I have fond memories of the Netflix DVD service. In high school, I would get a disk, immediately burn a copy, and return it the same day. I could get about 20-25 DVDs a month on the 3-DVD plan this way.
Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive.
At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and I was rewarded a free month.
After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard drives started getting large enough that I could just store all the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final transition.
I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays, with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many movies barely elicits a shrug.
But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world. Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.
Have been a Netflix customer since about 2000. I used to blog about them all the time in 2000-2001, did full writeups on their UI design, even the red envelope design. Had a dialog going to Neil Hunt their CTO/product guy. Even visited Netflix and had lunch with him once over the blog posts. I'd say they made about half the changes I urged them to make. Which was fun to see, that it made a difference.
As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.]
I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in.
It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars.
I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre.
It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.
Probably the same thing going on inside Google with user feedback on search results and ads.
At some point, after years of clicking the almost invisible [x] on the top of "hot singles near you" and ads for mail order brides from various countries and patiently telling Google it wasn't relevant, I got fed up, tilted, clicked the ad, found the contact address and explained in sufficient detail how Google scammed them by including me and others who absolutely weren't interested at all.
Sometime after that it suddenly stopped and now I only get irrelevant ads, not disgusting, embarrassing or insulting ones.
I can't say if what I did made the difference or not, but I can say that years of telling Google did change nothing. (Or to be fair: when I said I didn't want Russian mail order brides they would admittedly show me some other nationality next time).
Also today I have almost completely[1] given up Google and I don't feel I break an unspoken contract by blocking ads anymore.
[1]: Visited Google the other day and noticed they had brought back a working context menu with a working "view cached result" option, but it would take 200 more such fixes, many of them much bigger, to restore Google.
In many places in the US, pedestrian buttons don't change the lights, certainly not within 1-3 min, if it's a busy or major intersection with lots of vehicle traffic. Also, the controller behavior can change during the day/night depending on traffic volume, or maybe time of day. One time I counted it took the lights 7 minutes to change at a three-lane intersection late at night, even though there were no cars.
It depends on the light. Some lights don't change unless they sense a car or pedestrian going the other way. Some run on a timer so they change automatically. On others, the light will change but the walk light will not come on if you didn't push the button (these ones drive me insane). Then there's the ones that only activate a chirp for the blind people. Then, finally, there are the fabled buttons of lore that do absolutely nothing. Oh, and some are just broken.
I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.
> I still haven't come across the placebo buttons though so I'm willing to doubt their existence.
IIRC the "placebo" buttons, where they exist, were not installed as such, but simply deactivated after the traffic light control system changed, since uninstalling them would be more expensive.
In my home town in Germany (and probably other cities as well, only I've realised I've never really paid attention to that subject while visiting other cities), the little tactile arrow marking the crosswalk direction plus a tactile buzzer for blind people is mounted together with those buttons, so even when a certain direction and its parallel crosswalk always get green by default (and therefore there's no need ever to push a button), a button housing still gets installed for the buzzer and arrow.
The only difference is that those kind of non-buttons are painted a different colour, plus with the older style of buttons that you physically have to push in order to operate a switch, on those non-buttons the push-plate is fixed in place and cannot actually be pushed. (Some people occasionally still try to.) With the newer style of button that operates via some sort of electronic touch sensor and therefore has no moveable parts to begin with, the only distinction might be the colour? (Not sure, because the intersection I regularly pass by on the way to work still uses the old-style buttons…)
Oh phooey. It's a longstanding joke that the "Don't Walk" lights don't change to "Walk" any sooner if you press the button. Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.
> Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.
I recently read an article (maybe even here on HN) that explained this fully.
Basically, in the US, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the doors must stay open for a minimum time (which depends on some variables). The door close button can only have an effect after that time is elapsed, but in many (if not most bases) the time after which the door automatically closes is set to that same minimum anyway.
My understanding has always been that, at least in the US, it is usually the case that the "close door" button doesn't do anything unless there is a firefighter key inserted and the elevator in fire mode. That's really there to allow a firefighter to manually control the door open/close functions during fire-ground operations where you really don't want the elevator doing things on its own.
There are, of course, always exceptions. Some reading I did earlier suggests that there is some variation based on elevator brand, and possibly even then whims of the building owner (in terms of what instructions they gave the elevator installer about how they wanted things to work). Curiously though the "door open" button does usually pre-empt the (automatic) closing of the door, even in "normal" mode. At least IME.
For example I used to live near a major junction, for about 18-20 hours per day the buttons have no effect because there is traffic, the junction's computer is adding walk cycles where they fit in its schedule anyway so there's no difference. Testing would show no effect.
Late at night you can see the buttons work, there is no traffic so the junction is left with the fast through lanes green indefinitely, but pressing a pedestrian button causes your walk cycle to run immediately.
On the other hand I work on a University campus, the University would prefer to shut the road through the middle of it, local government said "No" so the pedestrian crossings are set to run very frequently with no penalty delay, meaning most of the day if you push the button you get a walk cycle immediately. During term time it's probably quicker to drive around the campus to the far side than use that road - because somebody will push the button, probably more than once, there are like four crossings with this treatment. So on campus it's very obvious that the buttons work.
Ha I had the same experience renting Xbox games from Blockbuster. Got to the point where I'd rent a stack of games, rip them to my modded Xbox in my car then return them to the drop bin to perplexed faces of employees inside who had just rung me up an hour earlier.
Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just amassing a library.
For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've atoned for some of these 'crimes'
Lol. My friend and I did the same with a local DVD vending machine. If you brought the disc back within a few hours the price was ridiculously low, so we had the laptop in the car with a cigarette adapter and ripped 700+ ISOs.
The irony is this was around 2002 to demo a video on demand over the Internet system to some execs at Microsoft. It was a really, really nice UI and nothing like it would be replicated for years, really until Netflix launched their own product.
The idea was summarily rejected as "people like having things on their shelves." A weird response because the same folks were paying me to destroy the CD market.
That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their car.
It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.
I remember getting together with a high school friend when we were in our 20s and he talked about the massive amounts of pirated software he’d downloaded (over dial-up internet, no less), none of which he’d ever used.
On the gaming rig thing, I had a co-worker once who spent a lot of time buying and modding mid-level electric guitars. He was not really a player, he just liked doing the electronics work and being able to accept that was one of my milestones towards maturity.
I think this is a fascinating effect seen in almost any hobby. I wonder if there is a word for these sort of sub-hobbies or pre-hobbies. I think you can find it's parallels in cars, aquariums, 3d printers, wood working, etc.
Electronics people use this term for collecting Test Equipment as well. Amusingly, on the EEVBlog forums, one of the largest and most active threads of all is the "Test Equipment Anonymous - Group Therapy Thread" which nominally exists to support those suffering from severe GAS.
Cyclists too, are notorious for frequently pointing out that the correct number of bicycles to own is always n+1, where n is equal to however many you currently own. :-)
Quite a lot of musical instruments are beautiful objects that you could display. While you could display electronic test equipment, even geeks usually don't.
Some people get addicted to the tools of a hobby and not the hobby itself. Sometimes thinking they need the best of the best in order to produce the best.
The older we get, the more we and my friends tend to this nowadays. Downloading everything, legal or illegal, just "in case of" as we did our whole life, but don't have any time nor will to play anything anymore.
You're touching on something I've always been fascinated about...the game being the collection and building of the library itself. I suppose it's not that different from any other hobby centered around collectibles and yet with media, especially digital media, it always felt a bit different. I'm not sure why.
I think Leo Laporte once said something along the lines of some people are tool people and other people are doing people. Some like to obsess over the tools, some just want to get work done.
I saw another similar quote about amassing knowledge is pointless if you don't actually do something with it.
I’m always amused at how home cooks all have the meme $300 knives, then you see a pro chef explain their gear and it’s a $30 knife with plastic handle.
It was perfectly fine when it was cassettes off the radio, or a friend's record or cassette. RIAA changed the rules when it changed to, "on a computer."
It wasn’t cassette vs computer, it was the scale of the sharing. With tapes, sharing wasn’t really practical beyond a handful of friends. With Napster, you could share with the whole world.
I think the general rule back then was you couldn't make money off it. People would charge for the cost of the cassette or something like that. There were tons of bootlegs out there too.
DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There was a record store where you could “buy” a used record for like $5 and they’d take it back within a week or so and refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes.
For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.
DVDs predating your youth implies DVDs were phased out before you were young. Given that you were copying records to cassette tapes, it sounds like the opposite is true?
Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I’m not sure of the current status of that law.)
I’m very out of date on this stuff, but I thought the more relevant thing was that you’re not supposed to keep permanent copies of stuff around. I believe the original court cases were about recording live TV to watch later, presumably under the assumption that the video tapes would be recorded over quickly (as was common in those days). In that case I don’t see why doing the same with a rental wouldn’t also be fair use.
Had the exact same experience, ripping and dropping the dvds back at the post office a few hours later,even getting throttled towards the end of the month.
Man, life was complicated if you didn’t have friends with access to the markets in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. I’d just write up a list of stuff I fancied and the Hong Kong kids would show up at school at the start of term with suitcases laden with fresh VCD warez, games, you name it - everything you’d asked for, and then some, and usually stuff that hadn’t hit the cinemas yet.
This was late 90’s, so broadband was still very nascent - downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming mission.
I did the exact same thing in high school. I would rush home from school, and on a good day I could get all 3 DVDs ripped and back to the post office before 5pm for same-day turnaround. I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week.
For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful.
I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD collections. I don’t think any of them lasted long. Heck, some of those could have been a single person mailing out and restocking discs.
> I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week.
I need to go in and fix broken links, but I tracked 5+ years of Netflix mailings (dropped DVDs into my sixth year).
What I rented, when I got it and shipped it back, when they received and mailed another, and what mailer I got (local address or further away).
It’s conceivable given the laughable behavior of streaming services lately (e.g. HBO removing recent flagship original content from its streaming service is just ludicrous).
Of course if it became common again it would probably be met with a new era of IP lawsuits, even though it seemed to have been settled previously. Oh, and it would likely only be doable legally with content that had a legitimate physical media release, which is becoming somewhat rare.
I did something similar -- though I didn't burn as many discs (my friends did, however) because I've always been a collector. But like you, Netflix exposed me to so many movies and TV shows I would have otherwise not been able to see (or afford, and I used to spend a couple hundred a month on physical media!)
The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.
They had a $1 million prize for improving the recommendation algorithm. The data was anonymized and sanitized but it was apparently potentially possible to identify people from some of the data. A closeted-lesbian mother filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix (even though I do not think she was actually outed by the dataset, meaning I do not think anyone ever connected her rental history to her) on the basis that offering the dataset to researchers at all was a violation of US privacy laws over video rental records. The argument was that someone looking at her video rental records could deduce that she was actually gay.
It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be about privacy in general, but video rental records are protected differently from some other data because of the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part because reporters were able to get his video rental records whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember all the details). As a result of the Bork situation, federal law was passed to protect video rental records. Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something similar with its Beacon program.
Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or potentially "outing" anyone.
Bork's VHS rentals were actually pretty boring and didn't include pornography. The indignation / backlash to the list's publication made it clear that he and his supporters were hypocrites; Bork had repeatedly argued and ruled in a way to curtail privacy rights.
That lawsuit killed the contest but the recommendation system went on for a while longer until they realized their streaming service didn't have enough content for the original recommendation algorithm to work and they wanted to promote their own stuff.
Clarence Thomas has a way, way more sordid "fetish" history than just renting porn. No normal person would care if it was just him renting an erotic video.
I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a while.
I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either.
Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.
> having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn
It's the opposite. The primary cause of churn is that there is nothing a subscriber wants to watch. You might assume that a recommendation helps a user maximise the amount of the library they will watch but it actually helps the user conclude there is nothing they want to watch and leave.
Netflix wants their library to be more like a one-armed bandit. Users have to gamble on whether they will like something and they will never know they have run out. They want the user to keep hanging on, to keep scrolling, assuming something great is just around the corner, never getting to "I'm done with this".
I noticed this effect with the DVD subscription. If you added 3 discs to your queue, they would send the first two but not the third, waiting for you to add some less desirable titles to your queue, which they would send before they sent your high priority title. If your needs get satisfied, your subscription ends. It's a fundamentally user hostile business.
Netflix' key metrics are basically around retaining subscribers and attracting new ones. Except to the degree it supports those goals (and there's obviously a correlation), they don't actually care how much you watch, how much you like the content, how easily you find content you like, etc. Correlated, yes. But not one and the same.
If you open Google and type in “netflix recommendation system lawsuit” you’ll find many results on the first page explaining it. You can use this method for a lot of topics that people here on hacker news mentions.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Your low effort comment is a hundred times worse than the one you responded to. Trying to shame someone in that sarcastic juvenile tone for asking a question in good faith is itself shameful.
People naturally respond to such things and use them to segue into another topic as part of conversation, and sometimes it is nice to have someone tell their recollection of a story instead of getting the wikipedia version.
I had a similar experience copying DVDs from the Redbox (automated rental kiosk). I felt so accomplished getting all the right software and amassing a huge collection of pirated disks (stacks of DVD organizers in my room).
Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either gave them away or donated them...
I had a few binders full of movies on CDs that I had... obtained. When I ripped the movies onto them, the quality seemed acceptable. Damn good actually when you played them back on a CRT TV. Now when I try to watch them, I see how terrible they look. At that time, we didn't have DVD burners (or they were super expensive), so I would have to transcode the DVD into that weird DivX codec so it would fit on the 700MB CD.
I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where I couldn't copy the file back off of it.
When blockbuster was going out of business they offered a free trial of their similar service for video games. I had soft modded my wii to rip play games from a hard drive, so I got about 20 or so games ripped to my hard drive this way. Good times. Till my roommate in college formatted my hard drive and I lost all my games (not just the blockbuster ones). This guy spat on me, and I forgave him for that, but never for this. God damn it Paul :(
Yeah, I didn't rip a bunch of Netflix stuff because I'm a movie collector, but I used to abuse Blockbuster's video game service and rip Xbox and Wii games from on the reg. I still have my modded Xbox from 2002 with a bunch of old games on it (my hacked Wii still works too).
By gaming the promotions - get a free month, pay for a month, cancel, get promo for free month, repeat - i think he got maybe an 8 month subscription and only paid for 3.
And he’d do the same - as soon as a movie arrived, make a copy, drop it back in the mail that night. I think the max was maybe 24 movies a month.
He amassed a collection of over 200 movies that way. Then he cancelled and had movies to watch for the next 2-3 years.
This was me! I loved the thrill of ripping dvds to .iso and figuring out how to burn it to the 100 pack of smelly dvd-r spindles I picked up at Black Friday every year haha I probably never watched the dvds I burned again but this seriously felt like the greatest victory ever to not have to deal with/rewind clunky VCR tapes in my young adhd dopamine craving brain!
A lot of people don't remember Blockbuster reacted pretty fast to Netflix. They let you rent a couple movies out at once for something like $20/month. The killer part was when they added playstation games for a little more.
I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a date to blockbuster was the norm.
Yes, going to Blockbuster with friends was a fun start to movie night. It was more of an event. But "Blockbuster and chill" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
We must have gone through about 20 free trials for Lovefilm during uni, using subtly different addresses with typos so they'd still be delivered but not show up as dupe accounts. Good times.
Netflix also (I think briefly) offered DVD rental in UK, competing with LoveFilm. LoveFilm did continue for a while after the Amazon acquisition, both as DVD rental and with streaming added (LoveFilm Instant, if I remember correctly), which eventually got rebranded into Amazon Instant Video
I lived next to a post office distribution hub. Would drop dvds at Post office in morning. Get home and new dvd would be in my mailbox. Watch all of em. Return them in morning. Rinse and repeat until they started delaying how it took for the DVDs to arrive.
What’s the deal with piracy and hoarding? I also knew big torrent users who were constantly filling disk after disk. How many of those copies did you actually watch? Maybe it was all for the thrill of the crime!
The one big advantage the disk service had over streaming, was that Netflix could buy the disks from anywhere (even the local Walmart, if they had to), and lend them to customers.
Streaming requires negotiating licensing rights, with each IP owner independently.
This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
> This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
It still does. Just think of a movie or show and search for it, and they'll probably have it, although they seem to be missing the occasional season.
I think the DVD site would still be popular if more people were aware of the size of its catalog. Most probably assume it has the same catalog as the streaming service.
I think it would be popular if they even attempted to grow that arm of the business. Netflix made it obvious they had zero interest in it when they tried to spin it off into Qwikster.
It's the quality of the image for me. I remember when DVD looked phenomenal (because compared to broadcast and VHS it was) but now it feels barely watchable.
Some films are just not available for streaming. I used the Netflix disc mailer service relatively recently for this reason. It was a pretty good "catch all" for hard-to-find titles not on one of the major streaming subscription services and not available for streaming rental.
> There's so much more on the DVD service than the streaming side
This is something I've wondered about. I've never subscribed to either CDs or streaming but my impression of streaming is that there are hundreds of movies not tens of thousands. Wikipedia says that in 2005 Netflix had 35,000 different movies on disk, presumably many more by now. How many different titles does Netflix streaming have for the USA service ?
Interesting, thanks. I certainly don't know this but my impression is that outside of the US (specifically in New Zealand) the Netflix catalogue would be significantly smaller than that, around 1/10th of both categories ? ... this is just based on sitting in hotel rooms thumbing through the menu so it's possible my sense of what's available is off.
Netflix puts you in a bubble very quickly, and unless you specifically search for titles outside it you might not notice that a lot of the available titles never show up in any of the menus.
I purposefully create multiple Netflix profiles for myself to avoid that bubble. When I notice I keep seeing the same titles or when I notice one genre is taking over (started watching anime on Netflix recently - bad idea, every row is now nothing but anime) I make a new profile to start fresh. Usually find tons of new things I was missing out on.
Your local public library likely has a decent selection of movies on DVD and with inter-library loan they can probably get you just about anything you want. I’m in the midst of transitioning my Netflix DVD queue into a list on the library’s catalog and thusfar, I’ve only had one movie/TV show (Rammbock) not show up in the local library system’s catalog.
California folks, worth knowing is that most (if not all) library systems in California will give a card to anyone with a California ID, even if they don’t live in district. When I lived in Santa Monica, I had cards for Santa Monica, LA County, LA City, Orange County and Beverly Hills.
Your local public library likely has a decent selection of movies on DVD and with inter-library loan they can probably get you just about anything you want.
My previous city library was a pretty good supplement to Netflix. But my new city only has new stuff. An only does inter-library loans for printed material.
West coast libraries are unusually well stocked for DVDs because occasionally (before streaming) a movie or other entertainment company will get caught doing some minor misdeed, and was able to pay the fine by dumping DVDs on rural library systems.
I finished my transition from a dvd netflix queue to creating a list on the local library system’s online catalog. I’m in suburban Chicago and of the 149 titles (a bit more when measured in DVDs) in my queue, only two were not available (The Secret Policemen’s Last Ball and Rammbock). I would have kept doing my $7.99 a month for potentially forever, but the announcement managed to get me to empty my queue a lot faster.
There's Redbox for newer stuff, libraries, purchasing new or used, and piracy. Which maybe sounds like a lot but adds up to there's no service where you can just subscribe monthly and rent pretty much anything in print with a search and a mouse click as used to be the case with Netflix. So you're not exactly SOL but there's a lot more friction now and I expect a lot more people will just shrug and watch whatever is available for subscription streaming (as a lot of people won't even buy a la carte streaming).
It is very sad. I still use the DVD service more than the streaming service simply because most of the content I want to watch isn't available streaming. The back catalog on Netflix gets smaller every year as publishers move content off to their own services, or to deliberately withhold it.
I only use the disc service (yeah, I'm the one!). Too bad. The wife and I were trying to get through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die". Although, the truth is, Netflix has maybe only about 80% of them.
When I first got Netflix, I spent a couple years watching everything from the IMDB top 250 that I hadn’t seen. There were a handful of movies that Netflix didn’t have that I ended up getting (on VHS!) from the local library. I would recommend checking the library for your gaps in the list.
In fact plenty of the movies you and I have probably already seen ("Easy Rider", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "The Graduate" for example). So perhaps even before I began going through the list I may have seen 20% or so.
But there are also a lot of early films from the 1930's I had not seen, and plenty of foreign films. In fact, now that I'm working through the 1970's, "foreign films" is more or less the rule.
Sadly the foreign films are the ones hardest to find both on Netflix and at the local library.
it was more fun, too. Something about the queue system and the fact it was paused until I returned the DVDs I had prompted me to watch more things I hadn't already seen. I tend to default to comfort watching with streaming or endless "I'll watch that later" cycles. There was something of the 'discovery' process of the video rental stores still in netflix.
The site also still had a social component back then with star ratings, lists, you could see what your friends were watching and comment. There was almost a goodreads vibe to parts of the site - it was fun.
It's kind of the paradox of choice. You knew you had one thing to watch and that was it. If something was interesting, you stick it in the queue and get to it when you've watched the other stuff you already head. And it was exciting to wait for something in the mail. There was anticipation.
This is why I think it was smart they started releasing content weekly instead of all at once. Give people a chance to build excitement and talk about something.
Agreed. Back with netflix and redbox I would rent movies and watch them to the end because it is what i had. Now, I see the first 15 minutes of 100 movies a year and might complete 10.
I'm pretty sure that's not true - most normal DVDs/BluRays come with a "not for rental" text somewhere and you can't legally rent them. Distributors sell different copies of discs which specifically are for the rental market and which come with a different licence.
That feels like a situation that would only affect the "first sale" at most. Unless you sign a contract to that effect, I don't think it holds. Book publishers tried this with "Only for sale outside the USA" but Supreme Court shot that down.
I think it depends on the country. My Japanese discs have レンタル禁止 (rental forbidden). My North American discs do not. European discs seem to have "Not for rental".
Not true, they are legally rentable for profit without a contract. Redbox has stated on the record that they have done it sometimes when there were tense moments with movie studios. Blockbuster used similar provisions. It's called the First Sale Doctrine which applies to all physical products, but not necessarily digital products.
It is, however, not legal to rent CDs in the US. Because the US is weird.
The way the law works is that intent matters more than the actual written word. Even if the law explicitly says "renting needs a licence but resale is fine" you wouldn't get away with a "loophole" of saying "ok you're really buying a disc from us for $10 and then we buy it back from you after a week for $5" because it's clear that you're just doing renting with extra steps. It wouldn't survive any judicial scrutiny.
VidAngel tried this. They sold movies for $20, bought them back for $19 when you were done, and then streamed the video to you in the meantime. $1 streaming video rentals, for movies that weren't available anywhere online.
Their main problem, IIRC, was that they broke DMCA 1201 to crack the encryption on the disc, edit the contents of the movie, and then stream the movie back to the customer; unless the customer requested the disc back.
It wasn't the buying and reselling. It was the editing and digital lock picking.
There was a similar case where some NY-based startup had thousands of small antennas and DVRs, so you could stream NY TV, and in theory the entire pipeline was being just rented to you.
Went to the Supreme Court, and they got owned. Company was shut down.
IIRC the trouble came down to the notion of retransmission (thus copyright violations). The argument that it was being sent to just one customer was not really accepted by the justices I think.
I'm almost positive that Netflix had a licensing agreement to print as many discs as they needed after a while. After the first few years, the number of "branded" discs with the silkscreened movie logos dropped dramatically.
Yes, that change happened early on. They could print DVDs on demand at negligible cost to Netflix and in return the studios received a fixed fee per rental instead of a fixed fee per DVD.
A major problem was the high breakage rate for the DVDs they were renting. This created issues with the supply chain of new DVDs to replace broken ones since DVDs are not considered continuously consumed, disposable products. Additionally, it made it easier to manage the bursty nature of demand for particular DVDs since you no longer had to optimize the economics around the number of rentals per physical DVD.
Sure, but that's because the threat of "just buying originals" existed. Publishers had to choose from "be paid some money, and Netflix gets a deal on copies of movies," or "be paid zero money, and Netflix pays extra to scrounge up copies of those movies from somebody else." Netflix (and movie viewers) get what they want either way, so the publisher can't just hold firm on a high price or block distribution of the film.
Licensing deals are a great way to get around contract items that include volumes of "sold copies." Netflix didn't exactly have them over a barrel. It was a good deal for both parties.
Well, the studios never really had a problem with Netflix as a DVD rental company and were usually happy to supply them discs. Netflix's pricing model didn't cut into the immense profit studios were starting to see from the home entertainment boom (which was tied to DVD as a medium) and if anything, they had a massive bulk buyer. Plus, for the first five or six years, Netflix was way smaller than the Blockbuster. Studios knew that if The Matrix or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars Episode 1 or whatever was released and people wanted to watch it immediately, they would buy it rather than waiting for it to be available from Netflix (or Blockbuster or Hollywood Video). Meanwhile, they could use Netflix as a longtail way to sell bulk discs of titles that might not do tremendous retail numbers. Plus, as fast as Netflix was, there was still a delay of a few days between requesting a movie and getting it or returning one and getting another. For a new release, you'd be just as likely to try to buy it if you absolutely had to see it that weekend.
It was Redbox that got the studios on the ropes. Not only were home entertainment revenues dropping because of over-saturation, a bad economy, and burgeoning digital rental options -- and these were revenues the studios had started to rely on and build into their budget forecasting for films that would often only become profitable after a successful home release -- being able to get a new release for $1 from a kiosk (a kiosk that can store 500 copies and might be loaded up with just the top X new releases) and then returned and re-rented within 24 hours, that was a problem. Because now I don't have to pay $15 for that movie I'm not sure I'll ever watch again and that will clutter up the living room, I can just drive up to the grocery store or the gas station or whatever and grab a disc and go. And a website will tell me where the disc is available if it's out at the place up the street. And it's $1 and I can just return it right after I watch it. $1 rentals was a threat, but Netflix never had that pricing. They were like $7.99 for one out at a time and then it would go up from there.
But the studios didn't have a problem with Netflix and in the early years, were probably able to get better terms (for the studio) with them on bulk purchases than they had with Blockbuster.
Studios didn't start to have to grapple with Netflix until Netflix signed its landmark deal with Starz, allowing it to stream Starz's catalog of content (there was no provision in the Starz contract with studios that disallowed offering a digital streaming option -- future contracts obviously added those clauses but that would take several years to expire), thus truly making good on Reed Hasting's vision of having the internet deliver movies.
And even then, the relationship was adversarial but also somewhat necessary from both sides, because Netflix needed to license content for its library, and studios needed that sweet licensing revenue (at least before Netflix started to create its own content that competed directly against the studios).
That's not true in the US. This was true in the VHS days, where home video and rental releases were separate, but in DVD and Blu-rays, there has never been a distinction. First sale doctrine means you can't limit what someone else does with the product. They can rent it out or resell it. However, studios would only release a limited amount of product on "home video," priced at $19.95 or whatever, versus the $89.95 or higher list price for films that were only available through distributors as "rental" copies. I remember as a kid sometimes getting the local video store to order me a copy of a tape that I would then pay full price for because it wasn't available otherwise (more often than not, this was what two VCRs were for, but I digress).
That changed with DVD, where the studios stopped differentiating and went direct-to-consumer.
The proliferation of DVDs without the need for a distinction between home video and rental is part of what led to the decline of video stores (in addition to the real threat, which of course was streaming) because consumers could buy their own movie collections instead of renting them for $5 for 2 nights or whatever Blockbuster used to charge. I became an avid DVD collector as a teenager in the peak DVD era (1999-2003) and a combination of unsustainable online stores (many that were dead by 2001) selling DVDs at rock-bottom prices (even during release week) and Blockbuster's lackluster selection led to me getting a Netflix account in 1999 (thanks, mom, for the credit card!) and then building my own collection of what would become thousands of titles, rather than rely on the chains. I still have a great affinity for local video stores and support my OG hometown video store (Videodrome in Atlanta) and Scarecrow Video in Seattle, b/c curation is key.
Now, when the DVD boom flatlined in the late 2000s, three of the major studios refused to sell directly to Redbox until 28 days after a tentpole got a home video release because they worried about kiosk rentals cutting into their home video revenues (which at this point, had often started to overtake or match theatrical revenue), but Redbox got around that by just buying through other distributors or buying out Walmart, Best Buy and Costco stock. They also sued the studios that were refusing to sell to them directly. The reason the studios went against Redbox was because Redbox undercut them by offering rentals for $1 a day and most people (obviously not me), stopped collecting movies.
But again, the first sale doctrine means that they can't require anyone to buy a different version. This is the same with book publishers. They try to strongarm libraries into buying library copies of physical books but the truth is, if a library needs a book or needs more copies, they can buy them from Amazon or a bulk distributor all the same.
Redbox probably had a specific agreement with the DVD creator to buy in bulk at a discount. You are free as a business to have special terms that restrict your rights when you buy from a vendor
Redbox had a similar setup, but some companies like Disney would not sell them disks in bulk. So instead they bulk purchased Disney movies, which also included a digital code to redeem the movie online. Redbox sold those as well. Disney sued and they went back and forth until Redbox stopped selling codes [0].
> was that Netflix could buy the disks from anywhere (even the local Walmart, if they had to), and lend them to customers
Is that actually true ? I thought buying a disk and then lending it for money was a breach of the copyright ... isn't that pretty much what that big block of text says at the start of every disk delivered movie ? At least where I live !
No, buying a physical disk gives you rights to lend that physical object. The warning says you are not allowed to make copies. That is one anti-consumer aspect of the shift to streaming media. With physical discs netflix could build a sharing business without permission from anyone. With streaming the corresponding thing is illegal.
I remember DVDs coming with a message before the main feature asking you to call Fox if you had rented the DVD instead of purchased it so they could crack down on unauthorized distribution.
Is that correct? You need to have an agreement with the studios to rent out videos by mail. It might not be the case at mom-and-pop video stores, but Netflix had a website offering a catalogue and national distribution. That puts them in Blockbuster territory.
I am not sure that Prime is charging per stream for most of their content. (Some specific content under a particular program is charged this way but I cannot remember the name of said program)
Frankly I think that for innovation it is mandatory to break the vertical integration media conglomerates or create some form of mandatory licensing for content.
This is most certainly not the case. Rental licenses are their own thing and usually get their own media stock. For DVDs, the discs usually had basic monochrome screen printing and came in paper sleeves that would later be processed into rent-able form.
Nope, you only need a rental license to get copies of movies to rent out before they are available to purchase (and the contract for those often made you agree to only use rental licenses for any movies from that publisher). If your rental business is content with always waiting for DVDs to be released to the public then yes you can rent out any legally purchased DVDs by the right of first sale.
Correct -- and studios decided to go direct-to-consumer in the late 1990s, realizing they could sell way more discs for $14.99 (often sold for $9.99) to the general public than they could sell $50 discs to rental shops. Plus, the technology allowed studios to digitize their back catalogs that had never had home video releases, opening up a new revenue stream that would last another decade until over-saturation and the recession stopped growth (the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray battle didn't help) and consumers transitioned very quickly from VOD/digital purchases to streaming.
When direct-to-consumer happened, there was typically not any difference between when a large rental chain got a disc and when I could pick mine up on Tuesday morning at Best Buy (or get it in the mail, sometimes arriving the day before) or wherever.
Some chains like Blockbuster did sign rental agreements with studios both because of the bulk orders they needed and because for a few years, Blockbuster had to stock VHS tapes AND DVDs and the studios would basically make them sign those agreements if they still wanted to get VHS tapes -- but nothing stopped them from carrying the home release versions from retail if a rental copy was not available. And as you say, nothing stopped the indie shops from buying Tuesday morning at 10am and then immediately putting them out to rent.
Right of first sale lets the buyer rent out discs. No matter what publisher/studio cartels might tell you, no licensing from the publisher is required. This doesn't preclude the existence of specially packaged "rental" discs but Netflix is not and has never been limited to those.
There is one, in the sense that the law states you cannot use the digital contents any way you like - you can only use the digital contents for your own personal, home use.
However, the physical disk is protected by First Sale Doctrine. You can sell it, rent it, auction it, destroy it, whatever you want. The same applies to, say, your laptop. You can do whatever you physically want to your laptop, even if you can't copy your Windows license wherever you like.
Sad. Bluray sounds and looks better than any video streaming I've seen. Never look for compression artifacts, you'll never be able to enjoy highly compressed streaming again.
I got a LG C1 tv, upgraded netflix to 4k streaming ... and was disappointed, until I started watching bluray.
It's not technically streaming because any movie that you rent first has to be fully downloaded to local storage on one of their devices. And you're talking $6K for an entry-level device, just for the privilege of being able to rent/buy movies from their store:
However, rentals/purchases are equivalent quality (if not bit-for-bit identical) to Blu-ray media.
The company was started by one of the founders of NetApp back in 2001, so it was way ahead of its time. I guess it's survived by sticking to the niche high-end audio-visual market.
presumably this is ideal for environments like boats or private jets with limited connectivity - the sort of owners of which can afford more insane pricing
Limited connectivity and limited space. If you had the space, you could just use a disc. Although, boats and jets also do deal with a lot of motion. Not sure how well discs would do in that environment.
UHD discs have a bit rate of 72, 92, 123 or 144 Mbps
Core Pure Stream has a max bit rate of 80 Mbps. So yes indeed, it's comparable.
This is silly though: "To enjoy at the highest speed of 80 Mbps, you need an internet speed of 115 Mbps or faster. Ethernet (wired LAN) connections are limited to 100 Mbps due to the TV's product specifications. Therefore, to enjoy 80 Mbps with the Pure Stream™ functionality, you need to connect to a Wi-Fi router that supports IEEE 802.11 ac/n (wireless LAN)."
A lot of people don’t care. More than once I changed the setting on my parent’s television to stop stretching SD channels to fill the wide screen. They didn’t care. Nor did they care that every SD channel had an HD channel and all they had to do was add 100 to the channel number (or something like that).
Compression artifacts bug me as well but if I’m watching something great, I forget about them pretty quickly. Same goes for black and white movies or foreign movies with subtitles. If it’s good, that all disappears.
More than once I've been to see a film and it's being shown in the wrong aspect ratio. I find this intolerable. The circles aren't round! Yet when I grumble to the friends I'm with they haven't even noticed. Most people will put up with any old shit.
I miss the Seattle Public Library! They had a great collection. I could place a hold on materials for my local SPL outlet and it would be delivered there from whatever others the material was at. Wonderful!
Here in the middle of nowhere, the public library's selection is slim, recent, and popular. It's hard to find classics or art house or cult film - the kind of things that nobody streams because streaming service libraries are slim, recent, and popular. I can use InterLibrary Loan to borrow up to 3 DVDs at a time.
The "borrowing" time is time from request to time of return, then I can request 3 more. This works out to about 3 DVDs a month.
I was doing DVD.com for another ~12 a month. Total about 15.
Now that fifteen movies is become three, I may have to see if I can get a library account from the local university and also ILL through them.
Yep - Netflix 4K compression is pretty bad. They put a fair amount of work into specifying content delivery requirements (although they have some weird requirements like asking for P3 rather than Rec.2020) but then they compress the hell out of everything so it looks bad anyway. Very frustrating to see aggressive banding, block artifacts, etc. It is in many ways a blessing to be completely oblivious to such defects, which most people seem to be.
Yet another way in which streaming content providers seem to be incentivizing piracy. You can certainly pirate a full-quality blu-ray copy of a movie.
Apple TV+ has the best quality/bitrate for 4k, I wish Netflix would up their bitrate a bit as quality seems pretty mediocre.
The bigger problem with Netflix 4k though is that the "look" of every show is extremely uniform -- to the point that its almost like the same people made every show! This is suspected to be due to the small set of "approved" equipment Netflix requires the producers/cast/crew to use and standardized post-processing. They should allow more freedom in that respect -- many non-Netflix shows these days have a lot more personality simply because they don't have that muted/desaturated Netflix look.
Can confirm. Apple TV+ makes me want to not use Netflix. But of course with everything being spread around, you need all these different types of streaming services. Torrent is sometimes an option.
No time to look it up right now but iirc Apple TV were using anywhere from 20Mbps to 40Mbps depending on content. That is bitrate anywhere from 2x to 4x of Netflix.
No idea why they don’t up the bitrate considering bandwidth is extremely cheap and they do a lot of peering.
We have H.266 / VVC that is a lot better at the smaller details. Would love to see it being tested for those who are extremely sensitive to artifacts.
Can confirm, artifacts are what ruin the picture, once you're at 1080p resolution or higher. I've got a really big screen (100+") and my two seating rows are at only about 5' and 8' distance (measured to roughly where the viewer's head is), and even under those conditions, a high-quality 1080p source looks a ton better on it than a middling-quality 4K source (let alone low-quality 4k), all due to compression artifacts. You'd have to drop the alternative to high-quality 720p resolution before I'd take a middling-quality 4k over it, in how-distracting-is-the-picture-quality terms.
This has to be the biggest pivot I've seen in my life. A truly epic reworking of an entire company from successful business model A to successful business model B -- both wildly successful. And really there was a second pivot too: from streaming platform to original content studio.
It's a great reminder to focus on what value you bring to your customers (watching videos), not on any particular business model or way of doing business.
The way I heard it, Netflix started with the intent of being a streaming company but found it more difficult than expected so they pivoted to mailing DVDs, but continued to work on the streaming in the background until the market forces made it viable to pivot back (licensing, residential internet speeds, etc).
They may have had an idea for it in their heads, sure, but in the mid 90s (when they started their business) online video streaming was very, very far from reality. This was before the first online stream, before RealPlayer, before Broadcast.com. None of the mainstream video compression standards existed. You couldn't even stream video over ethernet back then. It was only the internet infrastructure upgrades over the next decade which made it feasible for general consumers.
I think the public-facing story of Netflix's start in 1997 (that DVDs came out in 1997 and they looked like they would be easy/cheap to ship).
But, the the first version of realvideo was released in early 1997. I remember using it to watch pirated streaming video of Star Wars special edition and South Park season 1 (I just checked and those were both in 1997). It was acceptable quality (slightly worse than VHS or video CD) if you had a cable modem.
I have a story about that. It's a lesson about how you never know who you'll meet in Silicon Valley.
My son was playing in one of the various non competitive soccer leagues here, and one of his volunteer coaches was a lovely woman who had mentioned she worked at Netflix. A day after the Qwikster debacle, after they announced they were abandoning the decision, my son had practice and while hanging out I happened to have a moment with the coach, and I said something along the lines of "Wow, so that was quite the screwup at Netflix, hey?" Complete with a stupid grin on my face.
And she responded with sort of a sour face, "Well, you know, Reed really thought it was the right decision and we supported him." And then she walked away.
Wait... "Reed?" "We?" Uh-oh.
How bad did I just jam my foot into my mouth? Badly it turns out. I went home and looked her up and sure enough, she was a c-level exec and was obviously part of the decision. And here I am, one of the many moron parents she has to deal with as a volunteer coach seemingly mocking her about it at practice during what was probably a very bad week for her. I felt like a total ass.
I apologized the next time I saw her, but you know, that doesn't really do much. I've since learned to not assume any more.
The NFLX share price dropped something like 70-80% after that announcement. At the time, I was a very happy subscriber and it occurred to me that, despite being on a DVD plan, I had only been watching via streaming for quite a while. Got a sense that the market might be overreacting and bought some shares. That turned out to be a great decision, my only regret was not buying more.
I highly doubt that we are going to see that again this time around.
I have hundreds of Steam games & keep buying there but god damn does it make me sad to have traded first-sale rights for this flimsy access to a catalog with no ability to share or resell.
I resisted for so long. But now my library is so big. I feel like half the random games I get are only available on steam or other like services anyways.
And yet all of these same companies are responsible for today's reality where you own nothing and can resell nothing. Converting the mainstream commerce system from simple buying and selling of goods into licenses and subscriptions is the biggest scam corporations have ever pulled on the consumer class.
Coincidentally, Amoeba records put out a really interesting episode of What's In My Bag? today with Seal[1]. At the end (I linked the timestamp) he starts talking about perceived value of owning an album vs. the digital ether. Really worth a watch.
LOL. Steam can reach in and take games from you at any time. (Ask me how I know.) If you don't have a copy, then all you have is temporary, DRM-encumbered access until they decide to take it away.
Then you need trakt, torrent search engines, and plex. ;)
Did Gabe Newell break into your house and smash your HDDs with a crowbar? If a Steam game has always-online DRM, it's because the developers chose to include it, not Steam.
Looking at offline games, yeah. While I havn't looked into it in a really long time, I know it was pretty trivial to bypass 15 years ago, and my understnading is that is hasn't changed much in that time.
Valve seems happy with it being good enough that just copying the game folder won't work, and thus pirates must seek out specialized tools.
Of course, all of that assumes the game in question even implements the Stream DRM. Which is completely optional on the game developer's side. Many do implement it, since they are pulling in the steam sdk anyway. (Even then it is not strictly needed, I've had steam achievements pop while running a DRM free version of the same game before, because the developer specially wanted that scenario to work. I suspect it also requires owning the game on steam. I wish I could remember which game it was that did this.)
Huh. And I was just thinking about quitting it. My queue has dropped from >80 discs to under a dozen.
I've been relying on it to bring me stuff on services I don't subscribe to. That's how I'm watching Picard, for example. There's not much else on Paramount I want to see. I could subscribe and then ditch it, but it has been convenient to just have DVDs arrive in the mail.
But there's less and less of that, and enough stuff on their subscription service that I've got plenty of entertainment. (I try to limit my staring-at-the-flickering-box time to a half-hour or so per day.)
What I'll really miss about Netflix DVD is the recommendation system. It adapted to the user rather than showing some pointless average. I graded things from 1-5 with 3 being a movie I liked and when it showed me ratings, it would show me what my expected rating would be. So when I saw a three star movie, I could expect to like it. If I saw a 4 star movie I could expect to really like it. I've not seen anything to replicate that since.
I have hundreds of movies rated in my Netflix DVD account. I wish I could export my ratings and import them elsewhere.
Any such options? Amazon Prime shows movies’ star ratings (from IMDb?), but didn’t let users rate movies, AFAICT. I’ve found Taste.io https://www.taste.io/ recommendations to be very good, even with fewer ratings than I gave a Netflix.
I have probably a thousand ratings and I know they are allowing a PDF export of your history and ratings. If I could find the right service I wouldn't mind spending a rainy afternoon or sick day migrating them by hand. That would allow me to revisit some of my old ratings and adjust them for my changed tastes. As far as I know there's no export function beyond that, however.
I'll give taste.io a spin. It looks like it might be a bit streaming focused. I know letterboxd is where real film fans go, but I'll miss that usually spot on star prediction.
As per their new FAQ [1] you may request download of this data
> At any time up until October 27, 2023 a current DVD subscriber or former DVD customer whose DVD subscription was canceled within the past 9 months may download their data, via our Data Download (https://dvd.netflix.com/Download), which includes: Your queue, Your rental history, Your ratings, Your reviews
Netflix streaming is an international force to be reckoned with. It has changed how movies and tv series are written and produced. It has changed strategies of major entertainment producers like Disney, HBO and Paramount.
Meanwhile Netflix DVD service is a small, national business that had a good run against blockbuster, but it was its sister service that killed blockbuster.
I think Netflix was right to try and push it into its own company. That way it had a chance to survive providing a niche service in the states.
Of course it’s just a distraction inside Netflix, no matter how nice the upsides are to its loyal followers.
Pour one out for a real one. I haven't rented a disc from Netflix in at least a decade but as someone who joined in 1999 (I got my first DVD player for Christmas in 1998) and used to lovingly curate my queue, I have such fond memories of the service in high school and college.
As a movie lover, Netflix was a great way to get stuff that was either out of print or sometimes prohibitively expensive (certain Criterion discs, box sets of TV shows) that I couldn't find anywhere else. I was/am an avid movie collector, so I often bought when I could, but Netflix was such a great way to rent stuff I didn't know if I wanted to buy or not and an early way to binge-watch TV seasons I even paid for the 4 or 5 discs out at one time option at one point. I probably still have some DVDs from Netflix that I forgot to return (and then reported as "lost") in boxes somewhere.
I still buy a lot of physical media, even though I then almost immediately rip it to my Plex server, because I prefer the bitrate and extra features -- I buy digital movies/TV shows too because iTunes always has sales -- but the era of renting a physical disc ended a long time ago for me.
Still, seeing this makes me a bit sad, just because of the memories I have of a simpler time and because the selection was just so fantastic (still better than what you can get on streaming for some stuff).
> As a movie lover, Netflix was a great way to get stuff that was either out of print or sometimes prohibitively expensive (certain Criterion discs, box sets of TV shows) that I couldn't find anywhere else.
It was until it wasn't. It was about 10 years ago I first noticed the "unavailable" section of my queue getting bigger. I cancelled my subscription somewhere around 2018 when I completely ran my queue out and still had 10 or 15 movies in the "unavailable" section. Some were even movies that didn't appear to be out of print.
In it's heyday I agree, it was the most reliable place to get anything, but towards the end they chopped off their long tail and therefore neutered their usefulness to me…
Yeah, that’s when I stopped subscribing to the mail option too. As you say, when they chopped the long tail off, I might as well just buy used discs off of Amazon or eBay.
Where am I supposed to get movies from now? Serious question, given that Blockbuster etc. no longer exist, and I don't want to use streaming services with terrible compression artifacts and dubious 24Hz->60Hz conversion.
Honestly? Pirate them? Passthepopcorn and Piratebay are still going strong. Easy enough to get "remuxes" which are uncompressed. Though usually on the private trackers, some light compression is truly not noticeable -- the people doing the compression on private trackers really, really care about visual quality.
TBH it’s just too much work. Maybe once you have a system up and working that might be easy but getting there seems annoying at best. Not to mention having to pay for vpn because I’m not risking a letter in the mail.
I'm pretty much regretting not keeping up with the private trackers I was a member of as certain spots started to fall apart users were sharing invites to newer sites and I didn't participate because streaming was going fine lol
Its in the Legendary Invites forum, so obviously you'll need to rank up to Legendary Gamer if not already.
EDIT: The thread also states you need to be a Master Gamer, and an account older than 1 year. So very tough requirements, although you can get to MG without uploading anything.
I borrow a lot from my local library but often they are unplayable somewhere in the middle. It can happen with Netflix also but it seems much less frequent.
I meant "preferably without having to collect a huge collection of physical stuff in my house". Vinyl records already take up all the space I want to allocate to media collections ...
Redbox and the library are great suggestions, thank you!
Where do you live? My California county library system has something like a 20 item limit on checkout and has large set of USA and foreign DVDs and video games in addition to the expected books.
many libraries also have access to apps like libby that allow you to checkout e-books, a streaming service for films, and access to digital newspapers, language learning apps, etc etc
The problem there is once big releases start going digital only, the torrent sites will only be able to provide you webrips with the same quality limits as the streaming sources.
For me that’s a last resort. As someone whose career involves producing intellectual property (like most programmers) I prefer to pay for it whenever possible.
I’ll torrent things if they aren’t available any other way, but I hope that isn’t the case.
While I'd also pay what producers deserve, in some cases it's not possible. You could pirate the content, and buy something (e.g. Merch or something similar where the funds go roughly to the same place as if you've obtained a legal copy of the actual content) other than the actual media from them.
If buying a 4K Blu-Ray copy of a movie is 20 dollars, but I'd prefer an MP4 on my computer (and don't have a disc player anyway): I can simply pirate a BRRip torrent, but get for example a T-shirt of a similar price, or perhaps even directly donate money to them if possible.
Me too. I subscribe to Netflix, HBO and Amazon though. There are shows companies will not offer in my locale at any price. I could either take a stand and hope that whoever is in charge picks up the signal somehow then wait … or I could just download a few episodes and move on.
Netflix has up to 16Mbps bitrate for its 4k video streams. Bluray is up to 128Mbps. That's a ton more space for avoiding compression artifacts, even though Bluray is lossless. Netflix compresses its video to shit so that it can save money on network costs. (https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...)
My subjective opinion is that Netflix has the worst video quality, though I've had some really bad experiences with Amazon Prime too. But Netflix is worse for me because some shows on Netflix can never get to the max bitrate they offer. For example, the last season of Peaky Blinders on 1080p Netflix had a ton of very noticeable compression artifacts, but that's not always the case for 1080p content. They just encoded it very poorly on the backend.
Apple TV+ has the best bitrate (up to 40Mbps), and Disney+ and HBO Max are decent as well.
A whole DVD only stores 4.7 gb, so a 5 gbps network is well fast enough. Maybe depends on your hardware. Netflix you need the top plan to get 4k streaming though.
It's not whether Gbps is fast enough, it's that the egress traffic for the streaming provider costs a lot of money, and they do everything they can to serve 1080p or 4k content that is actually much lower in quality than what we expect.
A lot of scenes look very impressive until you start seeing artifacts and hearing poor sound.
Netflix 4k compression is pretty bad. Lots of aggressive banding, blocking, and other compression artifacts. If you don't notice them, good - don't try to start looking for them.
Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they’re showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.
Rent from your local library. Most movies are free, newer ones $1 or $1.50 for week. You can request movies from any of your county's library branches and it'll be shipped to your local branch.
People recently got accustomed to think "I have all the films in the cloud". However as for my experience the movies I'd like to watch are not available on three major VOD providers I am currently paying for. Moreover movies disappear, especially from Netflix and when I come back to re watch it with my spouse, it's no longer there... I wouldn't call myself a Luddite but I'd like to have a stability here
Yeah, all those moments when you are asking someone "remember that movie? That is a classic. You need to watch it" and then you look for it and it is nowhere to be seen.
Also I'd like to highlight that DVD rental laws are different than streaming laws. If I have a DVD rental, I think that no company can get exclusive rights to rent their DVDs in my country. However I am not sure, since this is simple observation that this exclusivity is a new thing.
Remember when Netflix wanted to spin off their DVD service into a standalone company? Before the internet bullied them into cancelling their plans?
Well, it turns out they were right. A standalone DVD by mail service with it's own name might have actually been able to hold on. It was a good service that died in the shade of Netflix's brand.
As it is, I miss being able to just watch whatever I want and not being locked into Netflix's dire content library. Want to make it through the Best Pictures nominees? Good luck without having 6 different streaming services.
I was a loyal Netflix disk user for decades. I was in the habit of adding anything I heard of I wanted to watch to my queue; you could even add stuff that hadn't been released yet.
I only finally cancelled it during the pandemic when I starting finding that Netflix just stopped bothering to buy a lot of titles that I wanted to watch; lots of stuff that I knew was out on Blu-ray would only be available in DVD, or would not be available at all. And there weren't any new release movies coming out because of the pandemic.
I try to be sympathetic to the entertainment industry when it comes to the topic of piracy, but they're really working overtime to make it harder and harder to be…
I have to imagine there was a trend away from refreshing the inventory as discs wore out while management was mulling the decision to shutter this side of the business, a lot of the inventory might be fairly marginal and worn by this point.
E: Not to say that Netflix should just dumpster it all. I'd love to see a pennies-on-the-dollar buyer beware 'these might be scratched to hell' wholesale for anyone who cares to pick some up. Whether its a la carte, or "Buy 10 <genre> for $X" or, well, who knows. Just about anything would be better than tossing 'em all into a landfill.
Yeah, but it's taken them the better part of a decade to do that. If they had been bought by Blockbuster they would have had access to people with the know-how and experience necessary to destroy a successful business quicker and more efficiently.
I think if we constrain it to scripted television (and a fair number of movies now, too), they did.
House of Cards was a big deal for being a streaming-first big-budget TV show. That's commonplace now. That wasn't that long ago. Since then, all of the major players have joined the table, sunk audacious sums of money into developing new projects, and there's more high-end TV made in a year than I can watch.
Cue the flip "but none of it is any good" comments but nevertheless, Netflix blazed that trail.
This is terrible news. They aren't streaming that disk catalog. It's often the only way to see a particular movie. And I'll miss the full-length snarky Eddie Mueller commentary on the film noir movies (better than the movie!).
With the loss of Netflix DVDs, what happens to everyone who wants access to the huge catalog?
Or who wants to refer people to obscure titles, even if those people normally aren't interested in a huge catalog?
(Are we back to monitoring eBay for used discs of titles we want to watch? Do we end up paying for all the umpteen half-butted streaming services, every time we add another service to get a specific title? Is there some tablescraps streaming service that can pick up all/most obscure titles, to supplement subscribing to one mainstream streaming service rather than all of them?)
- Reviews and suggestions from my actual IRL human non-algorithmic friends
Netflix knows what’s best for Netflix I guess, but those two features are what made the service for me. I discovered so much great stuff with those two simple functions.
I don't see a date. Anyone know? I still have this service. Like the other commenters, I have it to get access to content I can't otherwise get. Netflix streaming is, honestly, not full of very interesting titles. The DVD catalog is much more interesting.
This story prompted me to look into my email archives and I found an email thread from 2002 about how I accentually sent one of my own DVDs back in the Netflix envelope, and we had to straighten that out.
It's a niche, but I don't know how profitable it is. They pay postage both ways, which must cost them a significant fraction of a dollar. It doesn't take all that many disks per month to eat their profit margin.
And it all seems pretty hard on the disks. I've had a few disks arrive broken, including one just recently. I know that sometimes they have studio agreements to burn their own custom disks, but sometimes they're just paying full retail price.
Netflix got rid of much of its back catalog of cinephile movies a long time ago. I suspect that they just stopped replacing them when the physical disk broke. I don't know how big the market is for people who want obscure movies; I'm sure it's not zero, but it's probably not enormous.
That's what Netflix's niche should have been. They can own one copy of every movie. I gather that they used to have the greatest library in the world, and have gradually let it diminish to a kind of glorified Redbox.
I discovered that I'm just not a cinephile. I would love to love old, great, less-well-known films, but I just use TV these days as mindless distraction. It's the cinephiles (and fans of other material that doesn't get picked up by streaming, like some anime) who really lose out in this.
Could you have "remote access" to a DVD player in the cloud? And then stream the audio and video to a TV? Suppose you had one user per "DVD" at a time and you let them "borrow it" like they do ebooks at the library. It might be shutdown quick based upon the streaming laws but it does seem like a sort of variation to it all.
I think old movies will find their way, there is a relatively small number of them but there is an awful lot of TV (also probably just awful TV) that I have a very hard time finding someone wanting to pay to have it streamed. Other than some pop culture memories and nostalgia, I don't know that there is a great loss; the really high quality content tends to live on. It doesn't feel right. When Netflix DVDs are gone, there is a lot of stuff that I don't know where you could find it.
Netflix didn't have this service outside the US, and (at least in the last decade, there were some services like LoveFilm a long time ago) nobody has launched a competitor - the rising cost of postage and shrinking physical production means there's no opportunity here.
Not the same. Redbox is a good Blockbuster replacement in that they have a good selection of recent hits, but not much else. What made Netflix magical was that it had a huge back catalog - larger than any rental store or library I have ever used.
I used to get dvd cases, burn the disk after using dvd shrink to make it for on the disks I used then print out a coved and labeled the disk with the name and IMDb rating. I amassed quite a library but there were many I burned and never watched. These eventually moved to binders and have probably been over 15 years now. I wonder if they would still play.
They should keep a small DVD by mail service and run it out of the last remaining Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. That way tourists could come and see DVDs on the shelf and a bunch of people and machines stuffing DVDs in envelopes to see how we all lived in the 90s and early 2000s.
IIRC when I subscribed to the dvd service 23 years ago or so you could actually browse a library. Maybe it’s an apple tv thing but browsing titles feels near impossible in today’s streaming world - especially on netflix.
Side note: would love to know my ltcv - almost an annuity at this point.
Ah, I recall 1998 when my big idea was a DVD delivery and pickup service for Manhattan, with an online selection tool, utilizing the bicycle messengers that were already delivering items to your office.
Thankfully nobody encouraged me and I never wasted blood and treasure on the project ;)
Surprised it wasn't done earlier. Shoulda sold to redbox.com. How that business is still in business is beyond me. But I guess not everyone needs streaming. The sum total of streaming providers is probably more than what I used to be pay for cable at this point.
They tried spinning it off as Quickster some years ago. It was an epic PR failure. I suspect that's why they're throwing in the towel now: they don't want a repeat even if the business could be saved.
But I have fond memories of this service, of which I was an early adopter. My sons and I were among the first to sign up for the disc we could insert into our Nintendo Wii and watch the early Netflix streaming service, too.
Netflix has been a clear positive in my family's lives.
It was so much fun filling up your queue after first signing up, finding films you always wanted to see, being able to add entire tv series, changing priorities, etc.
It was a unique kind of fun that I can’t seem to reproduce anywhere else these days.
Which is just my way of getting to my wish that my local library could duplicate dvds for loan on demand. Rather, I have to request and wait. Seems ridiculous for digital media.
I recently discovered you can call Netflix to ask them to increase your disc plan to at most 8-at-a-time. I bumped mine up to get the last rentals I can until the service disappears.
This move makes sense. Netflix feels like it's 90% "store brand" products these days, and we know how much they dislike paying royalties to other studios.
End of an era. Netflix pulled off possibly the biggest successful self-disruption of a business in history with online streaming, right alongside Apple with iPod -> iPhone.
Thus we come to the sad end of a tale. A once robust medium where people could own content (yes the MPAA and RIAA will disagree with that statement, but at least users have some right of first sale rights) is dead. A medium where most of the world's good content got published is dead.
Now we have ever reshuffling access to a smaller select catalog of stuff. Ever piece of content has to be fueded over by lawyers & rights holders. DVDs and Blurays exist but primarily for mainstream content & republishes of old & smaller content is rare.
Netflix has attained their goal of disrupting reliable access to the form's moving pictures.
I no longer own any DVD or Blu-ray drives, or any optical drives at all! And even if I did, I wouldn't want to sit through the title screens or deal with the menus. Too many years of instant playing from streaming services and pirated downloads has spoiled me. And I don't miss the old ways even a little.
Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive.
At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and I was rewarded a free month.
After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard drives started getting large enough that I could just store all the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final transition.
I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays, with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many movies barely elicits a shrug.
But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world. Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.