The author of the piece referenced in the OP is John Bonazzo. A brief bit of internet sleuthing uncovers that he graduated Frodham U in 2015. So, he is maybe 25 years old. Personally, I find an unfortunate trend in young journalists / commentators that they sometimes write pieces that are fundamentally framed as “can you believe what these older people are doing? I mean REALLY?” It plays well to what they think is their core readership, others who are just like them. When I stumble across these articles, if there is a comments section I will sometimes point out the “ageist” point of view. Hopefully, the author will read my comments and adjust their editorial point of view in the future.
A big reason I buy DVDs is that I don’t trust Netflix et al to have a particular movie, or to KEEP it available.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought “Oh, yeah, I should watch that – it’s on Netflix!” Well, it WAS until last Friday… so if it’s a movie that I’ll watch again in the future, I’ll buy it. Or if I want to watch the special features (which is ALWAYS…).
Thus has it always been, thus shall it be forever.
I clearly remember reading car mags in the late 50s and 60s, and the upstarts were railing against the behemoth sedans “long enough for bowling a few frames on a family road trip”, with their huge fins. They’d call them “Grampa cars” and mocked the older drivers whenever they got a chance. Especially the one letter to the editor where an old guy was complaining about how hard it was to find a “modern” car with curb feelers. (Real thing. Look 'em up…)
Well, that’s another part of it. The streaming market is so fractured between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Starz, HBO, etc that some people would rather have a single source for their movie needs, even if it’s through physical media. Beats carrying six different streaming subscriptions if you’re the type who can say “I want this movie and don’t really care when in the next two weeks I watch it”.
I’m another one who’s surprised the disc service still exists. I subscribed to it about ten years ago, when they were just starting the streaming, and about the time that I left, there were already rumors that they were planning on dropping the discs and going stream-only within a year.
That said, I have no idea why I would have scorn about someone else’s entertainment preferences. The expanded library and lack of broadband are both good enough reasons to keep it… but then, so is “because I just like it”. I mean, “because I just like it” is fundamentally the reason for all entertainment in the first place.
I had never heard of curb feelers, but after Googling I must say that’s actually a pretty cool idea!
I agree that snotty ageist talk is a bad look. Just rude and downright unkind. But in a lot of other cases, it at least has some kind of logical basis. It’s not nice to snicker at people for continuing to pay for landline phones and read a daily newspaper in print, getting your hands all black. But while I’m old enough to have done both of those things in my early adulthood, I no longer do and wouldn’t argue that there’s really enough benefit to either to justify the expense.
So I guess my litmus test would be: if you’re going to be a jerk and snark about “outmoded” technological preferences, your “up to date” substitute should either be:
—Better and not significantly more expensive.
—Just as good, or almost as good, and a lot cheaper.
So you can look at the example of music that was brought up in this thread. Yes, it’s annoying that Spotify or (the one I use) Apple Music doesn’t have everything. And sometimes they will lose the license for a song, and it’s in a playlist but now it’s in very light text and you can’t play it any more. Trust me, I hate that.
But the cost of actually buying all the tracks (whether on iTunes or via physical media) on all my playlists would be prohibitive. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars—we wouldn’t be able to pay the rent or buy groceries. So the tradeoff is worth it to me, and since most young people have less money on everage than older people, it makes sense that they would go that route. But if someone of any age has enough dough that they can just say “I want the music I want, damn the cost”, then that’s fine for them.
Same logic applies with Netflix: you could buy all the movies and shows you want to see on iTunes or Amazon, or (as someone also said they do) just buy Blu-rays or DVDs. But that’s also something I can’t afford to do, and again would not expect most 25 year olds to be able to afford. Not if they want to be able to see a lot of recently released and/or classic films, and want to see specific ones they have read or heard about, not just “whatever’s on Netflix streaming that looks good enough”.
Therefore, I feel this is all kind of upside down. As a GenXer, I can remember when DVRs were a new thing, and people like me were like “hot damn, I’m watching only the stuff I most want to watch, when I want to watch it, and skipping the commercials.” When I learned that many Boomers who got DVRs still just sat there and let the commercials play, I did find that a little sad and laughable, although I would continue to maintain that it would be rude to say that to anyone who operated that way. And it has been many, many years—since childhood, really—since I could relate to the idea of just turning on the TV and flipping through a few channels to see what’s on at that moment and settling on something passably good enough.
But isn’t that what these young snarkers are basically saying? “Huh huh huh, you’re planning ahead and selecting the exact content you most want to see? That’s so lame. You should just open your Netflix app and find something that’s good enough.” A Brave New World, almost.
But they already had separate queues* and as noted upthread, they ultimately spun them off as separate charges anyway, not all that much later. I think the rebranding could have been helpful, as long as it didn’t have “DVD” in the title, which it now unfortunately does.
Later in that post you talked about the stock plummet after that customer backlash. Yeah, I had a friend who was fairly heavily invested in Netflix and sold off his shares as they started to fall. I didn’t blame him much as he got out when it hadn’t fallen that much. But then when it went quite a lot lower, I suggested to him that maybe he should turn around and repurchase the same number of shares he had originally and reinvest the difference in something else. He cited some analogy of a “falling knife” and passed on that idea. Obviously I know he regrets not taking my advice on that, but I’ve never said anything about it.
BTW, the disc service still uses a 5 star system rather than a binary thumbs up or down. Another way in which the older system is more subtle and useful IMO.
*Although until fairly recently, you could see on your disc queue if something was available to stream (it would have a “PLAY” button next to it). Losing that was a bit of a blow, as I obviously don’t want to waste a disc queue slot on something I can just stream for free. So now I actually have a periodic reminder set to search the instant app for each of the next five titles on my disc queue, which is hardly an elegant solution.
I still have the Netflix dvd/blueray service as well as the streaming, but many movies in my queue are “no longer available.” These tend to be foreign/art/cult movies. People kept the disks and Netflix doesn’t want to replace the stock.
In the past, I could go to some of my local video places for these gorgeous but less commercial films, but all my local places were killed off by . . . Netflix. It’s also true that the quality of their average dvd is low compared to what we can stream. I’m bitter.
Some of their movies? A couple years ago, before I turned on streaming, I checked my DVD queue. Fewer than a fifth of them had the ‘streaming available’ icon next to it. Now it’s even less because if I am interested in a movie and I can stream it, I do. Point is, though, if I relied on streaming only, my choices would be far fewer.
Edit: After reading Slacker’s post. No wonder the streaming icons are so few.
The PLAY button is still there in my Netflix DVD-by-mail queue.
Mine also. Just checked.
Of about 30 movies I put on my queue from the 1001 movies you should see before you die book, only 4, all recent, were available for streaming.
Plus streaming does not let you hear commentary and special features. Theat’s really useful for classic movies.
Actually, often the Netflix DVDs omit the commentary and special features. The DVDs appear to be specially made for the rental market. (Some even have a message suggesting buying the retail disc for the extras.)
Oh! Okay, my bad. I think I made this erroneous assumption due to switching over to managing my disc queue through the phone app, which definitely does not have the PLAY button. Good to know I can visit the website to scan for those that are streamable.
Yeah, things are worse in “long tail” terms in some ways than they were a few years ago. I think I actually read an article about that, that the “long tail” was an idea we all thought was sort of here for good but turned out to be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, a brief golden era. [some Googling/reading time passes] I didn’t find the article I previously read, but I did find an adequate, more recent, and perfectly depressing substitute on the same subject: The Long Tail: When A Famous Theory Got (Almost) All Wrong | by Willy Braun | Before The Dot | Medium
ETA:
That’s true, but a notable exception is the Criterion Collection Blu-rays, which make up a sizable chunk of what I watch. (And again: these sneering 25 year olds are missing out on some of the all-time greatest works of cinematic art—great job, you guys.)
Ugh, that sounds awful. I’ve dealt with that for a .99 Redbox rental of a new release, and that’s fine. But, I’d expect more from Netflix. I remember one summer when I rented all the James Bond films from Netflix, just to watch them with the commentary since I’ve seen them all multiple times
Thanks! Though I wonder how long those already long movies will end up with commercials…
Back in the day, tires were much more fragile, but radial tires can take a beating, so the feelers are less useful. The classic tires were also whitewall, so scrapes affect the appearance more.
My modern take on it is to put it in reverse for a second and use the backup cam to check curb alignment and distance. It won’t prevent you from scraping the curb, but will let you know if you need to move closer without having to get out.
I don’t really watch commentary, but it seems in my experience that obviously rental-ready movies are the rarity, and that the vast majority have the full DVD. I can’t put it into percentage, but certainly most have commentary.
I mostly use the Netflix DVD-by-mail service to see the new releases, and often the big titles have the specially made discs. (You can tell, because the discs are plain with none of the fancy artwork on retail discs. Sometimes they actually say For Rental Only right on them.)
I’ve seen that, and maybe I’ll have to pay more attention, but I seem to remember that they might be missing deleted scenes, interviews, etc. but have a commentary track. But again, maybe when you play the commentary, it’s just the producers exhorting you to pay for the real DVD.
Also note that all DVDs you get from Netflix are rental copies. Buying a DVD at Walmart does not give you permission to rent it out legally, that requires more expensive licensed copies.
Counterpoint: For everyone of these there’s a “Millennials are killing X” article.
First Sale Doctrine allows exactly that: you can rent out your retail DVDs all you want.
In fact, Redbox recently won a legal case against Disney where Redbox was buying retail DVD/Digital packages and then renting out the DVDs while selling the digital codes. Disney couldn’t do anything about the rentals since those were covered by First Sale Doctrine but claimed that selling the codes was a violation of the terms of agreement. the courts said nope, Redbox was free to do what they wanted with those once they bought them.
It’s probably better for Redbox or Netflix to have an arrangement with the studios though since they can get the discs cheaper and easier than raiding every Target and Walmart in the tri-country area each time a new movie comes out.
I think I misread, thank you. Has this always been the case as applied to rentals, whether DVD or VHS?
The studios played hard ball with rental places. There was a window where you could rent a new release but it wasn’t yet for sale. If a video store wanted to get the videos for that window, they had to agree with each studio not to buy their regular consumer-sale stock and rent that. Having videos to rent weeks after all the other video stores meant you went under, so you complied.
A place like Netflix has other reasons not to irritate studios (streaming) so they play along … some of the time.
[quote=“Quimby, post:5, topic:815950”]
That said, to the generation behind mine DVDs already feel old fashioned so I get it.QUOTE]
I’d think anyone under 50 probably feels a lot like DVDs are back there with buggy whips and snuff boxes, if only because they’re not HD.
Overall the arguments sound a lot like the vinyl vs. CD vs. MP3 arguments I used to hear; basically they all boil down to how much you value quality over convenience. In essence, MP3 files are convenient even if they don’t sound all that great relative to a well-mastered vinyl record. But the record is a pain in the ass that you can’t take with you, and requires specialized hardware to play, etc…
Same thing applies with discs; you have to have a player, plan ahead as to what and when you’re going to watch, etc… while nearly every TV comes with built-in Netflix support these days, and you can just fire up that app and watch your stuff whenever, at the cost of a little quality and stuff like extras.
Now as to why they’re snarky or disdainful, I don’t know. Probably just assholes.