I am a Netflix subscriber in India. The monthly subscription fee is Rs 800. Which is very high by Indian standards. A very small portion of Indian audience has taste for American shows. Some of Netflix's Indian shows have a political/ideological undertone which is not liked by a segment of audience. Netflix and Amazon both suffer from a very limited collection of Bollywood movies. These are some reasons IMHO.
I've watched Indian movies that were controversial in India or some Indian states, and I can see how the western audience or curator could totally not understand what an Indian audience would agree with.
There was one Indian movie from 2004 that was controversial because it featured a lesbian couple. The movie had the typical bollywood love triangle, except the guy was ANGRY that the beautiful woman wanted to see another beautiful woman, along with seeing him. He expressed his anger and was trying to break up this "unholy arrangement" and correct the one woman into loving a man, and exclusively.
I'm more used to men expending all of their energy trying to get into situations with two beautiful women, and then accepting the improbability of two equally attractive and bi-sexual women existing.
So this movie was pure comedy to me, as well as the Indian state's extreme response. Just india things.
It is hard to understand the ideological assumptions of that pervasively conservative but kinda-wannabe-westernized society.
Behind the scenes, this has been a big boon for CDNs, my work is powering Amazon, and it is interestingly derived from work from Netflix on FreeBSD TCP. Together we are making TCP work much better on these largely wireless networks.
I know just networking basics so when I hear that someone's improving TCP I'm instantly captured. I need to know more. I had no idea you could improve TCP. I thought it was a fixed entity, for better or worse.
The problem that I personally see, at least with Netflix India, is that finding content is like finding needle in a haystack.
Some time back (last year or so), they were showing IMDB ratings for their content, but not now (maybe a falloff with Amazon since it owns IMDB). Now they try to find similar to what I've already watched, which IMHO does not make sense most of the time. I am here to find something new, not exactly same to what I've already seen. Moreover, I first look up the rating on IMDB of whatever I want to watch, and these days it mostly hovers around (5 or 6) out of 10 for almost all of their content.
PS: IMDB isn't silver bullet, but the user reviews are quiet spot on.
This is one of biggest gripes with Netflix as well. Their percentage rating system just tells how close a title is to stuff you have already watched. The problem with this kind of recommender system is that you stay in a bubble and never see content that is a departure from what you normally watch. Sadly, this is the case with most applications today.
Coming back to the topic, Netflix sorely needs an actual rating system, either like IMDB or something built in-house.
India is a highly price sensitive market, like some other developing countries. If something is "free", it will win in India. Not that paid services cannot survive, but "free" will trump those by a huge margin. This just cannot be changed. But with higher disposable incomes and reducing mobile data charges (which still cost a lot on some providers), people are willing to spend a little on quality.
Hotstar has a huge user base mainly because it offers a lot of content for "free", and this is something Netflix and Amazon don't do. If someone were to get the revenue numbers from paying subscribers, I'd bet on Hotstar being far behind the others.
As someone who has used these three services, my ranking of Hotstar would put it way below Netflix and Prime Video. The Hotstar app is quite primitive and is probably two or three years behind Netflix. It doesn't even have lists, ratings, profiles, etc., leave alone features like skipping title screens and others. Hotstar is also restrictive for paying customers since it allows only one screen at a time. Like Prime Video, Hotstar is designed for individuals, not families. For a family of four, if they wanted Hotstar's paid content, it would cost the same as Netflix's highest tier. This is subjective, but it'd most likely be a poorer deal for many.
Those who want high quality content and don't mind paying would go for Netflix. People also share subscriptions with their friends or family members to defray costs. Those who don't want to pay a lot would go with Amazon Prime.
What Netflix and Amazon need to do to grow their subscriber base would be to license a lot of local content (the latter is doing well on that), like movies and TV serials in different languages. They should also look at providing English and other foreign language content voice dubbed in Indian languages. Hollywood movies have long been released in India in English and local languages. The same goes for many English shows too.
Netflix and Amazon will hopefully figure things out, and I'm confident that Netflix is here to stay as the leader in quality on multiple fronts. The rest of the players may replace cable but remain ad supported (like 20 minutes of ads in an hour of content) and kill each other with their "free" and partially free offerings. They're more of a threat to each other than to these two behemoths.
This seems to be your 6th attempt to post the same article here (albeit with slightly modified titles). Are you doing this because you are genuinely interested in discussing with the community or because you are desperate for some internet points?
Fair point. I wrote the story. My thoughts are in the story. I don't generally submit my own stories, but I genuinely want more people to see it. (There is no traffic incentive or anything.)
Why the downvote ? Posting something 6 times is certainly an information that I, as a reader, would want to be aware of, so that I can have an insight on the motivation of the poster.
Given that HN is more and more the target of subtil PR teams for big players, I wish this kind of thing would be taken more seriously.
It's getting harder and harder to trust anything online, and HN is one of the last place where I get decent content. But the quality is dropping, diluted in well disguised advertisements.
So when a reader says : hum, this is suspicious, instead of downvoting, I wish for the mods to investigate.
Netflix's android app is simply horrible. I prefer to watch pewdiepie on youtube than netflix's latest show because of that. I subscribed to their mid-level plan for about a year. One day while watching the daredevil, I realized the quality was so pathetic that it felt like playing a VCR on my 1440p screen. Canceled the subscription and I just watch Youtube now.
What did you not like about it? I've been using it for the last few months and found it to be fairly good. I believe it got some significant updates (especially to the video player) recently.
[+] [-] webbrahmin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltateam|7 years ago|reply
There was one Indian movie from 2004 that was controversial because it featured a lesbian couple. The movie had the typical bollywood love triangle, except the guy was ANGRY that the beautiful woman wanted to see another beautiful woman, along with seeing him. He expressed his anger and was trying to break up this "unholy arrangement" and correct the one woman into loving a man, and exclusively.
I'm more used to men expending all of their energy trying to get into situations with two beautiful women, and then accepting the improbability of two equally attractive and bi-sexual women existing.
So this movie was pure comedy to me, as well as the Indian state's extreme response. Just india things.
It is hard to understand the ideological assumptions of that pervasively conservative but kinda-wannabe-westernized society.
[+] [-] Simon_says|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kev009|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwbacktictac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tushartyagi|7 years ago|reply
Some time back (last year or so), they were showing IMDB ratings for their content, but not now (maybe a falloff with Amazon since it owns IMDB). Now they try to find similar to what I've already watched, which IMHO does not make sense most of the time. I am here to find something new, not exactly same to what I've already seen. Moreover, I first look up the rating on IMDB of whatever I want to watch, and these days it mostly hovers around (5 or 6) out of 10 for almost all of their content.
PS: IMDB isn't silver bullet, but the user reviews are quiet spot on.
[+] [-] amjd|7 years ago|reply
Coming back to the topic, Netflix sorely needs an actual rating system, either like IMDB or something built in-house.
[+] [-] wtmt|7 years ago|reply
Hotstar has a huge user base mainly because it offers a lot of content for "free", and this is something Netflix and Amazon don't do. If someone were to get the revenue numbers from paying subscribers, I'd bet on Hotstar being far behind the others.
As someone who has used these three services, my ranking of Hotstar would put it way below Netflix and Prime Video. The Hotstar app is quite primitive and is probably two or three years behind Netflix. It doesn't even have lists, ratings, profiles, etc., leave alone features like skipping title screens and others. Hotstar is also restrictive for paying customers since it allows only one screen at a time. Like Prime Video, Hotstar is designed for individuals, not families. For a family of four, if they wanted Hotstar's paid content, it would cost the same as Netflix's highest tier. This is subjective, but it'd most likely be a poorer deal for many.
Those who want high quality content and don't mind paying would go for Netflix. People also share subscriptions with their friends or family members to defray costs. Those who don't want to pay a lot would go with Amazon Prime.
What Netflix and Amazon need to do to grow their subscriber base would be to license a lot of local content (the latter is doing well on that), like movies and TV serials in different languages. They should also look at providing English and other foreign language content voice dubbed in Indian languages. Hollywood movies have long been released in India in English and local languages. The same goes for many English shows too.
Netflix and Amazon will hopefully figure things out, and I'm confident that Netflix is here to stay as the leader in quality on multiple fronts. The rest of the players may replace cable but remain ad supported (like 20 minutes of ads in an hour of content) and kill each other with their "free" and partially free offerings. They're more of a threat to each other than to these two behemoths.
[+] [-] 6ak74rfy|7 years ago|reply
If it's the former, let's hear your thoughts.
[+] [-] mmaanniisshh|7 years ago|reply
Fair point. I wrote the story. My thoughts are in the story. I don't generally submit my own stories, but I genuinely want more people to see it. (There is no traffic incentive or anything.)
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
Given that HN is more and more the target of subtil PR teams for big players, I wish this kind of thing would be taken more seriously.
It's getting harder and harder to trust anything online, and HN is one of the last place where I get decent content. But the quality is dropping, diluted in well disguised advertisements.
So when a reader says : hum, this is suspicious, instead of downvoting, I wish for the mods to investigate.
If it's genuine, good.
[+] [-] Pica_soO|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amjd|7 years ago|reply