2) encourage user interaction (more telemetry data)
3) promote Netflix original content
As a user, I don't want any of this. A small cottage industry of alternative Netflix UIs has popped up, because sometimes you just want some good old fashioned filters and sorts.
A thousand times, this. Netflix should take all the money they are spending on ML to solve a discovery problem that they don't even have, and instead buy up rights to flicks from the period 1950-2010. A lot of these movies can't be streamed or downloaded anywhere - the only legal way to get them is to pay a grossly inflated price for the DVD on Amazon. This is actually a massive archival problem, and I would love to see someone tackle it. Unfortunately, it almost certainly won't be one of the current major streaming platforms.
To be fair, I oversimplified the problem. Every film's rights are owned by someone, and the problem wouldn't be solved entirely by Netflix merely throwing money at it. But the fact remains that there are a lot of great films from this period that as far as I can tell (and for some I've looked pretty hard) are not available for streaming on any platform - YouTube, Mubi, Netflix, Prime, iTunes, etc etc. [0]
The problem is worse if A) you're not in the US and B) you are interested in stuff that wasn't a box office top 100 hit.
It's an empirical question as to whether, as you say "the remaining few indie or abandoned flicks are not really worth it." Netflix has certainly decided that this is the case, but it's not obvious to me that they're right.
>A thousand times, this. Netflix should take all the money they are spending on ML to solve a discovery problem that they don't even have,
Really? I often find myself learning about Netflix stuff I want to watch only from friends telling it to me, and then having to seek it out in the search function.
This is the biggest problem. I have different profiles for family members. Some members get so many more good new shows that don't appear in my profile.
Their library isn’t that big. If it wasn’t suggested to you and you could actually just look through their library you’d have found those titles. Disney+, Hulu, HBO, and other streaming services do this and it works fine even when they also offer suggestions.
I used to be able to find things to watch on Netflix when they had publicly visible reviews. Then they removed that, presumably to hock their less than stellar original content. They optimize to try and show you as much crap as possible, which is the real reason you can't find good stuff on your own -- it's not the lack of some personalized algorithmic magic that's responsible here.
One can find many of those films on YouTube to rent for $2.99-$3.99, which is cheaper than Blockbuster used to be (adjusted for inflation) and much more convenient.
To be clear: I love this business model. This is how I watch films for the most part. But while lots of films are available this way, just as many are not. And many of these are not some obscure indie film - they are acclaimed mid-to-high budget Hollywood films that, for no good reason, are trapped in IP purgatory.
I will add a little side data point to this. Season 4 of Morty showed up in a lot of locations except US, Canada, UK.
They are a public company now. I find it hard to believe they could not afford US licensing deal.
And since they actively enforce their geofencing, the shallow library argument becomes even more apparent.
I really dislike streaming wars. We are basically reinventing cable. Any moment I expect unskippable ads in the middle of the show for all paid plans and people defending them as.. it is only 30 seconds..
Netflix revealed a way to monetize the long tail of media content, owned by big studios. To those big studios, Netflix is just a middleman; they'll raise rates until Netflix has no profit left, or give discounts where there's a marketing tie-in (this is why the earlier movie shows up in Netflix when the sequel is on in the cinema - it won't hang around for too long though).
This structure is why Netflix is turning into yet another cable channel. There's no network effect beyond an install base and a bunch of customers paying monthly - not nothing, but also not actually much of a moat if users are using things like Amazon Firestick or something else that apps can easily be added to.
If anything, copyright is the problem. Copyright ought to enable rent extraction to cover the cost of production and a healthy profit premium to encourage quality and have hits that cover losses. But beyond a certain point (and it's measured in years for cinema, not decades) the output probably ought to be considered cultural capital and have capped and non-discriminatory broadcast and streaming costs.
I can agree that copyright is the main culprit, but I am not willing to absolve Netflix from the choices they make. Just as you pointed out, those choices appear to a part of their generap strategy.
All that said, as a customer I don't care. I have been spoiled by near instant access to anything I want free of ads. If Netflix does not want my money, someone else will.
And if no one else will, then that is how we get piracy.
To sum up, I really do not disagree with you. I just think customers are less tolerant today.
The current copyright system is beyond messed up. Locking up IP for multiple generations is just downright pro-corporate nonsense, and we mostly have Disney to thank for it.
A major symptom of #1 is that there is no way to 'hide' content you're not interested in or any indication of what you've already watched. So I'm forced to endure giant, autoplaying banner ads for shows I know 100% I will never, ever watch.
Yea my 60 year old dad always complains why they can’t have a “never show me this again” because he’s tired of scrolling through all the garbage.
It’s a shame there aren’t more dictatorial Jobs-esque CEOs striking out all the bullshit vanity-metric-chasing the upper/middle managers will do if you let them. The world would be a better place.
Why don't you just "dislike" such content? I understand that that's probably not how one is supposed to use such a feature, but that has been working pretty well to hide unwanted content for me.
I never understand the complaint of a small library for Netflix... there are way more things to watch than I have time for. More things are coming out than I can watch.
Who are these people who watch so much stuff they run out of things to watch.
I think watching TV has shifted to "I wonder what's on, that looks interesting I'll watch that" to "There's a million things on, but I just want to watch X, and if X is not available then there may as well be 0 things on".
I used to go to Netflix for a few core shows (and still do) but they've slowly moved off. 30 Rock, Buffy, Sunny in Philly - all are gone, which means the number of shows I actually care to watch on Netflix was cut in about half.
They may have a million other titles, but it's extremely rare that I'm in a "browse and pick something" mood these days.
It's also why I hate the fragmentation. All 3 of those shows are from different networks - one day they will all be on their own respective subscription based websites. And I'm gonna just go back to pirating.
> It's also why I hate the fragmentation. All 3 of those shows are from different networks - one day they will all be on their own respective subscription based websites.
All 3 of those shows are on Hulu, so you only need to sign up for one additional subscription. So far. I expect that the fragmentation will only get worse from here.
I subscribe to Hulu (Always Sunny, Brooklyn 99, Bob's Burgers, Rick and Morty), Netflix (Black Mirror, Arrested Development, Bojack Horseman, Great British Baking Show), and Disney+ (The Mandalorian). I'm paying $31 a month for these subscriptions. I keep wondering if I'd be better off buying DVDs/Blu-rays and ripping them all to a plex server instead, but that seems like a lot of work, even if it would pay off in the long run.
'So Far' is the key. They also used to all be on Netflix.
Money isn't an issue, it's mostly just annoying to have N services to juggle. Pirating's really easy - I use exactly one pirating website, and it's free. Way simpler.
I can't remember ever having a movie in mind and then finding it on Netflix. If I have two hours to kill, I don't browse Netflix to choose from their selection (though my wife does once every blue moon).
For me, Netflix is just another channel with maybe some interesting shows this season.
This is like going to Trader Joe's and complaining that you can't get brand name items. There was a time when Netflix had a lot of major films. But the industry has found other ways to capitalize on those since.
There's a difference between a deep library and a comprehensive library. Netflix's library is quite extensive, so shallow isn't the right word for it. But it isn't a corpus that includes everything you could possibly want to watch--nowhere really is right now, and historically, corpuses like that have been rare and short-lived.
If Trader Joe's scattered their jams randomly throughout the store, we'd be upset too. Apricot jam in the "quirky and fun spreads" section along with hummus, grape next to peanut butter in "old time classics," strawberry in a section that isn't shown to you at all - you have to be told by a friend that it exists and ask a worker for it by name.
I've overextended the analogy.
The content available on Netflix is great, but the discoverability UX is atrocious.
A corner store might have a ton of options for "foodstuffs", but only a couple types of milk. Sure, it would be hard to eat everything in the store, but it's still a small selection compared to a grocery store.
It would be hard to watch everything on Netflix, but it would be a short list to scroll through, especially when you apply some filters (e.g. romantic comedies with a rotten tomatoes rating > 70%).
why do you think everyone wants to watch the same things? what's the downside of having a big library? why should my subscription fee pay for the license fees of stuff that doesn't interest me? (just like Spotify, although their library is impressive).
> why do you think everyone wants to watch the same things?
> why should my subscription fee pay for the license fees of stuff that doesn't interest me?
So obviously different people will have different interests... yet you don't think your monthly payment should subsidize any of those other things? How do you imagine that working exactly?
You have no idea how much I prefer this over the dominant competing model which is "promote content that costs extra because it is not actually included in the subscription I already pay".
Netflix at least is trying to make me satisfied with the content available, instead of making me yearn for more in order to upsell.
There is no such thing on Netflix as there is nothing to pay extra for.
They just try to avoid you canceling your subscription when their licensing agreements are not getting renewed and everything else except their original content is gone.
Originals are often promoted, and maybe I'm using the wrong acronym with "PPV", but if you click on anything that doesn't have a tiny "prime" ribbon in the corner, you'll get a screen asking you if you really want to spend $3.99 or whatever. Slight annoyance, but then again I have bought these before when they did something manipulative like offering 8 of the 9 available seasons of a show for "prime" viewing... Also sometimes you just want to see something now instead of waiting a year or going to a theater.
While those sites are fine for searching for specific content, I'm surprised no one has made a custom netflix homepage extension (and believe me, I've looked for it many times over the years).
I just want something simple and minimal. No bullshit fullscreen autoplaying trailer at the top. Just 3 sections: Shows I've been watching (with an easy button to remove any i'm done with), shows I have marked as interested in, and then at the bottom, there can be recommended shows and new content.
That's it. It shouldn't be that hard. Some day I might code it myself.
The shallow library argument is becoming increasingly dated. If you compare it to studios who have been around for decades, then sure. If you want to limit it to "quality" content, then maybe. If you want to look at it from a pure numbers perspective, Netflix is killing it.
Netflix is killing it if you think of them as a cable channel, like HBO. If you think of them as a movie rental shop, like Blockbuster (or Netflix) used to be, they're terrible.
Ah yes, the flood of foreign language TV shows and movies that we have no interest in watching. The problem is, Netflix has lost all of these licensed products and are forced to created original content. The golden age of streaming is dead. We now have cable/satellite style streaming services. Instead of 1 big bundle, we now have 2-6 streaming services paying roughly the same amount. At least there are fewer commercials.
Oh, you are quite right. I've just created Netflix account, exploring movies - series based on images - trailers when browsing with mouse and so on. Anyway, I miss basic filter..
Watched 2 seasons of 2 different series in less than 48 hours.
Yes, those “facades” are super useful. Problem is that most are US centric and simply break for international users, since streaming rights by country is a nightmarish jungle.
1) obfuscate its surprisingly shallow library
2) encourage user interaction (more telemetry data)
3) promote Netflix original content
As a user, I don't want any of this. A small cottage industry of alternative Netflix UIs has popped up, because sometimes you just want some good old fashioned filters and sorts.
A few examples:
https://flixable.com/
https://www.justwatch.com/
https://instantwatcher.com/