Streaming Services (business / market / service, not content-focused)

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

On 5/31/2023 at 12:41 AM, Heartofice said:

Watching Dan Murrells video about some of the shows being taken down off Disney and Hulu, my first reaction is ‘who the fuck did they think was going to watch these shows??’

Yeah, I know. I literally haven’t heard of most of these.

Even more shocking is that Lightyear has been pulled from D+. I don’t think it could have failed more comprehensively than that.

[Iskaral Pust]

Has anyone else noticed that the Max app has even more problems since the rebrand?  Now it forgets most of the time where I left off re-watching a show — I’ve been rewatching the Wire and keeps resetting to S1E1, so I have to remember my last location and manually move to that.  It seems to handle the first watch in something just fine.

[Myrddin]

I've noticed that too, especially with shows. My son finally started watching Game of Thrones and keeps bitching that he has to re-search for the show every time.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

@Myrddin @Iskaral Pust

How do they fuck that up? Like, wouldn’t it be as simple as a new name and a re-skin of the existing site? 

[Rhom]

2 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Yeah, I know. I literally haven’t heard of most of these.

Even more shocking is that Lightyear has been pulled from D+. I don’t think it could have failed more comprehensively than that.

I guess I don't know how that all works.  Does having Lightyear on there just take up bandwidth?  What's the harm in leaving it on there?

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

32 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I guess I don't know how that all works.  Does having Lightyear on there just take up bandwidth?  What's the harm in leaving it on there?

Speculation is streaming royalties.

[Iskaral Pust]

7 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

@Myrddin @Iskaral Pust

How do they fuck that up? Like, wouldn’t it be as simple as a new name and a re-skin of the existing site? 

It seems ridiculous.  My uninformed guess is that it’s because the rebrand added multiple content silos within the app, like Disney+, and the app’s data handling wasn’t designed for that.  They need some old school C++ for dynamic pointers.

Regardless, it’s a really bad user experience.  Especially when their biggest selling point is a back catalog of some of the most rewatchable TV shows in the entire industry.  I doubt anyone is paying the subscription fee for their new releases, the Discovery+ reality TV garbage, or movies that cycle through every streaming service. 

[SpaceChampion]

I wonder if the real reason they branded under "Max" is to build it up to a streaming platform like Hulu and sell it off to get out of the streaming business.  Continue being a supplier of content for it, but take fees for licensing to it, and let whoever takes it over worry about making it profitable.

[Zorral]

MAX is just about as impossible to navigate as Amazon Prime -- to find anything at all, even what one is in the process of continuing to watch.  As AP keeps forcing their pay for stuff on you while hiding what one doesn't have to pay for, MAX keeps pushing all that shit from Discover or whatever it is that I'd never ever watch no matter what and pushes the shit to the top, while hiding what one will watch, is watching.  Give me HBO!

[SpaceChampion]

Regarding dialogue sound levels...  This article blames streamers for not anchoring sound levels to the dialogue, specifically starting when AT&T bought Time Warner, and thus had HBO ahead of the final season of GOT:

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by SpaceChampion

[Rhom]

On 6/9/2023 at 3:11 PM, SpaceChampion said:

Regarding dialogue sound levels...  This article blames streamers for not anchoring sound levels to the dialogue, specifically starting when AT&T bought Time Warner, and thus had HBO ahead of the final season of GOT:

 

And all this time I just thought I was getting old!!!

[Zorral]

Streaming Shocker: Warner Bros. Discovery In Talks To License HBO Original Series To Netflix 

https://deadline.com/2023/06/warner-bros-discovery-in-talks-to-license-hbo-original-series-to-netflix-1235421444/

 

[Ran]

They used to do this stuff before and stopped only when they decided to go big on their own service... but as a lot of people in the industry are saying, streaming is not looking like the golden goose a lot of people thought it would be, and everyone locking their content behind walled gardens is proving ruinous for basically everyone other than Netflix who had first mover and scale advantages.

[Zorral]

Which brought us to Netflix in the first place in its golden period, that it licensed all the good shows from elsewhere. It did see very early the writing on the wall, that everywhere else would eventually lock up their shows on their own services, which would -- and has -- hurt Netflix, so they went after creating their own original programming.  Which, except for occasional big hit, like the House of Cards prior to the Spacey revelations, and Bridgerton, hasn't worked out so well.  Though picking up dropped shows like The Last Kingdom, worked too, though aqain, not always successful.

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

13 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Which brought us to Netflix in the first place in its golden period, that it licensed all the good shows from elsewhere. It did see very early the writing on the wall, that everywhere else would eventually lock up their shows on their own services, which would -- and has -- hurt Netflix, so they went after creating their own original programming.  Which, except for occasional big hit, like the House of Cards prior to the Spacey revelations, and Bridgerton, hasn't worked out so well.  Though picking up dropped shows like The Last Kingdom, worked too, though aqain, not always successful.

 

That’s news. Who says?

The streaming wars follow a typical business trend. A pioneer gets started and makes a bunch of moneys. Would-be competitors say, “Hey, those guys are making a bunch of moneys!”, and they all pile in. In a decade or two, most of these streaming services won’t exist anymore and they’ll just go back to licensing their content to others.

[Werthead]

On 6/21/2023 at 6:49 PM, Zorral said:

Which brought us to Netflix in the first place in its golden period, that it licensed all the good shows from elsewhere. It did see very early the writing on the wall, that everywhere else would eventually lock up their shows on their own services, which would -- and has -- hurt Netflix, so they went after creating their own original programming.  Which, except for occasional big hit, like the House of Cards prior to the Spacey revelations, and Bridgerton, hasn't worked out so well.  Though picking up dropped shows like The Last Kingdom, worked too, though aqain, not always successful.

 

Netflix had tons of hit original shows: House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, 13 Reasons Why, The Witcher, Stranger Things, Bridgerton, Wednesday and Squid Game, at least, are all massive shows that got people subscribing to Netflix. I'd say their relative hit rate has dropped off a lot, though, and they are producing more and more unoriginal reality trash which has the virtue of being dirt cheap compared to some of their shows.

[SpaceChampion]

Netflix's crackdown on password-sharing worked, with 6 million new subscriptions added in the 2nd quarter of this year beating analyst projections by 4.1 million subs.

 

 

 

[Zorral]

Netflix is also dumping the least expensive plan for ad free for new subscribers.

[mormont]

It's not a 'crackdown'. That would imply enforcing an existing rule. What Netflix did was change the rules.

[Rhom]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

It's not a 'crackdown'. That would imply enforcing an existing rule. What Netflix did was change the rules.

I think you’re splitting hairs.  The rule was always one household per account, they added a new level of enforcement to it… but the rule was existing.