I am still 'negotiating' with my wife to drop Directv and just use Netflix streaming, Hulu+, and the occasional Redbox DVD for entertainment.
This is all just my opinion, but in a digital world where there is way too much entertaining stuff to view, be it TV, movies, videos on Youtube, Reddit, online newspapers like the NYT, that something big has happened for me: there are no more "must have" TV shows, movies, or books. For example, if HBO won't let me watch a special on the web for a fair price I don't care if I miss it.
Seriously, I will probably take 5 Coursera online classes this year, read 15 non-technical fiction books, 15 technical books, write several hundred pages in my own book projects, etc. Plenty of fun stuff to do.
This is similar to travel: when we go to a foreign country I don't worry about "seeing everything", rather, I just want to enjoy myself and get a feel for the people and place.
Same with digital entertainment: just graze a little.
Netflix is the absolute best value for me in entertainment.
I think you're over-discounting the zeitgeist effect. Breaking Bad, for example, is fantastic TV on its own, but the fact that lots of people I know (even those who aren't caught up in the current season) are watching it right now makes it a lot more fun to consume. There are thousands and thousands of books, films, etc in the archives, so why do we all get so excited about new stuff? Because there's something about enjoying these things together that's a big part of the human experience.
In other words, access to specific parts of the culture is still a big deal.
"For example, if HBO won't let me watch a special on the web for a fair price I don't care if I miss it."
Completely agree. I get annoyed when people argue for piracy because they don't have a legal way of getting something (because of say regional restriction) or the legal way is more annoying (i.e. DRM). There is a sense of entitlement to all entertainment despite the fact that there are incredible amounts of alternatives available.
That's probably true but what if I am in a country where I can't have Netflix and the new AD episodes are just a click away on TPB or some newsgroups ?
Should I just wait for an hypothetic way to see them in the future like the old days ? Maybe I should, I know I won't because I just not think like that anymore, for better or worse.
I'm going through that negotiation with my fiancee right now, I don't have cable she does. The only thing is, she really really likes watching tennis, and sports in general is seems to be the thing still holding her to a cable subscription.
There isn't a way past this yet unfortunately. If you're stuck with someone who wants sports access, you're stuck with some form of cable.
The worst part is even if it's a high profile sport, and the league itself will accept some ridiculous amount of money for access, you're STILL at the beck and call of regional blackouts and restrictions.
I used to have a subscription, which I placed on hold for a while before finally cancelling.
Hulu is an attempt by NBC/Fox/Disney to dip their toes into the waters of online streaming. I appreciate the effort, but in the end, Netflix is a much better service for the price, and plenty of people would just as soon use the free options available instead.
It allowed access to older episodes of some shows (in some cases, the full series was available whereas only the last 5 episodes were available free).
But you still had to watch the advertisments, and the price was on par with Netflix (which made it substantially more expensive before Netflix's pricing switch). Nothing makes $10/month sting like being forced to watch the same advertisment over and over as a 'premium' member. Hulu's advertisements are far less varied than regular television, so I always half-felt like they were going for the subliminal-message-manipulation angle, since I would see the same ad during all three commercial breaks for the same show.
Also, they arbitrarily blocked access from certain mobile devices, which meant that I couldn't always watch it when I wanted to.
In the end, it wasn't worth the money, by a long shot.
Also, you can get access to HBO shows via Netflix's DVDs. Of course you won't get the current season, and you have to order each disc one by one. But for an extra ~8 a month, I have gotten a good value out of it.
This argument doesn't work for everyone, and you've basically said why — there is so much stuff out there, so if I'm going to spend my time on entertainment, I want to watch the best of the best. My time is an expense, so I want to get back the best I can for the time I lose.
In this sense, there is "must have" entertainment. I'm not going to waste time on anything but that I'm most interested in.
I've been thinking a bit lately about how web video content is beginning to become "legitimate." With series like Geek & Sundry's Tabletop [1], Penny Arcade's "reality show" [2], and hidden gems like YouTube's The Vault [3], I'm starting to reach a point where I could even cancel Netflix and just watch online web videos.
My guess is, that five years from now, both Netflix and YouTube will look like networks or producers than just distributors.
I'm not a big Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day fan, but I'm really enjoying Tabletop. Fun show with excellent production values. I just wish the episodes were a little longer (ie, fewer cuts) for some of the more complex games.
Internet broadcasting just keeps getting better and better. It's probably not a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers and real actors, but for entertaining nonfiction it's perfect.
> It's probably not a great model for fiction where you have to pay writers and real actors
Check out "The Vault" that I linked to above. Very reminiscent of Lost and (so far) of excellent quality. I gather from some of what I've read that they've received outside funding for the show.
Television has already changed. If you look toward the UK, already there's low budget comedy shows like Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, which is a continuation of a rather famous comedy character spanning radio, multiple television series and soon to be film -- which was recently produced for peanuts with modest corporate sponsorship from Fosters, dumped online as web episodes -- and now is being picked up for broadcast television after the fact.
Arrested Development may be news to some folks here, but the age of producing shows for internet distribution has been our path for quite some time. Not only are shows being produced in this fashion for the internet now, but we're increasingly recruiting new talent via the internet. Just look at the star of Community, Donald Glover. This is a brilliant comedic actor who first got his major break by producing a set of YouTube videos that went viral with the other comedians in the Derrick comedy group, a group which was later picked up by College Humor and several of which, including Donald, have been tapped by mainstream American television now.
I could only see Arrested Development 'changing everything' if you weren't already aware that things have already changed.
Cable channels seem to be so short-sighted here that I think they're going to be blindsided by this model.
Using the TV model, the maximum amount of shows I can provide are limited by the amount of prime-time hours in a week. I think this creates a very long tail of shows that many people would be interested in watching, but not enough that these shows compete for prime time space. These shows are usually cancelled, and nobody makes money.
But with streaming video, Netflix is not limited at all by a viewing schedule, and they can sell as many shows as they want. Even if a show is only popular among a small audience it can still be profitable.
Pay-per-on-demand-show is coming, and that will be the upset. The only demographic beholden to the TV station model are the baby-boomers who think this streaming stuff is weird.
The other element is the fact that like Lilyhammer, all 10-13 episodes of the series will be released at once, setting fans up for epic marathon sessions.
I think this is the beginning of an entirely new format. So far we've been restricted to the video equivalent of serials and short stories with TV shows and movies respectively. Its time for the rise of the video long-form novel.
There are certain stories (like Firefly IMHO) that really need this format to work. They make terrible serials from a network execs POV (because if you miss an ep or two, it becomes really hard to get into it later) and movies that only a fan could love by jamming too much story into 2 hours.
Oh wow. This is amazing news. When we got Netflix in the uk we randomly put on Arrested Development without knowing what it was. We watched it back to back and were a little depressed to get to the end of it.
I'm so happy to hear that Netflix are bringing it back. It ushers in an interesting new era in tv.
Arrested Development is a very European-style show. There are few explicit jokes and no laugh track. They aim more for puns and other wordplay, along with explicit foreshadowing that sets up a joke with no obvious punchline until the hammer drops (Buster's hand is a good example of this).
You're not spoon-fed the comedy and queued for laughter. There weren't many American shows like that when it aired, and that was one of the reasons it got canned. They even hinted at this in the script for the last season, along with the characters practically begging some other network to pick up the show.
We use a Roku with Netflix and currently have over 200 items in the queue, and some of the items are series with 100 episodes. Netflix doesn't have access to new Hollywood releases, but the Roku, through its Amazon link, does. Cable? We said goodbye to that years ago.
Has anyone got an idea why it would still be geographically restricted even though presumably Netflix will own the rights? It seems like this would be an ideal chance to move away from media being released at different times in different countries.
You don't need to crack the DRM to upload these to file-sharing sites. Pretty much all TV rips (and even Blu-ray rips) are already double-compressed, so it's not particularly important to get at the raw bitstream. That means that all you need is a "malicious" video card or something to intercept the video-out signal from your computer. (And no, HDCP does not solve anything. It's already broken and anyone willing to pay $150 for a Spartan 6 dev board with HDMI ports on it can remove it.)
Anyway, I'm pretty sure whoever made the decision to go ahead with this model knows that there's going to be piracy. You would have to be living under the world's largest rock to not consider that possibility.
This is all just my opinion, but in a digital world where there is way too much entertaining stuff to view, be it TV, movies, videos on Youtube, Reddit, online newspapers like the NYT, that something big has happened for me: there are no more "must have" TV shows, movies, or books. For example, if HBO won't let me watch a special on the web for a fair price I don't care if I miss it.
Seriously, I will probably take 5 Coursera online classes this year, read 15 non-technical fiction books, 15 technical books, write several hundred pages in my own book projects, etc. Plenty of fun stuff to do.
This is similar to travel: when we go to a foreign country I don't worry about "seeing everything", rather, I just want to enjoy myself and get a feel for the people and place.
Same with digital entertainment: just graze a little.
Netflix is the absolute best value for me in entertainment.