Poll of the Day > Is Netflix going the way of Blockbuster?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Employee layoffs, stock is way down, customer dissatisfaction, HBO Disney Paramount etc. having better selection of content. Things aren't looking good.
I personally canceled mine because of the price increase. I'm happy with Crave (Canada's HBO) and Amazon Primevideo so Netflix isn't necessary for me right now.
Also "He's expecting"? Lolwut, cringe Netflix

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/7/AAQwHjAADMEb.jpg

^Lol
I hated torrents though. Would rather just go back to buying DVDs

stream >>>>>>> download

https://fmovies.ps/home

That's got a better selection of stuff, and is immune to random price hikes.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

stream >>>>>>> download

It is, but when streaming means having to navigate a dozen different streaming services to figure out which one you need to pay for to watch what you want, with no guarantee it'll even stay on there long enough for you to finish it, and possibly being bombarded with ads the whole time, I can see the appeal of just going through the process of finding a suitable download once and being done with it.

As Gabe Newell has said, piracy is a symptom of a service problem: Most people are happy to pay you if you provide a better service than the free version. There was a time when Netflix did exactly that, and piracy rates dropped accordingly. Now Netflix is actively alienating customers and providing a pretty unreliable service in a desperate attempt to chase more money than they can actually make (as much as shareholders want indefinite growth in their investments, that's not actually possible), while the rest of the streaming market has become a convoluted mess that's not that much better than the cable service consumers want it to replace. It's no surprise piracy rates are climbing again.

Ferarri619 posted...

Also "He's expecting"? Lolwut, cringe Netflix

This, on the other hand, is a pretty silly reason to cancel. I see a lot of people citing all the "woke" content as a reason for leaving Netflix, but it's very easy to just not watch stuff you don't want to watch. The vast majority of any streaming service is going to be comprised of stuff you don't want to watch. Netflix isn't special in that regard.

adjl posted...

This, on the other hand, is a pretty silly reason to cancel. I see a lot of people citing all the "woke" content as a reason for leaving Netflix, but it's very easy to just not watch stuff you don't want to watch. The vast majority of any streaming service is going to be comprised of stuff you don't want to watch. Netflix isn't special in that regard.

It's not the sole reason to cancel, but it is one of many.
The point is Netflix is wasting their resources on making garbage original show. I remember when Daredevil was huge hype and it was a Netflix original. Now the shows they're producing are trash nobody cares about. HBO is producing some great originals and that's another big reason to switch.

Heard they pulled the plug on a project they were working on with the Royal family

JixHedgehog posted...

Heard they pulled the plug on a project they were working on with the Royal family

You also heard that Obama was President in 2008.

If they do, they deserve. Greed has taken over this country and now no one wants to provide good services and/or products with good CS etc because they're all about charging and overcharging people to the hilt.

On top of that, there are way too many streaming services now so the market is saturated and most of the services are utter crap.

Netflix is going nowhere.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

stream >>>>>>> download

Disagree. I have my shows and movies on NAS and I can watch them without an internet connection, which makes them vastly superior IMO.

11110111011 posted...

Disagree. I have my shows and movies on NAS and I can watch them without an internet connection, which makes them vastly superior IMO.

I always find this kind of a weird argument because downloading something implies that you have decent and reliable Internet in the first place. I might have shitty Internet, but even I can count on one hand the amount of times I have been without Internet for more than 5 minutes, and half those times I was without power as well, so I wasn't going to be watching movies anyways.

I get the argument for not streaming video games (and fully agree with it) because of latency and lag issues. However when it comes to any other media I would rather just stream than keep several hundred dollars worth of hard drives in the corner of my house sucking up power.

Dikitain posted...

I always find this kind of a weird argument because downloading something implies that you have decent and reliable Internet in the first place. I might have shitty Internet, but even I can count on one hand the amount of times I have been without Internet for more than 5 minutes, and half those times I was without power as well, so I wasn't going to be watching movies anyways.

I get the argument for not streaming video games (and fully agree with it) because of latency and lag issues. However when it comes to any other media I would rather just stream than keep several hundred dollars worth of hard drives in the corner of my house sucking up power.

the argument is that you may want entertainment while your good internet is down (or if you leave the area)

Ferarri619 posted...

Employee layoffs, stock is way down, customer dissatisfaction, HBO Disney Paramount etc. having better selection of content

...except that's not really Blockbluster's issue. Blockbuster no longer had a sound business model, which is why it lost out to the market leaders who replaced it. NF's business model is still basically the one used by the leaders in its marketplace.

Ferarri619 posted...

Things aren't looking good.

I mean, they've been better, but NF had continually expanded and overspent while enjoying little real competition. At some people, NF was bound to run into some struggles as they faced more competition.

adjl posted...

As Gabe Newell has said, piracy is a symptom of a service problem: Most people are happy to pay you if you provide a better service than the free version.

You can't provide a better service than free. So long as piracy is ready available and convenient, people will favor that. The big reason iTunes caught on is because people cracked down on Napster, etc. if that hadn't happened, iTunes wouldn't have been able to build much of anything.

Unless the ease of piracy goes away, legit will always struggle to compete with free. It's very hard to provide enough service to overcome free and it's a struggle to provide comparable value when the free alternatives are able to offer far more.

adjl posted...

while the rest of the streaming market has become a convoluted mess that's not that much better

NF has no real control over its marketplace beyond the services it offers, unless it's in a position to enforce a monopoly.

adjl posted...

This, on the other hand, is a pretty silly reason to cancel. I see a lot of people citing all the "woke" content as a reason for leaving Netflix, but it's very easy to just not watch stuff you don't want to watch. The vast majority of any streaming service is going to be comprised of stuff you don't want to watch. Netflix isn't special in that regard.

It's literally the straw that broke the camel's back, which makes it a relatively strong reason. People can bear discontentment -- issues like price hikes and reduced selections are annoyances -- but when you add insult to injury, that's usually when people take action.

NF price-hiking then vocally spending money on certain things will draw a pretty direct connection in peoples' minds where the money is going when they otherwise might just say, "Well, everything else is getting more expensive..."

And, personally, NF's decision to present certain content as woke has made it infinitely less appealing so something I might've watched I won't. And if I'm not watching a certain amount of stuff, NF doesn't have as much perceived value. Basically by wading into the culture wars, NF poisons a portion of its library -- even if that portion didn't have any intrinsic issues.

Ferarri619 posted...

It's not the sole reason to cancel, but it is one of many.
The point is Netflix is wasting their resources on making garbage original show. I remember when Daredevil was huge hype and it was a Netflix original. Now the shows they're producing are trash nobody cares about. HBO is producing some great originals and that's another big reason to switch.

Yeah, and that's the other half. People look at what NF cancels and then what they're making and it can piss them off.

Of course, DD's cancellation isn't necessarily NF's fault (although they probably could've worked a deal if they cared enough)

Fam_Fam posted...

the argument is that you may want entertainment while your good internet is down (or if you leave the area)

And that is my point, your Internet rarely goes down, and when it does it is very rarely long enough to warrant keeping TBs of data on hand at all times. It is like the people who stocked up on toilet paper because they thought Covid was going to completely shut down stores. You are creating a contingency for something that doesn't exist. My 6000W generator has gotten more use then a file server with all my movies stored on it would, and that generator isn't going to be powering a file server, it is going to be used for something way more important like my heater, hot water, fridge, sump pump, etc.

As for leaving the area, how many places have you gone recently where you had to wait long periods of time and didn't have free wifi? Even my DMV has that.

Plus people usually have books, DVDs, or other forms of entertainment. When I lost power for a week, I wouldn't have been able to use TBs of movies even if I wanted to, but I had a cheap all-in-one portable DVD player that let me watch a movie or two a night (and I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did).

I canceled my Netflix subscription a couple of months ago, but I cant see them going completely extinct like Blockbuster.

@The_Viscount are you still subbed to Netflix?

Ferarri619 posted...

The point is Netflix is wasting their resources on making garbage original show. I remember when Daredevil was huge hype and it was a Netflix original. Now the shows they're producing are trash nobody cares about. HBO is producing some great originals and that's another big reason to switch.

Except every company "wastes their resources" making "garbage." These companies are making huge amounts of content. Of course some of it isn't going to be something you're interested in. Nobody likes everything. The mere existence of content you don't like shouldn't act as a deterrent in any way.

The absence of content you are interested in? That's a legitimate reason to ditch the service. The existence of content you aren't interested in, however, should mean absolutely nothing. Treating that as a factor is profoundly illogical.

The_Viscount posted...

You can't provide a better service than free. So long as piracy is ready available and convenient, people will favor that.

Sure you can. By and large, people are happy to pay for content they want, provided the price is reasonable and they don't have to jump through hoops to access it. Bonus points if you do what Steam did and provide a client with social features, game servers, easy management of downloads and updates, and recommendation services. You can absolutely offer a better service than free, given that the free option usually has to be riddled with ads to support the distribution service and doesn't make enough to offer anything more than barebones content delivery.

Is there still a need to crack down on piracy to keep it less convenient and exert some control over IP's, sure. But this hypothetical extreme of "nobody will ever buy things if it's too easy to pirate them" has never been anything more than a pearl-clutching myth, no less absurd than the claim that piracy doesn't result in lost sales.

The_Viscount posted...

The big reason iTunes caught on is because people cracked down on Napster, etc. if that hadn't happened, iTunes wouldn't have been able to build much of anything.

There was that, but one of the major driving factors behind Napster et al's popularity was how poor the service and pricing was in the music industry. The only legit option was to buy entire albums for a non-trivial amount of money, from one of a pretty limited number of stores that themselves could only carry a limited variety of CD's. Even for those that wanted to support the industry (as much as only a small fraction of revenue ever reaches the artists), if you only cared about 1-2 songs on those albums, that price was a pretty steep ask, and being relegated to searching bargain bins for anything older or more obscure wasn't great.

Enter iTunes, with a large, varied library and the option to buy individual songs for reasonable prices, and you've got a service that those who want to be legitimate consumers can use without feeling like they're being punished for doing the right thing (again, putting aside the question of how "right" supporting the music industry is). At the end of the day, iTunes didn't actually offer a better service than Napster and the like (they were basically the same service), so cracking down on larger piracy services to give it an edge was still necessary, but they still offered a good enough service that it set the bar high enough to be hard for pirates to beat.

The_Viscount posted...

NF has no real control over its marketplace beyond the services it offers, unless it's in a position to enforce a monopoly.

They don't, you're correct. The fragmentation of the streaming market is more the fault of larger studios getting greedy and keeping their own distribution rights so they can start their own services and take a slice of that pie, rather than anything Netflix has/hasn't done. Their transition into focusing on their original content is really the only move that makes sense, given that it's the only content they can consistently rely on, but that transition is inevitably going to tank subscriber numbers as people who generally haven't cared about Netflix's original stuff move on.

Them trying to salvage revenue by hiking fees and cracking down on account sharing, however, is only going to accelerate those departures and drive away some of the users that do want to stick around for their content, so that's a bad move.

The_Viscount posted...

People can bear discontentment -- issues like price hikes and reduced selections are annoyances -- but when you add insult to injury, that's usually when people take action.

And being insulted by the mere existence of a TV show you don't want to watch is stupid.

Ferarri619 posted...

@The_Viscount are you still subbed to Netflix?

I don't use mentions and nope. And while I could access other peoples' accounts, I'm not sure when I last touched NF -- maybe in the last 6 months I might've watched a movie or two, but years ago I was an active subscriber who might've watched maybe 10-15 hours of content on NF a week.

And, honestly, something of the stuff I watched but had been iffy about I wound up skipping after they started packaging it in what they might've called their "Diversity Matters Collection" because the blatant virtue-signaling was a poison pill turnoff. If not for that, there's a chance I might've continued those series despite being lukewarm on them.

adjl posted...

There was that, but one of the major driving factors behind Napster et al's popularity was how poor the service and pricing was in the music industry. The only legit option was to buy entire albums for a non-trivial amount of money, from one of a pretty limited number of stores that themselves could only carry a limited variety of CD's. Even for those that wanted to support the industry (as much as only a small fraction of revenue ever reaches the artists), if you only cared about 1-2 songs on those albums, that price was a pretty steep ask, and being relegated to searching bargain bins for anything older or more obscure wasn't great.

Enter iTunes, with a large, varied library and the option to buy individual songs for reasonable prices, and you've got a service that those who want to be legitimate consumers can use without feeling like they're being punished for doing the right thing (again, putting aside the question of how "right" supporting the music industry is). At the end of the day, iTunes didn't actually offer a better service than Napster and the like (they were basically the same service), so cracking down on larger piracy services to give it an edge was still necessary, but they still offered a good enough service that it set the bar high enough to be hard for pirates to beat.

I feel like you're vastly understating the impact of the DMCA and enforcement of same which was the driving force in countering piracy in that arena.

adjl posted...

Them trying to salvage revenue by hiking fees and cracking down on account sharing, however, is only going to accelerate those departures and drive away some of the users that do want to stick around for their content, so that's a bad move.

Hiking fees is a necessity, although cracking down on account sharing at the same time is just stupid.

adjl posted...

And being insulted by the mere existence of a TV show you don't want to watch is stupid.

Which is bullshit for you to claim since I'm sure the existence of at least some programming annoys you and that's WITHOUT the added knowledge that the rate hike is being used to support stuff like that.

adjl posted...

But this hypothetical extreme of "nobody will ever buy things if it's too easy to pirate them" has never been anything more than a pearl-clutching myth, no less absurd than the claim that piracy doesn't result in lost sales.

Nobody says that. They say the numbers are inflated since not everybody would buy the products they pirated.

JixHedgehog posted...

Heard they pulled the plug on a project they were working on with the Royal family

was it Cuties?

I canceled my Netflix with the latest price hike as well. It's more than doubled in price since I first subscribed and it keeps losing content to often (though not always) cheaper competitors.

Dikitain posted...

Disagree. I have my shows and movies on NAS and I can watch them without an internet connection, which makes them vastly superior IMO.
I always find this kind of a weird argument because downloading something implies that you have decent and reliable Internet in the first place. I might have s***ty Internet, but even I can count on one hand the amount of times I have been without Internet for more than 5 minutes, and half those times I was without power as well, so I wasn't going to be watching movies anyways.

I get the argument for not streaming video games (and fully agree with it) because of latency and lag issues. However when it comes to any other media I would rather just stream than keep several hundred dollars worth of hard drives in the corner of my house sucking up power.
After 16 years, I have decided my signature will NOT be about my job! But I still don't know what to put here so...yea...

Maybe in your case. I travel often, so having a physical or downloaded copy is always preferred. I don't know what kind of connections I will have day-to-day, and in some cases I don't have any connection.

Just finished Ozark

what the beep kinda ending was that?

Its gonna be funny when the stock goes up again and everyone who panic sold is buying it at ATH prices

People are just largely ignorant about their choices in obtaining media so they will just pay for the ignorance.
Many such examples in this thread.

Judgmenl posted...

People are just largely ignorant about their choices in obtaining media so they will just pay for the ignorance.
Many such examples in this thread.

Are you advocating piracy?

The_Viscount posted...

Are you advocating piracy?

Sure.

Streaming services in general are collapsing in on themselves. Not only have they become very similar to the cable channels people went to streaming to escape from in the first place, a lot have made bad decisions of late (High Guardian Spice, rate hikes, preventing multiple users) and there's just a lot of free content to watch on places like Youtube. They won't go the way of Blockbuster; but they're HEAVILY shooting themselves in the foot and we'll likely see a few more fail before long.

The_Viscount posted...

I feel like you're vastly understating the impact of the DMCA and enforcement of same which was the driving force in countering piracy in that arena.

It was a factor, certainly, but it was far from being the only one. You can make legal consumption more convenient than piracy both by improving legal service and making piracy less convenient, and that's very much what happened. People generally do want to pay for stuff, unless they feel they're getting ripped off.

The_Viscount posted...

Hiking fees is a necessity, although cracking down on account sharing at the same time is just stupid.

Netflix's revenue has been breaking records every quarter for the last two years (if not more), thanks to pandemic-fuelled increases in demand. Nothing about hiking fees is "necessary" for them to continue running a successful business. What it is "necessary" for is to keep that growth going indefinitely to keep shareholders happy, which simply isn't a realistic goal, especially given how crowded the market is becoming.

Increasing their rates is corporate greed. Nothing more. Cracking down on account sharing is the same.

The_Viscount posted...

Which is bulls*** for you to claim since I'm sure the existence of at least some programming annoys you

Enough to say "that's stupid"? Sure. Enough to drive me to boycott the entire service/company over it? Not unless it's reflective of some truly troubling business practices (and that's troubling in the sense of "they beat anyone that tried to avoid working 150-hour weeks," not "they like gay people more than me").

The_Viscount posted...

and that's WITHOUT the added knowledge that the rate hike is being used to support stuff like that.

Pretty much any money you give to any corporation in any context is used to support far, far more deplorable things than making TV shows you don't like. That's a thoroughly ridiculous place to draw the line, especially given how fungible money is.