This is so strange to me. I guess people enjoy being ripped off and getting less and less value for their money.
That proves their recent moves are not perceived by people as unfair, contrary to what “the common web” said
Yeah I guess. It’s very shocking to me, but people have spoken…
You can’t trust people. People listen to Cold Play and voted for the Nazi Party.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
What’s wrong with Coldplay?
Nothing, I think the point is that people will listen to a band that may have left of center sensibilities (I don’t know about Coldplay in particular) then vote the opposite. A great example is the video of the old white couple, wearing thin Blue line flags, dancing to Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine.
Ben and Jerry’s “Coldplay’s Pretentious Vanilla”
Bland, self important and boring
Because they made the cost of adding a household less than the cost of two accounts, then banked on the fact that people wouldn’t want to “screw over” whoever they were sharing a password with. It was a good business strategy, if shitty consumer practice.
I’d agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.
It just proves that avergae people want their TV and don’t give a fuck about how much it costs.
My wife is a perfect example: We leached off my mom’s Netflix for years. I don’t really care, we have Plex that I manage and Netflix blows, so it’s all her. Mom ended up cancelling with the latest price hike. Brother and I took bets. My wife lasted 36 hours before making her own account. I lost my bet.
Same here. I set up a Servarr stack and showed everyone in my house how to use Jellyseer to pick shows. I set up Jellyfin on all of their devices as well as the common TV. It works wonderfully well and they can download anything.
So what do I see when I look over their shoulder to see what they’re using? Netflix and Prime Video. SMH.
Yup, happens every time. Even with everything working and that my wife can pick her own shows to automatically download, I think it’s the waiting that does it, because God forbid you have to wait 5-10 minutes. Also too, I can see the appeal in browsing someone else’s library and watching something on a whim.
Yes, and I think there is some inertia and cognitive load at play. Going to Jellyseer to find a show, figuring out what’s good, committing to the download, waiting for the download and then switching over to Jellyfin is a bit more cognitively involved than the basically mindless browsing you can do on Netflix. I see it with my kids with Tiktok as well. Tiktok looks even more passive with the algorithm just feeding you non-stop, constantly varying content.
Agreed. I’m not really one for much TV or movies anymore, though when I am, I know exactly what I want to watch. I also tend to watch things I’ve already seen before as background while I’m doing something else. But I know there are plenty of people that when they get home, they just want to zone out, and that mindless browsing, plus content they’ve never seen before available instantly certainly could have that appeal.
People will pay for things that they perceive to be unfair deals.
Didn’t read the article but I wonder how many people will now sub for a short period and cancel.
Like say you have a group of 3 and 1 person subbing indefinitely before and now there might be 3 people subbing for 2-3 months each. For a period of a year that’d be 12 months vs about 9 months.
So right now they might have increased their subs and revenue but it might change over a longer period of time? Or maybe people are just too lazy and will keep their subs. Who knows.
They upset and turned away people who were not willing to pay. Not a big loss. In the meantime they added tons of people who would pay if given a small push.
I have never really been sure how exactly “the internet” thought they would be punished for this move. It seemed kind of bullet proof to me. Like, sure you’re leaving and never coming back, but you were not really a paying customer and never would be.
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This doesn’t prove anything. Netflix can project whatever they want. It takes time for their shitty decisions to affect them.
How many of these subscribers are bundles and in emerging markets? Netflix doesn’t reveal such details.
Fucking weak. People are just begging to be screwed.
And yet this is 2 posts down from an article about their price hikes and increase in ads coming up.
I guess people love that shit… \o/
Am I on glue? I could have sworn the quarterly earnings call results were abysmal. Like quarter over quarter their revenue has tanked.
No. They’ve lost subscribers several times, but always in reaction to price hikes.
When you increase your prices 20% and lose 5% of your subscribers what you’ve done is reduce bandwidth costs while massively increasing profits.
And the crackdown on account sharing has been massively successful for them. If zero people had paid for new accounts their profits still would have gone up from their savings in bandwidth and processing. But then tons of people bit the bullet and started paying.
I understand that but the data I saw showed their revenue decreased substantially. I can’t find it for the life of me though. It was some google popup on my phone and I have no idea how to get back to it lol.
Anywho, seems like I don’t know what I’m talking about cause the stock is surging.
Growth of a few million subscribers is nothing for a company the size of Netflix and there could be all sorts of creative accounting going on.
Executives patting themselves in the back to justify bonuses is self serving bullshit. Quality and value build long term brand profitability but that is too hard for MBAs. Cost cutting and screwing customers is all they know. In a few years people will be asking what the fuck happened to Netflix.
I was a relatively early adopter of Netflix before it was available in my country and used it via VPN back when Netflix had more to gain by allowing that. They made some interesting shows that justified the very affordable price. Now there is more content and most is crap. I rotated subscriptions for the last year but I am hard out now. And ad supported tiers don’t fix it for me because I would rather eat shit than watch them.
They want you to eventually pay more and watch ads. It’s their long-term goal.
I also doubt the numbers and wonder if they’re outright lying just to boost stock (which is working apparently)
Ugh… Hate to see this
This would be strange if Netflix didn’t have enough of easily accessible good content.
When after finishing work we want to watch “a movie”, it’s much easier to choose a Netflix recommendation than to do a half an hour reasearch online and then wait for the movie to be downloaded.
Now add to this time, energy, and expertise needed for looking up and trying pirating options, figuring out technical aspects, paying for a VPN, doing maintenance… Very few can and are willing to do all that.
Yeah but the problem is, I was watching a lot of really bad movies on Netflix, just because they didn’t have anything I wanted to watch. So I was sitting there, feeling bored or annoyed or disgusted by the shit movies… I actually felt depressed by what I watched even!
So I was like… I’m paying for this, and I feel like shit most of the time when watching it.
No more.
That’s fair, if this was your case. No point in paying for something you don’t like.
As much as I hate old titles disappearing, I also enjoy the new content Netflix offers. To each their own, I guess.
Netflix produced content is either garbage or cancelled after first season. (or both)
The only quality content Netflix has is made by someone else and more than 20 years ago.
Yeah everyone has different taste. I actually like British TV a lot more then American too.
The people who don’t know how I understand completely. But honestly people who have the know-how are underestimating how easy it has got. I can torrent a movie at a much higher quality than Netflix will even stream to my PC and do it all within 5 minutes.
Now imagine you have a family that likes to watch TV in the living room and not in your room.
So you download the movie to your Plex or Jellyfin server and watch it in living room. I do exactly this all the time.
Right, I use Plex now too. However, it only has things that I already downloaded. So if we don’t plan, we end up watching something on Netflix instead of spending extra time on looking+downloading+going back and forth between rooms.
Well Plex soon is adding support for buying and renting stuff.
“download this app, create an account, I’ll add you as a friend, off you go”
It’s literally as easy as Netflix in that scenario.
I’m curious to hear more about this. What’s the app?
Plex
Jellyfin for the win!
hell, I’m across the country at my parent’s place and got them a movie by remoting into my home pc to start a torrent and had it populatred in my Plex server and streaming at full bluray quality 4k hdr in less time that it took for them to get popcorn ready.
they never even knew that i had to do any of that. i just told them “yeah, I’ll get that set up while you get snacks”
Lol that hasn’t been an issue for at least a decade.
But does Netflix even have good movies? Like I think it’d be easier to do exactly that but on HBO Max or Disney Plus, or a TV show on Hulu.
Weird. I can find and download a movie in a couple of minutes. It’s almost as easy as learning how to download and navigate Netflix.
Pirating movies has never been easier, but wait there’s more, you can just stream them for free too.
There’s even places you can buy a box for a one time fee, and have all channels and services free. Or get a subscription that offers every service and channel on earth.
It’s so easy my 80 yr old father can do it.
There’s no maintenance, no technical expertise needed, you don’t even need a VPN.
The only thing Netflix really offers is convenience and legality.
Eh, you don’t need to do all that. But I also have the same problem with the research stuff even if I use Netflix. A lot of the recommendations are not great for me, and low quality stuff. Once in a while something good will pop up though.
Usually I write down recommendations people give me in conversation then I refer back to that list when I’m looking for something to watch. If it’s not on Netflix, well…
For me it’s usually hear about a few things that could be interesting throughout the day and download them while I shower after work. A 5gb movie comes through in a few minutes so I don’t even feel it. It’s usually 2 or 3 at a time, and since I’d still be going in blind on Netflix recs, it doesn’t seem much worse.
Shame on those customers.
Maybe this is the people telling the other competitors to fuck off with their own streaming services. Maybe they think staying loyal to just one of them, things can go back to resemble how it was +5 years ago.
I don’t think any company that becomes shit ever goes back to being not shit again…
Oh, well. In general, I agree, but there must be examples that don’t fit with your statement. In the end, companies pursue profit, ideally, offering a better service gives you exactly that. I know this rarely is the case, but it can happen.
Arguably MS has become less shit over the last decade. But yes.
You must not work in IT
Do you remember the “open source is cancer” MS?
Sorry, I can’t hear you over how much they have businesses over the barrel with their absurd subscription licensing costs
How has MS become more friendly to FOSS? (Genuine question)
We have 6 streaming services at home. Most of them have one or two accounts, meaning they were never used. We are five and most of us are well versed in traversing the seas and with the exception of my father, we all understand spoken and written English pretty well. Whenever I bring the “Why don’t we drop off A, B and C that are not being used right now” to the table, they all react badly. I dont understand.
I see two approaches that you can take.
- instead of focusing on what you are taking away. Focus on what you can do with the money instead. Telling them that they can have a new TV with that money is a lot more motivation to say yes than taking something away.
- Do the scream test. Just cancel everything and wait for someone to scream about not having a services and resubscribe. Repeat every 6 months or so.
Set up a plex or Jellyfin server that your dad could use
Yeah, but they don’t mention how many they lost during price uprising, so I’d say it somehow equals.
One way I have reduced my subscriptions is by using control d. I know vpns are popular on lemmy but I found it an annoying to have to have a vpn for each device I wanted to bypass a country lock. Moreover it was annoyyng for some devices like apple tv that does not support a vpn. Establishing a vpn on the firewall broke other services that I needed to work locally in my country.
Control d on the other hand is a dns proxy tunnel so you just alter the dns on the devices you want to use it, and in their control panel you can have different countries per service - so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads. Bbc iplayer can be told to go via uk and so on. This is a lot more convenient and allows you to retain your country for all services except the ones you want to tunnel.
Thanks for this tip. I hadn’t heard about this before, and it sounds like an interesting thing to add to my tool chest.
so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads.
Can you tell me more about this? I’ve never heard about that this is a thing, and it sounds like a good thing to known
Set your country to Albania, Moldova, or Myanmar and you wont get ads on youtube.
For the annoyance, you could just use some open source firewall like opnsense to create a site to site to your VPN provider and route anything destined for your shady services through it.
Yes I do use opnsense and it was more annoying than control d. I tried both options.
I see. IMO the opnsense method is good because it’s set and forget, works across all devices without needing to touch them
I mean so is control d a set and forget. Even more so because they manage any changes and workarounds the companies come up with. Its basically designed for this. Having tried both options its my preferred option.
I have no idea what control d is
Stremio + Torrentio .
Yeah, I thought we had figured this out after Twitter. Or Reddit.
FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).
The big thing that I did was to go back to physical media and home streaming. Boycotts won’t work, but that? That might. At least it’ll make it less likely for physical media to be fully eliminated as an option.
Physical media FTW. I wish it was easier to obtain movies and shows physically. I like to own my stuff.
I love physical media but I also know that if I was buying everything I’m watching on Netflix, it would be way more expensive than my subscription.
Still I love buying dvd’s and blurays.
I would have to sanity check that math, honestly. I am so sporadically in so many of my media subs that if we counted by watched items as opposed to all items you get access to it may break even.
That said, I’d be lying if I said I don’t have BluRays still shrink-wrapped that I haven’t watched, so I guess it does cut both ways.
For music it’s cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.
I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.
With music it gets weirder because for some reason we’ve all accepted that anybody can just upload music to Youtube as long as they’re fine with whoever owns the rights reclaiming the ad revenue, which is very weird.
But in any case I think the value calculation gets a bit weird for a number of reasons. TV was indeed overpriced in physical media, but movies were a different story. It’s gonna depend on your consumption habits, but I can tell you there’s no way my average viewing on each of the services I pay for at 15 bucks a pop (not ten anymore on any of them, unless you’re ok with also watching ads) is anywhere close to one movie or five episodes on average. Across the whole lot, maybe, for each individual one? Probably not. Across the whole household… maybe.
Second, a lot of the media consumption was not made physically at the time, either, TV was a thing (and depending on the time period a source of home recordings, which are also fair game). But then those options haven’t been technically removed, I guess, so… I don’t know, it’s hard to calculate.
Which I guess is part of why these services are so resilient. It’s hard to figure out if you’re over or underpaying relative to the alternatives, and since there’s no way to grasp the core cost or value of what you’re getting intuitively it’s hard to understand if they’re priced reasonably, either. Netflix was doing this at a loss in that “disruptor start up” style that broke the 2010s that who knows what entertainment should cost at this point.
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A lot of it is familiarity. I begged my parents to cancel Netflix, especially since they complain about the programming (or lack thereof); I pointed out that they could try another streaming service for a month, and then if they really hated it, then they could just go back to Netflix. But they wouldn’t even entertain the possibility. They’re afraid of change.
And Netflix is making bank on that.
Their competition sucks big ass, too. I guess branding matters in this case. For example, once you watched the classic HBO TV series (The Sopranos, The Wire…), you don’t need it anymore. The others have even less going on.
