It’s fairly obvious that Netflix won the first round of the streaming TV wars. Here’s the thing: as subscriber growth becomes saturated, Netflix has to keep providing Wall Street with those sweet, …
They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won't cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.
The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.
People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.
I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don't know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it
I used yt-dlp and downloaded a shitload of old commercials once and I stick then in a random playlist to get the full TV effect. Never know what'll be on.
From the bottom of my heart, to everyone involved in the production of any kind of media: I hope you fall face into a fifty deep wishing well full of human shit and erect dicks.
I don't think the creatives who actually produce the media are the problem here...
Without them you'd have nothing to watch. The problem are the suits.
cut one layer of the parasitic middlemen out of the loop. 👍
the corporate noose is tightening on everyone; the rope will either fray and snap on drop or simply break our necks. I am sickened by the short-term likely outcome, because so few people are pulling out the knives and cutting at their tethers.
The sad reality is that the quality of modern BluRay releases has significantly declined. Sure the picture looks great, but they barely come with special features anymore. Also, the QA is atrocious. I buy a lot of UHD BluRays and ~30% of them come corrupted/damaged out of the box.
I really want physical media to become popular again so companies start actually putting in effort.
EDIT: I still love physical media. It’s pretty much the only way to own a copy of media anymore. I just wish it was as beloved as the DVD days.
If anyone knows of a player I can vertically mount to the wall let me know and I'll buy it today. I see that kind of thing for CDs. It's still just a spinning disc!
I honestly don't understand the visceral anger aimed at any business with a non-essential product offering.
It's as if the individual complaining should be diagnosed with a variant of consumerism.
If you don't like the pricing of a non-essential product, don't buy it. But if you still desire said product to such an extreme that you pirate it, recognize your shortcomings.
This discussion would be wholly different if we were discussing healthcare, food, or any other necessity.
So, if you're having an emotional reaction to a Netflix price increase, maybe you should get outside and touch some grass?
Does life really have to get ever shittier, just because a few people need more money?
Sure, everyone can live without Netflix. But some entertainment is good, not just individually, but also socially. Lots of public entertainment has died down during the pandemic. Now entertainment is getting more expensive while people already have too little money because everything else got too expensive.
Where does this end? When everyone can barely afford rent & food, and nothing else? After all, nothing else is essential, right?
TLDR: To make a long story short, Netflix used to be the crown jewel that had everything. Now they arguably have a much worse catalog, for a higher price, on a platform you can't have your family members share because they live in another household.
I definitely see your point but I can also sympathize with the other point. The way I see it, the market is saturated with streaming services that all get, I assume, licenses to show different shows/movies.
Because of this, consumers are spreading their spending between platforms to potentially watch only specific shows. I would guess that most people really only have a few movies/shows they actually want to watch. The rest being filler.
As an example, maybe people bought paramount+ for Yellowstone. Sure maybe SpongeBob or others that they have, but compared to their entire offering, that's only a few. Maybe that 10-15 dollars a month makes it worth it but when you keep raising it and offer worse items or cancel actually good shows while keeping alive shitty ones because they're trending (subjective, I know) then that's where the anger can stem from I think.
Yeah I really don’t know what a fair price for streaming is. They can charge what they want and I’ll pay if I think it’s worth it.
My current pattern is to keep one or two streaming services at a time and when I run out of shows I drop one and add a different one.
People are disappointed though that the service used to be a much better value. It’s like most things that start out good and become “enshittified” as the service provider tries to extract more and more profit.
... and that said, I cancelled years ago after their 3rd price hike in 18 months (in Canada). been sailing the high seas ever since and feel absolutely no guilt whatsoever. I remember their excuse was always something like, "In order to continue to bring you top-shelf content, we must also continue to raise your monthly fee, while at the same time our original content becomes increasingly shitty and we systematically remove quality content from our library, leaving you with horrible Netfux originals as your only option"
Can you share souce on RD shutting down? Cant seem to find anything beyond the hubub a couple of months ago but workarounds have since been available and haven't heard anything from official RD sources since.
Netflix has stopped being a product I am interested in a long time ago.
When they started out, they had a lot of stuff. These days, you'll have to subscribe to 5 or 6 services to watch a lot. And every service makes their own shitty shows to attract more customers. And 99% of them suck, with the occasional succes.
Right now, Netflix is too expensive for what they offer. But clearly they think they can get away with raising proces, so I guess most people think it is worth it or simply don't care.
I refuse to pay money for this, as the service continues to get worse, but the prices continue getting higher. They can blame it on data and hardware being more expensive, but that's not our problem to solve
You have to understand that streaming itself was NEVER going to make a profit.
In all likelihood, Netflix spent more dough on producing their own series (not even movies lmao) than it ever brought in.
This was the expected end game. "Invest upfront money" get your pick of the market, and then you can raise prices.
For people coming from 100-200 usd cable invoices, when Netflix launched, 10 USD a month for a big catalog, that was great! 10 years later the catalog is not that big, and the prices are raising
I think paramount and HBO are the only ones with actual revenue, because they already owned their content, they don't need to make anything new. They are pretty mid tho, not like Netflix or Disney
Well congrats to them I guess. The industry coordinated to recreate cable and its reviving the piracy that affordable streaming cut way down on back in the day.