[sametmax]

I'm just amazed somebody can come to this conclusion.

20 years ago you had to go to the shop, buy ONE film for $15 from a limited shelve, bring it back home, put it in a device you bought specifically for that film format and that does only that, navigate through a dubious UI, be forced to watch ads, then eventually get to the film. If you didn't like it... too bad.

Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows. No ads. Instant watching. Most of them were release on TV or on theater so basically same quality than other channels.

And people complain ?

I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down, but it has nothing to do with netflix. The good/sucks ratio is plummeting much the same on every medium (and I think it's because of us voting for crap with our money, like for most things in our society).

Well, I guess it's beautiful some people arrived at such a level of comfort in their life that they consider that amazing commercial offer to be not up to their standard.

> PC propaganda

While their original content do try to target specific niches including PC and SJW trends (it makes sense IMO), there are plenty of excellent content on netflix that don't follow this trend. Just opening my front page: Ajin, Rick and Morty, black mirror, battle royal, altered carbon, lastman, dirk gently, breaking bad, american beauty, pulp fiction, drive, trainspotting, house of cards, david chapelle, mad max furry road...

Yes, things like Sabrina, disenchantmenent, etc are pandering to a certain crowd. So what ? You can just click on something else. There is a lot of something else.

[beatgammit]

You're forgetting rental stores. My local grocery store had a rental section for $2/movie, and the selection was way better than Redbox, and the titles didn't rotate out as quickly as Netflix. I would typically watch 4-5 movies a month (one a week), which would cost me ~$10/month.

Now, I spend ~$10 per service for access to streaming content, and the selection is still worse than my grocery store was. Yes, there are more titles, but fewer good titles, especially since I'm not really into long series. I pay twice as much for half the quality.

So now my choices are only watch relatively new releases at Redbox (selection sucks), pay a ton to "rent" online (who thought $5/movie was a good idea?), or sign up for "unlimited" service(s) with mediocre selection.

Maybe I'm being nostalgic, but it seems we've moved backwards since moving on from video rental places.

[pwaivers]

> Who thought $5/movie was a good idea?

Is $2 vs $5 really that much different? You saved the time you spent going to the rental store and using a DVD. Plus, $5 to rent practically any movie on demand without trailers is pretty good IMO.

[cercatrova]

Just because something is better now than in the past does not mean that it cannot be improved. We cannot be placated with what we have but must constantly strive to move forward. That is how human progress is built.

[sametmax]

Of course.

But I noticed that many people were happy with the previous situation, and a lot are not with the new one, despite it being by all objective attributes, better.

I believe the issue here is perception, expectations and ability to enjoy. Not netflix which does an incredible job.

In a world of abundance and lack of attention, the public is bound to be unsatisfied.

It's not sane, IMO, if your brain think it is still hungry when you live in the most amazing all-you-can-eat buffet of all time.

Introspection is in order.

[asdff]

Ironically, I've never gone to blockbuster and failed to find what I was looking for on the shelves. Meanwhile, staples that brought me to Netflix disappear regularly. I've been a subscriber to Netflix since it was a mail order service, and that original hope that there would be one repository with all the content--literally online blockbuster--never materialized, and I fear at this point it never will.

I wonder why Spotify was able to easily and immediately license practically everything; it's not like Columbia and Atlantic records are exclusive to one service or another like with video content producers.

[Arnt]

It's not better by all objective attributes. The attributes that have improved may be the most important ones (and God how I hated those FBI warnings), but Netflix customers complain about two things: Time spent browsing the library, and that they're unhappy with what they actually select (which is obviously partly their choice, partly Netflix' UI).

Put differently, I've worked for several streamers. One of them explicitly mentions its small library as a feature. Just 30 films, so you will not spend twenty minutes looking for something to watch. Those 20 minutes are a feature and Netflix is worse than many DVD shops were in that respect.

[sametmax]

I'm the first to agree the netflix UI has huge flaws.

It's still miles better than going to rent a VHS in a mall.

It's still miles better than buying a DVD online.

It's still miles better than having to download the movie on eMule.

And you do have a small library sample on netflix. It's your front page.

Now people either complain there is nothing to watch (front page not interesting anymore after a while), or too much too watch (the size of the entire lib is overwhelming).

Wait, what ?

Besides, honestly, when you have a full life, where do you get the time to exhaust the netflix offer ? How many hours of video a week must you consume to arrive at a stage where "there is nothing to watch on netflix" ? Because in that case, not only the $15 have been paid for a 1000 times, but also, again, the problem is clearly not netflix.

Which remains me I'm spending too much time on NH today, so, gotta go :)

[michaelt]

  Now people either complain there is nothing to watch
  [...] or too much too watch [...] Wait, what ?

If my kitchen is bare except for 200 lbs of rice and 200 lbs of onions, do I have too much food or not enough?

[Arnt]

Different people.

Nothing requires you to add apples and oranges in the same way as I do. Your most important feature may be my totally unimportant feature, and that's neither your fault nor mine. And as usual gripes are louder than happy purrs.

I was happy with the DVD shop I primarily used; the owner's selection was much better suited to me than Netflix' is. (No I'm not a Netflix customer, but I've used it in a professional capacity.)

[ConceptJunkie]

And it's still miles better than Hulu, who seem to have this compulsion to make their UI worse and less usable every 6 months or so.

[TulliusCicero]

> I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down

I'd say it's the opposite, at least for TV. We're in the golden age, as they say. There are so many damn good shows out there.

And if you compare modern remakes to the old school versions, usually the difference in quality is drastic. Been watching She-Ra, and the old one is basically garbage compared to the remake. Same thing for Ducktales: the new one doesn't just have better animation, it's way smarter too (and I loved Ducktales as a kid).

[farrisbris]

~20 years ago my parents bought us(me) a new computer. A Pentium 2. For almost the exact same price(not adjusted) as the fairly well specced gaming computer i bought last year.

Prices drop for a lot of stuff. Thinking youtube for $15/month is expensive doesn't seem wierd to me. But i think its worth it just to avoid ads.

> mad max furry road...

What a movie that would have been :)

[forgottenpass]

>And people complain?

They're not competing against 20 years ago, the value proposition has changed. (Although 25 years ago there was "57 Channels And Nothin' On").

They're competing against a giant glut of content. Whats the marginal value in watching the latest hot Netflix show over everything else at my fingertips on the internet? Is there something inherently better about the 22-minute format? A movie's 3-act structure? Or a miniseries carefully crafted with plenty of plot climaxes but no plot resolution so you sit there and binge it? Do those shapes of entertainment earn a special place that commands a premium? Does the spectacle enabled by their production budgets?

I actually think they do have an edge, the social act of watching something together with people in the living room. But that's it.

[zanny]

At least contextually I will personally complain that the whole business model of making content to then profit off of (be it in $15 3D tickets, $100 blu ray box sets, or 5 cents of Netflix revenue) permanently as being incredibly amoral and culturally destructive.

We have the Internet. People give away data in their posession for free to the order of exabytes a year. As a species, we have the capability to host the total sum of all information produced by our kind in kind. We just chose to silo anything dating back to the 1920s in corporate coffers as a means to rent seek forever on properties the creators are either long dead or long gone from the studio that continues to profit off their work forever.

[xienze]

> Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows

Yes, but are they the movies and shows people actually want to watch? You know, classics and the like. Increasingly, the case is "no".

[pwaivers]

Which classics are you talking about? I think more people want to watch "Thor: Ragnarok" than they want to watch "Casablanca".

[xienze]

Well on the TV side, Friends, for example. Netflix is coughing up $100M to keep it for another year because people are flipping their lids about losing it. Also, you're taking the definition of "classic" far too literally. There's any number of movies from the 80s, 90s, 00s, etc. that Netflix just doesn't have or shuffle in and out of the service within a matter of months that are of far greater appeal than something Netflix cooked up in the span of six months. That's the difference between "lots of content" and "lots of content that people want to see."

> I think more people want to watch "Thor: Ragnarok"

Again, say bye-bye to that one in the near future when Disney's streaming service starts, and in its place we'll get some Netflix junk that no one's ever heard of. See the problem here?

[romanovcode]

Did you try to use Netflix outside of U.S.? It's pathetic.

[sametmax]

I'm french, we have one of the weakest offer in the netflix world. It's still way, way more content I could (sanely) consume in my entire life.

I think the problem comes from something else.

Regularly I watch movies with friends: they can't appreciate many good movies anymore. They need fast attention catching stuff. Otherwise they get bored, they loose focus (even watch their phone), and it snowballs since they miss pieces of the movie used to construct it that eventually gives it life.

I see plenty of netflix watchers that do it on the side, while browsing the web, in the background of a social activity, or even watching another movie (!).

You cannot taste "Scott Pilgrim", "The Shawshank redemption", "12 monkeys", "Forest Gump", "Pain and Gain" and "Life is beautiful" if you watch them the way you gulp "Rogue 1", get drunk on "Avengers" or skim "Transformers". Just like you don't eat a burger and osters the same way if you want to enjoy both of them.

In fact, you can't appreciate anything special that way. The problem here is not netflix. It's that the way many people consume things now will always leave them unsatisfied.

Also, there is a quantity effect. You can now watch more than you should, and many do. But it will make you numb.

And to finish on a more positive note, the fact we have watched so many things now also educated us more to what's quality and what is not. It's fair we have now higher expectations.

[cableshaft]

There was always ways to consume things on the side. I remember way before Netflix (around 2003) I went through a phase of about six months where every day I would come home from work, put a playlist of Mr. Show on my computer (a single TV show that only had 30 episodes), and play Dynasty Warriors 3 for 2 to 3 hours. I probably rewatched Mr. Show at least 10 times in that six months.

And after the first time I mostly didn't look at it anymore, it was just the audio I chose to play while I was playing the game, and since I'd already seen the whole series, it was predictable and didn't distract too much from the game playing.

I don't find watching TV to be that virtuous, and usually when I'm doing it I'm feeling guilty for not doing other things. So yeah, I'll do that as a 'side thing' and not feel too bad about it.

However, it's gotten more difficult than it used to be, as I used to think that TV wasn't too good and was an easy to skip medium, now I think there's just waaaay too much good stuff, I just have to actively choose not to watch it (like so far I've managed not to watch any Marvel TV shows on Netflix, but it's always there tempting me).

It's also usually the only leisure activity we can do together in the evenings during the week that my girlfriend feels like doing, so that's how I keep up with Game of Thrones, West World, Silicon Valley, Doctor Who, and whatnot. But I might be designing something on the computer while we're watching them.

I wish it were easier to write with TV on in the background though. I'm getting way, way behind on that.

[asdff]

Have you considered that nothing really changed with how much attention people give to movies? You are only looking at your friend's behavior, and assuming that the story would change if you lived in another decade. You can't rule out that even in the days where movies were only shown in a theater, that maybe 10% of the audience was paying enough attention to truly appreciate the film and not distracted with other thoughts. Being an active and engaged watcher is difficult work, and it can be as hard as analytical reading for many people. Cell phones and the internet also didn't invent trite, low effort, distracting content; that stuff is as old as writing.

[slantyyz]

When I subscribed in Canada a couple of years ago, I was struggling to find good content. Today, I find it more annoying that I can't keep up with what's coming out.

The user interface makes it hard to discover and track stuff that interests me. It's weird, because the UI is actually OK, but it just can't handle the volume of new stuff coming out every week. Only the stuff that Netflix wants me to find out about trickles onto the main view.

[simtel20]

Living in Brazil right now. I'm pretty satisfied with Netflix. It's not as good as when they started with Starz, but it's got a lot of content in both English and Portuguese, and most everything is subtitled and lots of the content is dubbed (as opposed to content I've bought from Google play which annoyingly doesn't even have the option to buy in another language, so I can't invite friends over to watch).

[dagw]

I'm in Sweden and Netflix has gotten much much better of the past few years. Sure there are a few movies that are on Netflix in the US but Viaplay (the other big streaming service in Sweden) here. But at the same time there are movies and shows that are on Netflix here, but Prime or Hulu in the US. These days I doubt there are that many shows/movies which are available for streaming in the US, but not here.