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It’s not like cable was going to vanish and leave us with this wonderful ad-free Ala carte service we've always wanted. They dangled the bait and once everyone bit they set the hook and reeled in the suckers with an even worse, and costlier, scenario. In every avenue of entertainment, marketing is there to make sure it fucking sucks. Even some of the pirate apps have ads in them. Greed ruins everything and will be remembered as the true folly of man.
Set sail mofos! 🏴☠️
poor service
bad library
too expensive
can’t share passwords
“How could pirates do this!?!??!”
Operating Revenue: 33,723,297,000
Cost of Revenue: 19,715,368,000
Gross Profit: 14,007,929,000
Operating Expense: 7,053,926,000
Operating Income: 6,954,003,000
"Our profits may be obscene, but they're not obscene enough! How could these evil pirates ever do this to us?"
Cry less, make better service more.
It's not like I dropped Netflix and opted to pirate their content instead because of their password sharing restrictions or anything. Nah, can't be that.
Once, not so long ago, streaming was more convenient than pirating. But, as expected the commercial services went through their Standard Cycle of Enshittification and now we either let ourselves get flogged by 50 competing predatory services or just take the easy way and sail the high seas.
The choice is not that hard. Yarr.
Of course this returns us to the state where the streaming companies who have literally "enshitted their own beds" now turn to legislators and policymakers (who they hated, just couple of weeks ago) to ask them to provide some "law and order" to this unruly mob and to defend the corporations right to put thumbscrews on the population for ever increasing profits.
And so it goes.
I'd love some kind of federated streaming service. So that different content providers can sell their stuff, you pay once monthly into a pool, and you can choose different clients to access all content services. Then the money gets distributed depending on your viewing habits.
Fully agree. I‘m shocked though that corpo shills are not all over this post as they are in every other community. They probably stay out of this community or get banned quickly.
I‘m getting blasted regularly on memes and other communities.
Everyone is blaming Netflix, but it’s not their fault.
It’s the fault of the content owners. Disney, fox, paramount etc…..
Rather than make a little money off of Netflix, they decided they could scam more money by launching their own competing service
They all collectively and individually enshittified until it became worthwhile to pirate again.
They can point fingers all they want, or change their attitudes for longer-term gain.
The problem is, of course, their shareholders who are pushing for maximizing short-term profits, and then shareholder primacy, meaning they are legally obligated to obey their shareholders, even at the cost of business collapse.
Let them die.
Being first does not make you the legitimate proprietor of a flawed system.
The greatest flaw in the system is the fragmentation and consequential cost - when things were consolidated under Netflix, things weren't perfect but it can't be said that they weren't far better.
The true underlying flaw is capitalism, but isn't it always?
It's also Netflix's fault.
It's less Netflix fault than others' fault.
I probably wouldn't have cancelled Netflix if it weren't for their password policy change. That's Netflix's fault, but the content wasn't great, so it made it easier to pull the plug.
I've never seen a magnet link respond with "this is not available in your country".
The likes of FMovies and movie-web offer a virtually unlimited catalogue that contains everything you could ever stream, for free. And their streaming quality is almost always at par with Netflix, if not more. There is zero rational reason why anyone would turn to those "legit" streaming platforms if they know about them.
The only thing separating is app support on smart TVs. It's Game Over once TVs start allowing PWAs and ad-blocking browsers (do they already? I don't know).
Well my smart TV does, oh shit, I added a laptop with a dead screen to the TV because the smarts were dumb and slow and didn’t do what I wanted
Try making a decent product again then, that seemed to limit piracy quite a bit
Jellyfin / self hosting is so great. You get the experience of a good streaming service and you can share with your friends and family, and there is no risk of a DMCA other than the initial seeding.
Unless you are friends or family with one of the Disney execs.
dear netflix: may i interest you in the concept of not raising prices every year, not cancelling every queer show you put out, and not catering to transphobic bigot comedians?
Being someone who is less sensitive to those signals I wonder if it's that they are being phobic or if it's a situation where those issues and associated audiences are easier to marginalize... oh shit, had another revelation in the white, 35 and up market over here. Those systems roll hard.
Guys! If you are part of a group that has a month things might not be going well.
All jokes aside. Thanks for pointing this out as something I can be aware of. I'm pretty pro-human but things skip through the cracks. Good luck out there friend.
Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.
I fondly recall excitedly using Netflix on my PS3 all the fucking time in like 2011. It was cheap, there was an app right there on the device I already bought, and there was a pretty good selection of content that got updated frequently enough. I had friends who would pirate and I was interested in getting into that until Netflix came along and completely fulfilled the need for me. The incredible convenience made it worth it over the work to learn how to pirate and the time to safely find everything and the risk of getting caught, and then even after doing all of that it would be on a computer and not just a couple of button presses from my couch. I know piracy has gotten to a point now where it's much more convenient, but back then it was a totally different beast. All of this was. YouTube was so much better for users and for certain classes of creators. Media and media platforms across the board are fucking terrible compared to back then. We used to chastise people for still having cable because Netflix was so fucking incredible in comparison. Idk what comes next, but these streaming companies are on the way out if they don't figure it the fuck out. At this point, I'd rather go backwards to go to a goddamn Blockbuster these days.
Your local library probably has a better selection of movies and TV for free than any streaming service you might consider paying for. Let's starve these beasts.
Everyone decided they wanted to have their own streaming and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That fragmented where to watch and caused old shows and movies to cost way more for streaming rights.
Then Netflix cancels too many originals without proper endings, which passes people off. After that they got rid of password sharing which made it a pain to have a work and home type of viewing experience. Now they're adding ads. They've become shit and now it's making it a bit harder for themselves.
It's a mystery! I'll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.
My issue was cutting out the sharing. I was paying for 4 screens at a time. Why should they care which 4 screens are being used?
Once I realized a decent VPN was $5/month, that I could get TV shows without the 35% time addition of commercials, and stop worrying about what I get going away, the issue wasn't that Netflix was bad, it was just worse than the alternative.
edit: not that Netflix has commercials, but the fact one could get anything without them as well (like paying for cable...)
not that Netflix has commercials
There's a tier with commercials for many countries now.
Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.
Pirate streaming growth itself doesn't 'threaten legal services' as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry's market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term 'hearts and minds' approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You're now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That's not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with 'you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity'.
They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.
That's funny, I haven't stolen music in over 10 years thanks to Spotify, but they haven't split all the music into 20 services or jacked up the price every year.
Granted they don't pay the artists, but that's not my problem.
And even the "they don't pay the artist thing" is somewhat defensible in that the record labels take a much larger cut than Spotify.
They're the main ones taking the money away from artists.
By far my main issue with Spotify is for giving massive paycheques to the likes of Joe Rogan
Bullshit. Make it reasonably priced, fast and easy to access, no bullshit, clean interface, no ads, great customer support, and I'll rip this parrot right off my mother lovin shoulder.