In 2010 everyone I knew paid their media tax through Netflix or a similar provider since paid services were more convenient than piracy, and things just worked.
Somehow, in the past 2-5 years, piracy is quickly moving back as the more convenient option.
The core problem with entertainment is you're paying for fun. Spending hours fighting with broken service is not fun. Increasingly, these services provide negative value to me.
Do you spend hours fighting with Netflix or Prime ?
How are the online media services broken for you ?
Paramount+ won't play on any device. It says I have to disable my ad blocker. They have code to break playback with an ad blocker, but it's broken, and disables playback even without and ad blocker. Paramount+ support says I should disable antivirus software, firewalls, and essentially, leave myself open to attacks.
Netflix selection has been getting worse too, with a proliferation of streaming services.
For the most part, I'm on Youtube. Youtube works. I can also use tools like yt-dlp to download Youtube content for plane flights, which is the major place I'd like to watch content. Most streaming services don't support use without internet access.
Oh -- and if I buy something, I'm liable to lose it. Google almost killed my whole library of purchases with the whole GSuite free thing, before backpedaling at the very last minute. For a few months, I had unnecessary stress and headache.
Piracy has all the content I want, works off-line, on any device, and in any player. Pirated content doesn't expire or break. If I weren't a high-profile figure liable to look bad in media, I'd go with piracy. It seems like the better option. It's certainly what I advocate to friends and family.
And stuff just disappears.
This space is going to be broken, just like messaging. Some things call for an enforced interoperability standard.
Maybe they think you can afford it
I don’t really understand these comments. Do you think Netflix is a charity? “Endless pursuit of revenue” is how they stay in business, employing people and yes, generating profits to shareholders.
Imagine turning this same thinking around at other groups I’d imagine you sympathize with like unionizing workers: “In their endless pursuit of revenue, workers have demanded pay increases”. Like wtf?
I think Netflix was too late to realize that they need to become an entertainment company like Disney or HBO and not a tech company, because that's Amazon and the world is too small for another Amazon, just as it is too small for another Google. It doesn't matter how good their CDN is or how good they are at writing JavaScript libraries, they will keep losing subscribers if there is nothing to subscribe for.
That next marginal dollar of revenue in the short term is often at the expense of subscriber goodwill in the long term. Rebuilding burned goodwill is very hard to do and dooms the business in the long run.
The two pieces of news I’ve heard about Netflix this year are stranger things season 4 is coming out and this. Why do I want to support a business who’s major contribution to the media landscape for 2022 is a new customer-hostile billing model?
Anyway, what they meant was "chasing short term profit bumps unwisely at the expense of long term satisfaction due to temporary economic stress"
If I gave some food away, and the restaurant I purchased it from called the recipient a free loader... I would have negative feelings about the restaurant such that a network effect would begin to take place after I kept telling people - just like this hn posting.
Edit: I guess you can argue that Netflix pricing is an insurance pool, where not always watching the streams you paid for goes into reducing the subscription cost (or raising profits). Having every subscriber let others use their downtime raises the subscription cost with that idea - but that is still contrary to years of their marketing.
Divorce is fairly common, and coming on top of another recent price hike, they are going to be shedding customers.
In my case, nobody is “stealing” anything. My immediate family has had to deal with these international issues for about eight years, where the kids spend about three months in the US and nine months in Canada every year, crossing the border every 3-4 weeks.
I have no idea how Netflix’s changes are going to affect my family.
Taking another example: Disney+ and Hulu. Hulu is majority (but not entirely) owned by Disney (post-20th Century Fox acquisition). In the US, we have Disney+ and Hulu as separate services. In Canada there is no Hulu, but Disney+ offers something called “Star” which is more-or-less non-US Hulu. In other words, Disney is already getting 2 subscriptions out of me in the US for content that only requires one subscription in other countries.
But I don’t mind. Why? Because Disney has high quality content. Even if I don’t want to watch it, none of it is necessarily “bad”. Netflix, OTOH, churns out so much garbage. And most of their original shows get canceled far too early. I now avoid most new Netflix shows until it has a few seasons under its belt, because I’m tired of getting invested into shows that are canceled after a cliff-hanger.
Ted Sarandos: I’m looking at you.
Argentina: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126602/ar
Plus, seeing shows like friends and breaking bad being replaced by big mouth and other Netflix content I find just gross (and not replacing it with content I enjoy). I cancelled. I was enjoying ozarks, and the comedy specials, but not at $180-$240/year and most of the comedy specials have become increasingly less interesting (when they came out at all — thanks lockdowns).
I think at lower prices they could honestly cover more niches because people were willing to pay for their interest (maybe 5% of the content). As the price increases more people don’t think that 5% is good enough for the price. And everyone has a different percent of content they like.
Imo this makes Netflix much more prone to lose customers when rising prices.
This is even more obnoxious because a lot of people who watch Netflix are younger. They travel, they go to school, etc.
> Make sure that the device is not connected to a VPN, proxy, or any unblocker service.
Their PR and marketing team clearly suck. I hope they've got a really good legal team, because they're going to need it.
I'm not sure how exactly this would affect 99% of their paying customers. People who travel all the time would probably watch it on their laptops/tablets anyway so it won't affect them.
They're not gonna come first at the people who use Netflix from two addresses regularly, there's no point to start from there.
Why shouldn’t Netflix seek to clamp down on account sharing? This seems to strike a nice balance that makes it easy to continue sharing, and not disrupt existing profiles, etc whilst charging a small premium for the privilege.
If you raise the cost they will just leave, leaving Netflix with a total of $0 instead of a "small premium for the privilege" from them.
Also, Netflix might be losing money when people share their account and want to get to a place where the profit per account increases and then go from there.
I switched to 5 countries still got the same message.
