Uhoh, Netflix is in trouble. Lots of people are cancelling because they don't like the price, now their solution is to start cracking down and charging more. This will be a long slow decline where competition fights its way in.
The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.
Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.
Here's what I don't get... there's more media than EVER in history (well, by definition there always will be). Netflix started out as a place I could get any movie. I remember my neighbor got "Kellys Heros" in the mail from Netflix and we ate Chinese Food. I felt bad but they offered it. In my family we had no TV and NEVER got takeout. To this day, it's one of my favorite flicks.
So many films, so cheaply to be had. Clint Eastwood did what, 500 films? Surely they can fill up a good catalog.
All this spending on Netflix's own studio is ludicrous cheap-money investment banking startup lunacy.
Just give me a big catalog of films, and give me all the stupid tv shows too. MASH, The Office, whatever. Pay HBO for sopranos and move on.
Or, just be a carrier. That's what Netflix is good at. Delivering reliable and easy to access, good quality streaming. Don't worry about the rest. I love my Roku because I can search and it'll tell me what service has the film or show I want to see. There's a good number of Cary Grant films I get for free consistently.
All that to say, Netflix seems to spend money on stupid stuff.
Which is why they should focus on being a carrier. Get the netflix catalog + if you want HBO you cant get a package for X price. Their expertise is in streaming. They should have been selling the technology stack to Paramount, Disney, CBS, whoever.
I think Amazon might be doing what you're describing. You can sign up for Showtime, Starz, AMC, etc inside of Prime Video and get all the content in one interface. But HBO for example has pulled their stuff, so sometimes companies just don't want to play together.
Edit: You know who else is doing this? Cable companies! You can sign up for HBO and get that content right in your Xfinity app, or search/browse on your set-top box and stream "on demand".
I’ve seen a lot of negativity about Netflix’s library lately in quite a few comments. And I just don’t quite get it. Netflix is still the one service I don’t even consider canceling, because of the breadth of the library: they have American sci-fi, Korean dramas, Danish comedy, and Japanese anime. Hollywood movies now are all the same — especially the superhero movies — but international stuff is different. Am I just on the long tail?
I think its a recency bias. Netflix has produced some very good content in the past like House of Cards, Dark, and Black Mirror, but recently it has not produced anything noteworthy at all.
Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
Calling it a recency bias implies that people are incorrectly concluding Netflix doesn't produce good content because they are biased to think of recent productions. But Netflix subscribers pay monthly, they are entitled to continual good content. If you've already seen the good stuff Netflix has made, why would you keep paying for the trash?
I think it’s more likely that the Netflix algorithm has failed you than you having seen all the good content. Have you seen Borgen and Hotel del Luna and Shaun the Sheep and Midnight Diner and Kath & Kim? Have you even heard of any of them?
Those are all different genres, made in different countries. Algorithms tend to want to match us to more of the same. But just because I like South Park does not mean I want to see a bunch of manatee jokes on Family Guy, right?
No, I don't subscribe to Netflix or watch their content. I just think it's not correct to say that it's a "recency bias" if someone complains that Netflix has bad content.
Bias may be the wrong word but i didnt intend to make it sound like an excuse for Netflix - just a reason why consumers think Netflix sucks. Trust me, i have cancelled Netflix precisely because it has stopped producing as much good content.
Technically, wasn't Black Mirror a BBC production, but then Netflix paid to have an additional season made. Plus, a holiday special IIRC. If you can't get the original production peeps to do more Black Mirror, then it's not really going to be the same. Something along the lines of maybe, but at that point, it's not the same so why bother?
> Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
This is due to a row over rights as well as Charlie Brooker's working on other things and hesitancy to create a new series in the first place. But a new series did get announced last month, so...
I much prefer the "British model" of slow releases over longer spans of time to the "American model" of just endlessly cranking out stuff like a factory.
> Lots of people are cancelling because they don't like the price
I think people are cancelling because Netflix gets boring after some time. When I first got Netflix it seemed to good to be true: So much stuff to watch instantly!
But after some time you realise that they use all kinds of tricks to make it seem like they have more content than they do (eg. different thumbnails for the same film), they don't have a list of their films anywhere, etc.
Their recommendation engine feels like it's written by a 3rd grader (you watched a Zombie movie? let me recommend exclusively zombie movies!)
In the end I just realised I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore, and cancelled the subscription. I don't think the price was important for my decision, I don't even remember how much I paid for Netflix.
Much more has been lost from Netflix than gained, their catalog used to be much bigger before everyone split off to their own service. There used to be much more to watch instantly, and anything in particular you wanted to see was more likely to be there in the past.
I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly
That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem
With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly
It’s possible to keep it secret, it’s just more complicated. I proposed one such setup in an old comment. Quoted here with some fixes.
“What if you get the receipt with UUID and your voting choices, then at a separate kiosk only in the polling station, you can enter your UUID to view the full results as posted online (meaning electronically recorded and stored). Along with your UUID and results, a hash of the two is displayed and can be printed onto your receipt. Before leaving the station, you must detach and dispose of the plaintext voting choices portion, but you can hang onto the UUID + hash.
At any time in the future, you can enter your UUID into the site, which will compute and display only the hash, giving you verification of no tampering but not disclosing any results to nefarious third parties.”
It’s not foolproof and still requires more trust in maths than just showing your voting choices would. But it does solve vote buying and voter intimidation.
The only time vote buying was historically a problem was when it was decriminalized or legal and done out in the open. The instant it was criminalized it evaporated completely.
Doing it on a scale that is large enough enough that it becomes meaningful quickly becomes impossible even if the police only do a few half hearted sting operations.
Im not particularly in favor of electronic voting but i wish this particular meme would die coz it's mainly gonna be used to excuse voting systems corrupted at the source that the voter cant check.
> The 2010 and 2012 surveys for the Americas Barometer showed that 15% of surveyed voters in Latin America had been offered something of value in exchange for voting a particular way
> 16% of voters [in Africa] were offered money or other goods in exchange for voting a particular way in the most recent election
And yeah, in developed countries and stable democracies it probably wouldn't be an issue, but then maybe it would eventually be, and it's a pretty big flaw to introduce in order to achieve something that is not an issue
You can already check that your vote is being counted with paper ballots, you sign up as a poll observer or worker and you look at the vote counting operations
Brazil was a clear example of where it started out legal (until 1999!). After it was made illegal it declined a lot in spite of really inconsistent enforcement.
Where it happened it was perfectly obvious who was doing it, but the cops wouldnt touch them. It was a crime committed out in the open.
A similar pattern played out in America in the 1800s where it was widespread, made illegal, started out not particularly well enforced and then it gradually became extinct.
Everywhere it's been a problem it's basically been officially tolerated. The crime quickly becomes impossible to commit if it isnt.
This is in stark contrast to many other crimes (e.g. drugs) where even strict enforcement doesnt do much.
No, you could do it in a way where the voter can verify their vote was recorded correctly but can't prove it to anyone else. Trivial method: require the voter to assign random numbers to each candidate. They remember the number of the candidate they chose. The voting system later says "you voted for 6".
You have all of the recording done to a paper tape that the user can inspect as their vote is made. That paper tape is read by machine later. That means you only need to trust the counting machine, which is pretty easy because you can easily do random samples to check it is working, or have both parties count or whatever.
You can't eliminate the possibility that your paper vote is completely discarded and replaced by fake ones. But that's not really any different to existing non-electronic voting.
Looks very nice, and the price point looks perfect. Of course I only use open source software, so I take this as a challenge to reimplement these features in emacs.
For me personally, and I know others as well, I can't stand ads, if it comes down to the end of the world or accepting ads, goodbye world.
So naturally I go quite a bit out of my way to remove ads and build tools that remove ads, everywhere I can.
With YouTube's current trend of doing the worst job possible (see removing dislikes) there is no way in hell I'm going to be paying them anything.
I'm still waiting for good ways to pay content producers directly, how does one tip a tenth of a cent?
The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.
Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.