makes them look bad.
This was clear to me even though I share my girls 50/50 with my ex-husband so I really don't benefit from this at all because whose account should they use on their iPads, mine or his?
IRL I mostly used Netflix to watch things alongside my brother. I have the account and he has the TV. Sometimes I want to watch things on my computer, but sometimes I want to go over to his place and watch something with him. He lives on the building complex next to mine, so its less than a five minute walk if I want to show him something. I should have the option of doing that if I paid specifically to do that.
It had been a good idea. I spent more time outdoors or reading books or just sleep instead of watching mildly interesting serials.
A lacklustre catalog (except the occassional interesting ones), poor originals, price increases over the years and customer unfriendly moves--all these seem to have made Netflix lose sight of what their customers want.
I would even say that they are on their way to becoming the Blockbuster videos of the 21st century and their new policies are as customer unfriendly as the notorious "late fees" of the bankrupt Blockbuster videos that Netflix had disrupted as an upstart in the late nineties with their dvd-rental-by-mail service.
I had canceled my netflix sub and haven't regretted it.
Way too expensive for what they offer, but then again, I didn't know it was legal to share accounts, so I might have shared it and split the costs.