by Shaanie 17 hours ago
More choice as in more content available to choose from on Netflix?
So when they say "Consumers", it should really have been "Netflix Customers", as for everyone else there is less choice, only already paying Netflix users get more content.
Already paying Netflix users will get to either agree with a price increase or leave :)
After all, there is more "content" now.
I'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.
Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
I cancelled my NetFlix subscription already, what, 7 years ago, for that reason... However, it is not just NetFlix. Most newish movies don't do anything for me. I prefer a movie from the 90s (or even earlier) over almost anything produced in the last 5 to 10 years. It is likely a generational thing, and a case of old man yelling at clouds. If studios think effects are more important then the actual story, well then, so be it.
May be that our tolerance for samey bullshit reduces with age. After all, we’ve seen it all before. The movie industry isn’t that imaginative.
Also, survivor bias. You have to go out of the way to find mentions of crap 3rd rate old movies. We only remember the good ones.
It’s fun to pick a year and do a deep dive on everything that was released to theaters (old newspapers with movie times are great for this) - so much crap you never heard about, unless it was phenomenally bad.
Speaking of which, I recently ran into scans of some local magazines from the 30s.
There was a cinema magazine, and i ran into a 6 page obituary for this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney
Some silent movie star. Never heard of him before. Looks like he was worth 1/8 of the non-ad content 1 year after his death in 1931.
Wait I just realized Warner is hbo. Means now im paying netflix two times.
There’s even more content on “gentlemen of fortune”-type sites. Just saying.
That’s their competition. I wonder if they realize it.
> I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.
There was recently some link on HN about Netflix and using “AI” for “content creation”.
Not that Netflix scripts didn’t sound like an “AI” wrote them even before “AI”.
... don't paying Netflix customers already have access to the whole HBO back-catalogue?
As a Netflix subscriber, that would be news to me.
Not here (Germany).
HBO isn't available at all on it's own. It's exclusively sublicensed (until the end of this year) to Sky which has a terrible terrible user experience and of course is another subscription.
Two days ago there was an announcement that HBO Max is to start in Germany in January. Let's see how that develops after the acquisition.
I think it will.
Now they don't have to go negotiate for every WB content item. As it stands, subscribers might or might not get WB things, same as all the other IP holders that are playing hard to get. Otherwise, they might have to contract some seasons of a show from one holder and some from another, and maybe not at all sometimes.
Maybe they mean more content will be produced, which I believe. But I'd also argue that we really don't need more content on Netflix, we need higher quality. Netflix is drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the point where I have almost given up on investing in a new show because almost all of them reek of lazy writing and good-enough-but-not-outstanding direction. There are exceptions, but they are damn hard to find.
More choice as in “more revenue streams from which to create shareholder value.”