[Arubis]

On day 0, this probably doesn't affect most folks here. The option to not have ads remains, and thus far at the same-ish price, hand-waving preexisting upward adjustments.

Most of the brouhaha around this will be pricing-related: will Netflix use this to boost their prices???? Will I have to pay more??????

I dunno. Maybe. Doesn't seem unlikely. I don't really care, though, to be honest. $5 a month doesn't make a huge difference.

What concerns me is that this changes Netflix's incentive structure. Prior to this change, Netflix had one customer base: the viewers. So content was produced with the primary goal of making the viewers happy, enough so to continue paying them month over month.

Now, the shift is towards also having another customer base: advertising buyers. Will they have direct input into what content is produced? If not direct, will they have the right of refusal, or pressure? "We won't put our ads next to that" will likely reduce the amount of "that" being produced. Additionally, since ads are shown per time block, this adds an incentive to produce content that takes longer to watch rather than content that you can enjoy in concentration.

[tomjen3]

You are not wrong, but they had ads before: it was just called product placements. For example their Swiss Family Robinson (but in space) had a 15-20 minute segment of an episode about a packet of Oreos.

[jimbob45]

I looked it up and oof that's rough. It almost seems like a YouTube parody account photoshopped the oreos in.

https://vimeo.com/418604619

[an_aparallel]

holy shit - this is aweful. I have, for a long time refused to watch any netflix produced content - i almost dont care about the diamonds in the rough after seeing stuff like this.