| ▲ | advisedwang 2 days ago |
| > The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode. That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything. The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy. There are two reasons why this isn't working for us: 1. They've cut costs and over-optimized on engagement and now frequently a streaming service will literally not have anything you want to watch. 2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show. Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good. |
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| ▲ | user17847392650 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| You remember incorrectly. The first real commercial on-demand streaming service to gain traction was Netflix, and it exploded in popularity precisely because it did have "almost everything". One reasonable price, practically everything worth watching. That was the original promise. |
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| ▲ | mkozlows 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all. If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps. | | |
| ▲ | atmavatar 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The truth is that there was a lot more available in the early days of Netflix than there is now, which with some rose-tinted glasses may very well make it seem like Netflix had everything. It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services. | |
| ▲ | pooploop64 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems. I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could. | |
| ▲ | gpvos a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Depends in which country you live. Netflix was the only thing in many places outside the US for a long time. | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps. That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now. | |
| ▲ | Our_Benefactors a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It really was. Hulu was seen as “the worse netflix”, was launched significantly after netflix already had a critical mass, and its launch was seen as the beginning of the end for streaming as a one stop shop. |
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| ▲ | orev 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences. It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire. There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things. | | |
| ▲ | TitaRusell 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There were so many expensive TV shows being made that it simply wasn't sustainable. We're actually back to normal. TV before streaming was A LOT of reruns, trashy talkshows/reality TV, soaps and quiz shows. | | |
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| ▲ | blacksmith_tb 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch. | |
| ▲ | majormajor 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What? It famously didn't on the streaming side. It had everything on DVD. For years I kept both parts of Netflix because a lot of popular shows—newer ones especially—weren't on it. So I could get DVDs of past seasons. Or go to Hulu for newer episodes. Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time. High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space. |
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| ▲ | why_at 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show. >(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good. I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it. The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be. |
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| ▲ | baubino 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good. #2 is because streaming companies made a promise that they couldn’t live up to — namely, that subscribing to their service would essentially be tv on demand and we could watch the best tv had to offer without the limited scheduling of over-the-air broadcasting. Well, it turns out that one of the great benefits of network broadcasting was that everyone could watch the same show because everyone had access to the broadcast. The streaming companies are expecting subscribers to watch what’s on their service just because it’s on their service, which is exactly what regular broadcast tv had forced everyone to do. Streaming offers the option to watch anytime but not the option to watch anything, even thought that was in fact part of the original promise. |
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| ▲ | watwut 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I find the 2 being framed as fault of "us" weird. It seems completely normal to me to want to read a specific book rather then "just some" or see a specific movie rather then "any movie will do". Watching things because a friend praised them or because you seen a good review or because you liked it and want to re-watch is no more "the bad herd following" then mindlessly opening Netflix and clicking whatever it recommends. |
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| ▲ | advisedwang a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes, it would be nice to universal access to all content. But the streaming providers must negotiate licensing fees, and having a commitment to provide all content would allow the rights-holders to charge whatever they liked. That drive the cost of the streaming subscription extremely high. If it was PPV then it would work, but that is basically what you get with google/amazon's rentals. In a different world where rightsholders didn't get to set their price, then this would be possible. That world is bittorrent ;) |
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