- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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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.
Looks like they’re trying the new twitter and reddit strategies. FOMO is real!
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.
Yo ho, yo ho
Sounds like a bad idea…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I don’t think anybody knows, but I think it’s only a matter of time and you can only rely on brand recognition and momentum for only so long before people realize that there are better services for them that don’t actively strip away the shows and films you love while treating you like an asshole. There’s just too much competition and it’s not stopping any time soon and a ton of people are actually paying a closer attention to their monthly fees and tightening the purse strings.
They probably won’t go out of business tomorrow or a year from now, but maybe 5 years and likely in the next 10. They just don’t have the same cultural cache as it did even a couple years ago. What did they even release that everybody knows about past The Tiger King and Squid Game which was years ago at this point other than like Wednesday. Better Call Saul ended last year. What do they have? Korean soaps, The Witcher without Henry Cavill and a creepy French movie about little girls twerking?
They have a ton of reality tv dogshit content that a ton of female subscribers love lol. Personally i hate it but i bet all of our gfs/wives love that shit. Unfortunately you should expect all of the streaming platforms to lean into that bullshit, especially with the writers strike. It will be interesting to see how many people cancel their plans once all of the good shows dry up due to the strike. We are going to be in a content desert for like 2 years at least.
Edit: lol why the actual fuck was I down voted? For criticizing Netflix? Huh??
People probably didn’t like your reality TV comment but it’s true my wife watches that shit lol
Why are people upset with that comment? A lot of girls and women watch reality TV. I thought that was obvious…Reality TV’s main target audience is females. I’m not trying to be disrespectful or anything lol. It’s just an objective fact.
Because this site is full of people who are very left wing and get upset at the most minor things lol it’s pretty funny, I get downvoted a lot it assures me that my opinion is correct and these idiots in here are living in la la land
I really need to build a media server
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.
Aye ye scallywags! T’night we sail the seven seas!
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.
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.
They probably ran the numbers and found only a couple of grandmas running that 720p garbage. lol
