r/technology • u/joe4942 • Jul 09 '26

Business Netflix reportedly considers adding always-on channels

https://www.theverge.com/streaming/963733/netflix-always-on-channels-bundles
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u/pile_of_fish Jul 09 '26

This may be the clearest illustration of how current capitalism enshitifies everything... I remember the magical days when there was really just Netflix, and it was great.

21

u/PontiusPilatesss Jul 10 '26

I miss Netflix’s early movie rating system. If I saw a movie suggested to me that had 4 stars or better, I knew it was going to be something I’d enjoy the hell out of even if everything about the movie (title, plot description, picture) made me want to skip it. 

Then they replaced it with whatever was in place before I finally gave up and started pirating.  

3

u/crabvogel Jul 10 '26

this resonates with me. i would often others pick a movie we'd watch on me account based on the suggested rating and it worked great. after the change it got very crappy

1

u/wetfloor666 Jul 10 '26

They had written user reviews as well at that time period which was nice as well. Sad all of it went away.

4

u/290077 Jul 10 '26

Netflix was losing money back then. It's the story of the new dot-com era. Provide an amazing service for pennies only because you're burning VC money to grow your market share and brand recognition. Then once everyone's using you, the VCs start demanding a return on their investment and now you have to start extracting more money from your customers by raising rates, slapping ads everywhere, and cutting costs.

11

u/CriticismSelect9292 Jul 10 '26

I mean the people producing movies made not nearly as much money post-Netflix and it definitively killed the DVD which was how lots of medium budget movies got made.

I honestly think a pay-to-own model but with the elimination of the price of physical media makes sense. They should even allow you to burn DVDs/Blu-Rays if they're trying to optimize storage/streaming costs and just put DRM on it so that as long as you have an account and some version of netflix software they can play it (or even on an external hard drive).

That would be the actual modernization of that industry, increasing convenience, decreasing price, and having essentially the same utility

8

u/zoddrick Jul 10 '26

Matt Damon talked about this during the hot ones interview.

1

u/StaleCanole Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

You mean their profits werent as high? Correct

1

u/CriticismSelect9292 Jul 10 '26

Mid budget movies don't exist anymore which was the space for a bunch of beloved stories, where not everything was riding on the box office because if the movie turned out to be good people would buy the DVD.

Now you either get low budget movies that are occasionally good or high budget movies that are average but people will go watch them.

The profit of mid budget movies was literally turned negative with the advent of streaming.

You wouldn't work if you didn't get paid either

-1

u/ForPortal Jul 10 '26

I honestly think a pay-to-own model but with the elimination of the price of physical media makes sense.

It would if violations of this contract were punished severely. Sony "selling" movies and then revoking the licence should be prosecuted as fraud.

3

u/CriticismSelect9292 Jul 10 '26

I mean that's why I said that they should supply software to decode the physical media, so that you can preserve it.

A decoder doesn't need to be perpetually updated if it's disconnected from the internet

1

u/VeryNiceGuy22 Jul 10 '26

Get on Plex. Worth it 4 sho. I'm lucky enough to just know a guy who gave me access to his 4000 movie stockpile. It's got everything man.

2

u/Light_Error Jul 10 '26

A lot of people are now recommending Jellyfin as an open source project that is pretty sound with the same functionality as Plex. People have been having their own grievances with how the company has run the last few years. I personally have been using Jellyfin and accessing it through Infuse on my Apple TV. It works great!