1610

Here in the UK it’s still far cheaper to cut the cord, even if you effectively resubscribe to everything. Partly this is because we have a public broadcaster that is legally required not to charge for streaming, and that prevents the other terrestrial broadcasters for charging for their catchup services. So really you’re talking about the solely OTT services (one of which is free if you have Prime for other reasons), and NowTV, which is Sky’s service, and considerably cheaper than even the cheapest Sky package. The downside is that a lot of the free services have shitty video quality, and of course ads.

I subscribe to three TV services and a DVD service and MLB.tv, and I still pay less than the introductory price for Sky with movies and sport. It barely costs more than just Sky TV and movies. I’ll probably drop NowTV when HBO Max launches here,as I really only use it for the HBO shows.

1611

I find this utterly baffling. They long ago lost most of the movies and non-original programming that kept me subscribed to them. These days, I subscribe at most one month out of the year to watch the handful of originals that are of any interest. What on Earth are people watching month to month on this service at this point?

Whereas that I totally get. Generally speaking I stay subscribed to Amazon (for the reasons stated) and more often than not Hulu, because they’ve got a metric ton of old highly background-streamable programming. The others just don’t have enough stuff I want to watch to be worth sustaining month to month.

1612

I have literally hundreds of titles on my Netflix list and more gets added faster than I can watch it. -shrug-

1613

I’m just as baffled. I found this to be a good explanation upon reading it the other day:

Basically they’ve found their niche for people to watch certain shows in the background.

The incentive structure for a streaming service is slightly different. Earlier this month, Kyle Chayka ruffled some feathers at The New Yorker with a piece about “ambient TV,” presenting the widely hate-watched Emily in Paris as an example of a streaming-native show designed to be viewed passively. Detractors pointed out that having TV on in the background is hardly new, but “ambient” does accurately describe the overall effect of Netflix’s programming strategy: similarity as a selling point, not a disservice. Without ever leaving the app, subscribers can take in identical concepts like Tidying Up With Marie Kondo and Get Organized With the Home Edit , both female-fronted odes to the compartmentalized living space; look for baking inspiration from The Great British Baking Show , Sugar Rush , or Nailed It! , assorted riffs on the inevitable messiness of the most precision-oriented culinary art; or segue seamlessly from Chef’s Table to its spinoff Street Food to region-specific shows like Taco Chronicles or Flavorful Origins , all handsomely photographed food shows . Such commitment to a niche can occasionally verge on the absurd, as when the same platform bankrolls both credulous infomercials like The Goop Lab and debunkings like Unwell , riffs on the shared theme of wellness.

The idea is to keep viewers in the confines of a single walled garden for as long as possible, catering so fully to a given interest that there’s no need to look anywhere else. And while Netflix remains the strategy’s standard-bearer, other streamers are starting to catch on.

That linked New Yorker article on Ambient TV linked in that quote is also worth following and reading.

In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic. Nothing bad ever happens to our heroine for long. The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching. Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.

We’re moving past the prestige TV era into the Ambient era! I love that quote.

Confession: I do love me some Great British Baking Show. Every time I subscribe to Netflix, I have a plan that I’m going to watch that Charlize Theron movie, and this and that and the other thing, but I end up watching mostly the Great British Baking Show instead.

1614

Dude, my job involves knowing what people are searching for. And whatever is new on Netflix that week is always HUGE in terms of search. And Netflix releases new series and movies weekly at this point.

It seems that if you build it, they will come, and they will get used to it, and they will come there daily.

1615

My takeaway from that is that they’ve become the streaming home of crap reality TV, which I suppose explains my lack of interest.

I mean, I’m not doubting it’s true, I just don’t get it. :)

1616

Netflix’s content budget this year was $17 billion. That’s $1.4 billion a month. They have so much new content that there is always going to be something for everyone.

1617

Clearly not. :) They’re spending a whole lot of money, that’s for sure, but they produce perhaps 3 shows a year I give a crap about.

1618

They have a bunch of reality TV, sure. But yeah, they also do…basically everything else, too.

1619

Speaking for myself - at the moment I’m watching for the first time Avatar TLA, Schitt’s Creek, Star Trek Disco, Peaky Blinders, Blood of Zeus and Aunty Donna’s House of Fun, with new Big Mouth coming this Friday, while slowly rewatching Community and Rick & Morty. I also watch one to two movies a week, mostly new (to me), sometimes a rewatch. There’s usually around two new shows and a movie or two I’m interested in each month, on top of the existing catalogue which will take me ages to get through.

1620

What’s interesting about that is that it’s not mostly original programming, and a lot of it is stuff they’re going to lose soon. Big Mouth is, however, one of the few originals of theirs that I enjoy. I’ll probably resubscribe at some point here to watch that, the third season of Castlevania, and maybe the new Lucifer season. If Stranger Things would pop back up it’d be an easy buy.

But see, I’ve been off the service for a year and there’s like, three things I want to watch there.

1621

Look I could watch other TV than binging She-Ra over and over again but them the crippling wave of depression would descend and we can’t have that, now can we?

1622

Does Netflix lose non-original programming? Sure. But then they add other stuff. We may someday reach a point where they have to rely mainly on original programming, but by that point they’ll have tens of thousands of hours of back catalog.

1623

And even though rivals are building their own streaming services, they are not averse to using Netflix to boost existing shows. Evil Season 1 recently made it to Netflix because they want to expose the show to a larger audience, with the thinking that those new viewers will then tune in to new episodes weekly on CBS. Grey’s Anatomy found whole new life after it made it to Netflix; it got a significant ratings boost and continues to keep on going on ABC.

1624

Well, that’s just what I’m watching at the moment. I’ve watched a bunch of originals in recent months - Kingdom, Nailed It, the new Transformers animation, #Alive, A Life On Our Planet, My Octopus Teacher, Money Heist, The Last Dance, Wild Wild Country, The Old Guard, Dark, Space Force, Between Two Ferns and a bunch of comedy specials.

1625

This is pretty clearly a case of “to each their own.” Netflix has been hemhorraging non-original content for years as the major media players draw back to their own platforms. I sincerely expected their reliance on original content and a large body of foreign-made material (which may be good but often suffers from translation issues and would seem to me to lack broad appeal) to more substantially impact their bottom line. It wasn’t my intention to impugn anyone else’s taste, I’m just sincerely surprised at how well this is working for them.

1626

The EU mandating that streaming services must create X% of original content in the EU is certainly helping Netflix. There’s vast wealth of (to Americans) unknown talent over there, and they’re creating tons of new shows with new faces that are gaining traction with American viewers.

Netflix is spending like $350 million a week on new content. That’s enough to fund two or three seasons of Game of Thrones every week. No one else in Hollywood even comes close to matching that kind of spend.

1627

Are they losing stuff to proprietary services? Sure. But I think the degree to which that happens has been exaggerated by a) people overestimating how much stuff they used to have (before any of the competition arrived, I still constantly complained about how loads of what I wanted to watch wasn’t on Netflix’s streaming) and b) underestimating how much they still have. A quick browse of Netflix shows dozens of great movies and a wide spectrum of non-original television content that I’m interested in. And a lot of the losses have been just as temporary as the gains. Stuff moves around. Netflix is getting Stargate back, got Hannibal at some point when that was previously on Amazon, etc. It’s certainly possible that we’ll see every major content producer do their own service and restrict all their stuff to it - Netflix has certainly been pushing originals against such an eventuality. But we definitely aren’t there yet, and I’m not so sure all of these services are going to succeed long term.

1628

I will certainly cop to the fact that I haven’t been keeping track. Once stuff I was watching disappears from the service I stop looking for it there.

I do think there’s an issue where a lot of their non-original programming is also on other services. For people with Netflix as their “primary” this means they think of the service as having lots to watch, but since I keep Amazon Prime around for reasons wholly unrelated to streaming, any duplication between services doesn’t count for me on Netflix. So stuff like Stargate and Hannibal simply isn’t a value add for me, since I’ve had access to those for years.

1629

The Flight Attendant is excellent, has the Stusser Seal of Approval.

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