For the spouse and me, we like a lot of the “B-grade” or even “Z-grade” movies. Anything not covered by Netflix we can pick up at our county library which has a very well stocked video collection. So far I’ve found only one series I couldn’t get a complete run for between the two of them (Lost Girl, I’ve only been able to get the first two seasons).
Fact is, we don’t have a lot of discretionary income so we have to pick and choose which entertainment sources will give us the biggest bang for the buck. Netflix isn’t perfect but it provides a wide range of choices at a low price, so for us it beats cable and satellite.
If something better comes along we’ll consider switching, just like we went from satellite to Netflix.
I’d like to stream everything through my PC, pay a flat monthly fee for, say, 10 basic/expanded basic-style channels of my choosing plus one premium channel, plus internet access. That is, IF they don’t just jack up the price to match what you would get for a full internet/cable package. Big “if” there. And I’d prefer something like Netflix’s low flat fee for unlimited streaming of some of their movies, and pay the PPV price for new or premium movies.
Not that anyone asked me or cares, but these would be my channel selections:
NBC
ABC
CBS
CW
ESPN
SyFy
Comedy Central
Discovery Channel
History Channel
Fox
Premium channel: HBO
I very, very rarely watch any shows on any of the other channels that my cable provider includes in their lineup.
Oh, never mind. It didn’t sound a hunch the way you posted it. It sound like you had an informed and potentially cite-able opinion about the next 12 months or so.
You very well may be right in the long run, but remember that you said that this would all happen by the middle of next year or so. Do you think you kind of exaggerate things a bit? Or have a very poor sense of how long things take to occur?
And, wow, they were right. You said:
Dude, was that a hunch too? It wasn’t* that *big of a deal. 10-15% is a huge number? Why did you guess such a large number?
Do you tend to mis-estimate(yes, I made that word up) quite a bit?
I had NF disc service for at least five or six years and slowly moved to streaming, then dropped disc when that service hit rock bottom.
I never said their content sucked. It’s pretty good overall. However, for the last year or more they’ve been substituting mass dumploads of crap for any significant quantity of new ‘quality’ content, and given their somewhat quirky search and browse system, I have gotten very tired of wading through grade-z titles and the kind of knockoffs and clones you find on grocery store shelves trying to find something new to watch. I have no immediate plans to drop them and we watch something on it almost every night.
Their disc service, however, got so lousy there was no reason to keep it. Besides the 30-90 day moratorium on new releases, they long ago stopped buying discs to meet demand and after about six months of having no disc at all half the time I gave up (we had anywhere between ten and twenty new/newer releases on the list that came at a rate of about one every ten days; we removed all the someday/wishlist titles because they weren’t stuff we wanted to watch on a regular basis).
I don’t see cable going anywhere soon. But the number of people who would rather save money by buying their content one selected block at a time rather than pay for an Amazon they occasionally sip from is growing rapidly.
Sorry not to have a hot inside tip for you. I don’t care to substantiate it any more than “hunch” but it’s based on a number of fairly solid and informed observations.
I’m not your broker or Reuters. Sorry if my predictions have let you down or fail to meet your standards. By all means, lock in your 10-year subscription rate now.
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We pay $75 per month for cable, from which we watch local news, Craig Ferguson, sports news, and one or two network shows. We pay $7 per month for Netflix, from which we watch about 95% of what we watch for entertainment. I’d drop cable like an infectious hot potato if we could get local news and sports news from a service like Netflix.
I’d also like to watch current seasons of things, rather than seasons from two years ago, but we can kind of do that with iTunes and AppleTV (buy a current season pass).
Hey, I don’t mean for this to get heated and I don’t have anything other than a monthly subscription, but if your hunch is based on “a number of fairly solid and informed observations”, what are they? Just a brief summary, not every single point.
I’ve mentioned most of them. Mostly, it’s that Netflix’s original success was as much luck as anything else - being in exactly the right place at the right time and taking advantage of it - and that they seem incapable of making valid forward-looking changes. Look at the renaming bumble alone - WITF could the CEO have been thinking?
They’ve also gone from providing lavish, attentive service (remember WordPerfect’s toll-free tech support line?) to squeezing every nickel. They won’t bid for better release terms, they no longer buy adequate copies of new releases even when the moratorium expires, and for every major-studio deal they shovel in a mountain of seriously WTF garbage.
They’re obviously trying to maintain profits to please the stockholders who got on board north of $100, an (MHO) unsustainable level. The razzle-dazzle never stops but if you shade your eyes, you can see they’re getting weaker and weaker against ever stronger competitors. The disc business is dead and the hurdles to becoming a competing streaming service are far smaller; all it takes is one moment of catching public attention and it will spark a wholesale AltaVista-to-Google switch.
Netflix is far from dead and does not have to fade away. But their inept management and failure to learn from Apple’s mistakes in the 1990s has them doomed.
I don’t suppose that cable companies care about the consumers. I’m not saying that they will adopt different pay structures out of the goodness of their heart. I 'm saying I believe that market pressures will force them to adopt different payment structures.
Imagine that your cable company offered CBS while Fox was exclusively provided by a competing cable company, NBC by a third one, and ABC a fourth.* Now instead of just paying a cable bill to one company you have to pay four bills to four companies if you wanted to have access to each of those networks. How long do you think that would hold up? Not long unless the cable bills were significantly smaller.
That scenario would never actually happen with the current method of cable distribution. But entertainment programming distribution is changing and soon we might see a situation where different content producers mostly have exclusive agreements with different content delivery companies.
At that point it could be too expensive for consumers to license (subscribe) to all the different delivery outlets so economic pressure would likely lead content owners and their exclusive licensees to allow piecemeal sales/rentals of content on a per-use basis.
I realize the FCC “must-carry” rules would preclude this from happening. I’m using the four traditional broadcast networks only as an example.
“A la carte” isn’t just about PPV shows on a per-use basis, *a la carte *could also mean choosing which channels you want to subscribe to. What cable customer has never complained: “I wish I could just pay for the channels I watch and to hell with the rest. I NEVER watch ESPN!” (Aside: ESPN is the single most expensive channel for cable companies to license.)
Back to my comments directed to Broomstick earlier about how market forces could move distributors to a la carte. Say that tomorrow DirecTV started letting subscribers choose which channels they pay for (instead of paying for all of them) resulting in 15 - 25% lower monthly bills. Do you realize how many cable subscribers would switch to satellite overnight? And how would cable react? By offering the same a la cart channel subscription, of course.
The whole entertainment delivery kit-and-kaboodle is going to be massively shaken up before long (natch, it’s already started). Right now cable subscribers who only watch “The Butterfly Channel” are subsidizing folks who only care about watching ESPN and other expensive live sports channels. If the sports fanatics had to pay the “true” costs of their favorite networks they would not be happy.
My vision of a “nickle-and-diming” (as suggested above) payment of programs on a per-use basis is way down the line. I shouldn’t have presented that as how I see TV in 5 years. I am looking way ahead but that vision can seem strange to people who don’t think about this as much as I do. In reality, an* a la carte* PPV paradigm would come about slowly, It has already started with currently available PPV movies and sporting events. I think that over time we will see more and more programs steadily be made available as PPV, and also free-to-view.
I don’t get why there would have to be multiple cable companies. You pay for one ISP and from there, you’d sign up (directly with the company NOT your ISP) for NBC, ABC, CBS. Aside from your ISP bill, you’ve got three compnies deducting $2(ish) directly from your CC in the same way Netflix does now.
Wait… you’re paying $75/mo for “local news and sports news”? Can’t you drop your cable and get an antenna?
We get twelve channels for free. Since the switch to digital TV (which the same rabbit ears pull in), our four network channels (plus PBS) have each added a couple of extra channels (heavy on the cooking and retro shows).
You could be watching Craig Ferguson for free, y’know!
This stuff all gets kinda complicated and maybe I should have been more clear when setting up my analogy.
I was using a hypothetical that I meant to strictly involve current cable distribution. The scenario outlined would never happen with today’s traditional cable companies. But it is starting to happen with online streaming sites like Netflix. The point of the analogy being: “I want to explain how folks could get screwed in the future by streaming sites that use exclusive contracts to carve up the bulk of popular media content among multiple online content providers. I’ll create a “what-if” using today’s cable companies as a hypothetical because that is tangible to people right now.”
But you kind of make my point about internet TV (streaming what you want from the internet instead of having a cable or satellite subscription). What you say about paying $2 each to NBC. ABC, and CBS? That’s the sort of a la carte payment paradigm I would like to see… only in that case it would be choosing networks a la carte instead of individual shows. Either way it works a lot better than having to pay for whole swaths of channels/programs that you never watch but are forced to pay for.
I’ll go back to the Netflix/Disney exclusive deal mentioned by **Jonathan Chance **in post #6. It’d be preferable to get your Disney content directly from Disney and your United Artists content directly from United Artists instead of having to pay for both a Netflix subscription because you want to see a Disney film, and, let’s just say, a Amazon Prime subscription because you want to watch a United Artists film (NOTE: Amazon Prime having an exclusive contract with UA is entirely hypothetical).
And there are tens of millions of people who CAN get antenna reception and they’re watching things like the news or sports, which aren’t suited to “on demand” playing.
Right now Netflix runs a good clean service with no commercials and little or no hassle. My prediction is that someone will get greedy and ruin things. That someone could be Netflix or their content providers. I suspect in the near future the content providers will decide they could be making more money if they hosted their own service, which will be a shame because the Netflix framework works pretty damn well.
One other thing people have not yet mentioned - you’d have to convince advertisers to move from the current ratings system to a census based system.
Census based would be pay per view, whereas the current ratings system is the projected percentage of viewers within a show’s universe (the number of people it can possibly reach based on the number of subscribers it has). Right now a 3.0 rating for 2 shows on different networks does not mean each show got the same number of viewers, it means both got 3% of their potential viewers. A 3.0 for a broadcast network with many potential viewers is not equal to a 3.0 for a small niche cable network which reaches fewer potential viewers.