Netflix Loses Toy Story 3, Tron and 1,000 More Movies | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Loses Toy Story 3, Tron and 1,000 More Movies

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61 pointsssclafani76 comments

Ever since my daughter was born two years ago I basically stopped watching movies and only watch a small amount of TV. This has made me realize that the products being put out by Hollywood are inconvenient and not a good value for the money. The few times I've sat down to rent something I did want to see, I found it wasn't available on onDemand, iTunes, etc... Instead of watching a movie, my wife and I end up goofing around on Facebook or something. I have plenty of entertainment options. Making it hard to see a movie just means I will do something else. I suspect I'm not alone in this regard.

Boardgames have replaced movies and TV in our house. There are some great games out there. Good ones can run anywhere from $20-80 (though usually around $40-50) but the value for your money is far greater. We get some quality time together as a family and the kid gets some strategic and problem-solving skills.

Of course... they take up a lot more space. :)

Try Bananagrams. Takes up as much space as a pair of socks.

We have it, along with many others. Our newest addition is Cutthroat Caverns, which we played tonight, for the first time. If you like tile-based word games, we picked up Lexigo a while back and it's pretty fun.

Race for the Galaxy! It's so much fun, though I found the rules to be difficult to understand at first. http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Grande-Games-RGG301-Galaxy/dp/B000...

Got that, too! :D Here.... let me just make a list of what's in the cabinet: http://pastie.org/3502486 There's not anything there that we don't like, but I'd say family favorites would be Qwirkle, Ticket to Ride, Robo Rally, Carcassonne, and Pandemic. Caverns was a lot of fun and may make the favorites list, too, but that could just be the newness... too soon to tell. :)

Our daughter's almost 10, and with the exception of Twilight Imperium (this game is massive, especially when you add both expansions) plays them all with us. In addition to spending more time together as a family, I'd say it's helped a with her math, reading, and critical thinking.

Cosmic Encounter is a space game that has _lots_ of optional rules. The basic game is pretty easy to learn but it can get very deep.

My son's almost four and I can't wait for him to want to play all these games.

Dixit is well worth a try if haven't already,

It's weird, something like that happened to me. I didn't plan this. There was just nothing on TV that I wanted to watch, so I stopped and never really started again.

I do sometimes watch a little TV, but it's pretty rare at this point.

Heh, 4 years since my son was born, and while at the begining HBO was ON, later as he grew up and was bothered by the TV noise, we switched to Netflix, but watch only movies with captions - and these are... well non-english ones :) So here ya go!

Oh, And I have to watch with him Yo-gabba-gabba, Franklin and the Upside down show (which is great btw)

I'm more excited than my kids are for the upside down show.

> “This decision is a result of our strategy to protect the premium nature of our brand by preserving the appropriate pricing and packaging of our exclusive and highly valuable content,” Starz said last September.

And the movie industry wonders how to fight piracy... well for one, don't kill a legitimate and convenient way for paying customers to access your movies! "Protecting your brand" you say? You are putting yourself out of business...

It's perfectly reasonable if that legitimate and convenient method isn't a sustainable business model. Tragically $10 a month for every movie and TV show ever isn't viable. It is in Starz' interest to focus on acquiring expensive premium cable subscriptions rather than collecting a small portion of the Netflix $10 monthly subscription.

Tragically $10 a month for every movie and TV show ever isn't viable.

Then they'd better make it viable really quick because that seems to be about the price point that the market has decided on.

I also don't see why it wouldn't be viable as long as you distribute it to the content that's actually being watched.

Lots of people pay $50-$100/month for cable/satellite. I don't.. and I don't understand the value, and you might not either, but a huge amount of the population does.

It's not really that simple when you account for the "triple play" style packages. People are getting their internet, phone, and TV all together for around $100/month. People don't really understand what portion of their bill goes to each of those services, but they view all three of them as critical (with phone service rapidly becoming provided by cell phones). There is pretty well understood psychological effects of bundle pricing.

When you break out just movies, $10/mo might be what people actually want to pay. I suspect the actual right price point for the mass populous is somewhere > $10 and < $50... but Netflix has to live in a world where people already have TV, thanks to aggressive bundle pushing strategies from cable companies. At $10/mo, Netflix is priced the same as Stars & friends: like "channel packs".

Live events. That's the value of that subscription. It's why ESPN can charge nearly 4x what other channels charge providers. Almost the entirety of my value from television I derive is from watching sports. If I can watch 20 hockey games in a month for the price of actually going to one live, then that's worth it to me. If I can watch my alma mater play some hockey, then that's worth the substitution of buying an expensive plane ticket, getting a hotel, and watching them play (I live about 2000 miles from the good ol' alma mater).

I think for this reason, you'll never see that expense go away and TV will remain fairly ubiquitous.

Why has it always got to be this direction though? Next time you watch a film try tracking the wastage, the unnecessary cuts, the plethora of extras, the ridiculous quantity of explosions and/or CGI.

IMO the future is about more films with lower budgets. At present the amount of money that film studios piss away with their bloated budgets is utterly unsustainable.

Not really. The movies which have racked in the most money of all time all cost 200 million+ to make. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/

The public loves and wants big budget expensive movies.

How much of the 200 million+ is marketing?

Even some celebrity actors are marketing.

Does that really matter? The total cost being 200 million plus of every flick on that list shows that big huge expensive movies, marketing, actors included, still are super popular.

It's contributing to the popularity, and there's a belief that hollywood is 90% marketing, 10% fluff. I'm just curious if you knew how much was marketing.

Reported budgets for movies do not include marketing, as such costs are highly variable.

Thus, those $200 million budgets are the budgets for making the movie, with additional outlay for marketing the movie.

They better get used to $10/month vs $0 when consumers go to The Pirate Bay instead.

A smarter move would be to offer their own streaming service, or even a download store.

Agreed. I'm not sure why this doesn't happen. Maybe because the royalties and such get more and more complex with that sort of system? Can anyone shed some light on this?

> Tragically $10 a month for every movie and TV show ever isn't viable.

Why not?

Further, can you explain that in terms an avid Netflix customer can understand?

Because the market size is currently bigger than that [[ keep reading, I am wrong ]]. Lets take 900 million people in the western world (rich like us) x $10 x 12 months ~ 100 billion for movies and tv (independent of ad revenue, etc). This is the upper bound of course, then there is the middle 2 billion people who can watch but have more limited means (no streaming, other formats, etc). So yes, $10 is a perfectly viable number. They just don't want it to be.

Still $10 a is in the order of magnitude. Some will pay zero, some will pay 20 - 30 (netflix,itunes,amazon,etc).

Why do you think 10$ for all you can eat movie watching via Netflix is sustainable, when new releases at the theater cost $7-12 PER movie? Unfortunately the industry set the price this low and now it is expected to be that cheap. Since the price is going to inevitably go up, or Netflix will just lose more content, the public is going to have to deal with the increase, or the people who don't want to pony up will just have to cancel their service.

The fact that new releases cost $lots doesn't affect the viability of Netflix's operation, any more than the fact that a new car costs $20,000 affects the viability of selling it secondhand later on for $5,000. Any costs related to property, rent etc are not relevant, and the (much larger) licensing costs of movies are arbitrary figures set by the industry. They could set them pretty much wherever they want for Netflix and still make money since their marginal cost is pretty much zero. And while they may not want to do that, the alternative to customers paying $10/month for Netflix is probably not customers paying $100/month when most people know there are other alternatives.

Netflix had to raise prices eventually, I wonder if they will have to do it again in the future to stay in business. Their licencing fees went from ~200 million in 2010 to ~2 BILLION in 2012. They must raise prices somewhere along the line. $10 a month is a hell of a deal for all you can watch movies. This is the price of 2 trips to McDonalds.

They have to charge more somewhere due to their skyrocketing license renegotiation costs the studios are charging. And they can charge this, because there is a demand for their content.

A movie at the theater and a movie in your living room are two different products.

A true comparison isn't really possible. The closest would be a premium movie channel; HBO, Showtime, Starz. Those cost more than Netflix and have a much smaller selection of titles.

How about that only one or two On Demand movies from Comcast cost as much as a month of all you can watch Netflix?

People still have cable?

It's worth noting here the Starz isn't making these movies - they're paying for to access the content from the creators just like Netflix is.

(Starz produces a few tv shows but obviously none of the titles in the title here)

I'm a very heavy Netflix user. Some people listen to music while they code, I watch movies/series. I don't care that Starz has removed their content and I'm not going to chase it down. They've overplayed their hand and it's going to bite them.

I do this too.

It's quite lonely living alone in a single bedroom apartment. The little extra background keeps me from going nuts at times.

I find it easy to code while having the TV on or if I'm just toying around a small window on my display in the bottom corner. The secret I have found is to put on one of two types of shows: 1. Something you have already seen, I really enjoy 24 for example, having it the background when I'm familiar with it, but still enjoy it, helps. 2. Documentaries or something similar such as Top Gear or PBS shows are good choices.

New shows that require my attention or movies I have never seen, but want to just don't work for me.

That can really mess you up if you're like me and don't get out much. I strongly suggest moving in with a room-mate. Keep trying different people out until you find someone you're compatible with. I mean living alone is great if you're surrounded by people at work and throughout the day but working alone + living alone can seriously make you feel like you're going insane.

Thanks for the feedback. However, I work with a bunch of people all day. I don't work at home. The cool thing is my work place is nearly across the street from my apartment.

Curious. How do you manage to pay attention both to a video and to your code at the same time?

Well...this will sound mildly insane but if i don't have something going it's like there's a bored 5 year old in my head that wants to distract me from coding. Of course there are segments of the video I miss but I follow the dialogue. It's how I watched most of Lost, for example.

Be careful, it might not be good for you: http://www.health.com/health/article/0,,20505051,00.html

one of my ex-colleagues used to do this. He had two monitors, one for running some video (youtube, netflix etc) and other was for his work stuff. I could never understand how he could do both at the same time. I assumed, either his work was too boring, or his videos were :D Interesting to know he is not the only one doing this.

Stories like this make the Netflix Prize seem ancient. You can build a better mousetrap and then spend a lot of time adjusting the springs, but keep an eye on your cheese supply.

Netflix just needs to raise their damn prices -- or offer a higher tier. Many of us were used to paying $30-$80 for our cable TV packages and another $20-$30/mo for Blockbuster. It's been about 7 years since I paid those, but now I'm only paying $8/mo for TV/movie entertainment in total.

I'd be more than happy to pay $18/mo if it meant I had 2-3x more content.

Netflix: $8/mo, Netflix Plus: $18/mo, and even Netflix Premium: $28/mo.

That they haven't done this is kind of dumbfounding.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. $10/month is way to low to be sustainable. Netflix has to raise their prices since the content creators are squeezing them because they know they hold all the cards.

> Netflix: $8/mo, Netflix Plus: $18/mo, and even Netflix Premium: $28/mo.

Hmm...that sounds a lot like how traditional cable TV packages are structured.

So? It wasn't price that made cable TV suck. It was the lack of on-demand viewing, alternate device viewing, region restrictions, commercials, etc.

That's all you can eat, though. I don't have to worry about emptying out DVRs, or programming it in, or (if I'm not a DVR subscriber) waiting for it to air and sitting through an absolute assault of commercials.

Additionally, I simply refuse to watch a PPV movie for $5.00 per on top of paying $50/mo for cable. Most of the channels are absolute garbage (yes, I'm looking at you, "reality" TV) or air the programs I actually want to watch so rarely that I end up not watching them at all.

Netflix is simple: Find/browse movie, check user ratings and synopsis, click play. That's Apple-level magic, and it's worth paying a premium, even if it means paying near what I did with cable.

I would cancel my subscription just on principle if they started doing that crap.

I would be willing to just pay more. But tiered content is trash.

That's absurd. Back when Netflix was primarily competing with Blockbuster, you would say something like 'Well, if I rent 2 or 3 movies at Blockbuster a month, I'll come out ahead using Netflix'. That's the world that Netflix prices came from.

Now Netflix has grown into something so great that it can replace not only your DVD rentals at Blockbuster, but also your Cable subscription, and for a lot of us, the thought of even buying movies. Suddenly they have gobbled up what used to be $100 worth of money going from my pocket to the industry.

And people cry foul when Netflix raised their prices $5. Get over it.

Why does it matter if there are higher tiers that have more content?

Your concern is that you would get less than you currently do for $8/mo or something?

Is it as objectionable when considered a higher base price, but letting people opt out of content they don't want and be refunded? I don't understand why tiering is bad. You'd have to avoid an awfully lot of businesses to get away from tiered services.

The main impression I have surrounding the "premium nature of their brand" is when I go to a Residence Inn and enjoy free movies.

For those that purport to track piracy, this will be an interesting case study. Perhaps if they can see (again) the inverse relationship of easy, non-free availability to downloads of free copies, maybe they'll finally begin to adjust their business model. I doubt it, but one can hope.

Yeah, I can't really remember the last time I watched a Starz movie on Netflix. It's been nothing but TV series for me for at least a year now. Occasionally I'll watch a movie that shows up in new releases, but they've been signing a ton of premium shows lately, far more than I can watch.

I think it's a perfectly viable strategy for them to focus on series - more content per deal and a perfect match for a long-tail streaming strategy.

It's ok, they weren't in HD, so I would never watch them. No point in having movies that clearly have HD versions in standard definition.

"Streaming HD" is usually a marketing pipedream.

Netflix's "HD" streaming content looks great. I don't know if it's "real" HD or not, but it's better quality than their non-HD stuff.

I know tons of people for whom "I don't own a TV" means "I watch everything on my laptop/computer" rather than "I am opposed to the mass media." So, how well does it work over wifi?

Netflix says they stream up to 5MB/s for their video quality, which looks great to me. Not as good as a blu-ray I'm sure, but still looks better than standard definition.

Important correction: Netflix's HD tops out at 5 Mb/s, not 5 MB/s.

Bluray max bitrate is 54 Mb/s, but I've generally seen transcoding to 20-30 Mb/s have nearly the same quality.

Correct, that's because up to 16 Mb/s is for sound.

I have (and love) Blu-ray, but as much for the sound as the picture. Blu-rays have incredible audio.

It's also usually better than "Streaming SD."

Have you tried VUDU? Their HDX stuff looks awesome.

Good luck getting people to pay for plastic discs in boxes.

Plastic disc in box sales this week: $74M

http://www.the-numbers.com/dvd/charts/weekly/thisweek.php

http://www.the-numbers.com/weekly-bluray-sales-chart

People forget why Universal Studios was originally founded. The monopoly envisioned by Edison and company (slowly) gave way to a cartel that arose out of opposition to the incumbent surrounded by a desire to capitalize on untapped opportunity. See this Ars Technica article:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/thomas-ediso...

Far from being a hinderance, the actions of the MPAA and its member studios are an opportunity for smaller, more agile companies to start producing content and refusing to license it to the incumbents. There is a whole new world of distribution out there, and no forced middle-man. Get out there and make it happen.

Hollywood continues to punish consumers, and then complain about piracy.

It is time for statutory streaming licences.

this will lead to 10x more piracy than Starz premium subscribers.

the flexibility of internet distribution has shown publishers and content creators that consumers will not stand for being sold a bill of goods - not as 16-track albums, nor packaged cable channels.

I'd never heard of Premium cable network Starz until I read that article, and I guess now I'll never see any of their content.

I do have Netflix and I don't have cable. I don't understand why people pay so much money to watch TV?

This is the biggest problem with Netflix, the value of Netflix is the value of its library. If it's not constant then it's a lot harder to justify a consistent monthly payment.

This sounds like a delusional way of saying "We'll wait until we can replicate the premium cable channel model over the Internet". They clearly don't understand that the concept of a "channel" is what's being disrupted.

Hollywood is never going to learn; i think Netflix should get themselves in the content creation business by making alliances with indie movie makers.

article says they are about to launch a tv show

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