

Why Arrested Development on Netflix could change everything - sandipc
http://gigaom.com/video/why-arrested-development-on-netflix-could-change-everything/

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mark_l_watson
I am still 'negotiating' with my wife to drop Directv and just use Netflix
streaming, Hulu+, and the occasional Redbox DVD for entertainment.

This is all just my opinion, but in a digital world where there is way too
much entertaining stuff to view, be it TV, movies, videos on Youtube, Reddit,
online newspapers like the NYT, that something big has happened for me: there
are no more "must have" TV shows, movies, or books. For example, if HBO won't
let me watch a special on the web for a fair price I don't care if I miss it.

Seriously, I will probably take 5 Coursera online classes this year, read 15
non-technical fiction books, 15 technical books, write several hundred pages
in my own book projects, etc. Plenty of fun stuff to do.

This is similar to travel: when we go to a foreign country I don't worry about
"seeing everything", rather, I just want to enjoy myself and get a feel for
the people and place.

Same with digital entertainment: just graze a little.

Netflix is the absolute best value for me in entertainment.

~~~
dmishe
What is hulu+ for? I checked it last week and the content does not seem more
uptodate than netflix.

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chimeracoder
I used to have a subscription, which I placed on hold for a while before
finally cancelling.

Hulu is an attempt by NBC/Fox/Disney to dip their toes into the waters of
online streaming. I appreciate the effort, but in the end, Netflix is a much
better service for the price, and plenty of people would just as soon use the
free options available instead.

It allowed access to older episodes of some shows (in some cases, the full
series was available whereas only the last 5 episodes were available free).

But you still had to watch the advertisments, and the price was on par with
Netflix (which made it substantially _more_ expensive before Netflix's pricing
switch). Nothing makes $10/month sting like being forced to watch the same
advertisment _over and over_ as a 'premium' member. Hulu's advertisements are
far less varied than regular television, so I always half-felt like they were
going for the subliminal-message-manipulation angle, since I would see the
same ad during all three commercial breaks for the same show.

Also, they arbitrarily blocked access from certain mobile devices, which meant
that I couldn't always watch it when I wanted to.

In the end, it wasn't worth the money, by a long shot.

~~~
timjahn
Hulu = current content on TV.

Netflix = old content not currently on TV.

Two different uses. If you want to watch current television without cable, you
need Hulu.

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karlmdavis
I've been thinking a bit lately about how web video content is beginning to
become "legitimate." With series like Geek & Sundry's Tabletop [1], Penny
Arcade's "reality show" [2], and hidden gems like YouTube's The Vault [3], I'm
starting to reach a point where I could even cancel Netflix and just watch
online web videos.

My guess is, that five years from now, both Netflix and YouTube will look like
networks or producers than just distributors.

[1] <http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/episodes/> [2] <http://penny-
arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the-series> [3]
<http://www.youtube.com/user/VaultShow>

~~~
TillE
> Geek & Sundry's Tabletop

I'm not a big Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day fan, but I'm really enjoying
Tabletop. Fun show with excellent production values. I just wish the episodes
were a _little_ longer (ie, fewer cuts) for some of the more complex games.

Internet broadcasting just keeps getting better and better. It's probably not
a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers and real actors, but
for entertaining nonfiction it's perfect.

~~~
karlmdavis
> It's probably not a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers
> and real actors

Check out "The Vault" that I linked to above. Very reminiscent of Lost and (so
far) of excellent quality. I gather from some of what I've read that they've
received outside funding for the show.

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neverm0re
Television has already changed. If you look toward the UK, already there's low
budget comedy shows like Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, which is a
continuation of a rather famous comedy character spanning radio, multiple
television series and soon to be film -- which was recently produced for
peanuts with modest corporate sponsorship from Fosters, dumped online as web
episodes -- and now is being picked up for broadcast television after the
fact.

Arrested Development may be news to some folks here, but the age of producing
shows for internet distribution has been our path for quite some time. Not
only are shows being produced in this fashion for the internet now, but we're
increasingly recruiting new talent via the internet. Just look at the star of
Community, Donald Glover. This is a brilliant comedic actor who first got his
major break by producing a set of YouTube videos that went viral with the
other comedians in the Derrick comedy group, a group which was later picked up
by College Humor and several of which, including Donald, have been tapped by
mainstream American television now.

I could only see Arrested Development 'changing everything' if you weren't
already aware that things have already changed.

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wyclif
I also thought of Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee"
<http://youtu.be/s1u7A3sEnPY>

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tomjen3
It is certainly going to be interesting to see when the DRM is cracked and the
shows are up on the various file sharing systems.

My bet is that it won't take that long, a few weeks or a month at most.

~~~
jrockway
You don't need to crack the DRM to upload these to file-sharing sites. Pretty
much all TV rips (and even Blu-ray rips) are already double-compressed, so
it's not particularly important to get at the raw bitstream. That means that
all you need is a "malicious" video card or something to intercept the video-
out signal from your computer. (And no, HDCP does not solve anything. It's
already broken and anyone willing to pay $150 for a Spartan 6 dev board with
HDMI ports on it can remove it.)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure whoever made the decision to go ahead with this model
knows that there's going to be piracy. You would have to be living under the
world's largest rock to not consider that possibility.

~~~
jonursenbach
Or you can just fire up something like Fraps and record the show in the
browser while you watch it.

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icefox
Way over thinking it here, there will be _someone_ that sticks a (hopefully
mounted) video camera in front of the screen and hit record.

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jrockway
That's a lot of effort for a rip that will make the releasing group the
laughingstock of "the scene".

(I giggled the first time someone told me about this, but Wikipedia has an
article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene>)

~~~
ConstantineXVI
I was impressed the first time I ran across the scene's standards[0].

[0] <http://scenerules.irc.gs/>

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drblast
Cable channels seem to be so short-sighted here that I think they're going to
be blindsided by this model.

Using the TV model, the maximum amount of shows I can provide are limited by
the amount of prime-time hours in a week. I think this creates a very long
tail of shows that many people would be interested in watching, but not enough
that these shows compete for prime time space. These shows are usually
cancelled, and nobody makes money.

But with streaming video, Netflix is not limited at all by a viewing schedule,
and they can sell as many shows as they want. Even if a show is only popular
among a small audience it can still be profitable.

Pay-per-on-demand-show is coming, and that will be the upset. The only
demographic beholden to the TV station model are the baby-boomers who think
this streaming stuff is weird.

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noonespecial
_The other element is the fact that like Lilyhammer, all 10-13 episodes of the
series will be released at once, setting fans up for epic marathon sessions._

I think this is the beginning of an entirely new format. So far we've been
restricted to the video equivalent of serials and short stories with TV shows
and movies respectively. Its time for the rise of the video long-form novel.

There are certain stories (like Firefly IMHO) that really need this format to
work. They make terrible serials from a network execs POV (because if you miss
an ep or two, it becomes really hard to get into it later) and movies that
only a fan could love by jamming too much story into 2 hours.

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aidos
Oh wow. This is amazing news. When we got Netflix in the uk we randomly put on
Arrested Development without knowing what it was. We watched it back to back
and were a little depressed to get to the end of it.

I'm so happy to hear that Netflix are bringing it back. It ushers in an
interesting new era in tv.

~~~
freehunter
Arrested Development is a very European-style show. There are few explicit
jokes and no laugh track. They aim more for puns and other wordplay, along
with explicit foreshadowing that sets up a joke with no obvious punchline
until the hammer drops (Buster's hand is a good example of this).

You're not spoon-fed the comedy and queued for laughter. There weren't many
American shows like that when it aired, and that was one of the reasons it got
canned. They even hinted at this in the script for the last season, along with
the characters practically begging some other network to pick up the show.

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goatforce5
Note that it'll only be on Netflix US. Netflix Canada, UK, etc, subscribers
will have to wait in hope:

[http://o.canada.com/2012/04/24/the-good-news-about-
arrested-...](http://o.canada.com/2012/04/24/the-good-news-about-arrested-
development-netflix-and-canada/)

~~~
lemond
Has anyone got an idea why it would still be geographically restricted even
though presumably Netflix will own the rights? It seems like this would be an
ideal chance to move away from media being released at different times in
different countries.

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expralitemonk
We use a Roku with Netflix and currently have over 200 items in the queue, and
some of the items are series with 100 episodes. Netflix doesn't have access to
new Hollywood releases, but the Roku, through its Amazon link, does. Cable? We
said goodbye to that years ago.

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larrys
If you are an Arrested Fan (although not highly rated on Netflix for some
reason) the first season of "Children's Hospital" is hilarious.

~~~
frontier
Thanks for the tip! I'd never heard of this show and the clip I just saw on YT
was really-really funny!! :-D

