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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Higher fees, fine. If you look at the amount and cost of content over the last decade it was clear it was unsustainable. The amount we all were paying vs. the amount of content was/is staggering. We were in a content golden age.

On the other hand, ads are a problem and I refuse to watch them. There are too many other sources of content to ever sit through an ad.

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I’m skeptical that content quality is as high. Movies especially are stumbling, and many streaming service originals seem very derivative or written by algorithms.

Now content quantity is enormous, but that just makes separating the wheat from the chaff even harder.

To be fair, every generation says “they don’t make $media as well as they used to.”

This may or may not be true, but looking at the past few years I have to say it’s subpar. That was probably exacerbated by the pandemic.

There are decades of quality films worth seeking, some are on Criterion Collection physical media and their streaming service.

Vinegar syndrome filled a big niche for me in the last few years

Swing by archive.org, they have full movies!

This one is next in my watch list:

https://archive.org/details/Gattaca

I've also "discovered" their software tab recently.

What if you don't like comic book movies?

I can't stand comic book movies and my list of content to watch right now is probably more than I'll ever be able to get to.

> If you look at the amount and cost of content over the last decade it was clear it was unsustainable. The amount we all were paying vs. the amount of content was/is staggering. We were in a content golden age.

Nonsense.

You know what actually had a staggering amount of content? Disc-based Netflix.

They had and made available damned near everything.

I’d happily go back to slower (legal) access to damned near everything rather than stay with the status quo of heavily fragmented fiefdoms, each ever more enshittified and with comparatively narrow selections of stale low-value crap available on-demand.

Love the downvotes for bringing facts.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Why not? Sometimes people downvoate a perfectly good, informative or interesting comment for completely stupid, bullshit cliquish reasons on HN and it absolutely deserves to be called out when it's obvious.

I mean, the explanation is in the rule itself. Has anything magically changed overtime because someone doubled down and said "oh no I'm being attacked with downvotes!". Never saw it end positively on Reddit, never saw it end positively on HN.

Also, it's all about the delivery.

>Love the downvotes for bringing facts.

just comes off as snark. If you really want to invite more nuanced responses to the clique, say so

>I am open to rebuttals or corrections if I'm incorrect on something.

replies matter so much more than points. That's why the points aren't public to begin with. So invite that instead of pseudo-begging for upvotes.

Netflix disc had everything in a much smaller universe of content. The amount of money spent creating content over the last decade is staggering as is the number of shows/movies coming out.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/444870/scripted-primetim...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/str...

Total media industry content cash spend rose 14 percent to $134.6 billion in 2022 after a 25 percent jump to $118.4 billion in 2021, he noted, citing company reports and his firm’s estimates and analysis. For 2023, he forecast a 1 percent gain to $136.4 billion. Content spend in the coming years was likely to be “relatively flat or even decline,” he argued.

‘Content’ is what you get when bean counters and technologists commoditize our artistic output and cultural heritage.

And the enshittified, ‘content-rich’ era is what you get when these same entities then proceed to churn out endless, mostly low-value and low-effort, variations on the existing themes. Oh boy, another reality show. Hey, look, yet another low budget third-rate superhero spinoff.

Who cares if there’s ’more content than ever’ if 99% of it is unwatchable drek?

> unsustainable

I got the impression all the major streaming players made significant profits and grew substantially over the past decade.

Does "unsustainable" just mean they weren't making as much cash as they wanted to?

Netflix is about the only one making money. Disney+, Hulu, Time Warner, etc... are all losing a lot of money on their streaming ventures. Expect to see consolidation incoming. The strikes also helped since it gave them cover to cut a lot of costs.

Honestly that would be awesome if the studios were forced to make their content all available on Netflix again like they used to.

Netflix is o ly really problematic because the studios all had $$$ signs in their eyes and pulled their stuff to make their own streaming service. I was perfectly happy paying Netflix every month. But I'm not paying Amazon, Disney, Apple, Hulu and whoknowsehatelse on top of Netflix.

would it be? Then it'd just be netflix calling all the shots, controlling what is and isn't on TV, and free to price gouge as they have already been doing with the rest of them.

It'd be Youtube all over again. Ask Youtube content creators how they are treated by Google. We have a story here today of someone uploading public domain content, being struck by copyright claims, reinstated, and then hit by a different company within 24 hours.

If Netflix was basically just the broadcaster like say a movie theater but streaming online I do think it would be OK yes. Maybe have another broadcaster or two but not actually hide content behind 7 different ones with a completely non overlapping set of exclusive content so that I have to subscribe to all of them.

It's better than the "studios" controlling everything. Think Paramount ruling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....

Basically we need a paramount ruling for streaming. Instead of what they are actually currently doing which is to revert it.

I doubt it will go back to Netflix, but we'll see Netflix plus a couple other big players.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the peak content era was actually the peak blockbuster era. Apparently stores had a couple thousand titles in each (1). They would of course have all the new releases across any major motion picture studio too. There's no streaming service that maintains such a comprehensive catalog of the classics today along with all the major releases that a blockbuster might have stocked.

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/blockbustervideo/comments/gum716/ho...

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