Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
The plans to offer a free ad-supported tier, albeit in select markets, suggests that pivot towards monetizing user data, in other words — making users and not the extensive library of award-winning shows a product, might be well in the pipeline.
I’ll take “Organizations that made it to the top by doing something different, only to fall under leadership that doesn’t understand what made them successful and descend into ruins” for 200, Alex.
Seriously, Jeopardy team - this is a rich category:
- Netflix advertisements.
- Zoom mandates staff return to offices.
- Microsoft forgets what the “P” in “PC” stands for.
- Toys R Us implements a shitty holiday gift returns policy.
- Sears decides to sacrifice reputation for quarterly stock price gains.
- Walgreens decides bottom-of-the-barrel incompetent pharmacists can uphold their “get it all done in one visit” secret sauce.
- Radio Shack decides that once-every-two-years cellphone contract sales are the future for holding passionate electronics hobbyists’ loyalty.
Netflix can’t do what got them to the top.
Fuck everything about the changes they’ve made for the last several years, but they were always going to hit a wall when content owners put their content on their own platforms.
Netflix can’t do what got them to the top.
They can’t grow that way but they could easily hold on and remain profitable, popular and successful.
They were well on their way to enjoying “Kleenex” or “Oreo” stable market success, but their leadership and shareholders apparently aren’t satisfied with winning.
The entire source of their growth was “you can get almost anything you want to watch for one low monthly cost”. They no longer have rights to any of that content, and for most of it didn’t even get an opportunity to make a bid.
It’s the equivalent of Oreo shipping 3 Oreos in a big box for 3x the price. But also they had to change their recipe because they didn’t own the old one.
Yeah. Netflix got really lucky with streaming for as long as they did and they knew it. Cable and broadcast subsidized their content and they were able to lease it for pennies on the dollar.
Of course, people don’t want to admit that the subsidy for their content is gone and they are pissed about rising costs.
I don’t care about the why. It was worth it.
Now it’s not worth it.
Then cancel and move on.
The way that people talk about it here, a streaming service raising rates is the equivalent of a significant other dumping them.
I did. A long time ago.
People are allowed to recognize a dogshit excuse for a product is a bad product.
Oreo was originally a ripoff so it makes sense.
I worked at Radio Shack in 2012 for a few months and was told by my boss that if a customer wasn’t there to buy a cell phone, be as little help to them as possible.
That’s heartbreaking. Radio Shack was so fun, while it lasted.
It’s a shame they went under during the rise of the maker movement. What an asset they could have been. I remember they started carrying arduino near the end and thought somebody must have tried to reach for their roots. Too little, too late.
I had quit in October of that year because I found a much better job that I ended up working at for 11 years. In those few short months though it was wild all the things that happened in that store. That store was in a mall and it didn’t last a year after I quit. They had a going out of business sale and I got a ton of arduino stuff for 75% off.
Time to bring back Tivo
That’s the problem. They already wisened up and HDMI, the propietary standard they forced everyone to change to for HD+, has built-in DRM. Most smart TV have DRM built-in as well.
Cryptanalysis researchers demonstrated flaws in HDCP as early as 2001. In September 2010, an HDCP master key that allows for the generation of valid device keys was released to the public, rendering the key revocation feature of HDCP useless.[8][9] Intel has confirmed that the crack is real,[10] and believes the master key was reverse engineered rather than leaked.[11] In practical terms, the impact of the crack has been described as “the digital equivalent of pointing a video camera at the TV”, and of limited importance for consumers because the encryption of high-definition discs has been attacked directly, with the loss of interactive features like menus.[12] Intel threatened to sue anyone producing an unlicensed device.[11]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection
I’m aware of this. But no corporation will ever let anyone get even close to releasing a consumer product like TiVo used to be.
Then it can be an open source project like PiHole that runs on a raspberry pi and that only cool people know about
They would be ceased and desisted out of existence. There’s a reason no one on the scene right now discloses methods and streaming piracy is a closely guarded secret. I’m sure it is perfectly possible, as that is how most piracy occurs nowadays. But it is extremely technical and most likely risks exposing any person doing it wrong.
Well it would be something that is for, you know, research. Like the core technology exists in a GitHub repo for science and the public interest, but the master keys are just not included, and up for you to procure on your own with a “legitimate license.”
They already have an ad tier (tmobile bundles it into some of their plans). Is this going to be an even more ad tier?
Mega ad tier.
This is step 86 in the plan. Step 87 is make people pay for the previously free service
Didn’t they already had a paid and with ads tier?
Yeah but now the roped in new suckers that didn’t know they need the product and the price is now 10 per month
Growth hacking. Shake loose more market share with the “FREE!!” version and then the frog boil
The advertising ouroboros continues to devour itself
“The enshittifucation will continue until profits improve.” --CEOs of Publicly Traded Companies
the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience
In what universe do ads, no matter how “relevant and engaging”, ever not detract from the overall experience?
I hate ads, but sometimes prime puts 2 minutes of ads at the beginning of a show or a movie and then no ads, I’m ok-ish with this, much better than imdb or tubi that play the same commercial every 15 minutes
If I start a stream and it shows that it will have several breaks I stop it and get it from the high seas
I would be fine with that if it was free and didn’t reply the ads if I stop and resume.
If I am paying money, then ads are unacceptable.
Included with this, promoting one of your shows before the one your watching starts should be considered an ad and not happen on ad free tiers, looking at you HBO and Paramount.
I wish they wouldn’t do that. If i have to hear about Southern New Hampshire University again I’m gonna hurt somebody.
If I agree to free thing and have to watch ads, aight fine.
But at least make them different man, i hate that they play the same one over and over again. It does not make me want to buy your product.
I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.
Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.
But you are telling us about kia, so maybe it did work
deleted by creator
Nissan! Shoot, I did it wrong…
Honest answer? Kids toys ads. The kids love the ads more than the show sometimes.
It sucks for parents though. Gets expensive.
deleted by creator
Cerveza Cristal?
Always does but some implementations are better than others and bills still need to get paid. Network TV can’t force you to watch ads before beginning your program, but streaming can. I’m irritated that Prime has ads even though I pay for it but at least the way they handle them (only before the program starts) is acceptable to me. Interrupting a program to show ads the way YouTube does is horrible customer experience. What’s crazy to me is the way network tv shows have gone from 22 minutes in a 30 minute block to 17-19 minutes.
When is interrupting my viewing experience to show me an ad ever actually relevant?
Engaging is the last thing I want from an ad
You engage with the skip button
I’ve been watching Monk recently, without ads, and it’s very interesting how television shows used to be written and edited for commercials. It’s dead obvious where the commercials used to be, and even that detracts from the overall experience.
Its painfully obvious when watching Star Trek TNG.
music swells, fade to black
I don’t mind those breaks… It feels like going to the next chapter in a book.
But actual ads, yea, not for a service that costs.
Though this whole thing is funny - they collect even more user data than they did with cable or broadcast, and now want to show you ads too.
Can’t wait to finish my media server setup.
I don’t mind when it’s an obvious break followed by a new scene. I do mind when the break is in the middle of a scene and they essentially replay the last thirty seconds before continuing the story. It just feels very disjointed and dated.
Some shows we’ve watched spend their time “recapping” after the 'ad breaks", playing same scenes we just saw. Drives me nuts, wastes my time and feels so dated.
That was a trope of real tv shows especially , and also a way to fill time with less filmed content i.e cost cutting. Often you’d see many shots 5-7 times throughout the show. Opening montage , before ad tease, after ad recap, thr event itself, end of show montage summary etc. Also drives me nuts. Even back when ads were between. “Yes I know what happened two minutes ago!”. And then there were so many shows you could tell the edit project file was a template and they just replaced the footage. Same exact structure every episode.
Anime was bad for this too, especially the dubbed kind and one piece.
Reality tv shows took this the farthest its so bad
One of my favorite skits for that: https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc?si=i6He7wklxdSt8gpn
Monk doesn’t go that far, and it’s still obvious. “Here’s a joke before commercial!” Pause. Fade back in to a new scene. Pause. “Here’s a little cliffhanger before commercial!” Pause. Fade back in to a new scene. Pause.
At this point if I’m ever responsible for making a tv show it will have obvious places for commercials to go just because I don’t want them butchering it.
Good luck, if you ever watch any of the free TV apps like freevee they will just hard cut in a commercial, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Then they have the old places where a commercial was in the OG broadcast and it just fades to black and back. It’s really jarring to watch.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I always thought it would be a nice addition to piracy for a release group to edit a version of shows that cuts the recaps and makes a more unified episode. I would totally only ever download their releases.
Mythbusters streamlined is like that. A bit rough on some cuts imo, but overall just cuts the fluff.
Mythbusters is 50% recap, that sounds so much more enjoyable to watch. Where would I find that?
It’s on reddit going back quite a few years, with a recent tracker update:
https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths/comments/8gix4w/streamlined_mythbusters_complete_may_2018_update/
I was about to mention this example. It’s everything you love about mythbusters (doing crazy science experiments), without everything you hate about mythbusters and what made me stop watching. No more constant hopping over between the different myths per episode, or tons of recaps.
Just myths, one at a time, no bullshit.
My thoughts exactly when i was watching old seasons of Canadas worst drivers
Maybe the vid angel people can get on that.
Myth busters had to be the worst offender in that realm. “here a 2 minute recap of that things you just saw 5 minutes ago.”
Ahhh, I suffer from this with old animes!
I’m gonna be king of the recaps! 👒
modern shows frame things differently to account for people watching on tiny phone screens and we might be bothered a few years down the line when we get holodecks or
mind controlimplantsSame, been watching Dead Like Me and Xena: Warrior Princess and it’s pretty distracting when it happens.
Futurama had some jokes based around the commercial break times.
The Simpsons as well.
we were not the customers… we were the product lol…
yeah it hurts, so let’s stop allowing ads into our lives as much as possible…
the fact that netflix wants to offer it for free is telling what their core business is turning into…
I’m not streaming it, it’s on my media server, so there are no ads. I don’t pay for any services except Shudder because it’s still cheap and niche.
good, same here but we are a very small minority…
half the population still pays for cable haha
Their core business is lost, IMO. Once they stopped offering movies in favor of their own content and tv shows, thats when it was game over for me.
I agree I stopped with them mid 2010s… their OG content is just low quality engagement slop. I prefer spytube for that.
There are also shows that based jokes around the fact that they were going to or just came back from a commercial break and now you don’t have those in those shows. And now, I guess, they’ll go back to editing shows for ads.
What a weird modern landscape we’ve made for ourselves.
What a weird modern landscape we’ve made for ourselves.
Every generation ever. Well, maybe since inventing the wheel
Those ads that are now inserted during the program on us tv shows are annoying as fuck Banner at the bottom or side… Goddamnit.
Especially in shows not edited for commercials. They just throw them in the middle somewhere so the show gets cut mid-sentence. It’s ridiculous. If you want to show me ads after that episode, then fine. But killing the entire pacing of the show for your ads in a service people are paying for already? that’s just infuriating.
Fuck, these days even in shows that are edited for commercials, they’ll ignore those breaks and just put ads wherever they feel like it
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
Greg Peters, Netflix’s co-CEO, recently told The Verge that they view ad sales as “a new muscle” for the streaming giant to “build” and then apparently flex.
According to a recent Madison and Wall survey, cited by Bloomberg, Netflix currently ranks around ninth or tenth in the online video advertising space, all while lagging far behind not only YouTube, but also Disney and Paramount, and struggling to catch up with Amazon and Roku.
Maxine Gurevich of Horizon Media argued that as long as people find the service valuable and the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience.
For example, Netflix’s intention to show ads during the NFL’s Christmas games to all subscribers, including those in the ad-free tier, is a tad disconcerting.
Only time will tell what happens with Netflix’s subscription tiers, and whether we’ll see moderately priced ad-supported options alongside premium ad-free versions that will be generally out of reach for regular consumers.
The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Enshittification? ✔️
I look forward to when someone releases a box to record the screen or shows you want to watch on Netflix just in case the rights gets pulled before you get the chance to watch it. Added benefit is they can make it skip ads too. Gotta have a catchy name… like… NeVO for Netflix Video On(demand)
Tablo already exists
If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
Do it!
Ill cut subscription to free tier let adblockers do the rest. Profit.Let me know if it works and I’ll follow. I don’t need quality, I just need something for my kids to watch occasionally.
If that’s all you need, I’d probably just start using Tubi, Pluto, and Plex. Pluto and Plex have some good live channels (Tubi might also, haven’t checked). Tubi and Plex have a decent catalogue of on demand shows and movies. Of course if you already have Netflix, it might be hard if there’s a specific show they’re used to.
Tech bros reinvent broadcast TV.
With my NAS, plex and Usenet I reinvented streaming. It’s awesome.
Im the one that was paying for Netflix for my family, but the password crack down motivated me to learn how to build a server and go full arrs. They had a good thing going, but now that $26 a month will be used to buy hdds.
Told people this years ago when pewdie pie became a millionaire selling ads. Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out and making the internet the hellscape this is. But no we Revere and emulate these people.
Like that was the time to wake up and hate every single one of these content creators for selling out
And then what? Stop consuming their content?
Yes
Sure, or accept that you participating in that industry will always lead to this stuff.
What do people want here. In what world do you think you can separate the two things. Monetizing content through ads and marketing and a world where ads and marketing are not capitalized on.
We all had to stop this decades ago when it was a tiny little part of the internet. You can’t kill it once its tendrils are in every corner its grown into Fafnir
You all have to get better at listening to the crazy ranting of random strangers with hair triggers and obsess over things you don’t care about. Otherwise the future is bleek
What’s even crazier is kids today will never realize the freedom that the first few decades of the internet was when the topic of information scarcity was supposed to end.
We were all so against the idea that capitalist and opportunistic people could artificially create scarcity to make us all pay more. They did it through monopolies on industry’s that choked out smaller competitors. The internet was a new frontier that was supposed to reject that. We could digitally copy and share everything. Hero’s shot up and built all kinds of amazing tools and things. Then it got popular and we recreated the same scarcity issues within decades. Everything trapped behind walls and monetized. Instead of open courseware at Berkeley we favored monthly subscriptions to udemy.
This is the average 6 year olds dream right now. A life where they can emulate a NASCAR fender and live that twitch life just like their heroes Pewdie and Moist and whatever else. Those kids grow up with that mentality and end up shaping a new generation pulling away from what all this could have been.
This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?
I’m a big fan of Patreon.
Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living
I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.
Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.
Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.
But why do they need to make a living creating content.
We should go back to hobbyist sharing videos of their hobby and interest for the love of it instead of a guy trying to make money by jumping into trendy hobbies and creating bland generic content until the algorithm picks them.
It would reduce so much noise online and the stuff we would be left with would be people who have the best content. It would eliminate the drama and toxic crap for views.
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I see it the same. Every one bares responsibility. And even though a big chunk is on the pharma and media companies. There is still the pusher
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?
Mind explains what is far fetched about it?
There was an opioid crisis where drug makers sold pills to the public that the public did not need and they used doctors to sell them.
There is an advertising epidemic where industry is working to push ads into every space we listen, look or experience and they are using content creators to justify it
Both have a large well funded industry. Both require an interface between public and the industry to sell their product. Both push products to people who don’t need them by using these interfaces to bullshit, lie and leverage their authority to sell the product. And in one case we blame the interface in the other we say " they aren’t responsible they are just making money" so why?
For me, it depends on what they’re promoting. If it’s some crappy mobile game or crypto, I’m out. But I’m fine with the usual shit like energy drinks or VPNs. Like, those things usually have a serious business behind them, even if they might be useless for the vast majority of viewers.
Yep. I don’t hate youtubers for doing ads. Everyone needs to make money. Just skip the ads.
Except for Ryan George because he actually makes his funny as fuck.
If Netflix ads were just energy drinks and VPN then you’re cool with them adding these tiers?
Honest to god question. How many hours a day are you OK being spent on being sold something. What is your ratio of content to ads.
That’s your time by the way. My full belief is anyone trying to sell me anything needs to pay me. Not a content creator. That’s my time I barely have any of it to give so when 1 hr out of 3 hrs I got to relax is spent being sold shit I’m pretty pissed.
And it isn’t like I can. Just opt to enjoy ad free content creators. They no longer exist because the ones that monetized it. That’s the part I hate most.
It’s a little different with Netflix, because of what they started out as. With Youtube, I expected to be advertised to from the beginning, you know? I pay for Youtube Premium and use Sponsor Block to support the creators I watch while having a mostly ad free experience. Also, I just trust most of the creators that I watch to have my best interest in mind in terms of what they advertise.
But for Netflix, their whole thing from the beginning was that they were better TV. That’s how they sold it to me. Now they’re slowly losing their point. So I’d definitely not be alright with it if they started showing me ads on top of my subscription fee. Same with Prime Video, because I know they’re experimenting with that.
Who reveres and emulates PewDiePie lol
Too fucking many. But replace him with any of them. Speed, H2, Moist, donkey something. We use to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to see content.
I won’t support any streaming service that has a sub+ad tier. Ads with no sub or sub no ads, anything else is incredibly greedy and the same as cable TV.
Piracy it is then…
