They started to enforce the multi home rule on my account, so I cancelled my subscription. I think I had the account over 10 years. I was barely using my account anymore, so I don't miss it that much.
Same here. I feel bad for my family who was using my account (and has less disposable income) but they have access to our Plex now so win/win.
Don't you need a lot of upload speed for Plex etc to work?
Depends. For example a large ISP will have generous up/down speeds within the same city for customers on its own infrastructure so maybe that helps. You can of course transcode to less quality.
If you have fiber, 99% of the time your speeds are symmetric.
Yea sadly I have fiber at 100down and 10 up. And from what I can tell, I need faster upload to stream anything to anyone. And yes, this is the best option available.
That can't be considered fibre than can it? Fibre is generally 1gup/down atleast in my city.
Fibre is just the medium of transmission, the ISPs can throttle it however they want.
I saw the actual fiber spools they rolled out. It's a fiberoptic cable. I just live out in the country and the other option is LTE4. The DSL company basically quit selling it, and it was slower than LTE4.
Looks like they're trying the new twitter and reddit strategies. FOMO is real!
It's like all the CEOs decided "we're doing ok, but I want a legacy. Today's the day I'm going to burn this place to the ground, and refuse to admit I was wrong"
FOMO?
Fear Of Missing Out
How does this apply to this situation?
They mean it sarcastically. FOMO on fucking up spectacularly
Is a result of the massive shift in the economy over the last year. Lots of these tech companies were built on the back of the historicly low interest rates since 2008 meaning people saw better returns on investment than saving so there's money at anything. With the interest rates shooting back up, it's now the other way around so these companies need to be making much more profits and paying out much bigger returns to keep investors interested rather than just sitting on their hordes like Scroge McDuck.
I agree and I don’t think they are equipped to deal with the future economy. Web 3.0 is going to level these assholes and it’s going to be glorious. I see a future without these tech giants. I can’t wait to watch them all implode.
This is just going to push more people to piracy.
It’s funny how these things go.
Long ago, you would need to buy or rent your movies, because other options weren’t really very convenient or effective. Then the internet became fast enough for you to use DC++ and later torrents to get all the movies you would ever want to see. Next, streaming services became popular due to convenience, ease of use and affordable prices.
What’s going on today? Streaming services are increasing prices and reducing convenience. Seems like the balance of power is tipping again.
And meanwhile extremely convenient piracy options have cropped up, like, just as convenient as real services, if not more because all the content is in one place.
Hell many people even use paid piracy services.
Not me though, I'll suck my dad before I pay for piracy.
I won't pay for piracy as they if they share content they could share payment details.
My number one criticism of Netflix was that it was too accessible so this is a welcome change, I really think the higher bar will increase the quality of views.
Do you not think it's a bit too cheap as well? I feel guilty thieving such a quality service from them.
Real question - not sure if you guys are serious? It's my least used service these days due to the quality and longevity of its content (outside of the kids shows)
I think getynge was being sarcastic and I was following suit. I do actually have a subscription because my family uses it a lot but I agree that the service is getting worse and worse. What other services do you prefer?
Not OP but for me Netflix is useful because of weird stuff it provides, like anime and Korean romcoms.
That stuff is definitely not anybody else's cup of tea, so if they ever force me to stop sharing it with family and girlfriend I would readily pick any other service over it (Disney, HBO, Amazon etc.)
Mostly Prime these days because they have some pretty obscure horror, but I don't know if I'd subscribe if it didn't come with Amazon Prime.
MAX has also been pretty solid since all of the documentary channels were brought in, and the HBO originals are always good for a rewatch.
Honestly AppleTV has been putting out some of the best OC these days, if I wasn't getting it for free I would be okay paying for it.
I've heard good things about AppleTV. My friend has been raving about Ted Lasso.
I do feel like it's quantity over quality with a lot of the streaming services.
I agree
Netflix used to be the only game in town, now they are just the most expensive.
I recently cancelled all streaming services I had.
Ditto. I'm on Kodi / The Crew + Real Debrid. Such a pleasure to use.
Do debrid services even seed back?
From what ive been reading it seems that they just don't.
That's a great question. I believe it does
What's realbird? Like a seed box?
Yep!
Correction. I guess it is a bit different than a seedbox (I've never used a seedbox)
Here is what I found online:
A Debrid service has support for multiple premium file hosts, while a Seedbox does not
A Debrid service, once it completes a torrent download, will stop seeding, while a Seedbox seeds a download forever until you stop it from seeding (hence the name).
Some Debrid services, such as Premiumize, can seed for a certain amount of time.
A Debrid service is usually cheaper than a Seedbox.
RealDebrid not only allows you to download but also stream directly from them. I use rclone to mount the drive to my media server and read the files with Plex/Jellyfin.
Ah ok so it's a bit different setup but basically like Plex + seedbox and + rr suite
Ribbit
Yes! Plex_Debrid is the automation component that will go and add the torrents to RealDebrid based on your Watchlist in Plex. The Plex_Debrid Github has a step by step guide on setting each component up.
Ribbit
Does this stream the torrent or does it steam just from my debris account?
It downloads the torrent and then streams from the service. That way your traffic is clean.
Everyone here seems to think this'll be another nail in their coffin. But I'm not sure. As far as I know, they're the only steaming platform that's actually profitable. Plus any current users of that plan are getting grandfathered in, so they're just removing the option for new people which I think is pretty normal for services to do.
Only they know how many people are on the 720p plan. And I'd bet they've run the numbers to know that they'll make more revenue from new users who sign up for the higher tier than the revenue lost from users no longer being able to select this plan.
Profitability is a funny thing, especially with internet services and such. Some companies launch and raise money hand over fist without even having a revenue plan in place - I had a family member who proudly boasted about how he was going to short google at their ipo because they were obviously going to crash hard and were all hype. Other companies have a model for revenue but choose to concentrate on growth instead. Amazon skirted profitability for years as it sank its money into infrastructure and kept its prices low.
Companies can have staggering valuations because of the prospect of growth, and profits (depending on where they are coming from and what you’re doing with them) may not contribute to that perception because that’s money nominally not going into headcount, r&d, etc. This is especially true of streaming services that are rising on the backs of other profit centers, such as Disney. Hollywood accounting is an entirely separate beast anyway.
Ultimately, the importance of profitability is decided by the stakeholders - the large investors, board, and c-suite. If people are happy with the growth model and performance, they’re not going to care as much about the balance sheet. Stock prices stay up. If money starts to get tight, stock prices will fall and the company will go into cost cutting.
All of which is to say that if Netflix starts to lose customers, it should probably get pinched. They’re going after new markets and developing new IP, but the space has become really crowded over the last several years. They’re not going full Musk, but they are making decisions that will affect growth and retention in a per-customer revenue grab. To me, that means they’re having accounting issues and they’re hoping their continuing IP investments and international growth (where they might still be losing money) will be paid for by the customers they do manage to hold onto.
As a customer who subscribes to at least ten streaming services, I’m probably going to just start rotating monthly. That will save money, give me enough time (and focus) to catch up on the series I actually want to finish, and at least theoretically let me show a reaction to the price hikes.
I mean, the essential problem is the streaming video services don't have close enough to "everything" that the streaming audio services have. So you essentially fragment your market. You basically become a specific niche (in a way) because you can't appeal to "everyone" because you can't afford to make a popular version of "any show". This tied with people already wanted to shrink their cable bill so most people DO NOT WANT 10 streaming services. Even if they have the money to burn, they will feel (like you do) that they can't possibly make use of 10 streaming services worth of content. So you start to be choosy about what shows you want to watch, and probably start to lose FOMO because it's so fragmented there's just not that many "everyone is watching the show and I want to talk about it with them" that used to make appointment TV. I.e. there's less peer pressure to talk about any given Netflix (or Hulu, or P+ or D+ etc) show, so you might well think "hey, that's something I might like, but it's like not important enough for me to pay to see it or plan to see it." And today, if you aren't scheduling it - I'd say there's a good chance it'll be like that 500th book you got at the local book sale for $0.50 that "you definitely plan to read" that's been sitting at #500 for the past 10 years.
What's even worse is unlike in the 80s when cable took off is that there's so much content and competition that people probably aren't even watching as much "TV" as they used to. I already mentioned books, but there's comics, graphic novels, forums like this, YouTube, Anime (a big portion of a whole other cultures collective TV series added in now mainstream), video games, 3 hour long podcasts, and just fricken getting off a device and going outside. Some of this always existed, but a lot is new, and competing. I'd argue that as a share of what you could do in your spare time, as a whole TV is down.
I don't know if it would ever work, but I do wonder if we don't start to see something like "personal syndication" return. I know the app stores used to sell an episode of a specific show for $4 or something, but that's way too much. But I wonder if we start to see much lower per ep pricing where you literally pay for the show you want more directly. But again, we rapidly hit the microtransaction problem again. Maybe you just can't pay for an episode at at time, you have to pay per season to make it work. Maybe $4 a season / no ads would work? IDK. I guess as soon as you want more than 4 shows on a given streamer it makes sense to buy it bulk.
I don’t think micropayments have entirely worked yet. There’s still intellectual resistance to paying for an article that you expect to be free, and I don’t know if you could change that by making them available for $.05. It hasn’t been normalized yet.
I also have not yet caught up on 80% of the shows I was enjoying last year, including multiple Treks, shows where people cook stuff or make clothes, or stupid sitcoms that I got eight episodes in before being distracted by jingling keys. Don’t even get me started on my Steam library - I bought a Deck just to try to work through my backlog of more unplayed than played games.
I liked it when Netflix had movies I wanted to watch and shows I had missed. I watched Lost, Heroes (S1), B5, and Battlestar for the first time on the service. There was a service, and it had a lot of content. Then the studios, which had ignored streaming, saw there was a market and jumped in while raising prices or withdrawing licensing.
People went to Netflix from Pirate Bay because, as Steve Jobs pointed out when he got music studios to remove DRM, people will pay for it if it’s easy and reliable. It has ceased being easy and reliable because of fragmentation and predatory pricing.
I hope Netflix’s strategy dies and they have to think of something better. I hope the same for twitter and reddit. But other than the occasional glance in the rear view mirror for an opportune “I told you so,” I really am not planning on paying attention beyond logging off.
including multiple Treks
And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.
I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.
I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.
Sounds like a bad idea..
I hate Netflix as much as you guys do and I think their content is dogshit, but you're naive if you think they're going under any time soon. Their revenue increased from the password sharing ban crap, and it's likely only like 1% of people used the 720p plan anyway. Netflix is ass but financially they're chillin.
I still pay for NF and will probably keep paying for it in the foreseeable future. There is some local (Thai) content on it that my partner wants to watch. Content on any of the other services is too little to even bother with.
I pirate whatever looks interesting and isn't on NF.
And what is the price? I think it's like $16 CAD a month or so? So the price of a movie ticket and not even enough for a small popcorn. I find it a bit overreacting that people act like that's way too expensive for what you get out of it. Used to be that I'd spend way more than that for a TV show season on DVD that I'd finish in a week.
I'm not saying this is a good move. But the folks vowing to only ever pirate because a month of content costs about as much as my local hourly min wage seems a bit much.
They're forcing me away everytime they make a decision. I'll stick with paying for a plexshare, I know I can get it for free elsewhere, but I can't be arsed messing about if there's shit links.
Wasn't plexshare that led to a lastpass employee getting keylogger on his system and then attackers getting the full download of vaults.
I cancelled when they jacked up their prices and announced the ad-supported tier. They've been nothing but anti-consumer the last couple years and their product just isn't worth the price anymore.
All of these internet corporations really thought they were institutions that could not be rattled. They forget that in the grand scheme of things they have been around for no time at all and consumers will be happy to move to whatever comes along next.
They haven't forgotten anything. What we are seeing now is simply the result of climbing interest rates and the loss of cheap debt forcing companies to actually become profitable by any means necessary.
Aye ye scallywags! T'night we sail the seven seas!
I paid the highest amount so my friend and her nuclear family could watch Netflix at the same time as my husband and I. They got shut out so I just cancelled. My friend bought a lower package so Netflix actually lost money. Not sure it is going to work out worth it for them overall.
I guess your average Joe is just gonna take it as things get shittier
For those looking for alternatives, I would only suggest Plex if you're OK with hitching your wagon to a different company with interests possibly competing with your own. Its great software and easy to set up but they can remove features you like and use at any time. It may be a risk worth taking for you but go into it with eyes open. I dropped them when they removed photo sync and started getting more aggressive about their content offerings.
Jellyfin is my current home and I like it a lot but I recognize that not everyone wants to deal with the setup and troubleshooting.
For some middle ground, there's also Emby which is a commercial version of Jellyfin.
I like Jellyfin but I do not like the way it shitted up my media directories. I have them meticulously sorted. I don't want images and database shit in them. I much prefer how Plex keeps its database and metadata separated and in its own directory. I would otherwise love to switch.
You should use jellyfin in docker and mount your media files without write permissions. It's exactly what I do partially for this but more to ease maintenance and reproducing my server.
My media box runs Windows 10 but I'll be converting it to Linux eventually. My main PC is Linux but I am a newbie. If you could, tell me what docker is.
Docker is a container framework. Basically a recipe for a piece of software or a service. All you have to do is download a docker container image (there's numerous one pre prepared for stuff like qbittorrent or sonarr or jellyfin) and you need to mount (basically reference) your media or configuration directories into the container. By default each container is basically it's own self contained os (like a vm, but much more efficient). This prevents services from stepping over each other and aids composability because if you're interested in something new like bazarr literally all you have to do is pull an image and configure it. There's also something called docker-compose which let's you put all that configuration for your services into a readable yaml file and then you can just move it from machine to machine to setup or transition.
Note. You can use docker on windows but it's much more efficient on actual Linux. Windows just runs a pseudo Linux VM for docker support. The real thing is always better.
+1 for Jellyfin. GPL licensed software so nice.
I really need to build a media server
Plex is really easy to run and use.
Cool I’ll try that. I just have to pull out an old Sony VAIO or something :D
Netflix has been cooking this up for years now and other video platforms like Youtube are testing similar strategies already to follow suit. Prices are ramping up and quality of pretty much all services (web and others) is downspiraling rapidly. Guess that's what they call market self-regulation, heh? Anyway, as much as Netflix and others say this will make them a great deal of money, it will backfire soon or later. I think a lot of us will realise we're better off with less of these time wasters in our lives in the end.
Personally I got fed up of all their cancelling shows I was actually interested in. Moved to paramount plus to get star trek, then will probably cancel that for as bit. Just found myself watching crap on netflix, I can get crap from the free streamers like Roku and Pluto and 4od/itvx/my5 that get free in UK (with ads no subs)
Looks like the basic tier was already shrinking anyways as people were opting for the ads option more and more, so they decided to nix it anyways to make their own lives easier.
Makes sense, its 1 less "mode" to support and that is a big deal for QA testing.
I still have an active Netflix account (for the odd thing I haven't yet added to my self-hosted Jellyfin instance), and actually downgraded from the Premium tier to the Basic tier a few months ago when they started cracking down on password-sharing here in Canada.
Even though the Basic tier is "only 720p", I barely notice the difference in quality since my TV (and a lot of other modern TVs) has built-in upscaling that works surprisingly well. And I'm the type that is really picky about picture quality, particular about codecs and encoding methods, and all that jazz. But I'm really happy that I managed to get onto the Basic tier before they removed it. I was prepared for a clear drop in quality in return for cost-savings, and I was okay with that, but was delighted to find nothing had noticeably changed after switching over.
The Basic tier checks all of my boxes, verifiably:
1 screen at a time is enough
The end result of the video quality I can perceive is perfect
Cheapest plan without ads
Sometimes I even wonder if my TV is even actually upscaling from 720p, or if Netflix is just quietly serving 1080p in reality, but was just continuing to advertise 720p to deter people from the cheaper plan to get them onto a more expensive one, with plans all along to phase this tier out.
My parents, who were previously sharing my account when I was on the Premium tier, ended up getting their own account also on the Basic tier. The net result is that Netflix makes less money off of the two of our accounts combined now compared to the single Premium account we shared before. So in the end, they ended up losing money, and we lost nothing of perceivable value.
I'll probably end up cancelling our account at some point entirely, and my parents can continue to use their own account without being affected, so the forced split actually saved us all money and made our situations more future-proofed.
Contrary to popular belief, I actually think that the Basic tier could have ended up seeing more uptake in the long-run had people who only needed a single screen and wanted to save money, decided to try it, and notice that the picture quality was more than satisfactory enough, either due to the stream quality being better than advertised in reality, or due to the pretty good upscaling ability of modern TVs. I'm sure word would have gotten around from technically-minded people to the masses at some point, and we would have seen more people switching.
I'm sure Netflix did away with the Basic tier because they knew it could realistically put a dent in their profits at some point.
Verizon just upped the price of my grandfathered plan I was on. They told me that on the phone. I just left, luckily that was an option.
It was inevitable after the response to Netflix's crackdown on account sharing and progressively higher prices.
That was a critical moment for the users to exercise their leverage against a new, worse direction in the value of streaming offerings, but the general user lacked the foresight to understand that.
Now that it's been proven that the general user will maintain their subscription even after such drastic changes in value, the trend of a loss of flexibility in tier options, the inclusion of ads in more, if not all, tier options; multi-month subscription requirements, and the complete loss of account sharing will all continue, not only in Netflix but accross all the streaming industry as a whole.
Ads is my line in the sand. They bring in ads on my tier (HD 2 connections) and they'll be dropped in a flash.
The streaming market was good when Netflix were pretty much the main game in town and had most of the content.
I don't want to pirate. But I also don't want a huge monthly bill for multiple services with multiple interfaces to get still less content. I kept Netflix around but any shenanigans that effect me and I'm out.
They started to enforce the multi home rule on my account, so I cancelled my subscription. I think I had the account over 10 years. I was barely using my account anymore, so I don't miss it that much.
Same here. I feel bad for my family who was using my account (and has less disposable income) but they have access to our Plex now so win/win.
Don't you need a lot of upload speed for Plex etc to work?
Depends. For example a large ISP will have generous up/down speeds within the same city for customers on its own infrastructure so maybe that helps. You can of course transcode to less quality.
If you have fiber, 99% of the time your speeds are symmetric.
Yea sadly I have fiber at 100down and 10 up. And from what I can tell, I need faster upload to stream anything to anyone. And yes, this is the best option available.
That can't be considered fibre than can it? Fibre is generally 1gup/down atleast in my city.
Fibre is just the medium of transmission, the ISPs can throttle it however they want.
I saw the actual fiber spools they rolled out. It's a fiberoptic cable. I just live out in the country and the other option is LTE4. The DSL company basically quit selling it, and it was slower than LTE4.
Looks like they're trying the new twitter and reddit strategies. FOMO is real!
It's like all the CEOs decided "we're doing ok, but I want a legacy. Today's the day I'm going to burn this place to the ground, and refuse to admit I was wrong"
FOMO?
Fear Of Missing Out
How does this apply to this situation?
They mean it sarcastically. FOMO on fucking up spectacularly
Is a result of the massive shift in the economy over the last year. Lots of these tech companies were built on the back of the historicly low interest rates since 2008 meaning people saw better returns on investment than saving so there's money at anything. With the interest rates shooting back up, it's now the other way around so these companies need to be making much more profits and paying out much bigger returns to keep investors interested rather than just sitting on their hordes like Scroge McDuck.
I agree and I don’t think they are equipped to deal with the future economy. Web 3.0 is going to level these assholes and it’s going to be glorious. I see a future without these tech giants. I can’t wait to watch them all implode.
This is just going to push more people to piracy.
It’s funny how these things go.
Long ago, you would need to buy or rent your movies, because other options weren’t really very convenient or effective. Then the internet became fast enough for you to use DC++ and later torrents to get all the movies you would ever want to see. Next, streaming services became popular due to convenience, ease of use and affordable prices.
What’s going on today? Streaming services are increasing prices and reducing convenience. Seems like the balance of power is tipping again.
And meanwhile extremely convenient piracy options have cropped up, like, just as convenient as real services, if not more because all the content is in one place.
Hell many people even use paid piracy services.
Not me though, I'll suck my dad before I pay for piracy.
I won't pay for piracy as they if they share content they could share payment details.
Also volunteer to suck dad 👋🏼
Already done it for me
My number one criticism of Netflix was that it was too accessible so this is a welcome change, I really think the higher bar will increase the quality of views.
Do you not think it's a bit too cheap as well? I feel guilty thieving such a quality service from them.
Real question - not sure if you guys are serious? It's my least used service these days due to the quality and longevity of its content (outside of the kids shows)
I think getynge was being sarcastic and I was following suit. I do actually have a subscription because my family uses it a lot but I agree that the service is getting worse and worse. What other services do you prefer?
Not OP but for me Netflix is useful because of weird stuff it provides, like anime and Korean romcoms.
That stuff is definitely not anybody else's cup of tea, so if they ever force me to stop sharing it with family and girlfriend I would readily pick any other service over it (Disney, HBO, Amazon etc.)
Mostly Prime these days because they have some pretty obscure horror, but I don't know if I'd subscribe if it didn't come with Amazon Prime.
MAX has also been pretty solid since all of the documentary channels were brought in, and the HBO originals are always good for a rewatch.
Honestly AppleTV has been putting out some of the best OC these days, if I wasn't getting it for free I would be okay paying for it.
I've heard good things about AppleTV. My friend has been raving about Ted Lasso.
I do feel like it's quantity over quality with a lot of the streaming services.
I agree
Netflix used to be the only game in town, now they are just the most expensive.
I recently cancelled all streaming services I had.
I now use Plex / Jellyfin with Plex_Debrid & RealDebrid.
Ditto. I'm on Kodi / The Crew + Real Debrid. Such a pleasure to use.
Do debrid services even seed back?
From what ive been reading it seems that they just don't.
That's a great question. I believe it does
What's realbird? Like a seed box?
Yep!Correction. I guess it is a bit different than a seedbox (I've never used a seedbox)
Here is what I found online:
RealDebrid not only allows you to download but also stream directly from them. I use rclone to mount the drive to my media server and read the files with Plex/Jellyfin.
Ah ok so it's a bit different setup but basically like Plex + seedbox and + rr suite
Ribbit
Yes! Plex_Debrid is the automation component that will go and add the torrents to RealDebrid based on your Watchlist in Plex. The Plex_Debrid Github has a step by step guide on setting each component up.
Ribbit
Does this stream the torrent or does it steam just from my debris account?
It downloads the torrent and then streams from the service. That way your traffic is clean.
Good choice
Everyone here seems to think this'll be another nail in their coffin. But I'm not sure. As far as I know, they're the only steaming platform that's actually profitable. Plus any current users of that plan are getting grandfathered in, so they're just removing the option for new people which I think is pretty normal for services to do.
Only they know how many people are on the 720p plan. And I'd bet they've run the numbers to know that they'll make more revenue from new users who sign up for the higher tier than the revenue lost from users no longer being able to select this plan.
Profitability is a funny thing, especially with internet services and such. Some companies launch and raise money hand over fist without even having a revenue plan in place - I had a family member who proudly boasted about how he was going to short google at their ipo because they were obviously going to crash hard and were all hype. Other companies have a model for revenue but choose to concentrate on growth instead. Amazon skirted profitability for years as it sank its money into infrastructure and kept its prices low.
Companies can have staggering valuations because of the prospect of growth, and profits (depending on where they are coming from and what you’re doing with them) may not contribute to that perception because that’s money nominally not going into headcount, r&d, etc. This is especially true of streaming services that are rising on the backs of other profit centers, such as Disney. Hollywood accounting is an entirely separate beast anyway.
Ultimately, the importance of profitability is decided by the stakeholders - the large investors, board, and c-suite. If people are happy with the growth model and performance, they’re not going to care as much about the balance sheet. Stock prices stay up. If money starts to get tight, stock prices will fall and the company will go into cost cutting.
All of which is to say that if Netflix starts to lose customers, it should probably get pinched. They’re going after new markets and developing new IP, but the space has become really crowded over the last several years. They’re not going full Musk, but they are making decisions that will affect growth and retention in a per-customer revenue grab. To me, that means they’re having accounting issues and they’re hoping their continuing IP investments and international growth (where they might still be losing money) will be paid for by the customers they do manage to hold onto.
As a customer who subscribes to at least ten streaming services, I’m probably going to just start rotating monthly. That will save money, give me enough time (and focus) to catch up on the series I actually want to finish, and at least theoretically let me show a reaction to the price hikes.
I mean, the essential problem is the streaming video services don't have close enough to "everything" that the streaming audio services have. So you essentially fragment your market. You basically become a specific niche (in a way) because you can't appeal to "everyone" because you can't afford to make a popular version of "any show". This tied with people already wanted to shrink their cable bill so most people DO NOT WANT 10 streaming services. Even if they have the money to burn, they will feel (like you do) that they can't possibly make use of 10 streaming services worth of content. So you start to be choosy about what shows you want to watch, and probably start to lose FOMO because it's so fragmented there's just not that many "everyone is watching the show and I want to talk about it with them" that used to make appointment TV. I.e. there's less peer pressure to talk about any given Netflix (or Hulu, or P+ or D+ etc) show, so you might well think "hey, that's something I might like, but it's like not important enough for me to pay to see it or plan to see it." And today, if you aren't scheduling it - I'd say there's a good chance it'll be like that 500th book you got at the local book sale for $0.50 that "you definitely plan to read" that's been sitting at #500 for the past 10 years.
What's even worse is unlike in the 80s when cable took off is that there's so much content and competition that people probably aren't even watching as much "TV" as they used to. I already mentioned books, but there's comics, graphic novels, forums like this, YouTube, Anime (a big portion of a whole other cultures collective TV series added in now mainstream), video games, 3 hour long podcasts, and just fricken getting off a device and going outside. Some of this always existed, but a lot is new, and competing. I'd argue that as a share of what you could do in your spare time, as a whole TV is down.
I don't know if it would ever work, but I do wonder if we don't start to see something like "personal syndication" return. I know the app stores used to sell an episode of a specific show for $4 or something, but that's way too much. But I wonder if we start to see much lower per ep pricing where you literally pay for the show you want more directly. But again, we rapidly hit the microtransaction problem again. Maybe you just can't pay for an episode at at time, you have to pay per season to make it work. Maybe $4 a season / no ads would work? IDK. I guess as soon as you want more than 4 shows on a given streamer it makes sense to buy it bulk.
I don’t think micropayments have entirely worked yet. There’s still intellectual resistance to paying for an article that you expect to be free, and I don’t know if you could change that by making them available for $.05. It hasn’t been normalized yet.
I also have not yet caught up on 80% of the shows I was enjoying last year, including multiple Treks, shows where people cook stuff or make clothes, or stupid sitcoms that I got eight episodes in before being distracted by jingling keys. Don’t even get me started on my Steam library - I bought a Deck just to try to work through my backlog of more unplayed than played games.
I liked it when Netflix had movies I wanted to watch and shows I had missed. I watched Lost, Heroes (S1), B5, and Battlestar for the first time on the service. There was a service, and it had a lot of content. Then the studios, which had ignored streaming, saw there was a market and jumped in while raising prices or withdrawing licensing.
People went to Netflix from Pirate Bay because, as Steve Jobs pointed out when he got music studios to remove DRM, people will pay for it if it’s easy and reliable. It has ceased being easy and reliable because of fragmentation and predatory pricing.
I hope Netflix’s strategy dies and they have to think of something better. I hope the same for twitter and reddit. But other than the occasional glance in the rear view mirror for an opportune “I told you so,” I really am not planning on paying attention beyond logging off.
And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.
I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.
I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.
Sounds like a bad idea..
I hate Netflix as much as you guys do and I think their content is dogshit, but you're naive if you think they're going under any time soon. Their revenue increased from the password sharing ban crap, and it's likely only like 1% of people used the 720p plan anyway. Netflix is ass but financially they're chillin.
I still pay for NF and will probably keep paying for it in the foreseeable future. There is some local (Thai) content on it that my partner wants to watch. Content on any of the other services is too little to even bother with.
I pirate whatever looks interesting and isn't on NF.
And what is the price? I think it's like $16 CAD a month or so? So the price of a movie ticket and not even enough for a small popcorn. I find it a bit overreacting that people act like that's way too expensive for what you get out of it. Used to be that I'd spend way more than that for a TV show season on DVD that I'd finish in a week.
I'm not saying this is a good move. But the folks vowing to only ever pirate because a month of content costs about as much as my local hourly min wage seems a bit much.
They're forcing me away everytime they make a decision. I'll stick with paying for a plexshare, I know I can get it for free elsewhere, but I can't be arsed messing about if there's shit links.
Wasn't plexshare that led to a lastpass employee getting keylogger on his system and then attackers getting the full download of vaults.
I cancelled when they jacked up their prices and announced the ad-supported tier. They've been nothing but anti-consumer the last couple years and their product just isn't worth the price anymore.
All of these internet corporations really thought they were institutions that could not be rattled. They forget that in the grand scheme of things they have been around for no time at all and consumers will be happy to move to whatever comes along next.
They haven't forgotten anything. What we are seeing now is simply the result of climbing interest rates and the loss of cheap debt forcing companies to actually become profitable by any means necessary.
Aye ye scallywags! T'night we sail the seven seas!
I paid the highest amount so my friend and her nuclear family could watch Netflix at the same time as my husband and I. They got shut out so I just cancelled. My friend bought a lower package so Netflix actually lost money. Not sure it is going to work out worth it for them overall.
So far it seems like it might be working out really well for them: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66240390
I guess your average Joe is just gonna take it as things get shittier
For those looking for alternatives, I would only suggest Plex if you're OK with hitching your wagon to a different company with interests possibly competing with your own. Its great software and easy to set up but they can remove features you like and use at any time. It may be a risk worth taking for you but go into it with eyes open. I dropped them when they removed photo sync and started getting more aggressive about their content offerings.
Jellyfin is my current home and I like it a lot but I recognize that not everyone wants to deal with the setup and troubleshooting.
For some middle ground, there's also Emby which is a commercial version of Jellyfin.
I like Jellyfin but I do not like the way it shitted up my media directories. I have them meticulously sorted. I don't want images and database shit in them. I much prefer how Plex keeps its database and metadata separated and in its own directory. I would otherwise love to switch.
You should use jellyfin in docker and mount your media files without write permissions. It's exactly what I do partially for this but more to ease maintenance and reproducing my server.
My media box runs Windows 10 but I'll be converting it to Linux eventually. My main PC is Linux but I am a newbie. If you could, tell me what docker is.
Docker is a container framework. Basically a recipe for a piece of software or a service. All you have to do is download a docker container image (there's numerous one pre prepared for stuff like qbittorrent or sonarr or jellyfin) and you need to mount (basically reference) your media or configuration directories into the container. By default each container is basically it's own self contained os (like a vm, but much more efficient). This prevents services from stepping over each other and aids composability because if you're interested in something new like bazarr literally all you have to do is pull an image and configure it. There's also something called docker-compose which let's you put all that configuration for your services into a readable yaml file and then you can just move it from machine to machine to setup or transition.
Note. You can use docker on windows but it's much more efficient on actual Linux. Windows just runs a pseudo Linux VM for docker support. The real thing is always better.
+1 for Jellyfin. GPL licensed software so nice.
I really need to build a media server
Plex is really easy to run and use.
Cool I’ll try that. I just have to pull out an old Sony VAIO or something :D
Netflix has been cooking this up for years now and other video platforms like Youtube are testing similar strategies already to follow suit. Prices are ramping up and quality of pretty much all services (web and others) is downspiraling rapidly. Guess that's what they call market self-regulation, heh? Anyway, as much as Netflix and others say this will make them a great deal of money, it will backfire soon or later. I think a lot of us will realise we're better off with less of these time wasters in our lives in the end.
Personally I got fed up of all their cancelling shows I was actually interested in. Moved to paramount plus to get star trek, then will probably cancel that for as bit. Just found myself watching crap on netflix, I can get crap from the free streamers like Roku and Pluto and 4od/itvx/my5 that get free in UK (with ads no subs)
Looks like the basic tier was already shrinking anyways as people were opting for the ads option more and more, so they decided to nix it anyways to make their own lives easier.
Makes sense, its 1 less "mode" to support and that is a big deal for QA testing.
I still have an active Netflix account (for the odd thing I haven't yet added to my self-hosted Jellyfin instance), and actually downgraded from the Premium tier to the Basic tier a few months ago when they started cracking down on password-sharing here in Canada.
Even though the Basic tier is "only 720p", I barely notice the difference in quality since my TV (and a lot of other modern TVs) has built-in upscaling that works surprisingly well. And I'm the type that is really picky about picture quality, particular about codecs and encoding methods, and all that jazz. But I'm really happy that I managed to get onto the Basic tier before they removed it. I was prepared for a clear drop in quality in return for cost-savings, and I was okay with that, but was delighted to find nothing had noticeably changed after switching over.
The Basic tier checks all of my boxes, verifiably:
Sometimes I even wonder if my TV is even actually upscaling from 720p, or if Netflix is just quietly serving 1080p in reality, but was just continuing to advertise 720p to deter people from the cheaper plan to get them onto a more expensive one, with plans all along to phase this tier out.
My parents, who were previously sharing my account when I was on the Premium tier, ended up getting their own account also on the Basic tier. The net result is that Netflix makes less money off of the two of our accounts combined now compared to the single Premium account we shared before. So in the end, they ended up losing money, and we lost nothing of perceivable value.
I'll probably end up cancelling our account at some point entirely, and my parents can continue to use their own account without being affected, so the forced split actually saved us all money and made our situations more future-proofed.
Contrary to popular belief, I actually think that the Basic tier could have ended up seeing more uptake in the long-run had people who only needed a single screen and wanted to save money, decided to try it, and notice that the picture quality was more than satisfactory enough, either due to the stream quality being better than advertised in reality, or due to the pretty good upscaling ability of modern TVs. I'm sure word would have gotten around from technically-minded people to the masses at some point, and we would have seen more people switching.
I'm sure Netflix did away with the Basic tier because they knew it could realistically put a dent in their profits at some point.
Verizon just upped the price of my grandfathered plan I was on. They told me that on the phone. I just left, luckily that was an option.
It was inevitable after the response to Netflix's crackdown on account sharing and progressively higher prices.
That was a critical moment for the users to exercise their leverage against a new, worse direction in the value of streaming offerings, but the general user lacked the foresight to understand that.
Now that it's been proven that the general user will maintain their subscription even after such drastic changes in value, the trend of a loss of flexibility in tier options, the inclusion of ads in more, if not all, tier options; multi-month subscription requirements, and the complete loss of account sharing will all continue, not only in Netflix but accross all the streaming industry as a whole.
Ads is my line in the sand. They bring in ads on my tier (HD 2 connections) and they'll be dropped in a flash.
The streaming market was good when Netflix were pretty much the main game in town and had most of the content.
I don't want to pirate. But I also don't want a huge monthly bill for multiple services with multiple interfaces to get still less content. I kept Netflix around but any shenanigans that effect me and I'm out.