All the handwringing over Netflix subscriber loss seems to be overlooking the fact that they raised their prices - significantly. Of course they could lose subscribers from doing that. But 200k subscribers out of 150 million? Combined with the end of the pandemic and sky high inflation meaning many people have less opportunity to watch and less money to spend. The fact they raised their prices something like 20% and lost less than 1% of their subscriber base in that environment could almost be seen as a positive.
The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.
Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.
They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it!
Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to watch and a good amount of things we both want to watch.
Things only I want to watch I mostly find on Hulu and HBOMax. Or I have to watch them the old fashioned way because they are too obscure to be on a streaming platform.
> They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
That's not particularly informative, though. It could be true right now. "Users" is not a group with a fixed population.
If they drive their content quality into the ground and hemorrhage users as a direct result, it would still be true that the quality of the content was uncorrelated with the amount that users consumed. Instead, quality of the content would correlate with number of users. But the users are always people who are willing to deal with whatever the current content is!
What's weird is that, as a flat-rate subscription service, they're already aware that increasing number of users is good, while increasing the amount of content that users consume is bad.
I noticed yesterday that nine of the top ten shows on US Netflix were squarely aimed at women; Better Call Saul was the exception and it was in last place.
Netflix is slowly turning into a weird mix of "high production quality Lifetime + HGTV" and imported dramas from places with strong media like Korea.
Same symptom happens with addiction: just because you see short term engagement because the product is designed to get users hooked, does not mean that they will not switch once better options are available. You can't retain long term loyalty with bad quality products - same thing happened with Facebook.
Yet another example of 'engagement' metrics ruining everything.
Lowering tye quality may not change viewership, hut it radically increases your likelihood to realise it's a pile of garbage one day and go climb a tree.
All this makes me realize that we have Netflix and haven't really watched or enjoyed it since, I think, the Expanse. I guess we watched the Squid Game, too, but I thought that was terrible. Like a low grade ripoff of an old (and much more intelligent) manga called The Liar Game.
Ironic that you complain about Squid Game being a rip off of Liar Game, when it's also derivative of another series, Kaiji.
Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.
When it was on scifi the funding was done by splitting syndication rights with scifi, amazon and netflix
Scifi dropped out because they didn’t think enough people watched it, their inferior cable model has no way of collecting data on what actual humans do, and when they would do it especially by being limited in airings things at a set time
This effectively cancelled the show since it didn’t have funding
And then amazon/jeff bezos picked it up completely after a major fan campaign
Few months ago I rage quit Netflix because their shows would start autoplaying and nothing I did could disable that. I couldn't read one synopsis distraction free or browse without having to constantly click my GTV remote just to stop the friggin thing from playing. WTF! I'd like to think there were more like me who voted by cancelling their subscriptions. I hope PMs at Netflix who forced this onto their users lost their jobs.
Had done that (obviously), didn't work on Chromecast with GTV. Had called customer support and filed a technical ticket. Nothing happened. Too late now.
And to combine your observations with the parent of this sub thread: Netflix raised an insane amount of debt to fund all the projects a lot of people didn’t ever end up watching, and continued to keep raising subscription costs to cover the payments on that debt they raised. I don’t really know if it could’ve turned out differently after other media outlets decided they wanted to make their own exclusive streaming services.
Same here. There is literally nothing I want to see on Netflix since The Witcher season 2 ended. Same with Disney+. Oddly enough Amazon has the most compelling content, and I'd pay for Prime even if they didn't offer streaming, so it's essentially free for me.
Seems like most content is dubbed foreign stuff now days, which I’m not at all into watching. The only thing they have at the moment I watch is Ozark and that’s ending on the 29th.
Subtitled (not dubbed; dubbing is a sin) is the best. Then again, for me all Hollywood cinema is subtitled. I wouldn't have it any other way, I love hearing the original actors speaking.
I hear in some countries like Spain, dubbing is the norm. And they are quite proud of it. I find that puzzling.
In France the dubbing is very well done and some movies are even better when dubbed. I still watch movies in the original language with subtitles but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French. There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
9 of 10 times dubbing doesn't fit with natural situational space(echo, reverb, any time based post processing in general). It's almost always out of space, stands out for me annoyingly which I find breaking the immersion. I wonder french dubbing is different.
I found that as a result, dialog was clearer. I really hate how loud everything other than dialog is in most movies for the sake of 'immersion'. I eventually gave up and settled on using subtitles when I don't want to miss any parts of a conversation.
I will agree with you animation is a special case where it can happen. But in general and in my experience, it's not common even in this case.
Spanish dubs of animé are sometimes good. All English dubs I've heard are atrocious. I remember one of the first dubs that was lauded was the English dub of Princess Mononoke... and it's hilariously bad, even if it has big names doing the voices. The Japanese version is the best, but even the Spanish dub is better.
I think this both misses the point and is incredibly insightiful at the same time. A cover of a known song may be better (it happens!), but you'd never claim you heard the original song if all you listened to is the cover.
A dub is like a cover, agreed. Almost always, a terrible cover. I can always tell when I incorrectly set the language on Netflix to something other than the original -- you can immediately tell it's a dub because of the drop in voice acting quality. English dubs are particularly terrible, it's like the voice actors are emotionless drones, and when they try emotion, they use it in all the wrong places.
Besides, it's disrespectful. An actor/actress is not just their face and mannerisms. It's their voices, too. The voices are an essential part of their acting (if you are deaf, you can't help missing them, but if you are not, unless it's a scene without speech, you're missing a key ingredient). Saying "ok, I'll replace his voice with this other voice, and his face with with this other face I like better.. you know what? I'll just edit him out of the movie and replace him with this other actor I like better!" is way too scifi and post-cyberpunk dystopia for me. It's just disrespectful.
I cannot honestly say I watched a movie if I watched it dubbed. I watched a cover instead.
>but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French.
what do you mean by this, that the French language is so much better that it renders the movie better by using it? Or is it that the writers translating the English to French are better and make the movies more interesting by their choices?
>There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
Or is it that the dubbing actors are better speakers than the original actors, for example most actors when they do voiceovers suck because they aren't trained for it I guess, and maybe a dubbed actor is trained for it or... I guess I am just confused by how a dubbing could improve a really good movie although I might suppose it would be possible to improve a really bad movie in this way.
So how does this work?
If it is a replicable aesthetic phenomenon you might expect people to aesthetically choose to make movies in this way, to make better movies.
I despise subtitles, I watch films for the visual medium when I turn on subtitles they distract me from watching the actual film. I know I’m uncultured etc but I can’t help the way I feel about it.
I'm ok with turning off subtitles, but then I can only watch English language (or Spanish) films. Only subtitles let me watch French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, etc.
Dubbing is out of the question because I do not hate actors and cinema.
Sure. Normally I find quibbling annoying, but I hope you can understand why I want to highlight accessibility on a site that many of the world’s best software engineers frequent. I care about accessibility on all dimensions not just visual. At the end of the day accessible design is good design.
Actually dubbed content is one of the few areas where I would say Netflix has stolen a march on its competitors with some innovative practices.
Through Netflix I've been exposed to a huge back catalog of great content just because they were the first ones to invest in having it dubbed (I assume). Even though the dubbing is often pretty crude it's surprisingly watchable still and definitely better watching first tier dubbed content than second or third tier native language content.
You're not interested because of the dubbing? Then just switch to subtitles. Or do you not have the patience to put up with subtitles?
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there's considerable high-quality content coming out of other countries. I love that Netflix brings that to the U.S., otherwise I'd never know of it or be able to watch it.
It's funny because I used to sound just like you. But now I am much more sympathetic to the above comment. I spent a lot of my youth enjoying films by a bunch of foreign filmmakers including:
Ozu
Bergman
Fellini
Suzuki
Clouzot
Bresson
Kurosawa
Mizoguchi
Costa-Gavras
Herzog
Renoir
and on and on
I especially loved the films of Jean Pierre Melville, Masaki Kobayashi and Anrei Tarkovsky. And yet, when I am done with a long day of work and chores, I cannot stomach anything with subtitles. Exhaustion plays a part in it. It just feels like work after a long day. And I wouldn't want to have that experience of any of the movies I loved back then, seeing them as a chore to be tolerated.
As someone not from an English-speaking country, most of the things I watch anywhere are subtitled.
I'm really puzzled by people with no stomach for subtitles or who would only watch stuff in their native language. Subtitles + original language of other cultures is so much better.
Yeah this is it. At the end of the day I just want some background noise that’s entertaining not to have to focus entirely on what I’m watching. It’s rare that I have the time and energy to sit down and watch a show or movie just to take in the plot. That is usually reserved for the theater where I’m forced to not distract myself.
I have wached a bunch of stuff with subtitles, mostly anime. But more recently even movies, esp. recent movies(I find the sound balance off, effects are too loud and voices too soft).
That said, subtitles can be very distracting. You end up focusing on the word and missing things in the scene/shot as well as the background.
Also the subtitles are not always faithful to the dialog. A good example of this is watching One Piece in English w/ Subs on Netflix. The spoken dialog will be one thing, the written will be another. I have some Japanese knowledge and can tell you that the subs(and the dubs) definitely do not reflect the feeling in some scenes.
I agree neither dubs nor subtitles are 100% faithful to the original. By necessity, they cannot be. There's no such thing as a perfect translation even with books, but with TV/cinema you also have to keep the pace, which makes things doubly difficult.
Even then, just hearing the original language, even if you don't understand the words, conveys essential emotion. I like to hear the original voice actors, which are essential for the cartoon/anime (even more with live action movies, of course).
At the end of a long day of work and chores I cannot stomach a 90-120 minute film, regardless of what language it's in. I much prefer 30-60 minute content. At that length subtitles are much more digestible.
When I turn on subtitles I spend the whole time reading, so I’m not a fan of doing it that way. I’ve no doubt that the quality of the plot acting etc is great (I did watch squid games) but I only really watch TV at the end of the day and I’m usually browsing on my tablet as well.
Watch it with subtitles instead then—most non-English content has English subtitles in my experience. Many of many favorite shows of recent years have been non-English Netflix shows that I watch with subtitles: Fauda, Dogs of Berlin, A Very Secret Service, Lupin, etc.
Yeah, and I was right on the edge, not really watching it enough to justify the previous, cheaper, price. When they raised the price it served as a motivation to cancel it. In a 6 months I might join for a bit to watch some newer shows, then probably cancel again.
Raising prices works well perhaps if people are in love with the product or there is just no other alternative. But people have been auto paying and not really thinking much or using it, raising the prices is a decision point to re-evaluate the value of the service.
Yeah I’m surprised at how little I’m seeing about this. I canceled last month because of the price increase, and I would not have canceled if they hadn’t raised prices. At $9-$14 it’s fine if I only watch it once a month. But at $20 it’s no longer worth it.
I recently got a new monitor, and new internet, so I’m finally able to watch 4K Netflix, I upgraded at right about the time the price rise went through, and must have glazed over the announcement, so I just went “oh right, that’s just got much 4K costs, ok”.
Given the subsequent lack of actual 4K content, general lack of content, and the fact that I’ll be finishing the shows I’m watching means that I’ll likely join the lost-subscriber group in a week or 2.
The full effect of price increases will take time to fully play out, plus the effects of implementing commercials have yet to be seen. Also, it remains to be seen how other streaming services will respond. Will they raise prices and add commercials too?
If Netflix becomes the one streaming brand most associated with actions hostile to their viewers, this could be the beginning of a long decline.
This 200k subscribers number is missing the elephant in the room. They expected 2.5 million new subscribers. They didn't get those 2.5 million new subscribers and actually lost 200k, so they're technically -2.7 million subscribers.
This may have also triggered an exodus of subscribers too, even if Netflix doesn't do anything additionally stupid to turnoff consumers.
I know it’s commonly used logic, because announcements and expectations and whatnot, but I find the logic of:
> They didn't get those 2.5 million new subscribers and actually lost 200k, so they're technically -2.7 million subscribers
To be extremely questionable, if not outright incorrect.
They didn’t lose something they didn’t have. 2.5m people didn’t leave, 200k did. Sure, they didn’t reach a target of 2.5m new users, but that’s not the same as losing them.
I know, shareholder announcements/analysts predictions etc, I know I’m not going to change that logic, but I still think it’s bad logic.
They didn't "lose" 2.7m subscribers. but they did miss their goal by 2.7m.
The important thing to note is that stock prices aren't tanking because of 200k. If they had gained 200k subscribers, the stock would have tanked still. and the headlines would have been "netflix misses subscriber goal by 2.3m" instead and only investors would care
They actually lost 700K subs to Russia, when they stopped the service there, and some around EMEA too. They actually added 500K subs net minus Russia impact.
I mean, pedantically, you’re correct but you’re missing a very substantive point - we regularly deal with metrics which are rates (or vectors) of change. Velocity is change in distance over time, for example - what Netflix had is a reversal of their growth. They had expected all inputs to yield at positive 2.5 mil. change in members. Instead, the lost 200k members. It is completely sensible to talk about their loss of velocity of growth. Moreover, if you want to be get into technicalities, they lost many more customers than 200k - but they gained enough new customers to net -200k - so why not object to that technically imprecise language too? Why? Because while technically incorrect, it still communicates something useful, just as it does to talk about the lost growth vs. expectations.
For all your points about technical and substantive arguments, I think you have skipped over the crux -
> They had expected all inputs to yield at positive 2.5 mil
The crucial word here is expected. I can model all the things and expect that I’ll get a million dollars next week, but I haven’t lost a million when I inevitably don’t get it the next week.
If you make a prediction of +2.5m new subscriptions, during a pandemic and associated economic flux, and the prediction doesn’t pan out, the only thing that’s happened is that you made a bad prediction.
> If you make a prediction of +2.5m new subscriptions, during a pandemic and associated economic flux, and the prediction doesn’t pan out, the only thing that’s happened is that you made a bad prediction.
I mean, that’s demonstrably false. The world works by individuals taking action based on expected outcomes. That crosses species and pervades every waking moment of life. It is involved in things as simple as walking and as complex as mate selection, migration or habitation choices among thousands of others.
To treat this instance of variance between expected outcomes and reality as somehow different makes little sense.
I think it's still very much relevant within the context of the stock dive though - no-one invests in what you've done, they invest in what they think you're going to do next. So they've disappointed their investors, and their investors have disappointed them right back.
I think it’s that the logic only matters to shareholders who are willing to pay a premium price for the shares based on trajectory. Mess up the trajectory, mess up the share price.
They also guided that they expect to lose another 2 million subscriptions in the next quarter. The stock price collapsed because it appears the growth story may be over.
> The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different.
to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.
I completely agree. I was only lightly using Netflix so when they last raised prices it was the push I needed to actually cancel. The recent content they've rolled out doesn't justify the heftier price tag compared to competitors. I love the UX of Netflix, but content rules and they're losing that battle. I don't even want to try new shows because of their reputation for cancelling things unceremoniously.
> I don't even want to try new shows because of their reputation for cancelling things unceremoniously
Ah, so I’m not alone in this! Nowadays, I typically only consider shows that have at least a few seasons, I will never ever try one with just one season. The chances of them killing it off are just too high, and that would ruin it completely for me.
I like to binge watch, I can’t enjoy that when they keep killing off shows. It feels like a restaurant with only starters.
It's an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy of the modern data-driven mindset. Sometimes the very act of collecting and acting on that data materially affects the data itself by creating perverse incentives.
The two parent posters are far from alone in my experience. Lots of people are getting turned off by the variable quality and uncertain future of the home-made productions, which means lots of people are holding off starting to watch a show until it's somewhat established and had some positive reviews. If your management strategy is to measure early engagement with your own shows and viciously kill off anything that doesn't make the cut, and if your viewers know this, then you have defeated yourself no matter how good the show is or how popular it would naturally have become.
A few years ago there was almost a trend for shows that weren't getting the numbers to get wrapped up with some sort of mini-series or TV movie so at least there was a chance for the production team to finish telling their story and give some closure for the fans (who might be fiercely loyal in sentiment even if too few in number to sustain the show). It's a little ironic Netflix would probably have been in a better position than anyone to adopt this kind of strategy and establish a reputation for being trustworthy and loyal to fans. Now it has the opposite reputation and we're openly speculating about whether it will ever recover.
It’s classic modern fuckery where analysts focus on data without understanding the information it contains.
I sold my Netflix a few years ago when they started talking about how they are an attention sink vs an entertainment company.
A/B tests and manipulative apps have a hard time accounting for external competition.
The CEO’s reaction confirmed the cluelessness - pulling some bullshit non-plan about ads out of his ass is like ripping out the IV. If I was on the fence about Netflix, having the company accuse me of being a thief for allowing my family to use it and announcing ads will certainly get me off the fence.
It feels like a restaurant where the chef loves creating new dishes and has ADHD and rearranges the menu every time you go. Oh, the prosciutto eggs benny? Yeah, we don't do that anymore, but I can get you a tofu scramble!
I'm rapidly running out of things on Netflix I actually want to see but haven't gotten around to. Once I run out, I'm not sure why I would keep the service around.
I think many single-season Netflix shows would have been movies 15 years ago. But many types of films just don't get made anymore, and many directors and performers would rather work on series.
I’d still watch a show with one season, just like I’d watch a film without a sequel. I don’t tend to watch Netflix shows because they just aren’t that good.
i agree, as long as it has a clear finale. cancelling series which were meant to have more seasons is what troubles me.
I absolutely agree where i’d rather watch an entire season than a movie, tho. i really enjoy the depth that can be exlores from doing an entire season. but like i said above, if a show requires further seasons to finish the story, it’s very frustrating when it’s canceled.
to me it feels like reading a third of a novel and having it yanked away.
I've watched some great shows that were one-season-and-done. Unfortunately in the Netflix era you might instead instead get half-and-dropped or one-and-unresolved-cliffhanger. A lot of us find those endings very disappointing and so don't engage with new shows at all even if they look like we might enjoy them. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven times since the start of COVID binge-watching...
I prefer the long form, it gives more time to flesh out the world and characters, but it has to be done right there shouldn’t be a minimum episode count on a streaming services. If you only have 6 episodes worth of story please don’t add 6 episodes worth of filler so you have 12.
> I think many single-season Netflix shows would have been movies 15 years ago.
There would be one big change there I believe, in a movie they make sure to kill off arcs terminally pretty often, in series they make sure not to do that in order to be able to spin on it perpetually if demand be.
Yeah it feels like the binge watch mindset kind of papers over and enables this.
Shows like a lot of their lower-tier Marvel ones can have significant pacing/padding issues but it's such easy watching and you can just burn through it in a weekend while doing something else anyway.
You focused on price and I think that's a significant factor. Where once Netflix was $8 not really that long ago, it's now $15.50, which is more expensive than HBO (and HBO Max with the merger has an even deeper catalog than it did in the HBO Now time, even though the HBO Now software and website was IMHO much better).
What these media companies seem to want is for us to pay $100/month in various streaming services rather than the $80/month we were paying for cable because, hey, we should pay for the privilege of unbundling right? I refuse. Netflix is no longer an automatic renewal. I'll sign up for it 1-2 months a year to binge watch on certain shows.
But you glossed over a really important point I haven't seen given much attention: the pandemic. The pandemic was a huge boost for subscriber numbers for obvious reasons and we're now pretty much at the end of the pandemic (as far as staying indoors goes, anyway). That has to have an impact.
Additionaly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has cut off hundreds of thousands of subscribers due to the sanctions. IIRC I heard this was 700,000. If so, isn't down 200K still a net increase?
The stock market routinely overbuys and oversells on good and bad news. It's the fear and greed cycle. And this honestly feels like an overreaction that'll be corrected as soon as Netflix spends some time controlling costs.
When everything was bundled together, we complained about paying for things we didn't use. Unbundling was initially cheaper because it was just extra profit on the side.
Now, it's becoming the primary business model and has to stand on its own.
It turns out economy of scale is real, and we've lost it. Other people were paying for our content before, but not watching it. How does real public educational content get funded in this new world? Most of us probably agree that there should be quality, unbiased content.
Cashflow consistency has a value as well, so subscribing and unsubscribing creates a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers.
I'm not saying things can't improve, just that many unrealistic, entitled attitudes exist. Content is better now than before as providers have to compete more to get subscribers, so the value is greater.
> a cost that needs to get covered by someone. Currently, the loyal subscribers.
Those loyal subscribers don't get anything in return for that loyalty. the nash equilibrium is therefore to not be a loyal subscriber, but only subscribe for the shortest period of time and consume the maximum possible.
Hence, eventually the service would lose all loyal subscribers.
There's time, effort, and cognitive load in switching. Potential self-image impacts. Some people will think past their immediate needs and want to support Netflix, because that's how they fund good content. The most price-conscious people leave. Many people don't optimize.
Fairness here would be putting the externalities of switchers on themselves, but that doesn't usually work well in the market. We'll probably just tolerate a certain amount of these 'switch freeloaders'.
Given the number of services, the cognitive load of switching will become normal. I'll be cancelling Netflix at the same time I resubscribe to Stan. And consumers will demand it becomes easier, or they won't bother signing up in the first place. We are already seeing articles in the popular media about how expensive it is to subscribe to everything, so the market is well aware. Over here, if I want to subscribe to Paramount+ (and a few others) I just select it in the Prime app and start watching in the Prime app. All that is missing is easy cancellation, or being able to purchase a single month rather than a subscription. I'm reasonably confident that Amazon will provide a way to make this easier once they have the second tier streamers by the short and curlies. But just having one spot to 'manage my subscriptions' like it is now makes it pretty easy right now for anyone who pays attention to their credit card statement. Heck, even a bank may decide to differentiate themselves by identifying recurring subscriptions and sending service cancellation notifications on your behalf.
actually Nash Equilibrium would suggest loyal subscribers to be loyal unless the rules of the Game change for the service to exist at all i.e. someone has to keep not watching and paying for someone to keep watching in short busts and not pay for rest of the time to avoid catastrophic changes.
This is looking back at cable with some serious rose tinted glasses. It’s nothing like you describe. Also nothing forces people to sub to all streaming services. We switch them up and pay a small fraction of the $150/mo our parents paid for cable.
Agreed with the author of this news, the content killed netflix. In the last two years of pandemic and WFH, more people paid attention to the online streaming and willing to spend more. It didn't take long before you'd learn who's content hold the better quality. Netflix has been relying on foreign contents approximately 70% if not 50% in the recent years.
I wouldn't say netflix is completely out of favor at this point but definitely lost its edge comparing to others. It has occurred to me I could go on by weeks on HBOmax, Hulu and Amazon without missing Netflix, among which two are bundled with wireless plan and Prime membership, Hulu is cheaper with commercial. If it comes to paying full price I'd probably cut Netflix without a blink.
I feel like Netflix has been declining for years. A decade ago, their recommendation algorithm was phenomenal. Today, both their library and their recommendations are severely lacking. I'm not sure how much longer I'll bother to subscribe.
This is it for me. Maybe they have decent content but I can’t seem to find it easily anymore. Netflix was a necessity once upon a time, but now I am on the edge of canceling.
The first season of Dark was released in 2017. I believe the "shit content" phase got really strong in 2020. Which is also when Dark's last season was released, and it's the weakest (IMO).
Funny as paramount+ has done a better job of adding new content than netflix these past few months. The Halo TV show and Picard while C to B- are still miles better than much of the newer netflix content.
Racist homophobic bigots hate "woke" content, but so what? Who wants those snowflakes as customers anyway, who are so terrified of being exposed to cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto having steamy hot gay sex? Let them try to cancel culture and walk away from scary cartoon animal sex all they want. How's Trump's "unwoke" social network working out?
>TED CRUZ WARNS DISNEY PROGRAMMING WILL SOON DEPICT MICKEY AND PLUTO F--KING
>The senator from Texas thinks the company’s opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law means it’s going to introduce X-rated content featuring animated characters “going at it.”
Without being a "racist homophobic bigot", you can be tired of seing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the race/gender/sexual orientation bingo.
To me, it feels like the "diversity" of the characters included in a script is one of the factor that is taken into account when deciding to finance a show or not. It really shouldn't be: either a script is good enough and you should finance it, or it isn't and you should reject it. But adding artificial additional criteria just means that good scripts will be rejected and less good one will be accepted. And the logical consequence is that sometimes it feels like perfectly good stories are altered in a way that ensure more "diversity" is ensured, often times making the story worse.
And finally, casting is sometimes...weird to say the least. That does not help producing better shows.
Now you know how it feels to be tired of a lifetime of seeing that every single TV show they produce seems to absolutely need to play the cis heterosexual orientation bingo.
Eh, I'm gay and I still agree: those types of shows get a bit boring sometimes. I'm all for representation but it shouldn't be the only point of a show: it shouldn't be "here's Ghostbusters, the exact same film all over again, but with women!", or "here's Ocean's Eleven, the exa"- eh, you get the point.
I'm sure some people will hotly contest that these shows/movies are genuinely works of art, and representation just happens to be a bonus, but that's not how it feels when watching a load of this tedious paint-by-numbers pablum.
(This isn't to say that there are no instances where I feel the opposition to minority/female casting was driven more by bigotry than by people's finely-honed critical faculties. Of course there are. But I happen to think it cuts both ways in this case: many of those shows/movies are just godawful, and trade on the "you're a bigot if you don't like this!" card to drive sympathy/virtue demand, from people who want to feel like Rosa Parks for going to the cinema.)
But previously, movie houses would just produce the exact same film again without women. It's not like women are the reason every goddamn movie is a remake of a good idea someone had 30 to 70 years ago.
There’s no accounting for taste. You should not be so fast to hate; it prevents you from understanding that which you wish to change. After all, we’re talking about entertainment, not war. Aren’t we?
Actually, we are talking about war, a cold civil war in the US and a lot of the West, and often hot shooting ones in the countries in which we foment color revolutions, the Ukraine being the current extreme example of that.
Think I read somewhere that of one of their content production differentiators is their direct-to-consumer approach. Classically lots of content was produced for the "average" consumer. Netflix can use their subscriber data to create low-cost content for extremely niche consumers, who might love that extremely relevant production (think super edgy, super graphic, super cartoon, etc - the type of extremes not covered by the average).
Not sure how much this holds true anymore, as now many big players have direct-to-customer streaming, but just sharing since it was a neat thought when I first read it
This seems like a way of sugar-coating the actual content strategy Netflix deploys, which has much more to do with product placement than it does content production. Their strategy is to align their content productions with the brands that best correlate with their subscriber base. In so doing, they can create lucrative deals with brands where their products are intricately woven into the stories/narratives of the show.
As an example, Stranger Things featured an average of 9 minutes of product placement for each episode of their third season. [0] The company claims they did not receive any payments from brands for this placement [1], but they likely received other extremely valuable considerations in the form of payment instead.
Many of the big tech stocks are insanely overpriced according to traditional investment measures. The rational reasons to support those prices are expectations of similarly extreme future growth or a belief that it might be a speculative investment but the dollars will keep pouring in.
The discussions this week aren't just a wobble, they're about whether Netflix can still generate that kind of extraordinary future growth. If there's even a strong hint that it might not then the speculative bubble bursts. If there's a serious expectation that it won't then the growth investors are out as well. One stock price crash, coming right up.
It's literally the N in FAANG, a term that came from the investment world and referred to (at the time) the five tech stocks that had the most impressive performance.
It was treated that way by one commentator on MSNBC.
But let’s not forget that the original term was FANG and didn’t include Apple - the most valuable tech company or Microsoft that has been in the top 5 since 2000.
Netflix is around #50 in the most valuable companies - it at least it was.
Their streaming tech is a commodity. Any media company can throw money at someone like BamTech (now owned by Disney) and spin up streaming infrastructure.
The market reacted because a much higher subscriber growth was factored into the price. After the massive drop Netflix is still worth $100B and is one of the largest media companies out there, which is nothing to scoff at.
Along with the huge miss this quarter they quided that they will lose another 2 million subs next quarter. That signals and end to growth and a rerating of the stock.
The problem is that Netflix’s valuation was based on the idea that they could raise prices without losing subscribers.
That in turn was based on the experience with Amazon, which has raised the prices of Prime, products on its site, and the fees it charges its sellers all
while still growing.
Netflix’s valuation was based on the thinking that Netflix was now a necessity for people. But this shows it isn’t.
In fact, the loss of subscribers is an even bigger deal because it suggests Netflix is eminently replaceable.
I can't think of anything I care about that's on Netflix. I also can't imagine cancelling it... There's always something. Between my wife and I both barely caring, they have my money for years. I imagine they'll survive, and if content doesn't turn around, they'll be bought in some final round of media conglomerates mergers, where I'll be even less able to get rid of it.
> question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more
Netflix is a scalable company precisely because they produce content, when they are share other people's content any other platform can do that. But when they create their own content suddenly they operate based on a fixed cost rather than paying for other people's content.
With the established content producers starting their own streaming services, or having more competition of buyers for their content, it seems Netflix has little choice but to move into production. Otherwise it would be a slow death as competitors move in and content prices are bid up. Just my guess though.
One thing that always confused me about Netflix content is that how uniquely un-re-watchable all of it is. Literally, there isn’t one piece of Netflix content that I watched more than once. It is pure volume and even though some of it is good, they produce nothing lasting.
I just took a search through my email to see what I've been paying in the past:
2013 joined at 7eur/month. Can't find the email from when it went from 7 to 9. May 2016 increased from 9 to 10. August 2019 from 10 to 12. March 2021 from 12 to 13. April 2022 from 13 to 15. (All prices euro and rounded up one penny).
I cancelled the day the last hike arrived - it's the least amount of time between raises, as was the previous raise before it. At the same time, their offer is getting more and more disappointing, and they're talking publicly about reducing their content spend and the possibility of adverts.
I feel like they're hooked on a growth bubble, and now that they're reaching market saturation the only way they can maintain that bubble is to squeeze it out of us - charge more, deliver less - which as a user is the complete opposite of value for money, so I'm out.
$8.99, $13.99, $17.99 since the last increase. But in 2018 the prices were $7.99, $8.99, $11.99. It's definitely gone up significantly in just a few years.
consumers don’t everywhere react instantly to price changes. the number of lost subscribers is likely to be greater than what you see today as consumers explore alternatives over time and change. though by how much i don’t know. (for example, it pushed me past the edge to install Jellyfin & friends, but i’m keeping Netflix as backup until i’m comfortable/confident with my new setup).
Honestly for me I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad. I wish instead of pushing shows to me best on algorithms, it would just let me browse categories and recent additions etc in a simpler way. Maybe categorised by year.
Absolutely, Netflix would be 1000 times better if they just let me sort, filter and find content based on concrete metadata. Instead, I'm forced to rely on their recommendation algorithms that purport to know what I want to watch, but for some reason keep recommending low quality content in languages I'm just not interested in. I'd be happy if I could just filter Netflix to only show me content with original audio in languages I speak. The few shows I'm interested in watching with subtitles or dubbed audio are things I can search for on a case by base basis. And don't get me started on Netflix's non-intuitive categories which seem more intent on forcing me to view ideologically motivated content than on helping me to find content in a category I'm interested in. I don't want to search for "Christian Films with Family Values" nor do I want to watch "Films With Black Female Leads". Nothing wrong with those types of films, but I'm searching by "Action", "Romance", "Comedy", "Sci-Fi" etc.
"there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows"
Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
You never watched Sesame Street did you? They've been explaining social issues to kids since the 1960's. Of course Mr. Rodger's first episode was explaining the Vietnam War. Kids shows are and have always been political if they're not pure fantasy (even then...)
I didn't suggest it was "hurting" children however I do believe it hurts the overall quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
Cuties isn't a children's film, it's rated MA (for mature audiences).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
I've been seeing people complain about the presence of PoC in many of these programs too, even though artificial diversity has been a staple of children's programming since at least the '70s.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
I think you are straw manning vs steel manning the argument. I don't think people mind the inclusion of LGBQT or POC people in shows. I don't think people mind even the occasional artificial inclusions - e.g. Mr. Rogers did a great job of bringing in kids with special needs and helped the audience understand that they were people too. He also showed how whites and blacks could be friends and equals in a time when this was still a bit controversial in some pockets of the country.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
All anyone is asking for are examples and while everyone is happy to go on and on with long paragraphs about how white Christian men are under attack and portrayed as evil, while gays, browns and Muslims are portrayed as absolutely perfect saints, no one is yet able to produce any actual examples of children shows that are engaging in this indoctrination.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
They said they were not Christian, but I agree with the rest of your arguments.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
Cuties isn't a children's show. It's a commentary on sexualization of minors in France. Do you have any specific examples of political agendas in childrens' shows?
You mean about Abercrombie & Fitch? The company whose former CEO Mike Jeffries effectively spelled out his tactics in a now-infamous profile on the news site Salon, saying: "We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong (in our clothes), and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."[1]
There's a difference between targeting a segment and saying others don't belong.
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
Not really. I am saying there is an artificial corporate element of inserting political narratives into much of the programming. Authentic pieces where writers just create a good story typically reverberate better with audiences .. despite the writers political opinions whether they lean left or right.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
Exactly. I don't know why is it so difficult for people to understand that you aren't sexist, racist (pick your favourite -ist) for noticing this. The time you take to "educate" viewers about your preferred political agenda is time you are taking from the plot, from character development, from story cohesion... It feels forced no matter what.
Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
>Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
I disagree with the parent comment that is is commonplace (I think it is rare) but I have definitely seen it. Several episodes of shows for girls under 5 have the trope "boys/grownups say girls can't do X" which the girl characters have to overcome. This is absurd material to expose to children of that age, who have never been exposed to the concept outside of children's programming! It's so far removed from the reality of young girls today it makes me doubt that the people writing this stuff even have children.
They've been doing this my whole life, and it drives me nuts. I used to complain that nearly every Disney movie on TV contrived some reason for men to be assholes and say something along the lines of "GIRLS can't play soccer!" Only of course to be thoroughly flummoxed by the end. It's endlessly tiring, and as you note, it inadvertently demonstrates to girls the bigotry it hopes to overcome.
1. direct harm - a girl might get into a fight with a man and get hurt because she believed a falsehood
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
>And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/
"Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
It's not really vague, it's a very clear question. And my response is phrased as a question because it depends on your personal morality. No one can answer for you. Plus, I was very curious to hear other people's position on the importance of truth (or lack thereof), and I find that I am compelled to engage in whatever way I feel at the time of commenting.
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
Political themes in TV shows are pretty ubiquitous these days. In part this is because US politics are more interested in "culture war" issues than they are with specific political platforms. In other words, culture war issues tend to deal with moral and social values. In a previous time, political issues might be much more limited in scope: what should the government tax? Which regulations are helpful? etc.
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
Poppycock. Political issues in media have always included cultural and social issues, it's just that they now span a larger universe that includes more than white male Christians.
I grew up in the '80s and it was there then, too. Some example episodes from "Diff'rent Strokes," a show about a white industrial magnate who adopts a couple of Black orphans:
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
Except in virtually all of this woke programming white male christians are deliberately and exclusively portrayed negatively, if their characters aren't outright replace with race and gender swaps. It's petty revenge racism.
If you're saying that you cannot find a single example where a white male is portrayed non-negatively, you need to look harder. Longmire on Netflix is just one example. Jack Reacher and Bosch on Prime Video are others.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's?
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
>But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
Why do you think international audiences care about whatever is the American cause du jour? I for one don't and I'm put off by the hamfisted political content.
> D&I is not discrimination against straight white men.
Well, it isn't. As a straight white man myself, I don't feel like I'm particularly suffering from discrimination. Am I picked first for everything now, like maybe before I would have? Maybe not. Does it adversely impact my life? Not really.
It's OK to let others to have the first sip from the fountain once in awhile, and you can help lift up historically-persecuted people without it necessarily being a loss for you. Attitude goes a long way in helping yourself be at peace with it.
If you're a straight white man and you're feeling seriously oppressed by D&I, I'd like to hear from you personally and understand your situation better.
Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the discussion, which is really about specifically how media is harming people and children in particular.
This isn't some debate where you can score cheap points on technicalities. Frankly comments like this lower the quality of the discussion.
If you want to know why D&I is an issue, it's because it is re-entrenching all of the stereotypes by hamhandedly trying to give everyone different handicaps, like life can be simplified to a game of golf. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter what handicap I'm given, due to my poor golf game I'm never going to play against Tiger Woods.
The only thing the handicaps change is what we're measuring, and at some point people decide not to play the game, or lobby to change the rules. Look at the resurgence of the far right: it is D&I which gave them the resentment in people's souls to which they could place their hooks.
You’re just reading the news and jumping straight to conclusions. If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful (or personally harmful to you), or specifically how it is reenforcing harmful stereotypes with examples of such, then that would be an enlightening discussion.
>If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful
Because it's racist and sexist? Because it reduces people to their skin color and gender? Because it implicitly reinforces the notion that minorities are "different" and forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments? Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field? Because top to bottom it is not a cohesive, consistent, or rational policy and implies that all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed, and their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
On one hand your ideology implies that all of this is deserved because of the past and necessary for an equitable future, but then at the same time you blatantly deny that any of it's happening and shame anyone who speaks up against this discrimination by calling them bigoted. It's insanity.
> forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments
What is "forcing" you to do this? The D&I training I've been taking has been about finding positivity in differences to our mutual advantage, but never does it say that all aspects of it are 100% positive. People are always going to find areas of disagreement. Yet we find ourselves working together, and so we must find ways to collaborate as a team despite those differences, even to the point of respecting them.
> Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field?
The evidence on this is pretty clear, because several minorities do suffer from historical poverty (in money, in education, and quality of life) that has been very difficult to overcome. A lot of damage was done prior to the Civil Rights Act through mechanisms specifically intended to keep Black people down, and we haven't recovered from that yet. We're getting better, but I don't think we can just put our heads in the sand and conclude that the Civil Rights Act was the end of our journey to remedy the terrible legacy of slavery and racism.
> all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed
You cannot be serious about the silence of white voices in the media. Maybe some individuals are being silenced (see below), but the sentiments certainly are not. For every 1 person who may have been silenced, it's easy to find thousands who haven't, whose opinions track roughly identically. And those people who have been "silenced" seem to have no trouble getting their voices heard through other avenues. Alex Jones still has plenty of mouthpieces, as does Donald Trump. (Both also happen to own several of those mouthpieces...)
And it is especially ironic when a person claims they are being silenced... on Twitter, and then when it is republished through various blogspam ad nauseam.
> ...their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
I think it depends on the nature of the advocacy in question. If you're saying, "I want the opportunity to learn, to work hard, and be successful," I would be very surprised if people were to threaten your livelihood over that. On the other hand, if your advocacy consists of lies, exaggerations, and hysterics, then people might not want to associate with you.
I don't accuse anyone of being a bigot because they have genuine and good-faith concerns about whether we are remedying social inequity the wrong way. It's when they flat-out lie, deny the past, make racist remarks themselves, or make themselves out to be the victim without evidence that they deserve that moniker.
> Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
> Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
> Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
It would certainly be disingenuous to say that TV shows did not have political themes in previous eras: obviously they did. I believe what's different now is simply the speed of change and extremity of political viewpoints. This debate is sort of similar to when people worry about misinformation on social media, and someone answers back "well there's always been bias and misinformation in the news." This is true, but it fails to address that the nature of the problem is different now than in previous eras.
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
In one kid show "She-Ra" for example, every relationship is gay/lesbian save for one. I cannot prove harm in any meaningful way, but I think this sort of misrepresentation of reality is very confusing to kids.
She-Ra is a show that takes place in a world where people _wield magical swords while riding around half-naked on giant armored tigers_. Yet your chief complaint is that a friend group having several non-heterosexual relationships is a "misrepresentation of reality"?
Smurfs were all (but one) male. I wouldn’t read too much into She-Ra. And “same sex couples exist” is not really a political statement.
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
Gay/lesbian relationships are overrepresented relative to real life in She-Ra, but there is far more than one heterosexual relationship. Off the top of my head there is Bow and Glimmer, Queen Angela and King Micah, Mermista and Seahawk, and Entrapta and Hordak by the last episode.
It's very real. I have friends in the industry working on a Netflix series, and the amount of political correctness being forced on them from the Netflix side is insane.
I cannot give a specific example due to exposing which show this may be on, but if the stories I hear or true, the Netflix staff must do a lot of Yoga cause the stuff they force to change is a stretch.
The artists I know on the show went from being excited, to just there for a paycheck after certain fruits were deemed racist around black characters (not watermelons), and a LGBT plotline was forced into a childrens show just because.
The info you've supplied doesn't support your premise. You say "it's very real," but you admit you cannot cite a single example, and your only evidence is some vague hearsay.
Hearsay is this a courtroom? I'll cite an example : the entire front page of Netflix is an agenda. When they removed ratings I knew it was going downhill.
Not OP. But I looked it up. A lot of the ones I found are ones my kids watched and I didn't even notice! Just shows how insidious and gently "slipped in" it is.
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
I clicked that link expecting to see opinions on “Trickle down economics” or “abortion” or “ownership of the means of production” being fed to children but all I see is: “Same sex couples exist.”
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
I'm not clear that your children can become old enough to decide things for themselves without exposure to the world. Hiding things from them is going to make their decisions more naive.
I haven’t seen She-Ra, is it only gay relationships? I’m curious if you think a show with only straight relationships is propagandistic too (ie most TV ever made)
It isn't. But in a show called "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power", you're going to have a lot of lesbian relationships if the cast ends up mostly paired. But there's a mix of relationships.
`- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)`
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
An example is the complete unnecessary cast of Caroline Henderson (a black woman) to the series "Vikings: Valhalla". I understand it is a fictional story, but these are Vikings for pete's sake. The only reason they cast her was evidently for diversity reasons. It is a distraction to the story, I immediately turned off. Though we know that not all vikings had blonde hair, some may be even a bit more dark skinned, but definitely not black. And it is more laughable because she's a character that yields some power in the Viking society. Laughable and a distraction to the story.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
I think it's because most of the time the "politics" that are objected to tend to be things like having an LGBT character in a show. While it's probably not true that everyone who complains about "politics" on TV these days are objecting to LGBT people, it is almost certainly true that everyone who watches TV and gets disgusted by seeing an LGBT character will code their disgust in terms of "being tired of politics" shoved down their throat, etc.
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Nonsense, its simply that if writers are engaged in social signaling some of that results in much worse shows and that is seriously annoying.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It sounds to me like you have an issue with bad writing, not necessarily diversity of characters or the portrayal of minorities at their best. That's a fair position to hold, and one that I agree with.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
What I am saying is that if you have a dominate political culture then bad writing will reflect that and people rightly point out what those are. But that doesn't mean that its a wholesale attack on that political culture.
> Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently poisons or guarantees the latter.
I just wanted to thank you for writing this. It's a model comment - one of the character I'd like to see more regularly around here. Even if I disagreed with you, I would still respect you for it.
> I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spend major screen-time on another sub-plot where the evil alpha-male messes everything up and then the all-powerful woman to come in the save the situation.
Its a totally unnecessary plot shoehorned into the story with no relevance to the main story the show is trying to tell. The source material had brother sister team working together, but we can't miss an opportunity to rewrite it into incompetent alpha male/wonder woman narrative. That is a perfect example of force feeding 'woke-ism' into a story.
Again, this alone isn't a big deal. But this approach is pretty consistently applied.
> Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill.
I certainty agree that there is an over-focus on crisis of woke-ism and many-times unfairly so. For me this is not 'culture war' for civilization, rather annoying meme that makes TV show potentially worse then they could have been.
To give specific example in Wheel of Time. In the book the 'Two Rivers' is a part of Andor. Andor is basically the Britain of that universe. Given its history and isolation, 'Two Rivers' is very culturally and racially homogeneous.
In the show the 'Two Rivers' looks racially more like New York City. This certainty makes little sense from a story telling perspective. Cultures that are very isolated for 1000s of years simple are not that diverse. Now you can certainty change that from something based on white rural Britain to whatever other racial group want to insert.
You can of course explain this away in whatever way you want, its fantasy. Genetics might work different. Who cares. You don't even have to explain it at all.
One of my friends had a problem with this diversity suggesting it hurts the story and that priority should be an accurate representation of isolated cultures. He would have been fine with that being non-white of some kind.
I said, while I agree that it doesn't really serve the story, when creating a major 100+ million$ TV show with 5 lead actors all from the same village making them totally culturally and racial homogeneous isn't really all that practical. A am willing to throw overboard some story purity (or strict adherence to the source) as to give a diverse group of actors to chance to get a role in such a show.
PS: Pretty much all those actors doing a great job! That was the least of the shows problem. Fire the writers and keep the actors.
I ask to elevate the level of discussion here. Speaking in generalities and characterizing people's work without evidence is too facile; you can go to other popular social media sites for that. Elsewhere in this thread, my gentle prodding has led to discussion of some actual shows and scenes that people are thinking of, and it's led to much more interesting - and less heated - discussion.
I'm honestly curious too. Our kids watch chip & potato, octonauts, number blocks, and all sorts of things. None of it seems political. But maybe I'm missing something.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
That's funny, because I've never seen a question like this answered, except with handwaving about how the poster can't say more, or they don't want to get distracted with specifics, or a handful of other reasons the original claim can't be backed up.
> - there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
---
- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
> Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
Your kitchen drawers are full of chipped flint tools, right? I mean, that's what was used for cutting and chopping for most of human history.
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
> Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
Human history has existed for much longer with same-sex marriages than without it. It was mostly outlawed with the rise of Christianity. The impact of same-sex marriage on child rearing is well understood as same-sex couples raising children predates same-sex marriage by decades and studies can be found going back to the 1960s on the subject.
I mean almost every single one of them prior to the rise of Christianity and the influence of modern western culture. The Chinese had no qualms with gay marriage or homosexuality in general, there are records of famous Japanese Samurais who married one another, Native Americans have the concept of two-spirit marriages, numerous Roman Emperors married male husbands, and neither the Greeks or Egyptians differentiated much between homosexual or heterosexual relationships.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
"Disingenuous"? You link to a Wikipedia article based on two or three papers -- when there are centuries of scholarship on Rome -- and _I_ am "disingenuous"?
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
Well we know one thing about Rome. When sexual deviations reached the peak -> Rome collapsed and imperium was divided.
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”..
Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
I'm of the opinion all marriage is bullshit, and the very notion of anyone needing to register their social standing, regarding who they live with, as a very peculiar practise...likely to mess up children more than having any two persons ensure they are loved and cared for, and just getting on with it.
Exactly. A lot of new content made seems to be really poor to me.
And oh, did I mention content that keeps making frequent trips in and out of Netflix? (Movies like The Terminator franchise, Troy etc.)
So cringe I just want to cancel it after this month.
Yes! I recently went on a little trip and the AirBnB host had Netflix. This is the first time I’ve ever used Netflix. And oh my god how do people find anything with it?? I didn’t realize that you could scroll horizontally for about a day. And the categories are… useless. +1 for traditional “action” categories. And the content was mostly straight to DVD B-movies with a few “80s oldies.” I did manage to watch the new Blade Runner there so ok they did have something I could recognize.
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Modern videostreaming is such a poison pill. Where the rights come and go arbitrarily. So Netflix decided they were going to do their own content because they couldn't rely on production studios. Since they don't have to pay royalties on their own content the streaming apps intentionally push the homegrown movies and obscure the slightly better 3rd party content. And it was not always like this. In their early streaming days the AAA titles (The Godfather, The Matrix, etc) were front and center. The recommendations engine was actually useful. And there were few competitors so AAA titles would stay on their platform for years.
I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.
To be fair, I think their algorithm is way better once it gets a bead on your interests. Now, that definitely results in some shows never pop up in your 'feed,' but overall I'm in 2 modes of watching:
1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests
2. Navigating straight to something I want
If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)
I actually want to search for "action series with female leads" but I have no idea how to do it with Netflix nor does Netflix carry most of them. Instead, I "search" on Reddit and pirate them.
I cancelled my Netflix premium subscription some years ago due to the UI.
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
Agreed. I have never used such a non-deterministic UI. Every time I load the app I have to hunt around to find the show I last watched and continue it. It feels like it’s in a different place every single time.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
The recommendation system crash is coming. Name a recommendation system that shouldn't be replaced with simple rules based on obvious and transparent metrics like popularity and ratings, or by organizing things into categories.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
YouTube has the best recommendation system in the world.
Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.
A few points though:
1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.
2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.
Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.
YouTube repeatedly tries to steer my recommendations from the content I'm watching (stuff on terrain making and miniature wargames) to decidedly alt-right content, to the point that at the moment, I mostly watch it logged out and directly searching for the channels I want to watch.
That doesn't work so well if you're trying to push a social agenda to people who aren't interested in LGBTQ+ or racial "wokeness". Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+. There wouldn't be much of a catalog to watch.
To me most of the new shows that has LGBTQ+ content, the LGBTQ+ stuff feels incredibly forced to the point of detracting from the story.
I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.
I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.
Netflix had a great recommendation system for their DVD catalog 15 years ago without any ML hocuspocus. The problem now is that their content is mostly mediocre and user driven ratings can't be used effectively to identify similar cohorts. That's why they got rid of the stars.
I recently did a trial for Showtime's streaming service. It's set up this way. Choose a category then get an alphabetical list of everything available. I'm not sure it's any better, but worth checking out if that matters to you.
I've always preferred to use https://unogs.com/ which lets you search with a lot of advanced search parameters and the resulting pages are much easier to browse, and then just pull up specific titles on Netflix itself.
I particularly hate the way they keep pushing serial killer documentaries, and there seems to be little way to get them to stop. When it's late at night and I'm trying to find something relaxing to watch before going to bed, the last thing I want to see is a serial killer's face staring at me and then footage of them starting to play. It ruins my night. Honestly that's been the last straw for me. They're happy to force their customers to see disturbing things, as long as it boosts engagement.
I have taken to using the dislike rating on stuff I have no intention of ever watching. I don't know if it helps yet. It might be fantastic for people who like the genre, but I'm now rating for myself rather than other people. Hopefully these metrics don't feed into any meaningful ratings systems.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
Algorithms? Netflix hasn't done actual recommendation algorithms since the DVD days. These days it just relentlessly pushes its own third-rate content to viewers, presumably because it's cheaper than licensed content.
After all major content providers dripped out of Netflix (Disney, Warner Brothers, just to name two biggest ones), Netflix can't afford to show you "all the content" because they don't really have any content.
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
That seems plausible. Netflix has an obtuse interface in order to obscure the fact that their catalog of content isn't very big, and has shrunk considerably in recent years (due largely to other content owners realizing that it's more lucrative to start their own streaming services rather than license the content to Netflix).
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Just yesterday I discovered that youtube's "home" feed in the iOS app is not actually endless. I know this because I reached the bottom of it without tapping into a single video! For the past 6 months or so in particular, their recommendation engine has just been abysmally bad.
> I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
Back when Netflix had DVDs the recommendation algorithm worked pretty well, at least for me. It's gotten gradually worse over the years. Or perhaps they no longer have much good content, so no recommendation algorithm would work well? Either way I guess it's time to cancel my subscription.
Dvd Netflix[0] is still sending movies to your house (in USA). Many movies which are not available in any streaming service. They got worse with new releases since 2020, but for many famous movies of the past this is a decent service.
I can't agree with this more. I find it extremely difficult to find something I want to watch, because I simply can't find out how to look at their entire library.
I have to agree. If I remember a show, I can search by name but I can only browse through the stuff that their algorithm shows to me. And that's just a few dozen titles.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
I only use Netflix and Prime, and both feel really stale to me. It's all "content" - good to very good production values designed to fill a gap and appeal to a demographic. But very repetitive and production line, with no passion projects, nothing too arty or quirky, nothing outside of the box, no surprises.
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
I think Netflix's big problem is I'll occasionally discover something amazing, and then look at the release date and wonder "why did it take so long to find this?"
If the experience browsing their catalog wasn't so awful, I'd be more inclined to try and use the service. Instead, after I've finished something good, I don't tend to come back to Netflix for awhile - it's easier to just watch stuff on Youtube because I know how to navigate it, the search works well, and the recommendations are actually decent.
I remember a couple weeks ago, Blade Runner 2049 was the first thing that popped up when I logged into Netflix. I was so happy to see it there, but when I went back the next night to watch it, it wasn't there (which is fine, the homepage isn't static). So I went to search for it, and "Blade Runner" returned nothing relevant (nor did "Blade Runner 2049"). I had to search "2049" to find it, and after the movie ended, Netflix recommended the first Blade Runner (which also didn't show up in any of my searches).
The search isn't always this bad (both Blade Runner movies show up in search the way I would expect them to now), but still...even when I know something great is on Netflix, it can be an utter pain to get to. It's like they're trying to get me to go with the mediocre recommendations instead of watching the good stuff that I know is on there.
It's so annoying that if I was the one paying for it, I'd cancel my subscription. And I remember things used to be a lot better, which just makes it all the more frustrating when looking for something good.
I guess this is the cons of being such a data oriented company. It requires guts to think beyond ROI when you have so much infos about your users and their habits.
Data oriented optimization strategies tend to result in local maximums. Jumping across the solution space from a local maximum to the global maximum requires a visionary leader, and some luck.
Throwing money at graduate filmmakers and telling them to follow their passions would all but guarantee a catalogue full of $CURRENT_DAY political messaging, which would be poison for subscriber retention.
I feel what you say too, that all the content feels samey. But I'll offer a suggestion that works for me: try some animation. That's where you get the passion projects that can feel different. Animated characters and settings can be far more expressive and varied and fresh, compared to the stock sameyness you get from live action.
The new She-Ra on Netflix was the best thing I've watched in quite some time. It's not a kiddie show, it works for all ages, think like Pixar movies. Other great cartoons across a variety of streaming services: Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Star Trek Lower Decks, also the more mainstream Bob's Burgers. If you want something fresh to watch, try animation.
I have a similar experience with respect to watching foreign produced content. It's interesting because they present different approaches to the shows and even if they're using entertainment tropes they can be different enough because they're tropes of that nation.
But once I watched a few, Netflix filled my entire recommendation catalog with almost all e.g. Turkish and Korean shows. Pretty annoying as it's like ordering an ice cream dessert, then the only thing the menu ever shows is all ice cream desserts. It makes me think part of people feeling it's all the same is that the recommendation optimization is overbearing in shoveling too much of more of the same recent history vs presenting a mix of recommendation and discovery.
This exactly. Across a LOT of their anime, crime drama espcially (in my limited view, probably applies to other genres as well), I feel they have this minor variation on a theme, sort of algorithmically built, almost. Everytime i watch some new series i get this "wait a minute..." feeling. I occasionally find new stuff to watch that is interesting (of late, noir crime drama shows on Prime) but those also have the same ingredients. A lot of those are not prime original anyway. That original content seems rare.
I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.
+1 for Vietnam. And Jazz. And The West. There is something about starting a Ken Burns series that is super relaxing, and releases the pressure to find the "perfect thing" to watch for the next 10-20 hours.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
The West is pretty depressing, though, as it's mostly about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people of North America. I've been putting off the Vietnam one for similar reasons. Not exactly what I think of as relaxing.
Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
I haven't "watched television" in over 20 years. At the same time, the internet (YouTube to a large degree) has crept in to steal away my time.
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
I'm in the same boat, I cut the cord in 2008 and truly feel that my kids had a better experience as youths. Having cable tv in a hotel was a huge deal for them, although they didn't really understand commercials.
Strangely my reaction was the opposite. I didn't really have tv, and I LOVED commercials, I would even put on the paid programming channels if left alone.
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
So, I see this and think "ooh, BG, I'd watch that again". Then I think, how do I find it, will I need a new subscription, it's probably not even available in my geographical area ... or I could probably go to a Torrent site and be watching it in 5 minutes (the limitation being the speed of my internet connection).
As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??).
The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
Deadwood. Re-watching it now after 10+ years and am (again) impressed. Given the abundance of -isms in that show, I'm doubtful it would even be made today, which makes it even more of a find.
I think Arcane is probably the worst scripted show I've ever watched. It makes me immediately skeptical of ratings. My only hypothesis is that everyone enjoying it has never read a book.
My belief is that, like any media, there is a massive backlog of good content.
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
Under all that muck, you aren't seeing the nuggets. A great example is Severance which came out just this year (Apple+) and it's a masterpiece, from cinematography to high concept to acting.
We live in a golden age because there is something for everyone, but that also means there is a lot of trash. Luckily, there are also more gems available now than ever before.
Sure there's good content, but I'm not going to commit to yet another monthly fee. If there was a way to buy a season of a particular show for a one-time fee then I might do that. Amazon offers that option for some shows.
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
I've never been into "flow tv", and about 2 decades ago i simply stopped watching anything but the news, and that only for 30-60 minutes per day, and shortly after that i simply read the news on the internet and completely stopped watching "normal" tv.
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
During quarantine I switched to mostly movies. They require more singular focus (it's harder to watch a movie while doing other things), don't really have the binging problem (2 hour and done instead of just continually extensions of 45 minutes), and are generally higher quality. I've seen some very good (Memories, Son of the White Mare), some very bad (I went through a Bakshi phase), and overall decided I prefer this to watching yet another sitcom or graphic novel adaptation on tv.
movies can also better adapt to be a bit shorter or longer depending on whether the story calls for it.
something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season.
i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
Agreed, I never watch TV unless it's, weirdly enough, a social setting. My wife and I watch TV together all the time, we have shows that we like to enjoy together and talk about. My roommates and I would watch TV together all the time in college, and every now and then there will be a show that I'll go to my friends houses to watch (game of thrones). But now that I think about it, I don't think I've watched a TV show by myself in over 20 years.
I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
It's sad that we cannot own titles but are forced to rent them from these streaming services that can't seem to get their shit together. (Not blaming Netflix per se; this is a pox on all their houses). Used to be nice in the DVD days. I built myself a nice collection then.
This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its successor Movies Anywhere, in which Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate are not participating.
I still buy hard media (which makes me a Luddite apparently) because I consider it art and refuse to pay for digital media that is allegedly perpetual and then one day it goes missing because the wokes decided it should be memory holed.
Even things like iTunes Music Store which once claimed that all your past purchases are available for download from iCloud forever quietly became untrue when I discovered parts of my music library went missing. Come to find out the record company decided to pull licensing from Apple which made that media forever unavailable. So don't forget your backups..... rule of thumb is that you can never trust any company with your media no matter how much bullshit they sell you.
I have had 4 different shows have content cut from them that I noticed this year, for a variety of woke factors.
- Peep Show (Jeremy & Nancy "taboo" breaking episode)
- 30 Rock (Jenna & Tracy "role reversal" episode)
- Community (Chang D&D)
- Always Sunny
In these instances, the character that is doing the "deplorable" act is the villian or idiot. It's not like these shows are promoting those views, they're actually doing the opposite.
Do you have any little disc destroying demons around... oh wait, did I say that out loud? I meant little kids.
Discs are good for ripping then straight to storage (or mailing back to Netflix?) but that's about it.
It would be cool to have a shared database of binaries+commands to recreate scene rips from the discs. Or just following along with someone who knows what they're doing and doesn't go for one-size-fits-all compression.
The majority of the media I bought on iTunes from about 2006 onwards is gone. Some of the music is still there, but every music video, show, and movie is gone. If I hadn't had the common sense in high school to back it all up to my hard drive, it would be gone forever. that was a tough wake up call that I don't own any media I "buy" from Apple/Amazon/etc. I'm renting it until they're done hosting it.
More examples: There is at least one Disney film that is not available anywhere (Song of the South; even eBay banned sale of used dvds. I saw this film as a child on I guess VHS).
There are other Disney films and WB cartoons with large sequences removed.
Disney pulled the chord on SotS decades ago of their own accord despite their conservative leanings as an organization. That wasn’t because of “the wokes.” They straight up saw it as a liability.
It’s also very easy to watch if it’s that important to you to watch racist nonsense. Hell I think internet archive hosts it, they did a while back for sure.
>because the wokes decided it should be memory holes
You truly believe that’s the driving force behind the problem? That “wokes” are the primary reason some content is hard to get and/or keeps getting pulled from streaming services?
It’s licensing increasingly becoming the core product and everyone and their mother trying to launch their own streaming services. We’ve been slowly backsliding into this situation for the better part of a decade.
But how do you actually find content that you like?
Sometimes I have to go though 4-5 different shows/movies on various streaming networks before I find something worth watching and even then, the shows usually get really bad by season 2-3. I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
But how do you actually find content that you like?
Recommendations from friends. Reviews by trusted critics. The same ways we've always found other things we like really.
I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
I have a significant disc collection of movies and TV shows I enjoy. I have almost nothing I haven't rewatched at least once and enjoyed again and/or lent to friends or family at some point for them to enjoy as well. I don't really know how that happened but I can tell you that almost none of those discs were bought as new releases other than big names that I was already fairly sure I'd enjoy or sequels/spin-offs of things I'd previously enjoyed.
The cost is part of the reasons those never really caught on, not just participation. The number of titles I (and I assume, most people) will watch enough to warrant paying $20 for is vanishingly small. Even $4 a rental is a hard bar to pass at this point with streaming competing.
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
I would do a whole lot more digital rentals if the prices weren't so damn high. How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? How can I watch 20 hours of stuff on HBO in 4k for like $10 or $12 or whatever that runs now for a month, but a single 2-hour movie is $5?
It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.
> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once?
Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name.
If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay.
Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1.
In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money.
In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk.
At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).
If you want to sugar to help the medicine go down...
Compare the current digital rental prices to taking yourself to the theater. While the digital rental rate is high, it is less than one ticket for admission. If you buy concessions, it only goes up. If you take someone else, it gets higher. That one digital rental starts to look less steep from this vantage point. That being said, I still don't do the digital rental.
How do you know? I’m a highly paid engineer who is oncall on a SAAS, it’s been a wild ride. It’s expensive to keep this crap running. But a DVD burner and fedex? That sounds cheap and simple to me.
They don't even use burners at that scale, they use replicators. Takes seconds to stamp a DVD. Here's a place in California that charges as low as $.075 each per copy, and this is low volume pricing...
There are companies that provide on-demand pricing for just the steaming component (edgecast for example). Then just throw up a DynamoDB table and some simple apis in lambda and you have a pretty cheap (relatively) way to deliver streamed content.
They probably are making a significant profit off it, I'm not saying that's not the case. I'm just saying you can't figure that out by just looking at the marginal cost; you have to look at the investment and ongoing costs and planned payoff period too, which is information you probably don't have available.
Is it somehow cheaper when it's a subscription, and when the set of things you might start streaming isn't "this single thing I just paid for" but "anything in your catalog"? Because they don't just give a discount for that—they give a tremendous discount.
First Sale doctrine - you needn't pay any licensing fees to rent out a purchased disc. Practically speaking, Blockbuster that was did have special arrangements with the studios, but this paved the way for Netflix to rent out DVDs with little barrier to entry.
The problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
I kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done. It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.
This niche has largely been replaced by casual mobile games. Pop open Candy Crush and play for as long as you have time. You're never really done, but each session is basically independent of the past and doesn't require a whole lot of mental effort.
TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.
I have trouble imagining what the games / movies hybrid of the future will be. It's clear something is changing (game revenue exceeds hollywood - even if that's not a totally fair comparison).
There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.
Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.
My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.
I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end
I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !
I've been watching some of them recently. It's amazing how relevant All In The Family still is today. The Jeffersons is still good, Cheers is relaxing after a stressful day. That easy-watching episodic nature is nice for a change.
There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.
"serie" is the singular for series in a bunch of languages, which honestly makes more sense than having a singular noun ending in s and the plural form being identical to the singular.
This happened irrespective of Netflix streaming. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, BSG, Lost, etc. The thing is serial was fairly annoying if you had to be in front of the TV on Wednesday at 9pm every week to watch something. People would do it for a must-watch miniseries. But as soon as you could do on-demand it was a nice format for a lot of things.
Totally disagree, all of my favorite shows would have made terrible movies. Breaking Bad is just barely long enough as it is, trying to compress that down into even a long movie would have destroyed the story.
Netflix used to be an unlimited dvd rental service. It turned into the same thing without the mail step, so of course we stopped using it. I think if we had known what streaming would look like today, a lot of people including myself would have held on tighter.
I let go of DVDs for quite some time but have re-enabled https://dvd.netflix.com recently. Good selection, plus the much slower act of selecting, receiving and exchanging is sort of a welcome restricted diet compared to the endless buffet over the past decade.
It's OK although the back catalog has rotted a lot. I suspect that they repurchase a lot fewer disks that have been reported as defective for older films. I agree in general that most people dismiss this as an option--or even consider it weird--but many people I know who are much more into films than TV find this a good option. I do off-and-on myself.
The one thing about the DVD aspect of it is that DVD content just looks bad on my current viewing screen. Blu-ray discs are okay. However, the DVD catalog is much much larger. Whachagonnado
I admit I'm still at just HD. And getting rid of that TV with a higher-res one would be something of a task. So I mostly just stick with regular DVDs and HD streaming content.
Except back in the DVD rental days, Netflix could rent out basically everything instead of having to fight for exclusive content rights. You could subscribe to Netflix or go to Blockbuster but you could get the same selection more or less at either.
I don't know about movies, but music streaming is awesome. I have a couple thousand CDs that are sitting in a closet somewhere. For a while I kept them as mp3s on a hardrive, copied other people's mp3s to build up my collection. But its still so limited. I love going through my favorite artists on spotify, listening to the less popular albums I never would have bought and discovering new artists.
Isn't it because it differs so much from movie streaming? On major music streaming platforms you can find most of the popular music artists. I don't have any numbers to back it, but my gut feeling tells me a-number-so-close-to-100 percent that it doesn't even matter anymore it may not be actually 100. Movies? You can't get Disney on Netflix, you can't get Apple on HBO, you can't get... you just can't. Imagine having Metallica on Netflix, Madonna on Apple, Beatles on Sony and Silent Poets on Amazon.
Music streaming doesn’t suffer nearly the fragmentation issues film and television streaming services have, though.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
I don’t think this really affects my point that the fragmentation situation is infinitely better with streaming music than it is with video.
Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.
The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.
This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.
It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.
The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.
The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.
I did the same thing. I used to put a lot of effort into getting a perfect FLAC rip of everything I ever listened to, having them on my devices, or setting up streaming from a home server. I threw that shit out a long time ago, partly because I don't listen to the garbage that I used to, and partly because I've got better things to fuss over now. The amount of time worrying about file integrity, backups, server being up (and updated)...sorry, 90‰ of it is music I'll just get tired of soon. It wasn't worth it. Spotify makes more sense for me.
Same with movies. As I've gotten older, I can name about a dozen movies I'd like to watch again. I can afford to buy the next "highest quality release ever" when the time comes.
Agreed except a lot of my old CDs aren't available on Spotify. I do plan on ripping a select portion of them when I find them again. But it'll only consist of my favorite records and unavailable.
Before I do that though, I'm going to check into Youtube Music. It's possible what I don't find on Spotify is available there.
Movies, I don't find many are missing from services. Perhaps the movies I loved were less obscure than the music. I don't plan on ripping a single DVD or VHS tape.
I'd wager that UMG et al would be in breach of contract. I have to imagine they have an agreement not to "broadcast" in exchange for being paid license fees. Disney/ABC etc own lots of radio stations, and I doubt anyone really wants that legal battle.
There's a metric ton of neo-Nazi bands that aren't on Spotify as well. I don't know if it's Ice-T or Spotify stopping Cop Killer from being on the service, but Spotify and similar are private companies that don't have to host everything that they don't want.
I pay for a handful of streaming services but that's only because they're decent for content discovery and ease of use. If there's ever anything on there that I genuinely like I just pirate it (Arcane most recently) because the UX of having files that just work everywhere is so much better than the alternative. I would happily pay for unencumbered .mkv downloads if my recent buying trends wrt bandcamp .flacs are any indication.
The only way to stop me from pirating the media I like is if you actually let me buy the superior experience I can have as a pirate.
P.S. copyright and IP law in general need severe reform if we want to serve creatives and not executives
Blockbuster had web rental service for console games, which probably decreased piracy; Netflix used to have such a huge library with working subtitles it was pointless to pirate (nearly) anything.
Not just that but it's sad we can't even just rent the titles we used to be able to rent from videos stores. There is no much content that is just not available and I fear it never will be. If you were fortunate enough to have lived near a cinephile type rental place then you probably remember how directors often had their own sections. You could browse Kurasowa, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Godard ...
I remember looking at the Criterion Collection streaming channel not that long ago and what struck me was just how much of the Criterion Collection was not even available on their streaming channel.
If only there were a way to get a file of the same movie from a different site and then make a copy of it to save to your personal archive of movie files, ensuring you never need to worry about paying for multiple streaming services that will probably remove titles you like and never carry others in the first place...
I think an issue for me that prevents me from collecting DVD’s, to; say - collecting CD’s - is that while a CD from the 1980’s is pretty much the best quality of audio you can still get today, DVD’s unfortunately suffer from an issue where the SD quality has aged very poorly, and the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s.
Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio, it doesn’t matter if you play them on the most modern sound systems, they’re still going to sound great.
Streaming allows me to find a nice balance between quality and bandwidth, unfortunately while DVD’s are neat for bonus features, the quality unfortunately makes it rather unpalatable on even semi-modern (1080p) TV’s.
Surprise, the physical layers in your DVDs and CDs is also decaying, so a CD from the 1980s may well be unplayable now. I've found that with many of my old commercial disks, let alone the ones I've burned myself.
Unfortunately as a SEGA Saturn collector, this is no surprise, and disc rot has taken claim to games that could otherwise be worth hundreds of dollars today. :(
Weirdly, almost all of even my much older audio CD’s - stored in the same bin away from heat and moisture - don’t have this issue.
I have to wonder what effect the specifics of the manufacturing process have on how likely a disc is to experience disc rot, as actually even within the SEGA community it’s widely accepted that Saturn discs have an unusually high rate of failure compared to other compact disc collectables.
However - importantly - my original point about quality also applies to backups of these mediums as well - so, assuming any copy of that audio CD has been properly archived and backed up, it will pretty much always be the best quality it can possibly be. Backing up a DVD these days - when there is a majority of the time a superior Blu-Ray or streaming release, is frankly pretty pointless, except for, unusually - the much more abundant amount of special features often found on DVD’s.
I never understood why special features pretty much went the way of the Dodo when Blu-Ray became the standard.
Some DVDs are definitely noticeably low quality transfers, but the vast majority are are fine. I have a 60” 4K screen and don’t really notice in a way that bothers me, at least.
That’s fair - but also remasters can be subjective. For instance - I vastly prefer most of the original Beatles masters to the 2010’s remasters. Point is that we’re almost comparing 128kbps MP3 to CD quality with DVD vs. Blu-Ray.
Many Blu-Rays are remasters of the originals as well - so, it’s kinda moot with remasters. My point is with the massive quality difference, and that DVD’s in general will only get less worthwhile as time goes on.
> the difference in resolution and image quality is insanely noticeable on, especially 4K, TV’s
It's possible to make them look a lot better, but you're right that it's a huge amount of work to do so. There's basically nothing out there tagged "DVDRip" that's worth a damn IMO, because almost all encoders (both human and software) treat the DVD like encoding a CD where making the most exact copy of what's on the disc is the goal.
Encoding a DVD for modern screens on the other hand requires some art direction all its own. DVDs have a huge amount of legacy hidden in them, not only in the interlaced NTSC/PAL systems but in Sony's D-1 tape system as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)
A good modern DVD rip will be:
- Deinterlaced to 60FPS (technically 60000/1001 fields-per-second) using a temporal-smoothing filter like QTGMC. Handbrake will not do this. Almost all DVD rips are 30FPS and just look gross and feel gross from all the lost motion information.
- Cropped to avoid the black bars on the left and right of the D-1 resolution and to make circles into circles instead of slight ovals. This is really noticeable in cartoons with circle-guides for eyes like The Simpsons.
- Stretched to 960x540 (16:9) or 720x540 (4:3) at encode-time with a quality resize filter. This is probably the part nerds have the most internalized opposition to (I sure did) since the raw NTSC DVD res is 720x480 and expanding it feels kind of like encoding a FLAC out of an MP3. All DVDs are anamorphic (704x486 is a 3:2 res, stretched equally for both 16:9 and 4:3 DAR!), so the alternative is that the display performs the stretch in real-time using the container PAR/DAR flags. Most displays do a terrible job.
The vertical 540px is the EDTV resolution and still part of the ATSC spec to this day, technically as 544px with four dead pixel rows on the bottom for 8px block size. I've yet to meet a decoder fail with 4px blocks though so I prefer the panel-accurate res. It pixel-doubles in exact multiples to 1080, 2160, etc, so it looks way better on modern screens.
- Color-corrected from the oldschool D-1 colorspace to the newer HDTV or 4K colorspaces, or at least tagged as such if not converted. This doesn't undo the lossy nature of subsampled chroma but still looks a lot better, especially in the greens. This is another thing that cheap displays are terrible at doing in realtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601
- Rip the raster-based DVD subtitles to a modern format like SRT/ASS. I usually use SubtitleEdit and correct the few OCR errors by hand: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
- Encode AC3 audio to AAC, preferably with something nicer than FAAC. I include all languages because why not. I like FDK-AAC and will use VBR-4 or VBR-5 if I want low-pass or not based on the source waveform: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...
- MKV container, take the time to fill the container metadata fields, tag audio track languages so the player picks the correct one, attach a `cover.jpg` for Explorer/Finder thumbnail, name all the chapter stops, etc. This is actually grueling some times. My precious metadata.
Totally huge pain. Worth it though for things worth having :)
those DVDs come with an EULA backed by a dozen laws, which, if they were universally enforced and followed to the letter, would put you in jail for the criminal act of making a backup copy, among a myriad other possible violations
What people don't realize is that part of the pricing model for various physical media is that the media wouldn't last. VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc all age, get lost, break, get scratches, whatever. They're not "forever".
Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable.
A cloud copy of something on Google, Apple, Amazon or Netflix is essentially forever.
People don't realize what they're effectively asking for is digital rights to something in perpetuity. And you can't really price that realistically.
Streaming services actually far better match what users actually want (in general). There's no issues of storing media or keeping digital copies safe. The limited time you can view something is what makes it economical.
Remember too that most things tend to only ever be watched once. The satisfaction for collection isn't relaly about repeat viewing at for the most part.
Streaming services would match what I want if the content I want was on all services and the services competed on service quality.
Instead I want to watch “The Expanse” and I dont know if it’s a Netflix special or HBO or Hulu or Amazon or what. I logged into three of them and it wasn’t there.
Oh look, it’s on the Pirate Bay. Also, it’s not throttled / forcibly downgraded to 720p or whatever.
I personally possess CDs from the 1980s and vinyl records from as early as the 1940s. Meanwhile I can’t access digital purchases made in the last few years. Perhaps not “forever”, but frankly close enough.
I have friends who work in media archiving. Properly stored physical media can last a LONG time, like hundreds of years.
And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.
The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.
Do you use FOIAFS to let the NSA do all of your archiving for you? Just post your digital content you want to save along with a unique token, then when you need a copy, FOIAFS automatically issues a FOIA request for all documents the government has with that unique token. It's kind of slow and unreliable, though.
I don't know, I feel like my physical copies are much more "forever" than the censored and "improved" versions available for streaming. In my copy of Star Wars, Han shots first.
> It's sad that we cannot own titles but are forced to rent them from these streaming services that can't seem to get their shit together.
It's sad that the general public cannot get its shit together and every man jack keep and use his own library.
I know because I'm one of the sad sacks that owns hundreds of original LPs, CDs, VHSs, DVDs, and also has a couple TB of HDD worth of borrowed series, and hasn't touched the damn pile of 'precious' in ages.
"Give me Convenience or Give me Death", as those 1980s punks so neatly summed it up.
For better or worse, half way through realizing it was stupid, I've bought myself a massive collection that I don't "own" on iTunes. Technically, it is tied to my Apple account, but there isn't a way to transfer ownership, or etc outside of Apple even for e.g.if I die.
I think though there will be some laws passed hopefully that will allow us to own digital content outright in the near future, hopefully in a decentralized way.
Doesn’t apple still allow you to buy movies on their service? I only bought two (the iron giant and the bucket list) but i am pretty sure iron giant i bought close to 15 years ago. I can still download it from their service without any problems(just went to the tv app on my phone to confirm and just started to download them right now)
Yes, lots of services do. Apple is unique though in that a purchase entitles you to all versions of a film, including future versions. I bought 3:10 to Yuma on iTunes in 2008 and I can watch it in 4K/HDR today without spending another cent.
I still prefer buying and ripping Blu-Rays though.
It would be much worse if we were forced to buy the rights to watch a TV show or movie before we know if we even like it. I'd have a massive virtual library of half garbage.
I see a lot of focus on the "lost 200 000 subscribers", but less acknowledgement that they kicked 700 000 Russians off the subscriber list, meaning they actually grew by 500 000 subscribers (still well short of wall streets expectation of 2.5 million.)
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
You're right, but the article posted includes statements like:
> Two hundred thousand subscribers did not suddenly quit their subscriptions and start using their friends’ passwords.
That implies the author thought this was a natural subscription drop and not a result of losing 700k subscribers in Russia. I'm not sure I have any confidence in their predictions about the future, since they're so clueless about what's happening today.
The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has. Look at Apple TV+, they're absolutely TINY compared to Netflix in both library size and money spent on new production, but they have arguably more hits than Netflix. Like, since when has any drama on Netflix been as buzzy or as good as Severance on Apple TV+? When was the last time they had a comedy success like Ted Lasso?
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
"The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has."
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
>The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
I was really skeptical of subscribing to Apple TV (an additional streaming service really?) but after watching some of the Apple content I'm a convert. Ted Lasso, Severance, Pachinko, and many more.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
I think they've over-interpreted their viewing data. Seems like they concluded that viewers spend most of their time watching garbage filler, which is probably true. But they shouldn't presume that each viewing hour is equal to the next.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
Netflix always had a terrible business model dependent on transient properties of the media environment. I thought from the beginning they were not masters of their own fate (remember Redbox's hack to get around publisher restrictions? Weird streaming windows even from the streaming era's earliest days?) and once they started spending the big bucks to try and stay afloat it was clear they were doomed. They were only in "FAANG" to make the acronym funny.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
I blame Netflix for popularizing the stack of horizontal scrolling carousel of thumbnails. It is a terrible way to browse, and so many companies mindlessly copy it.
Can you point specifically to what you don't like about it?
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
I have to change from the traditional 2 finger vertical scroll to get to the bottom of the page to a single touch pointer action to bypass the area of the screen so I can get past the area and continue to scroll to the bottom. It's horrible UI if you have a multigesture touchpad, like apple macbooks. Instead of scrolling from the top, it starts scrolling vertically (like it's supposed to) to suddenly scrolling horizontally as soon as you hit that area. Amazon prime does it too. Instead of speedily cruising around the interface, it's a nonstop battle for control to go where I intended. You end up fighting the interface, which leads to a very poor experience day after day after day. If I want to scroll horizontally, scrolling left-right should do that, not horizontal to get a vertical action.
All that automatic zooming and whirring and auto-playing as my cursor moves around drives me batty! It's so distracting - it's harder to figure out what I might want to watch with all that chaos trying to grab my attention.
A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters. They go with the carrousel for better or worse because it lets you quickly scroll through categories without scrolling through every item in a category. If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
If you just want more search options, I agree but the search layout is also already a grid.
I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better. There are subtle issues with getting this layout right. Its not as obvious as you say when you need to deal with crap remote dpads and no keyboards.
> A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters.
It doesn't need to be a list of movie posters.
> If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
It's not though, you have to scroll horizontally for each section. That's not the same as a grid.
> I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better.
That's tough to do if everyone is implementing it poorly. However, I would say that something like this feels better in practice (even if it's still not ideal): https://i.imgur.com/AU6Az7e.jpeg
That wastes more space than a horizontal scrollable grid that’ll go back and for with the mouse wheel. Even Netflix large rectangular preview boxes still fit more shows.
Because then you can only traverse in one dimension as opposed to two. You can currently scroll through categories quickly. In a single list you have to scroll through every title.
I didn't mean to abandon two scroll axes. Only make the vertical scrolling the primary method people use to scroll though videos. Or do people prefer to scroll through categories?
The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating. There are a lot of people who were content to pay for a couple services, but even without any sports, you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60, just to get content that used to be on Netflix (plus whatever's been released since). Once you add one or two sports, you can be looking at prices above $100 per month.
> you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
> I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show? They create mindless entertainment for society and yet they are so highly compensated. Yeah, I don't feel like I owe them anything.
> Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show?
Because that is the agreement they made for selling their labor/services/content to the buyers of the labor/services/content.
"Mindless" is a subjective term. Millions of people enjoy the entertainment you refer to, as judged by the fact that they go to the cinema and pay for admission. That's why they're so highly-compensated.
If you don't see the value in the entertainment those companies provide, you're probably not the target audience.
Media companies have been using the value of "content you want to watch" to subsidize "content you don't know you want to watch" for about a century now, the back catalogs are what will keep you paying but that only retains value so long as new content can be added to it.
While I myself have purchased many seasons of TV, I should caution you that none of it can be "purchased outright" on these platforms. Your account can be cancelled at any time, and you then lose access with no recourse. "Purchasing outright" requires buying physical media, and even then, disc players are becoming dangerously niche.
If people really start doing that en-masse, then the next thing the streaming services will implement is that cancellation means you lose access immediately.
Then I will set a reminder on my phone to cancel before next renewal. Or if too troublesome, I will just pay for the specific episode or show or movie.
Or if the price is too high, I will find something better to do with my time. Same as every other entertainment option in life.
> it is easy to see how a family of frogs is slowly boiled back into having an expensive "entertainment package" as if it were the old cable days again,
It is not easy to see for me. If you want access to all the content all at once, then pay up.
If you want access to specific content at the specific time you want, then pay then, watch, and cancel the subscription if there was one.
This latter option was not available before, and it is now. I am loving the new system which cuts out the middleman (cable/satellite tv) that was able to jerk around both me and the content seller.
The next problem needing to be solved is reducing copyright length to 10 years or so. That is what will make the price of content go down by increasing the number of content sellers.
Buy a subscription. Then get a VPN so they don't force me to watch things from the wrong country. Then dislike the political narrative forced on me? Or just click through to some streaming site and close a few popups?
Why not just have one streaming service at a time? Each has an absurd amount of content so just switch it up every few months. You get to watch everything and it’s super inexpensive.
This is what I do. When the "to watch" list of shows I got recommended or am otherwise interested in watching on one of the services gets a few items on it, I buy a month of subscription and immediately cancel. Then watch the stuff during the month, and some time later get another month of a different service. This has been working great for the past couple years.
All these services are going for the strategy of a couple big releases and hope people forget to cancel. But now with a dozen different services consumers are being forced to learn to swap in and out.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
> The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating.
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- Edit: Plex et al are not the *only* ways to download content, not sure why some replies are thinking so. I too can type in a show into a piracy site, click the magnet icon, and start immediately watching it. I personally don't even use Plex, Radarr or Sonarr myself, it was just a suggestion. In contrast, I can't just type any show into Netflix and watch it, since it might not even be on Netflix! Then I'd need to get on justwatch.com just to figure out which streaming service is playing the show. This is harder than piracy in my view.
- You can use whatever media player you want without having to go through a browser and its DRM. I use mpv and filters like Anime4k to automatically upscale my content, something that I cannot do via a browser or otherwise without the physical file on my hard drive.
- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
... and you are not forced to use those grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers (and their SDKs), in other words, open source drm software which is "obfuscated" via complexity and size: you can use the media player you like, and in my case my shmol media player I wrote (using ffmpeg).
This issue is actually critical as it is not really piracy as it narrows down to the right to have interoperabitily with technically reasonable and sensible software.
I don't really get why Netflix is so sour about password sharing, it's literally part of the subscription pricing, they tell you how many concurrent streams you're allowed to have.
In the 1990s some homes would have several screens of cable TV, so several people in the same home could watch different things at the same time. Parents with teenage children, for example. Because of the physical cables it only worked in one home - when the kids moved out, they had to pay for their own cable or go without.
Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.
Yes, this very much bothers me. You pay for streaming. How many streams do you want? Well, pay Netflix for that number. However you like to use those streams is up to you.
Having not touched this since early days of TPB, is there a decent overview to approaches in 2022 you could point me to? E.g. has torrenting moved to the cloud or are most running vpns? Asking for a friend.
Latest and greatest is "plexshares" just google that. I've been sailing the high seas since 2002 and this is my last stop. No fuss, no worrying about anything. Wife and kids are very happy.
Find one in there that you like in your price range. I pay $20 and have 1080p/4k remuxes. I used to spend at least 10 hours a month managing my own Plex/Emby, the money is well spent to me.
Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.
I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.
rarbg.to is the popular index site.
Bittorrent, the purple client. My smart TVs can access my PC's dedicated media directory - which took a bit of fiddling to get right. The big drawback is a lack of subtitles, unless they are baked in to the rip.
I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime).
I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.
I wouldn't recommend BitTorrent/μTorrent, they're now run by a Chinese cryptocurrency company and have ads.
qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.
I have heard this term and briefly looked into it. My takeaway was it’s a vps with prebaked software/config offered by shady looking providers. Is that roughly correct or did I get lost in adwords?
Basically, you'll find ones with fast storage with big storage for reasonable prices and that are... explicitly sanctioning this use case. And I'd bet the competent ones specifically design their network and client settings for good performance. In professional settings getting good large storage performance is sometimes a struggle or expensive.
I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.
A friend can recommend bytesized hosting if you want minimal hassle. They have installer scripts for all the most popular tools (like the ones in parent) and it's really easy to set up your own netflix-like experience, with Plex as the streaming UI, deluge as the torrent client and Sonarr and Radarr as automated torrent downloaders.
> It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
> It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Very true.
In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.
My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.
And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.
I don't think I agree with this level of negativity around plex, radarr, and sonarr. Using a seedbox provider and all of these things are setup and don't need any additional tinkering. You are right that the indexer is probably the least friendly part, but set it up once and it keeps working for over 6 months at a time.
Even without a widget I can definitely see that with Netflix I am getting 720p on a 4k TV, even more frequently when watching childrens shows. I have a 200Mbps internet link, Disney+ plays 4k just fine.
It is not. It's very clearly not HD and we gigabit internet. Other services do fine. Especially rented HD movies that are streamed. So instead of using my TV for Netflix, I watch on my laptop with a browser plugin to set a proper resolution.
All this. Plus, if you live in a country that's not the US, half the streaming services aren't available, and on the ones that are, half the content is missing because it's 2022 and geographic region licensing is still a thing.
Since the rise of streaming services it have been surprisingly hard to get older and less popular content as less people are seeding. Also seems there are stringent laws present for content sharing than it was 10 years ago. I doubt that content piracy will come back in the way it was so that an ordinary citizen could say "It's easier just to pirate".
> Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.
Theft, in plain english, is defined as the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive. Stealing is the act of theft.
As mention in a comment above, it is not the consumer's responsibility to provide income to employees of a company providing goods or services. Please stop with this fallacy.
You're conflating consumer responsibility with consumer spending. It's the company's job to provide wages - the company dictates and designs the means to acquire money to provide wages. If the company provides a widget that consumers don't want, is it the consumer's fault the company cannot pay the wages of the employees? That's just silly.
Technically stealing is depriving someone from his property which is not the case here. Also one should make a distinction between services. In the case of audiovisual content It can be consumed without changing anything in the life of the producer. I do not say that it’s a good thing but qualifying it of stealing does not seem right.
>You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k")
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
Maybe, but I'd pay for better content and UX. Many movies above that royalty threshold just aren't available. Also Netflix must die because they canceled Cowboy Bebop.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
Disney, Paramount, CNN would eventually be held hostage to their platform by a Spotify or Steam ... The Music business and artists have been destroyed by Spotify
Plex is nice! I run a Server for Family and Friends, it works great, but I’m an IT GUY and it’s a Hobby.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Maybe it's because I haven't done it in earnest since the days of Limewire but pirating sounds like such a fucking hassle these days. So I just don't do it not out of a strong sense of morality but because I'm lazy.
Sure. It's also stealing. And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy. Don't get me wrong, I've done it for some things that I wanted to watch, but wasn't willing to pay for. But let's not pretend that everyone torrenting is a reasonable solution.
There were a few years were I literally stopped all torrenting. Netflix and Amazon had everything I wanted. Sure, there were a few things that didn't exist, but I was too lazy to go after that minor amount of content. I was fully legal and paying for everything. I was fine with it.
Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
Back in the 90s you would have had to pay $3-5 per movie at Blockbuster. Drive to the store, hope the movie you want was in stock, drive home, watch movie, remember to rewind the movie when it's done, drive back to the store to return it before the due date.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
Movies are different than games (and music) however. While I have rewatched movies--multiple times in a (relatively small) number of cases, movies are mostly one and done for me--and I imagine most adults.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
It was normalized back when the first video rental stores opened decades ago. It remains today because there needs to be some way to differentiate between a rental and a purchase, otherwise everything would become a purchase at a significantly higher price point.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Do you also make backups of HD movies using this process, by any chance? Like you, I have no issue purchasing something. But I don’t like “purchasing” something stored in a walled garden online-only service that can be taken away.
I am fine with renting and paying. But the arbitrarily stupid rule “you have 48 hours to finish once you started” is what stops me from “renting” any lure.
Amazon and Youtube (and maybe other streaming services) also offer some of the movies for free with advertising. So the model hasn’t changed much from going to rent a movie at the store for a few bucks or watching it on cable tv, except you’re not paying for cable now.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
Why don't you just not partake in the content? You really don't need to spend all that time watching shows. If you don't like the terms under which it is offered, just find something else to do.
The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different. But content production is an expensive treadmill you can never get off and unless they find a way to innovate on that front, they are up against much more experienced and well established players with no differentiator at all.
But reading the sky falling into the current reported figures seems a little over the top.