Ad-Supported Netflix Tier Planned for Last Three Months of 2022, Crackdown on Account Sharing Coming

[Killbynumbers]

The value isn’t there for me anymore ??‍♂️

It never had value for me. I had it for free for two years for buying two S7 Edge phones many years ago. Cancelled as soon as those years ran out because I never watched it enough to justify paying.

 

[ponzicoinbro]

I find that Netflix’s current woes are due to a number of problems, and cracking down on account sharing is not the panacea they are hoping for.

1) Rising prices. It’s twice the price of a Disney+ sub and easily thrice that of TV+, but I don’t feel I am getting proportionally more value out of it. Especially when I am paying the highest tier chiefly for 4K resolution.

2) Tons of crap content that I cannot be bothered to watch. I am not the sort to rotate my subscriptions, so dumping their episodes all in one sitting doesn’t impact my decision to continue paying every month. Admittedly, netflix still gets my money every month regardless of how much or how little content I consume, but there will come a time when people eventually decide to quit altogether because they will wonder what exactly it is they are paying for.

3) More competition all round, and coupled with rising prices makes it harder for people to justify maintaining access to multiple streaming services. When deciding what to cut, Netflix’s prices stand out the most.

I feel that Netflix is especially more vulnerable because unlike Disney and Apple, they are wholly reliant on subscriber revenue, so any reduction in income will affect their ability to produce new content, which will in turn affect churn, and so on.

It’s still early days, but it could also be the start of a downward spiral we are seeing.

To your points

1

I actually don’t care about the prices because we used to spend $50 a month renting just a small selection of VHS and DVDs three times a week. Now I have Apple TV, Prime, Disney and Netflix and I can watch movies and TV series from a massive selection and I can watch them over and over again for months if I want to repeat watch.

Years ago we tech fans and movie fans were demanding such services. Now a new generation who never experienced how expensive entertainment used to be goes mad if they have to pay a dollar more.

2

There’s tons of crap on every service and everywhere. There’s also tons of good stuff, new and old. There’s a great back catalog if you don’t like some new stuff.

3

More competition is great and I’ll sign up for those too if they have a decent library.

So if I have 5 streaming services I’m still paying less than I paid for entertainment 20-30 years ago and it is unlimited how many times I can watch.

I also buy some titles.

I do think the same day as cinema release rentals are too expensive if you are watching alone.

 

[ponzicoinbro]

The clown’s path is cracking down on their “shared account problem” that has existed since its inception and making a bad ad supported model. They’re spending money in all the wrong places yet punching down at their customers to resolve their bad content contract and original content strategy.

Being pithy isn’t “angry irrational bandwagoning” but just avoid barfing out an explicit analysis of their situation that everyone save you seems to understand implicitly.

I mean sometimes ads are great. You go on youtube and search for compilations of 80s ads or 90s ads. Many of them are iconic and if you read the comments people laugh and enjoy how great those ads are.

As long as ads are really well made and enjoyable and honest then we shouldn’t reject them.

YouTube itself has horrible ads, very scammy, many dishonest marketing people and fake products. They don’t have any quality control.

But if Netflix has ads it would be more like we have in cinema theaters. There would be quality control and high production values. It would be branded content from popular companies, not junk marketing.

However, they should keep the ads minimal, skippable and also rely on some product placement in their movies. In a sensible way of course.

I can’t imagine living in a world without iconic and historic ads like this classic…

Or how about this one

 

[ackmondual]

YouTube itself has horrible ads, very scammy, many dishonest marketing people and fake products. They don’t have any quality control.

I generally hit the "skip" button when 5 seconds have gone by, so I don't pay much heed to those anyways. At least with the ones that don't have a skip button, they're mildly entertaining (e.g. Geico), and are only 15s to 30s (which is far less than what you'd have to deal with on the versions of Paramount Plus and Hulu with ads). FWIW, there have been some decent ads as well. Some of them got a chuckle from me, but I have ended up buying some of it as gifts (yeah, fancy toothpastes!)

 

[oldtime]

How can you decide within 10 minutes that it’s garbage (it’s not 2019 anymore, so there’s more stuff on there now) & why wouldn’t you keep it for the 3 months to see if there’s anything you like?

I found myself watching Apple TV+ more and more, so I ended up paying £50 for the year.

Indeed, while atv+ was lacking in the beginning, it is boiling over with good content now. Slow Horses, Pachinko, Essex Serpent, Severance, Afterparty have all hit the service the last couple months and are all somewhere between good and great. Coming soon there's the Attenborough dino doc, cha cha real smooth, the Napoleon movie, and the Scorsese/Deniro/Dicaprio project + whatever else I'm forgetting. And then next year the adaption of Wool, which if good, will be just massive. Exactly the kind of high concept sci-fi post apocolyptic story that people go gaga over.

All that for $5. I don't see how anyone can complain about ATV+ at this point. Their plan seems to be to adapt major written works or load up with huge starpower or give free reign to talented creators or buy up (like coda or napoleon) available properties that look like winners. Seems a better strategy than Netflix who will happily pay Sandler half a bllion dollars to create films for one specific demographic and cut a lot of other interesting content across the board and throw their hands up wondering why people aren't happy with the quality of their available content.