I remember when it was a fairly safe assumption that almost all content would end up on Netflix in time, with only a few odd-balls going to Hulu. Now with the big players — Disney, NBCuniversal, HBO, and Paramount — all having their own streaming platforms, Netflix is no longer the indispensable service it once was.
They can try to raise prices and cut features / content in order to return to the golden age of profitability, but I don’t believe they’ll ever get it back.
That was never sustainable. Netflix got that content for cheap because streaming was the last stop on the value chain. All cost of production was paid by the tv network that commissioned the content. And if you couldn’t sell it for re-runs, streaming was a way to get something out of a dead asset. It was free money.
Now streaming is putting the TV networks out of business. Nobody is going to make content to dump on streaming for nearly free.
People also forget that in the glory days, Netflix’s steaming movie selection was always bad. Like discount bin at Walmart bad.
Netflix didn't have the title selection their DVD service had, but it wasn't as bad as it is now. Before everyone decided to jump into the streaming game for themselves netflix's selection was much better. It was also less full of ads and only ~$5 a month.
I’ve been buying DVDs and Blu Rays, then ripping to my NAS, and running Jellyfin to serve.
It’s really nice to be able to stream any of my DVDs or Blu Rays, to any screen, without having to actually having to hook up a player or find the specific disk.
How has your luck been on ripping them? I’ve taken a similar route but have mixed results on the ripping side of things. Different quality levels, more/less DRM to get around depending on the disk etc.
I ditched Netflix years ago, and am not interested in any other streaming services. As a result, I have gone back to physical media.
It's been really, really great, actually. I may not be able to get streaming originals, but personally, that's not been even a little issue. There is more excellent stuff available in the existing catalog of physical media than I have time left in my life to see anyway.
I've also been buying new and used DVDs and Blu-Ray that have movies and shows that I hold dear, and rediscovering old favorites. That's been great.
Blu Ray is really going through a renaissance. After extra features were stripped from releases in 2010s, boutique Blu Ray labels have made buying movies on physical media fun again.
> This way there’s no financial incentive to create new content.
I personally don't see the problem in this (would like to hear opinions). The current copyright system works to keep rent-income on past productions. If incentives shift to prioritize making profit from live performances instead of gatekeeping access to already-produced digital files, it seems like a step in the right direction.
I don't disagree with your initial point, copyright does indeed work to allow people to make income on things they've produced in the past. I think where we disagree is on that being a bad thing.
It costs huge amounts of money to make a TV show, even one that doesn't look technically demanding. You summarise it as "gatekeeping access to already-produced digital files", when as I'm sure you know the costs here aren't the incremental cost of providing you with a copy of that file, the costs are the initial production of the contents of that file which is amortised over however many thousands or millions of people are going to watch it.
As fun as theatre can be, I don't think you'll get many people deciding they want to go and watch the live stage production of the new Mission Impossible (unless I guess every night they blow up the entire theatre, but then you have the same issues of cost).
In my opinion copyright law is overreaching now. The fact that Tolkien's children are still raking in money from his work is somewhat ridiculous to me, there should definitely be better limitations on copyright length, with work entering the public domain sooner than it does now, but I don't think the system is fundamentally broken.
I don’t think that copyright is bad, per se. I do, however, see that copyright enforcement is often overreaching and it appears to be because some people running a business somewhere don’t want to fail. The business model of “creating content” is simply not something that scales into a billion dollar company in the age of the internet.
Perhaps this is mistaken. Disney and Nintendo come to mind as very successful but also very aggressive about protecting copyright, even such that (as you brought up with the Tolkien estate) Disney has successfully lobbied to have copyright terms extended so they can be the only arbiters of all things Mickey Mouse (and Nintendo all things Mario, etc.). But Nintendo keeps making (good!) Mario games.
Still, there could be great works produced by independent creators but they seem to be stifled precisely due to copyright law. When Disney bought Star Wars, they decided that all non-film iterations of the stories are non-canon. Imagine being an Expanded Universe creator who made an Official Star Wars Game only to be told after-the-fact that it’s not official anymore. That’s not even getting into fan creations which are somehow illegally distributed for free.
I might agree that it’s not fundamentally broken but it does not seem to work in practice; at least, there are many cases in which it is abused which need to be curbed for me to really consider it a Good Thing. Commonly a person’s labor is invalidated by dubious copyright claims and I see that as more harmful to society than what harms are caused to corporations by individual piracy. Let corporations duke it out with copyright law and ignore the individual consumer, even if it’s millions of individuals. Such a scenario means the business model doesn’t work and that is absolutely not a consumer problem.
(Thanks for sharing your thoughts! There is a lot of nuance around this topic so I apologize if my initial comment over-simplified.)
I think anyone who has tried to figure out which movies & series to watch where and how to line up the billing cycles to move to the next service when you run out of content, will disagree.
This is fundamentally a service issue, providers aren't competing on price or the quality of the service, but by monopolizing the availability of content which makes the user experience objectively worse.
Netflix is now the most likely service we are going to cancel. We get the most value from Disney Plus as a family, then Apple TV, Prime, and recently enjoyed a few things on Paramount plus.
We are probably going to start revolving services through the year, saving things to watch on each service rather than having them all concurrently.
The rotating services around the year is the most logical especially given no discounts for "continuity of service" and that I'm usually only binging one show per month.
In some cases it is actually sort of the other way around with effectively discounts for "discontinuity of service" because some services offer discounts to people who have cancelled to try to get them back.
For example I've had offers from Disney+ for a month of Premium for $3 and for Basic at half price for up to 6 months. (To be clear the latter was still billed monthly and could be cancelled at any time. You didn't have to keep it for 6 months. It was just that after 6 months the monthly rate would revert to the regular price).
> I remember when it was a fairly safe assumption that almost all content would end up on Netflix in time
This was never a safe assumption because the entire entertainment industry cannot sustain itself on a single $15/mo subscription. The "golden days of Netflix" were a product of Netflix licensing shows in syndication, not footing the full bill for their production. Cable and network TV was still actually funding these shows, and Netflix was getting "reruns" a year or two after the fact.
The golden age of streaming is long over. Pricing is going up, options are going down, and we're arguably in a worse place now than we were when cable was all but required.
I struggle to see how the current status quo is worse than cable.
I pay less for my streaming services than my parents do for cable, and the quantity and quality of content at my disposal is still far better than I ever remember getting with cable.
The idea of accessing all TV content from one provider for ten bucks a month forever was absolutely a fantasy and I cannot believe so many people believed it was going to stay that way.
The only reason it was financially viable was those shows were all subsidized by legacy cable plans, and Netflix was just additional revenue. As soon as streaming had to become the primary financial backer of production, the math changes completely.
One way to view the current wave of content disappearing from the streaming services in a slightly, maybe, sort of positive light is that it does signal that companies are remembering why they'd resell content to other companies/platforms (because it makes more money that way) and are about to return to rotating content through multiple streaming platforms. (Paramount said this explicitly with Star Trek: Prodigy that they are shopping its mostly completed second season to other companies right now. Paramount and Disney both have content that was previously "streaming exclusive" that they plan to air on broadcast TV networks now.)
I don't know if that guarantees we will return to that feeling that most everything will be on Netflix eventually (or something like Netflix), but it's starting to sound possible again knowing the streamers are starting to feel that pinch on "exclusive content" not making money being resold to other distribution channels.
I also don't know if it that hope excuses the bad ways that the streaming services have been pulling content without warning nor the questionable "coincidental" timing of doing much of this in the middle of a strike in a way that leaves questions about if the National Labor Board is tracking this data.
Netflix market cap is $210B, Comcast is $178B, and Disney is $160B. All the other content sellers are far below.
Netflix is a perfectly viable business, and investors are betting it will continue to be a leader in selling video media.
> Turns out they created a technologic berm instead of a moat.
Unless Netflix had a plan to lobby legislators to enact laws coercing content makers to go through them, I do not see what chance they had at making a moat due to the way the internet works.
>Personally I think Amazon is next. They exist based solely on their first mover momentum.
Amazon actually has a moat. Creating all the warehouse and transportation infrastructure and managing the 1.5M employees they have is not a simple feat, certainly not relative to setting up a streaming service. Not to mention AWS.
That Netflix is worth is more than Comcast or Disney is a symptom of people's madness around shares in tech startups. Netflix's entire thing is charging people a few dollars a month to stream video, its a solid service, and they deserve to do well.
In no world is that worth more than Disney, who own the rights to some of the world's best known franchises, several theme parks, retail stores, and quite a bit more I'm forgetting off the top of my head. Oh, and they have a service you can pay a few dollars a month for streaming video as well.
At some point investors will realise that while the emperor isn't entirely naked, he's just wearing an outfit he picked up from the supermarket while doing his shopping, and not a revolutionary new material.
Netflix started in 1997, IPO’d in 2002, launched streaming in 2007 (the same time NBC and News Corp launched Hulu), and has reported $100M+ net income since at least 2010, and $1B+ since 2018.
> At some point investors will realise that while the emperor isn't entirely naked, he's just wearing an outfit he picked up from the supermarket while doing his shopping, and not a revolutionary new material.
Netflix is not valued as revolutionary new material. It is valued as having solid cash flow, minimal liabilities (few employees and physical facilities), and low debt.
Disney and Comcast have much more liability from having many more employees and in person interactions with the public.
I think Amazon exists because of AWS and the distribution/delivery vehicle they’ve built on the store side. There’s certainly value there beyond first-mover advantage.
> I remember when it was a fairly safe assumption that almost all content would end up on Netflix in time, with only a few odd-balls going to Hulu.
If by “all content”, you mean, “everything produced originally as a TV series”, sure; movies (particularly, anything older that wasn’t alrrady there or anything not super mainstream) had a nuch better chance of reaching the Netflix disk catalog than Netflix streaming, up until the point when content owners having their own streaming platforms meant even the TV stuff and mainstream movies would often miss Netflix unless it was Netflix-owned.
So you get ads, and unlimited product placement? Whole episodes of Stranger Things revolving around Seven Eleven and Slurpees? You'd be a fool to say no!
> Unlimited ad-free movies, TV shows, and mobile games
I wish the USA believed in consumer protection, or had false advertising laws that were enforced, because most shows and movies are full of ads, they're just hidden. Ubiquitous computer logos, coca-cola bottles, car brands, etc
Maybe they meant unlimited-ad, free movies, tv shows, and mobile games and messed up the punctuation
Being from "flyover country closer to the East Coast" I've also loved that feeling of visiting the West Coast sometimes and the surprise of seeing businesses I know from TV or movies really exist. 7-11 was definitely on that list for me.
It came up for me the other day because Heathers was set in small-town Ohio and yet prominently featured a 7-11 in multiple plot points which didn't fit my mental image of (mostly Southern) Ohio. Curiosity turned up that apparently there are a few 7-11s in Ohio if you travel north enough, so it isn't entirely anachronistic.
There was a show where you can kinda hear some low quality audio that sounded like a song ringtone.
It's basically the end of the show, credits are rolling as this dude (high on edibles) is fumbling around his living room looking for the source of the music. After a good while he finally finda a pair of iconic red Beats headphones and puts them on and the music cuts to high quality and he starts vibing to the beat as the scene fades out.
I can't remember what the show was, but i remembet how pissed i was for getting hooked into a clever product placement ad.
Steaming services have become the very thing they were supposed to replace. The only advantage they have is that you can drop in and out of subscriptions, although, I suspect, it won't be long before they move towards 12 month lock-ins.
> Being able to watch wherever you want, on a wide variety of devices
You mean watch "whatever they have" and only on devices that are on the same network and only when they decide to let you watch them. Good luck watching Westworld on HBO max whenever you want. There are even new shows I want to watch right now, but I'm waiting for the streaming service to finish releasing the season before I start them because they want me to watch their shows like people did in the 1960s. "Tune in next week for another exciting episode!" No thanks!
Raised by wolves too. Supposedly amazon has it for a price per-episode maybe? HBO said they were selling it to other streaming services for a limited time too for some reason.
Sure, but the ability to open up my TV app, and chose to pay $10 per season to watch Westworld at the very moment I watch is there, which it was not in a world before streaming.
Obviously, content owners will probably mess around restricting access to stuff, but the situation is much better than before.
What exactly were they supposed to replace? Cable? I always saw them billed as alternatives to piracy, and indeed piracy has become much less prominent now that there are streaming services fighting for content.
I think piracy will go up now that everyone is fighting. My friends all subscribed to crunchy roll because it has all the anime, like old Netflix. But disney+ bought the rights to the new bleach series. None of my friends bought disney+, they just pirated bleach. I expect that to continue. If crunchy roll keeps loosing the good shows it will just be dropped and back to pirating everything, the result won't be everyone subscribed to 7 different services.
Well, I've seen the suggestion that you rotate services. Sign up, watch all the good shows, cancel and subscribe to the next. But yeah, one pirate platform with all the content will win any day.
Same. I really struggle to see how they still justify that pricing, it’s almost double the price* of Disney+ where almost everything within reason is 4k as standard.
* UK it is double - £7.99 versus £15.99, Disney will also give 2 months free on a yearly plan, Netflix don’t seem to offer a yearly plan.
Sure, but Disney+ loses money. Nevermind the jacked contracts - which everyone is striking over - that, among other things, cut workers out of residuals from streaming which is also artificially lowering costs.
I wish these companies would charge something sustainable.
I've completely stopped paying for streaming services (apart from Apple Music and TV+, because of Apple One). I pay $5 a month for Mullvad, and "acquire" everything I could ever want and play it using Plex on an old HP Elitedesk with OpenMediaVault installed on it. It's all automatic, so I request what I want using Overseerr, and it does the rest for me.
Do I feel a little bit bad for stealing content? Maybe. But I'm not paying for 4+ streaming services just so I can occasionally watch shows a few times a year.
I'm sure the HN audience already knows this, but Tubi is basically an ad-supported version of what Netflix was back in the late 2000s / early 2010s: a handful of marquee movies and TV shows with a ton of filler and diamonds in the rough. I'm finding myself watching Tubi more than Netflix these days.
Tubi isn't just some ads, they easily double the length of a show and damn near double movie lengths.
They literally doubled their ads overnight a while back and I uninstalled immediately as they had already been adding a good chunk of time to anything I watched.
I personally can't stand ads, regardless if the content is free. So it frustrates me when a service has something I want, but they do not have any sort of premium ad free subscription option.
You can tell a company is in decline when it’s doing everything it can to claw back value. Netflix has enough resources to recover, but it doesn’t seem like a given that it can or will.
>You can tell a company is in decline when it’s doing everything it can to claw back value.
Now that the free money is over so is the unsustainable free ride. All these VC funded scaleups are trying to claw back value as most of them weren't really profitable, just relied on investors, but now investors want their pound of flesh. It's way overdue wakeup call for the industry.
If a company is promising you something for free, check your pockets.
I only use Netflix for filler before going to sleep (on timer) on a 32" 720p TV. I should use the Basic plan (still an option in Canada). The only reason I don't is the hassle if/when I travel around devices/IP addresses.
From my netflix.com/ChangePlan page
> Only people who live with you may use your account. Add 1 extra member with Standard or up to 2 with Premium. Learn more. Watch on 4 different devices at the same time with Premium, 2 with Standard or Standard with ads, and 1 with Basic.
I'm not only thinking about to moving from streaming to own physical copies of movies (best quality, offline, touch an object), but also moving to watch more old and good movies.
I feel that the last decade, with the explosion of internet and social media, big part of the culture moved more aggressively to consume the latest releases, the most hyped, the advertised in small doses from months and months.
I adore Netflix honestly, watching them grow up since the 90s. But the streaming hegemony that's grown up around copyright control is so.. well maybe an image is worth a thousand words:
What I am not clear about are those ads of other content or more like the ads on tv channels? The former I could live with if it just before the start of a show but they shouldn’t bump the price anytime soon
While that sure would be convenient, I'm not sure I'd like the massive reduction in variety (or massive price jump) that would need to accompany such a move.
They can try to raise prices and cut features / content in order to return to the golden age of profitability, but I don’t believe they’ll ever get it back.