Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc).
Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof.
The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.
> Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,” Netflix writes.
People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins.
Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billion different confusing services.
The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free.
Netflix has a problem that the front page is now filled with "B-rated" rather than "A-rated" content for more money than before. The amount of content that they spent money on in the past is hardly discoverable, genre search is barely exposed in the interface. You have to rely on 3rd party sites to find links to category selections, say Epic movies based on true events... good luck finding what they have in this category in the AppleTV or Roku apps. They also don't allow to exclude content that one is not interested in, I want no superheroes, no animated stuff, no dei, etc - and yet every time I launch the app it is there front and center and I just hate this. And if I watched 2 WW2 movies it doesn't mean that's the only thing I'm interested in in the recommended section. I want to exclude producing studios as well, like Vox, let me tell Netflix what I don't like.
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
I have one point which I really feel exemplifies the entire Netflix experience: before you sign up, they do not give you a list of what's available to watch.
Seriously, check out their website. It's basically a landing page which says "give us your money". The prices aren't even displayed.
There is no list of shows, save for a few measly screenshots of featured/well-known titles. There is a search box which lets you search for titles, but nothing like a catalogue of offerings, which is the absolute bare minimum I'd expect to see before purchasing a service.
I really cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give their hard-earned money to a company which doesn't even tell you what you're getting in exchange.
If you search "dune streaming" in Australia, the top result (besides Google's little bits) is Netflix with the page title "Watch Dune".
If you visit that page as a subscriber, it doesn't say they don't have it. It just has the metadata and a "Remind me" button. If you visit in incognito, you get a 'not found' error. Maybe they have it for another locale. Maybe they used to have it. Maybe they will have it in the future. But you're left to guess.
Content hiding has become a really popular technique. Recently I reviewd Google's app of 2023 called Imprint and it purposefully hides all content counts to the point where some courses end abruptly with "get notified when next chapter is released". I emailed the team for content counts and got a firm no on that.
Just like with Netflix you can't browse the entire lists of content. All you have a is a search bar and some curated lists which give an illusion of content breadth. Not a fan of these dark patterns to say the least.
They could show you, but that's no guarantee of anything.
They rotate their content, and presumable the studios pull their content off. If they have movie X today, there's no assurance that it'll be there next week.
It's a subscription to a service, not to specific content. I don't see how it could be any other way.
Netflix could definitely make it easier to see what is on now, though. Amazon has a much larger catalog and you can browse it before signing up.
The content diaspora to other services has made Netflix tremendously less appealing; just par for the course as Netflix tries their hardest to lose me as a customer. I just had a support chat with them Friday because my kid has been in the hospital for several weeks after being hit by a car. Since they haven’t been home, Netflix has decided they’re no longer part of the household and we have to manually reauthenticate every two weeks or chip in another $8/mo for their own account. (I asked them point blank, “is it the official position of Netflix that a hospitalized patient is no longer part of a household?” and they just said “the policy applies to all devices”.) I’ve been using Netflix since it was a mail-order DVD rental service…but at this point they’ve sold me on their new most popular plan: cancelling.
> there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages
The author is a great financial forensics sleuth! Here is the passage “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth highlighted inside each conpany's 10-K on one site (shameless plug):
I stopped pirating games when Steam made buying games safer and more convenient than pirating them, while being affordable and having lots of sales. It didn't get worse despite being a monopoly for a long time, and now we have that plus another service that throws free games at you every week for attention.
I stopped pirating TV shows and movies when for a small monthly fee I could watch most of what I wanted to watch on Netflix. I wouldn't say it was more convenient or better quality on all counts, but it was good enough.
Now I need 10 different streaming subscriptions that keep increasing in price, often only available in dubbed German because I live in Germany, often in worse video/audio quality than it could be, originals getting randomly axed after a cliffhanger, horrible apps, ads being forced on you, no more entire seasons published at once because you can still cancel subscriptions monthly, and don't get me started about offline viewing which never worked properly in the first place.
The limitations are all artificial and it's clear that it's publicly traded companies scraping the bottom of the barrel for infinite growth again.
As someone who rarely watch movies/series, I was paying ~100$/month worth of subscriptions until I cancelled most recently. Why? Content fragmentation is mentioned by everyone, but to me, the main problem was that I could never get a proper watching experience even after finding what I wanted:
1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.
3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.
4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.
5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show
6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices
7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.
8- I can keep going on
I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.
> I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
Different strokes for different folks. As another non-native speaker, I personally like those descriptions, because they help me label a kind of music, or an emotional outburst.
It's like knowing how to describe a pain you have. You can't just say "it hurts" to a doctor, you need to be more specific ("it's a throbbing sensation with occasional sharp piercing pain")
The worst part of the subs for the hard of hearing is that the contain so many spoilers. They'll write "JOHN:" an hour before our protagonist learns who exactly this mysterious character is, completely ruining any surprise.
The streaming space desperately needs consolidation right now.
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.
Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?
If Netflix had seen themselves strictly as a distribution service, they might have taken an open-to-all, low-margin, high-volume approach, which had a chance to become ubiquitous and unassailable. Basically, they could have been the Cable-over-IP provider for everyone. But it's a lot harder to get there, from here.
My fear is consolidation will lead to a nightmare scenario where they will push prices up and up until you literally cannot afford the no-ads version and we'll be right back where we all started, paying for access to shows but still seeing ads every 10 minutes.
Piracy isn't difficult to compete against. You just need to provide a service at least as usable as piracy. I won't mind paying a couple of bucks, I just need a usable service which:
1. Doesn't restrict what content I can watch from which country and doesn't prevent me from using VPN. This is outright ridiculous and I deeply hate streaming services just for that.
2. Has all the content from multiple studios, not just from your "walled garden". Until you solve that, piracy is more usable. There are illegal Netflix-like services that stream all the content without a hassle — and some of them are even subscription-based! Hear me out — people FUCKING PAY pirates to watch content, because their services are more convenient to use than yours that are legal. So yeah, people don't mind paying. They just want a decent service.
All right, so just off the top of my head we have:
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime
- Disney+
- HBO+
- Hulu
- YouTube Premium
- Apple TV
- Whatever Sky's offering is called
- At least a couple of others that I've forgotten
- Plus some kid-specific services that aren't necessarily included in the base subscription (looking at you, Amazon)
- And then I haven't even got into music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc.
You know, competition is a good thing, but overall I'm not that sympathetic.
It's just too damn hard, and unsustainably expensive, to be able to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Then there's content duplication, content exclusives, and on top of that just this endless churn of huge quantities of content being thrown out that, frankly, isn't necessarily that great and feels like kind of a waste of time to watch.
This isn't really working for me. Let me say it again, I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it and with reasonable pricing. I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to be bilked. And I'm not interested in the arguments about rights. I just want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Competition is good, but this isn't competition, almost all of these platforms catalogs are mutually exclusive, so instead of competing to be the platform with the lowest cost/best UX/ network effect, they're just competing to get shows off of another platform and onto theirs, to the detriment of the consumer.
Music streaming is not currently suffering the same fragmentation that video streaming displays. I.e. the same music albums are available on all those music streaming services you mentioned. (I know there are a few exceptions but for the vast majority this is true).
Music streaming services have very few exclusive content. Which is why they tried to sign exclusive deals with e.g. podcasters.
Should they go in the same direction as video streaming, we will see an increase in music pirating again as well.
Hasn't stopped Spotify and co from increasing prices anyway of course.
I'll bite - people torrent because they have no other options. People will pay for content if they're able to access content after paying. So, here's my offer:
I will build a torrent streaming site where the torrent file costs some reasonable amount of $$ per download, for fully licensed content, with zero DMA protections.
If you have IP that you are willing to share on this torrent site, I will take 10% of revenue after subtracting costs, you get the remaining.
My email is on my HN profile. If you own IP and are interested in licensing it this way - shoot me a mail. I need a minimum amount of interest from IP holders before I put in any real work building this.
The technical side has been solved for 15+ years. It's a licensing/rights issue what is screwing with the video experience.
FWIW Netflix should go back to providing physical content rental (DVD, blueray) with full catalog. Or someone should do WHAT Allofmp3 did in the 2000s with Audio and THE ROMS licensing.
I haven't pirated in a while. I was happy to pay for some platforms.
The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere?
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them (i.e. Amazon Prime Video). So I'm paying the same or more (as prices continue to be increased) for the same base level of content with additional annoying cruft.
With all the extra complexity like this, it's easier to just pirate and maybe set up a server I can just give relatives access to.
I have found myself pirating more and more.
Netflix and co aren't just losing on the available content and the price, the actual browsing experience is far better on the illegal streaming site I use.
You know a business is out of ideas when they start lashing out at piracy.
Netflix has a content problem. They lost their licenses for most of the third-party content worth watching, and their own productions are now trash.
Netflix Original was a stamp of quality at one point, but I think they probably saw in the data that cheap content like true crime and docuseries were getting the bulk of their playtime and focussed in on that. However, for many people, that sort of content is not something they'd pay for, it's just background TV to watch while half doing something else, similar to podcasts and YouTube - which are both free.
Their competitors have shows and films that people actually want to watch.
The list of canned statements^0 about the dangers of piracy reminds me of Sinclair Broadcasting's famous memo to newsrooms^1.
^0:
> Apparently, there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages.
> Netflix: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> Triller Corp: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> FuboTV: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> Redbox Entertainment: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> IMAQ: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
CuriosityStream: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> We don’t know where these references originate. Netflix has mentioned it for a while, that’s for sure, and apparently, the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth."
Not that hard to compete against. Just stop being assholes.
If Netflix didn't raise their prices at more than double the inflation rate, and didn't crack down on password sharing, and didn't deactivate devices of deployed military members, and didn't keep cancelling and censoring content, maybe they wouldn't have this problem.
> “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> We don’t know where these references originate.
Search for that phrase. It has a rather large number of hits, in filings from multiple streaming services. Wonder where that phrase was pirated from?
And whether this indicates a degree of coordination which suggests the need for antitrust action.
Mainland China has good movies now. There's been progress since "Sky Hunter" (2017), produced by the film unit of the People's Liberation Army Air Force.
(You can watch that for free. It's heavy-handed propaganda.) If you like period costume dramas, there are many from China, because the political levels don't care about those. The writers thus have more freedom. "Princess Agents" is probably the best of that genre.
Stuff set in the present day will have clear signs of being forced to follow the party line. There are lots of cop shows. They're about as good, or bad, as American cop shows. There's a good version of "The Three Body Problem", but it's rather slow-paced, following the books closely. There's also a genre we don't see much in the US - business drama.
The US film industry has been eaten by superhero sequels. Just not much worth watching. There's a Hunger Games prequel out, if anybody cares. If you're willing to look outside the heavily promoted stuff, there's plenty to watch.
[+] [-] PlutoIsAPlanet|2 years ago|reply
Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof.
The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins.
Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billion different confusing services.
The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free.
[+] [-] SurgeArrest|2 years ago|reply
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
[+] [-] wackget|2 years ago|reply
Seriously, check out their website. It's basically a landing page which says "give us your money". The prices aren't even displayed.
There is no list of shows, save for a few measly screenshots of featured/well-known titles. There is a search box which lets you search for titles, but nothing like a catalogue of offerings, which is the absolute bare minimum I'd expect to see before purchasing a service.
I really cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give their hard-earned money to a company which doesn't even tell you what you're getting in exchange.
[+] [-] prawn|2 years ago|reply
If you visit that page as a subscriber, it doesn't say they don't have it. It just has the metadata and a "Remind me" button. If you visit in incognito, you get a 'not found' error. Maybe they have it for another locale. Maybe they used to have it. Maybe they will have it in the future. But you're left to guess.
[+] [-] wraptile|2 years ago|reply
Just like with Netflix you can't browse the entire lists of content. All you have a is a search bar and some curated lists which give an illusion of content breadth. Not a fan of these dark patterns to say the least.
[+] [-] shermantanktop|2 years ago|reply
They rotate their content, and presumable the studios pull their content off. If they have movie X today, there's no assurance that it'll be there next week.
It's a subscription to a service, not to specific content. I don't see how it could be any other way.
Netflix could definitely make it easier to see what is on now, though. Amazon has a much larger catalog and you can browse it before signing up.
[+] [-] shiroiuma|2 years ago|reply
These days... not so much.
[+] [-] j1elo|2 years ago|reply
> Disney+ removed Crater ~7 weeks after it was released, purely to reduce residuals and claim losses for lower tax bills[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252151
[2]: https://kotaku.com/disney-streaming-crater-tax-rort-scam-wri...
[+] [-] cgearhart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|2 years ago|reply
The author is a great financial forensics sleuth! Here is the passage “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth highlighted inside each conpany's 10-K on one site (shameless plug):
NFLX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/nflx#:~:text=In%20light%20of...
FUBO: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fubo#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
RDBX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/rdbx#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
CURI: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/curi#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
[+] [-] Netcob|2 years ago|reply
I stopped pirating TV shows and movies when for a small monthly fee I could watch most of what I wanted to watch on Netflix. I wouldn't say it was more convenient or better quality on all counts, but it was good enough.
Now I need 10 different streaming subscriptions that keep increasing in price, often only available in dubbed German because I live in Germany, often in worse video/audio quality than it could be, originals getting randomly axed after a cliffhanger, horrible apps, ads being forced on you, no more entire seasons published at once because you can still cancel subscriptions monthly, and don't get me started about offline viewing which never worked properly in the first place.
The limitations are all artificial and it's clear that it's publicly traded companies scraping the bottom of the barrel for infinite growth again.
[+] [-] aljgz|2 years ago|reply
1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.
3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.
4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.
5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show
6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices
7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.
8- I can keep going on
I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.
[+] [-] abdusco|2 years ago|reply
Different strokes for different folks. As another non-native speaker, I personally like those descriptions, because they help me label a kind of music, or an emotional outburst.
It's like knowing how to describe a pain you have. You can't just say "it hurts" to a doctor, you need to be more specific ("it's a throbbing sensation with occasional sharp piercing pain")
[+] [-] magicalhippo|2 years ago|reply
The worst part of the subs for the hard of hearing is that the contain so many spoilers. They'll write "JOHN:" an hour before our protagonist learns who exactly this mysterious character is, completely ruining any surprise.
[+] [-] spamtarget|2 years ago|reply
Nope, it's not a compression artifact, those white braid guys are actually twins!
(jk)
[+] [-] ta1243|2 years ago|reply
You deserve everything you get
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|2 years ago|reply
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.
[+] [-] bo1024|2 years ago|reply
Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?
[+] [-] ta8645|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] histories|2 years ago|reply
Everything should be everywhere. Let the services compete on something other than content.
Qobuz has the same songs as everyone else, but in higher quality.
Because when you compete on content, piracy always wins
[+] [-] Krssst|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willio58|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xpl|2 years ago|reply
1. Doesn't restrict what content I can watch from which country and doesn't prevent me from using VPN. This is outright ridiculous and I deeply hate streaming services just for that.
2. Has all the content from multiple studios, not just from your "walled garden". Until you solve that, piracy is more usable. There are illegal Netflix-like services that stream all the content without a hassle — and some of them are even subscription-based! Hear me out — people FUCKING PAY pirates to watch content, because their services are more convenient to use than yours that are legal. So yeah, people don't mind paying. They just want a decent service.
[+] [-] snvzz|2 years ago|reply
Artificial DRM-based restrictions ultimately mean not getting the quality you pay for. Netflix specifically becomes 720p garbage.
But I can just rely on less official sources. In this case I get a DRM-free, very high quality file that plays everywhere, forever.
[+] [-] bartread|2 years ago|reply
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime
- Disney+
- HBO+
- Hulu
- YouTube Premium
- Apple TV
- Whatever Sky's offering is called
- At least a couple of others that I've forgotten
- Plus some kid-specific services that aren't necessarily included in the base subscription (looking at you, Amazon)
- And then I haven't even got into music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc.
You know, competition is a good thing, but overall I'm not that sympathetic.
It's just too damn hard, and unsustainably expensive, to be able to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Then there's content duplication, content exclusives, and on top of that just this endless churn of huge quantities of content being thrown out that, frankly, isn't necessarily that great and feels like kind of a waste of time to watch.
This isn't really working for me. Let me say it again, I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it and with reasonable pricing. I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to be bilked. And I'm not interested in the arguments about rights. I just want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
[+] [-] themoonisachees|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuschkufan|2 years ago|reply
Music streaming services have very few exclusive content. Which is why they tried to sign exclusive deals with e.g. podcasters.
Should they go in the same direction as video streaming, we will see an increase in music pirating again as well.
Hasn't stopped Spotify and co from increasing prices anyway of course.
[+] [-] arijun|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64
[+] [-] Raphael|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilippkumar|2 years ago|reply
I will build a torrent streaming site where the torrent file costs some reasonable amount of $$ per download, for fully licensed content, with zero DMA protections.
If you have IP that you are willing to share on this torrent site, I will take 10% of revenue after subtracting costs, you get the remaining.
My email is on my HN profile. If you own IP and are interested in licensing it this way - shoot me a mail. I need a minimum amount of interest from IP holders before I put in any real work building this.
Your move, Hollywood.
[+] [-] xtracto|2 years ago|reply
FWIW Netflix should go back to providing physical content rental (DVD, blueray) with full catalog. Or someone should do WHAT Allofmp3 did in the 2000s with Audio and THE ROMS licensing.
[+] [-] Underphil|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spike021|2 years ago|reply
The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere?
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them (i.e. Amazon Prime Video). So I'm paying the same or more (as prices continue to be increased) for the same base level of content with additional annoying cruft.
With all the extra complexity like this, it's easier to just pirate and maybe set up a server I can just give relatives access to.
[+] [-] aqme28|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|2 years ago|reply
Netflix has a content problem. They lost their licenses for most of the third-party content worth watching, and their own productions are now trash.
Netflix Original was a stamp of quality at one point, but I think they probably saw in the data that cheap content like true crime and docuseries were getting the bulk of their playtime and focussed in on that. However, for many people, that sort of content is not something they'd pay for, it's just background TV to watch while half doing something else, similar to podcasts and YouTube - which are both free.
Their competitors have shows and films that people actually want to watch.
[+] [-] diego_sandoval|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charcircuit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JieJie|2 years ago|reply
^0:
> Apparently, there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages.
> Netflix: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> Triller Corp: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> FuboTV: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” > Redbox Entertainment: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> IMAQ: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” CuriosityStream: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> We don’t know where these references originate. Netflix has mentioned it for a while, that’s for sure, and apparently, the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth."
1: https://youtu.be/C-4HOgULcd8
[+] [-] torstenvl|2 years ago|reply
If Netflix didn't raise their prices at more than double the inflation rate, and didn't crack down on password sharing, and didn't deactivate devices of deployed military members, and didn't keep cancelling and censoring content, maybe they wouldn't have this problem.
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Search for that phrase. It has a rather large number of hits, in filings from multiple streaming services. Wonder where that phrase was pirated from? And whether this indicates a degree of coordination which suggests the need for antitrust action.
Mainland China has good movies now. There's been progress since "Sky Hunter" (2017), produced by the film unit of the People's Liberation Army Air Force. (You can watch that for free. It's heavy-handed propaganda.) If you like period costume dramas, there are many from China, because the political levels don't care about those. The writers thus have more freedom. "Princess Agents" is probably the best of that genre.
Stuff set in the present day will have clear signs of being forced to follow the party line. There are lots of cop shows. They're about as good, or bad, as American cop shows. There's a good version of "The Three Body Problem", but it's rather slow-paced, following the books closely. There's also a genre we don't see much in the US - business drama.
The US film industry has been eaten by superhero sequels. Just not much worth watching. There's a Hunger Games prequel out, if anybody cares. If you're willing to look outside the heavily promoted stuff, there's plenty to watch.