People forget this is what happened to cable television. It was started as a commercial-free premium service. Then gradually the commercials appeared and people got used to it. Now we have a couple generations of people who don’t seem to mind paying to see advertising on cable.
It seems inevitable this will happen to streaming as well, but I hope it doesn’t. It has happened already in some limited areas, such as Peacock for the Olympics, which was supposed to be commercial-free, but even at the top tier (which I have) it still had “sponsored content” that you couldn’t skip. On top of that, all the editing was done for the ad-supported version of the service, so you’d miss entire chunks of an event because they edited it for a 5 minute ad break on the other service. Brutal.
This is why I’ve started a project of ripping all my DVDs into .iso format, so they’ll live on (multiple, redundant) hard drives and I can play them on nearly any general-purpose computing device, at the same quality, and with all the special features. The situation for bluray isn’t quite as dire yet, but with the writing that’s on the wall I’ll be doing the same with those as soon as storage becomes even more cheap.
That’s not really fair, though. Netflix knew that would happen and planned for it. Netflix Originals (making their own content) has been the major focus of the company for almost ten years now (I have friends at the company, which is where I’m getting my info). We can certainly debate how good some of that content is. Certainly it started out very very good. It’s gotten schlockier and schlockier over time though. Shows like Stranger Things, Ozark, Grace & Frankie, Bloodline, etc. All outstanding. To go from that to “Is It Cake?” is really sad.
I understand why they made it but my criticism is that it’s very clearly pandering/chasing internet fads and that alone is a pretty flimsy basis for a show. As youtube content its fine even if i’m not interested, but for Netflix to produce and make it it just seems pretty pointless. Trends are short lived, so spending time and money on such concepts has too much of a risk to not pan out.
I predict this will be the new “software piracy” battlefield.
All through the 1980s and 1990s, game companies yelled to anyone who would listen that piracy was destroying their business. They spent billions on increasingly complex copy protection schemes. The assumption was always that every pirated copy was a lost sale. Of course, those of us doing the pirating knew that was nonsense. We wouldn’t have bought any of that stuff, and most of it we never played. It was just fun to trade the stuff around and maybe try it for five minutes. If we couldn’t do that because some magic piracy prevention existed? We’d go outside and play, probably.
Then over the years more and more companies gave up on copy protection, and… nothing happened. In fact, it was good for sales because it created a “try before you buy” and word of mouth effect. Turns out people will willingly pay for things that are good and don’t have to be threatened to do so. This is the basis for the entire modern content ecosystem, including things like YouTube and Freemium mobile gaming. Give away the content, then monetize around the edges (or in the case of indie creators, simply ask for support and you will get it if your content is good).
I see all this as the same arguments that will be made for account sharing. The assumption that all those shared accounts are lost subscribers will fall flat when they crack down on it and nothing happens to their subscriber numbers. I have occasionally borrowed a friend’s HBO password to watch one show. If I couldn’t do that? Who cares- I’d watch something else. I’m not paying for another expensive service every month on the off chance I might want to watch the occasional show on it.
I get it. I pay for the ad-free tier on Hulu. I guess my point is that, for people who already subscribe and hate ads, nothing would change. They’d continue to pay what they always have and continue to not see ads.
An ad-supported tier would be targeting people who haven’t subscribed or have canceled based on price. I think the bigger issue is this seems to devalue the brand quite a bit—they’ve always positioned themselves as a premium, ad-free service. Of course, maybe that ship has already sailed when they starting producing more and more terrible content.
My comment wasn’t intended as criticism of netflix, or an implication that they made a mistake(indeed, given the strikingly long and failure-riddled path of would-be competitors who were either primarily rightsholders or legacy broadcasters to get even vaguely credible streaming services either built or bought and out the door, one can only credit netflix for how competent their work in that area was); just an observation that the different copyright circumstances made it inevitable that going streaming would give netflix’s suppliers more leverage as potential competitors and make the existence of service exclusives much easier to preserve.
Cracking down on sharing, pirating, etc is what happens when people look at pure numbers and dollars lost/earned rather than look at how people actually use a service/product or why they don’t.
“Yeah, man, I don’t know what happened. When we first opened our coffee shop, which was the only coffee shop in Smallsvillesburgtown, we had so much business! The lines were out the door and around the block, man! We made so much money, it was crazy! Now, there’s 20 other coffee shops in town, and ours is empty most of the time. I don’t get it, man. We raised our prices to keep profits up, but now our foot traffic is even worse. We might have to try switching to instant coffee next.”
The death spiral of a company that seems to not understand how their own business works.
My library has Expanse seasons 1 - 4. They also have Game of Thrones. If you aren’t in a hurry to watch a (popular) show, I think they’ll eventually wind up at the library.
It may be pointless and silly, but my daughter likes watching the show. I really don’t get the impression that Netflix poured a lot of resources into making it.
I don’t get your risk aversion as long as they aren’t putting all their eggs in one basket. Generally speaking, I wish more studios were willing to take risks when it comes to producing different kinds of shows. Netflix produces a huge variety of original content in many different languages and not all shows need to resonate with everyone, especially lower budget ones like this.
For example: I loved Bojack Horseman, which is a really weird show that many people would have expected to fail. And a lot of their original content really is crap! But their strategy, at least in the past, seemed to be to green light a ton of different shows and just see what worked. It’s good that they’ve got the freedom to do that without worrying about time slot scheduling and similar restrictions that old broadcast networks had.
This is a problem for digital files. Archiving all the movies, photos etc. Could be tricky, as the media as we know today couldn’t last, unlike media like photographic film.
I once attended a lecture on how to organize photo collections and the lecturer referred to this scenario as the media apocalypse. He talked about different types of cassette tapes, VHS, Betamax, floppy disks, Zipdrives and other media that were abandoned by industry and users.
Whoever had made backup of photos on a Zip or Jazz disk, for example, will hardly be able to read the files nowadays.
I’ve still got my Zip drive in a case buried in the closet somewhere with a bunch of backup disks. IIRC it uses a parallel printer port connection. Now to find a computer with a parallel port that I can connect it to…
Yep. I get around this by migrating all my data to whatever new medium is the standard. All of the files I saved on my Zip and floppy drives in 1998 are still around, on my 2022 hard drive, perfectly accessible. You just have to stay on top of it. But it’s more work than I’d like.
There are a couple of sites charting it somehow, by whatever methodology they can cook up. The latest actually has Moon Knight in #2, with Severance slipping to #3 (which stands to reason as it was a weekly show and is now out of season)
