>That’s especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic. One major reason for BitTorrent’s rising popularity? Annoying exclusivity streaming deals.
In my country you can't even watch Netflix exclusives on Netflix because they already sold the rights to local TVs. So you sign up for Netflix and it's a wasteland of 2nd tier movies and old series. Yeah Friends is cool but who cares about it in 2019.
Segmentation is the biggest problem. But that's true for every digital store not just Netflix. I wish these stores were one unfied thing not US Netlix, German Netflix, UK Netflix etc.
I know it comes down to copyright laws and such but the difference between the countries is soooo big. Feels like you are signing up for a 3rd tier service for the same amount of money
This has been a problem for a long time with media. For some time, we've been perfectly capable of delivering globally. They don't want to do this, because the money gets made through a calculated release process. They want to maximize revenue on this extremely expensive asset, and there are strategic / logistical concerns.
On side note, I think there's a bit of a "look at this awesome thing you can't have" aspect to IP and content; this can be very frustrating, and has been one of the main reasons people turned to piracy (mostly people are just jerks though). There's actually some very understandable reasons why you'd want, or even need to carefully release in each region; however in other cases the attitude seems to be "we haven't figured out how to monetize this, so I guess no one gets it", "we'll need you to buy that again", or "you can't have this, because we want you to buy something else"
In the long run this sounds like the kind of area that begs for regulation. If you run a subscription service you have strong market power over competing content producers who can't do the same and create their own distribution channels. This gives the monopolist strong leverage to purchase content on the cheap and expand their platform to the detriment of other distributors, which is precisely what Netflix is doing, using their economies of scale to discourage consumers to seek alternate offers.
It seems sensible to force platforms with significant market power to open up and allow competing content to be sold on there too, maybe on a basis of costs-plus-fixed-profit for the platform.
From what I understand, "Netflix Original" means two different things:
1) Things that are actually Netflix's shows, like House of Cards
2) Things that Netflix bought exclusive distribution rights for in the US and markets as "Original" just like House of Cards, but actually had nothing to do with.
So it's less that Netflix sold the rights to local TVs and more that they never had those rights to begin with.
In Netherland, The Expanse used to be a Netflix Original, while in the US it was on SyFy. But this "Netflix Original" appeared on Netflix half a year after it had aired on SyFy. And of course now that Amazon bought all rights to The Expanse from SyFy, this "Netflix Original" vanished from Dutch Netflix.
"Netflix Original" clearly doesn't mean much. I think it'd be wiser for Netflix to reserve it for shows they actually own, so they can never disappear from Netflix.
I was extremely surprised to learn one of what I thought was Netflix's first original shows is not in fact owned by them: Orange is the New Black. According to this piece on Netflix's general problem (https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18166911/netflix-friend...), it is actually owned by Lionsgate, and I assume Netflix has an exclusive distribution deal.
In some countries (I think Australia was one of them) Netflix did sell the distribution rights to House of Cards before they entered the market and then couldn't show House of Cards on Netflix once they did enter the market.
3) Joint productions like Lilyhammer where Netflix partnered with a foreign broadcaster to produce.
So something like Lilyhammer that was a joint Netflix/NRK production means it's a Netflix Original in the US and aired on NRK1 in Norway, but it's actually produced by both companies.
Yeah, this isn't surprising at all. I've run into it. Typical lazy weekend evening...
- turn on AppleTV
- search for [year old hit movie or TV show]
- brief happiness because it's available
- followed by annoyance because it's available on one of the services to which I don't subscribe (or it's on Amazon, but isn't Prime)
I have Prime, Netflix, and HBO and still run into this regularly. It's really annoying. As soon as GOT is done, I'll likely cancel HBO - it doesn't add much value. Netflix is hanging on, barely - every time I go to cancel, I find something interesting to watch, and that keeps me for another month or two. But, it feels user-hostile and with the price going up again, I'm that much more likely to just cancel and be done with them. And I hate the idea of relying on Amazon even more than I already do.
>As soon as GOT is done, I'll likely cancel HBO - it doesn't add much value.
This is basically my philosophy with streaming services. I keep Prime because it's useful all-around, and Netflix (for now) still has enough variety to keep me as a subscriber (though I wouldn't be surprised if I jumped ship to Disney later this year).
But beyond that, why not choose a la carte? I'm signing up for HBO when GoT airs, and I'll binge True Detective in between, but beyond that I don't care much about it. Hulu I signed up for a month and then immediately canceled; watched all I cared to in that time. I binged Star Trek within the one-week CBS trial period.
It would be nice to have a Mint-like streaming services dashboard I could use to selectively toggle on and off various streaming accounts when I decide they've built up enough content I haven't seen to warrant activating for a month. There's a product idea for ya.
> It would be nice to have a Mint-like streaming services dashboard I could use to selectively toggle on and off various streaming accounts when I decide they've built up enough content I haven't seen to warrant activating for a month. There's a product idea for ya.
> I wouldn't be surprised if I jumped ship to Disney later this year
Oh, man, if Disney really makes their entire catalog available for a reasonable price, I'm definitely going to pay for that. All of Star Wars, all of MCU, all of Pixar, not to mention Disney's own stuff and apparently 21st Centry Fox movies. That's enormous.
But most streamers are just too fragmented to care.
What they should do is have one universal streaming service on which content owners can offer their own content on their own terms, rather than those of Netflix.
Same... i have Netflix and HBO (and my local countries tv service) but recently i get so annoyed by searching for "where i can find a movie" and then not finding it, that i don't even look anymore, i just go straight to torrenting which is a 99% success rate.
Also the Netflix auto-play-previews thing annoys me, trying to constantly force me to keep consuming.
My problem with Netflix is that it's being more and more user-hostile. It only displays shows it thinks I like, and not everything. And the top band does a horrid autoplay banner. I've still yet to figure out what elements I need to watch to disable that in HTML.
Hulu is also pretty hostile with lots of adverts, but a recent uBlock update fixed that. Now the advert timer goes from 30->15->0 but does black screen for a few seconds. But this service was for $1/mo for a year. After that, we'll cancel unless offered a similar deal.
But I certainly get the piracy angle. I don't want or need 6 streaming services. I wanted 1 or really cheap ala-carte. Instead, it's "Subscribe to Cable, and pay for streaming extra" for a lot of shows. And no.
The autoplay previews don't bother me. But, the recommendation engine and navigation/search could use some tweaks. I also hate that the "My List" row seems to move around a bit (though the AppleTV app does have a menu on the left now). I also hate that it removes series from "My List" after I've watched the last (current) episode, when there's a new season in the works, so have to go an re-find the series and add it again.
What bothers me is you can't remove content you've already seen from the list. So you end up having to track what you've seen and it reduces the signal/noise of the netflix interface in exactly the areas you are most interested in. They obviously track what you've seen, they just don't bother to hide it.
I am curious when providers like HBO realize that there are many of us who subscribe for one show only and drop and another group who goes so far as to wait till a series is done to sub one month and binge it. Should not be long before they try to throttle how many episodes of a series you can fit in per month.
It only takes three services to reach my prior cable bill and maybe four or five to hit the bigger bills when you roll it all up. so some kind of change will need to happen to keep it sustainable, either these networks are going to need to drop prices of group up. the smaller players will end up together sooner or later or just go bust. It is like when PTEN; Warners Brothers; tried to launch their channel. The had a few shows but fluttered out within five years
I suspect they will balance the annual and monthly charge.
So the monthly will jump to $65, but the annual will stay at $180.
Or maybe people are just too lazy and they won't have to bother. I have to say I'm shocked and amazed at how many families of modest means, generally pretty frugal, have cars that need repairs, and try to fix things themselves whenever possible, but happily pays $150 a month for cable.
One difference here in the UK is that I'm unable to even pay for HBO.
I wanted to watch Generation Kill the other day, it seemed like it was available on amazon prime but in fact isn't available in my region. My only option is to buy it for £2.50 per episode, which seems like a bad deal to me.
For years, I got HBO during the months GoT was on, and cancelled afterward. During season 7, they stopped offering in Netherland except on one cable provider (not mine), so I had to resort to alternative means. No idea why they decided they didn't want my money anymore.
No, the last season should be up later this year. I could cancel now, save a few bucks, re-subscribe when GOT actually does come back, then cancel again. But, I'm lazy.
Happened to me about a month ago when I tried to watch Miracle Mile ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097889/reviews ). I live in Mexico and pay for: Amazon Prime, Google Play, Netflix, CinepolisKlick and Claro Video (really, I am subscribed in one way or another to all of them). None of them had this movie in their Mexico version... I ended up having to watch it in PopCorn Time.
Not surprised I have a Netflix and Amazon Prime sub I find myself downloading the shows I pay for because it’s eaiser to have them in Plex than searching for them on Netflix/Prime.
In the US it’s even worse as there are many more services available like Hulu all of these really need to open up an API for searching and streaming so Plex and Kodi can easily integrate with them.
The cost is also getting pretty steep with more and more services being required for coverage.
Yeah, it baffles me why Netflix, a company with deep pockets and enormous technical talent, deliberately makes their search shitty and instead seems to be pushing algorithmic "recommendations".
Their genre categorizations are a joke too.
Really, the only thing that their search (at least on the Roku) seems to work for is Titles. Would it be too much to ask to be able to search against director, cast, language, actors, date?
Netflix is a hostile user application due to perverse incentives.
They see engagement as a proxy for stickiness, and similarly lack of engagement as a leading indicator of churn.
So they implement features that look like they increase engagement, like auto-play while scrolling, auto-play of next title, auto-play of a new series after the end of a series. I don't know about other people, but they absolutely infuriate me.
We normally mute Netflix on entry into the app because we know that it's going to start blaring out of the speakers as the menu is navigated. And even the menu can't be navigated in peace: I need to keep hopping between adjacent shows to stop it trying to auto-play in the background with distracting images. If I want to leave the remote idle, I need to exit the app or find somewhere for focus to rest where it's not going to start playing something.
It's just one or two more "engagement" steps away from getting cancelled.
> Yeah, it baffles me why Netflix, a company with deep pockets and enormous technical talent, deliberately makes their search shitty and instead seems to be pushing algorithmic "recommendations".
The reason seems obvious to me. They want to mask their lack of content. It always seems that Netflix is trying to discourage search. I guess that's because there's a good chance whatever movie/tv show you're trying to search for won't be available. Netflix only has 35 movies out of IMDb Top 250 [1]. Pretty sure the number is even less for other countries.
That they favor recommendations over search is bad, but in some ways worse is how they hide the "saved" content -- if you add something to your watchlist, it's usually not even on the first screen; that's something that I literally said that I want to save for watching later, and instead I have to go through page after page of recommendations before I can even see my watchlist, instead of it being front and center.
They seem to have elevated the prominence of the "continue watching" so that it's in the top three bars shown, but even that fact is ridiculous -- the obvious order should be "continue watching", "watchlist", and then start in with the recommendations. I have no idea why they make it so hard for me to watch things that I've declared an intention to watch. Why even have a watchlist in that case? Is it just a holdover from a previous design that they are no longer really interested in supporting?
One plausible, if slightly paranoid, explanation I read was that Netflix is trying to intentionally obscure the size of their library and the deficits in it. This would be especially relevant to OP's story about rising exclusivity.
It’s even worse with Prime as it’s getting harder and harder to find what is free and what isn’t as Amazon decided that it’s a good idea to intermingle pay per view/rental, buy to own and subscription based content.
I use justwatch.com to look for things I'm interested in watching. The search sucks sometimes because it doesn't always find what I typed in,sometimes I have to do a site:justwatch.com search in Google to actually find something, but in general it will usually point me in the direction of where I can stream or what subscription I need (so I do a trial, watch then cancel if there's nothing else to watch). If I can't find it anywhere, I hit up the library or rent it from Prime. I used to not have any money so I would pirate, but now I make enough that a couple of bucks isn't worth doing something illegal for.
>I have a Netflix and Amazon Prime sub I find myself downloading the shows I pay for because it’s eaiser to have them in Plex than searching for them on Netflix/Prime...
???
If it's easier just to have them in Plex, why would Plex need to search Netflix?
Serious question. I'm not a Plex user, but the first statement made me think about switching for a moment. Then you made the second statement about Plex needing an API to search Netflix.
They want to watch videos Netflix and other services from Plex. Those services don't have useful APIs, so Plex can't integrate them into their search/UI. So parent instead downloads the videos from torrents etc., so they are normal video files they can feed into Plex.
Because I care about the user experience not the legal technicality.
It’s much easier for me to automatically download and add all the shows into Plex and use its library management for all media.
If I had a legal way to do it I would, Plex has plugins for example I watch NFL trough a plug-in which is linked to my account, I also watch BBC content through the iPlayer plugin, as well as other content such as podcasts for example from multiple sources.
If Netflix and Prime has an official plugin that would allow me to link my sub and add that content to the Plex library I would do that in a heartbeat.
"That’s especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic."
Here's the thing — you can't legally watch HBO Now here. You simply can't access certain content through streaming. That's also one of the main drivers.
Licensing by country is so infuriatingly backwards for what is supposed to be a globalized economy. Maybe it made sense when you had fragmented countries with their own separate distribution networks (and cinemas) but when it's one provider direct to the end-consumer it's really just a relic of legacy processes being incapable of adapting.
If you look at some of the considerations, it makes a bit more sense. It's not about the technical aspects of distribution. I don't know if it's ever been about that, especially in the last 20-40 years. It's about timing, marketing, legal issues, ect. You can't release a movie if the content is outlawed. A tiny difference in marketing can translate into millions of dollars. These things aren't necessarily "deal breakers" for a global release, but it's virtually (or maybe completely) impossible to do optimally in every region.
>Maybe it made sense when you had fragmented countries with their own separate distribution networks (and cinemas) but when it's one provider direct to the end-consumer it's really just a relic of legacy processes being incapable of adapting.
But you are wrong, the vast majority of Netflix content is licensed and not an original product.
These licenses are sold for regions and countries the same way cinema, DVD or terrestrial programing licenses are sold for specific movies and shows.
They are sold by major distributors like say MGM to clients like Netflix (not really, there's a literal global hierarchy of distribution houses). So say for my country of Croatia, a distributor will offer to sell licenses for their new movie to all the cinemas, and after that to say ALL the digital distribution channels: pay-per-view, Netflix, HBO GO and others.
Basically its not a "a relic of legacy processes being incapable of adapting",why would they adapt? Its literally the business model of the 5-6 major american distributors which makes them boatloads of money even as Netflix tries their hardest to disrupt them. It took decades to build and spread across the world and works perfectly for its purpose: sell loads of movie licenses to all kinds of distribution channels.
Europe has HBO Go and it cost 2.99 ( in Romania at least ) euros per month. I cancelled my Netflix has I have HBO GO included in my internet package and use mostly Usenet or Torrents and my Raspberry Pi / PS4 for all my media consumption.
The solution I've been experimenting with is streaming rotation; rather than subscribing to a dozen streaming services and watching a few hours of each each month, this couple of months will be Hulu, this couple of months will be Sling (sports, mostly, though lately they seem to be getting locked out of more and more stuff too), this month will be this other service, and so on.
If the content is going to stay available, why have subscriptions to all of them all the time?
I know of people who do this for Sky Sports UK (traditional premium tv), who hold the exclusive rights to many English Premier league games (soccer). When the off season approaches, call up Sky and ask to terminate your subscription. Either they offer you a really nice deal, similar to what new subscribers get, or you quit for a few months and re-subscribe just before the season starts again. There's more on Sky than just soccer, but obviously that's the main draw for most people.
This is my solution as well, and I think it works great. I subscribe to a single month of a streaming service after the show I want to watch has completed, binge watch it, cancel, rinse and repeat with another service. At least they get some revenue out of it -- if they ever tried to require contracts, I'd just ditch them entirely.
that's a really cool idea. I just killed my netflix subscription last month because I felt there wasn't enough good content for my taste and that I've already seen it all ...
Nowdays, with a bit of elbow grease, piracy can be easier than Netflix.
In a purely hypothetical example, I could be running Sonarr and Radarr to gain almot immediate access to any TV-type media release as soon as it's available. I could feed the files into Plex and thanks to Plex Pass, I could then download the episodes of my favorite show in the morning and watch them on the go. If a show becomes unavailable due to legal reasons (Netflix' Star Trek Discovery) or other reasons (removed from media library, not licensed or license ran out), I would have a local copy. I could hook up bazaar to obtain subtitles for all those would-have media files. I wouldn't have to deal with resolution restrictions or siloing. It would be all in one app that contains all my media. This experience would be free plus the work I have to do myself to set it up.
But the actual reality is that I have 3 streaming apps on my phone because neither of the three offers all the tv shows, movies and anime that I want to consume. Shows vanish for various reasons and I cannot consume them anymore. They're gone. I have to put in actual work to discover where the current media is best obtained and sometimes the price is too high. For this experience I have to pay.
If Netflix and Friends want to keep people out of piracy, they need to stop siloing, stop geofencing their offerings and start competing around the service of media, not the availability of media.
Piracy almost always wins the availability contest. Piracy at the moment wins for Geofencing and other DRM (there is none). Piracy doesn't silo my favorite content. And piracy doesn't cost the end user anything, only the producer.
Now, I'm not advocating for piracy. I'd rather live in a world where piracy wasn't necessary or even lucrative for the end user. It's very frustrating to be stuck in the one where I throw money at the subpar solution.
And now Steam is under attack from Origin, Gog, Epic games' store, Blizzard, and all the other integrated storefronts that seem to be popping up. Sigh.
It's not just obtaining content, it's bloody playing it too. We have a Chromecast, which works great for Netflix and works acceptably for most domestic UK TV (BBC/Channel 4 etc). But it won't work with Prime, or several other subscription things anyway, and I really resent being forced into buying another media dongle just because the one I have has been crippled due to these corporations' wankery.
Torrenting and streaming local content from VideoStream or similar works great though, so as always, convenience is king.
"Competitors" is the wrong word here. The problem is not competition, it's exclusivity. I'm subscribed to half a dozen streaming services but I still regularly find content that isn't available on any of them.
There's definitely some truth to the notion that piracy is a service problem. Even without considering the costs, I really don't want to subscribe to any more streaming services simply because I'm being forced to maintain accounts and share payment information with so many entities.
It doesn't help that a regular subscription for a streaming service with only one or two appealing pieces of content is simply a bad value.
Readit News
In my country you can't even watch Netflix exclusives on Netflix because they already sold the rights to local TVs. So you sign up for Netflix and it's a wasteland of 2nd tier movies and old series. Yeah Friends is cool but who cares about it in 2019.
Segmentation is the biggest problem. But that's true for every digital store not just Netflix. I wish these stores were one unfied thing not US Netlix, German Netflix, UK Netflix etc.
I know it comes down to copyright laws and such but the difference between the countries is soooo big. Feels like you are signing up for a 3rd tier service for the same amount of money
On side note, I think there's a bit of a "look at this awesome thing you can't have" aspect to IP and content; this can be very frustrating, and has been one of the main reasons people turned to piracy (mostly people are just jerks though). There's actually some very understandable reasons why you'd want, or even need to carefully release in each region; however in other cases the attitude seems to be "we haven't figured out how to monetize this, so I guess no one gets it", "we'll need you to buy that again", or "you can't have this, because we want you to buy something else"
Please, do tell.
It seems sensible to force platforms with significant market power to open up and allow competing content to be sold on there too, maybe on a basis of costs-plus-fixed-profit for the platform.
1) Things that are actually Netflix's shows, like House of Cards
2) Things that Netflix bought exclusive distribution rights for in the US and markets as "Original" just like House of Cards, but actually had nothing to do with.
So it's less that Netflix sold the rights to local TVs and more that they never had those rights to begin with.
"Netflix Original" clearly doesn't mean much. I think it'd be wiser for Netflix to reserve it for shows they actually own, so they can never disappear from Netflix.
3) Joint productions like Lilyhammer where Netflix partnered with a foreign broadcaster to produce.
So something like Lilyhammer that was a joint Netflix/NRK production means it's a Netflix Original in the US and aired on NRK1 in Norway, but it's actually produced by both companies.
The effect in TFA only really happens with fixed-cost, apl-you-can-eat offerings. (Amazon Prime is another.)
It's why people groused for years about a la carte cable, but nobody cares about McDonald's not serving Pizza Hut.
I'm not paying £7.99 on top of my existing subscription just to watch a 30-year-old movie I've already seen 15 times.
Same thing in my country (United States).
Dead Comment
I have Prime, Netflix, and HBO and still run into this regularly. It's really annoying. As soon as GOT is done, I'll likely cancel HBO - it doesn't add much value. Netflix is hanging on, barely - every time I go to cancel, I find something interesting to watch, and that keeps me for another month or two. But, it feels user-hostile and with the price going up again, I'm that much more likely to just cancel and be done with them. And I hate the idea of relying on Amazon even more than I already do.
Le Sigh
This is basically my philosophy with streaming services. I keep Prime because it's useful all-around, and Netflix (for now) still has enough variety to keep me as a subscriber (though I wouldn't be surprised if I jumped ship to Disney later this year).
But beyond that, why not choose a la carte? I'm signing up for HBO when GoT airs, and I'll binge True Detective in between, but beyond that I don't care much about it. Hulu I signed up for a month and then immediately canceled; watched all I cared to in that time. I binged Star Trek within the one-week CBS trial period.
It would be nice to have a Mint-like streaming services dashboard I could use to selectively toggle on and off various streaming accounts when I decide they've built up enough content I haven't seen to warrant activating for a month. There's a product idea for ya.
I recommend JustWatch - https://www.justwatch.com
Note: I am not affiliated with them.
Oh, man, if Disney really makes their entire catalog available for a reasonable price, I'm definitely going to pay for that. All of Star Wars, all of MCU, all of Pixar, not to mention Disney's own stuff and apparently 21st Centry Fox movies. That's enormous.
But most streamers are just too fragmented to care.
What they should do is have one universal streaming service on which content owners can offer their own content on their own terms, rather than those of Netflix.
Also the Netflix auto-play-previews thing annoys me, trying to constantly force me to keep consuming.
I'll probably cancel both soon.
My problem with Netflix is that it's being more and more user-hostile. It only displays shows it thinks I like, and not everything. And the top band does a horrid autoplay banner. I've still yet to figure out what elements I need to watch to disable that in HTML.
Hulu is also pretty hostile with lots of adverts, but a recent uBlock update fixed that. Now the advert timer goes from 30->15->0 but does black screen for a few seconds. But this service was for $1/mo for a year. After that, we'll cancel unless offered a similar deal.
But I certainly get the piracy angle. I don't want or need 6 streaming services. I wanted 1 or really cheap ala-carte. Instead, it's "Subscribe to Cable, and pay for streaming extra" for a lot of shows. And no.
It only takes three services to reach my prior cable bill and maybe four or five to hit the bigger bills when you roll it all up. so some kind of change will need to happen to keep it sustainable, either these networks are going to need to drop prices of group up. the smaller players will end up together sooner or later or just go bust. It is like when PTEN; Warners Brothers; tried to launch their channel. The had a few shows but fluttered out within five years
Or maybe people are just too lazy and they won't have to bother. I have to say I'm shocked and amazed at how many families of modest means, generally pretty frugal, have cars that need repairs, and try to fix things themselves whenever possible, but happily pays $150 a month for cable.
One difference here in the UK is that I'm unable to even pay for HBO.
I wanted to watch Generation Kill the other day, it seemed like it was available on amazon prime but in fact isn't available in my region. My only option is to buy it for £2.50 per episode, which seems like a bad deal to me.
Sure you can. Sky (a.k.a. Now TV) carries most (all?) current HBO content in the UK.
Though I guess that doesn't apply to historic stuff like Generation Kill, which predates their exclusivity agreement.
Is GoT currently running?
For years, I got HBO during the months GoT was on, and cancelled afterward. During season 7, they stopped offering in Netherland except on one cable provider (not mine), so I had to resort to alternative means. No idea why they decided they didn't want my money anymore.
In the US it’s even worse as there are many more services available like Hulu all of these really need to open up an API for searching and streaming so Plex and Kodi can easily integrate with them.
The cost is also getting pretty steep with more and more services being required for coverage.
Their genre categorizations are a joke too.
Really, the only thing that their search (at least on the Roku) seems to work for is Titles. Would it be too much to ask to be able to search against director, cast, language, actors, date?
They see engagement as a proxy for stickiness, and similarly lack of engagement as a leading indicator of churn.
So they implement features that look like they increase engagement, like auto-play while scrolling, auto-play of next title, auto-play of a new series after the end of a series. I don't know about other people, but they absolutely infuriate me.
We normally mute Netflix on entry into the app because we know that it's going to start blaring out of the speakers as the menu is navigated. And even the menu can't be navigated in peace: I need to keep hopping between adjacent shows to stop it trying to auto-play in the background with distracting images. If I want to leave the remote idle, I need to exit the app or find somewhere for focus to rest where it's not going to start playing something.
It's just one or two more "engagement" steps away from getting cancelled.
The reason seems obvious to me. They want to mask their lack of content. It always seems that Netflix is trying to discourage search. I guess that's because there's a good chance whatever movie/tv show you're trying to search for won't be available. Netflix only has 35 movies out of IMDb Top 250 [1]. Pretty sure the number is even less for other countries.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/9gksft/netflix_only...
They seem to have elevated the prominence of the "continue watching" so that it's in the top three bars shown, but even that fact is ridiculous -- the obvious order should be "continue watching", "watchlist", and then start in with the recommendations. I have no idea why they make it so hard for me to watch things that I've declared an intention to watch. Why even have a watchlist in that case? Is it just a holdover from a previous design that they are no longer really interested in supporting?
???
If it's easier just to have them in Plex, why would Plex need to search Netflix?
Serious question. I'm not a Plex user, but the first statement made me think about switching for a moment. Then you made the second statement about Plex needing an API to search Netflix.
So I'm genuinely confused why that would be?
It’s much easier for me to automatically download and add all the shows into Plex and use its library management for all media.
If I had a legal way to do it I would, Plex has plugins for example I watch NFL trough a plug-in which is linked to my account, I also watch BBC content through the iPlayer plugin, as well as other content such as podcasts for example from multiple sources.
If Netflix and Prime has an official plugin that would allow me to link my sub and add that content to the Plex library I would do that in a heartbeat.
Deleted Comment
But you are wrong, the vast majority of Netflix content is licensed and not an original product.
These licenses are sold for regions and countries the same way cinema, DVD or terrestrial programing licenses are sold for specific movies and shows.
They are sold by major distributors like say MGM to clients like Netflix (not really, there's a literal global hierarchy of distribution houses). So say for my country of Croatia, a distributor will offer to sell licenses for their new movie to all the cinemas, and after that to say ALL the digital distribution channels: pay-per-view, Netflix, HBO GO and others.
Basically its not a "a relic of legacy processes being incapable of adapting",why would they adapt? Its literally the business model of the 5-6 major american distributors which makes them boatloads of money even as Netflix tries their hardest to disrupt them. It took decades to build and spread across the world and works perfectly for its purpose: sell loads of movie licenses to all kinds of distribution channels.
It's obvious and perfectly rational.
Deleted Comment
If the content is going to stay available, why have subscriptions to all of them all the time?
a) Sky Atlantic showing new HBO shows 1 day after HBO (no HBO in UK)
b) a slightly more polished EPG and recorder than the freesat/linux equivalents though that gap seems to be reducing.
In a purely hypothetical example, I could be running Sonarr and Radarr to gain almot immediate access to any TV-type media release as soon as it's available. I could feed the files into Plex and thanks to Plex Pass, I could then download the episodes of my favorite show in the morning and watch them on the go. If a show becomes unavailable due to legal reasons (Netflix' Star Trek Discovery) or other reasons (removed from media library, not licensed or license ran out), I would have a local copy. I could hook up bazaar to obtain subtitles for all those would-have media files. I wouldn't have to deal with resolution restrictions or siloing. It would be all in one app that contains all my media. This experience would be free plus the work I have to do myself to set it up.
But the actual reality is that I have 3 streaming apps on my phone because neither of the three offers all the tv shows, movies and anime that I want to consume. Shows vanish for various reasons and I cannot consume them anymore. They're gone. I have to put in actual work to discover where the current media is best obtained and sometimes the price is too high. For this experience I have to pay.
If Netflix and Friends want to keep people out of piracy, they need to stop siloing, stop geofencing their offerings and start competing around the service of media, not the availability of media.
Piracy almost always wins the availability contest. Piracy at the moment wins for Geofencing and other DRM (there is none). Piracy doesn't silo my favorite content. And piracy doesn't cost the end user anything, only the producer.
Now, I'm not advocating for piracy. I'd rather live in a world where piracy wasn't necessary or even lucrative for the end user. It's very frustrating to be stuck in the one where I throw money at the subpar solution.
Steam got it right...
Torrenting and streaming local content from VideoStream or similar works great though, so as always, convenience is king.
There's definitely some truth to the notion that piracy is a service problem. Even without considering the costs, I really don't want to subscribe to any more streaming services simply because I'm being forced to maintain accounts and share payment information with so many entities.
It doesn't help that a regular subscription for a streaming service with only one or two appealing pieces of content is simply a bad value.