Netflix, you're wasting my money. I'm not getting what I expected to get from you. I will be spend my money on something else than you.

I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.

Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.

It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content

What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.

So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.

Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.

Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.

My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.

Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video. Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)

I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

This is a different matter. Netflix has a finite budget to license content. It's not clear that it would be better for the consumer if they had a policy of never removing films from the library, as this would have to be counterbalanced by fewer new films being added. I suspect this approach would be much worse for the consumer overall.

Also, unlike when a series is cancelled, those films are still available to stream on an à la carte basis from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.

I've found that disc rental (by post) can be a surprisingly good option, even if it's been mostly forgotten with the rise of streaming. The available library is better than any streaming subscription is able to offer.

> I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series

Shouldn't this mean you're less inconvenienced by content churn? If you're part way through a series and it gets removed, that's annoying, but this doesn't really apply to movies.

For Netflix shows. Netflix is now a network channel producing its own content, in the mold of HBO. If you don't find value in HBO, then you don't subscribe to HBO. Same with Netflix.

Licensing content from turned out to be a terrible business model because a) licensing fees would bleed you dry of all your profits, b) content owners would yank their content anyway to compete with you because it turns out, creating a streaming infrastructure isn't that hard and much cheaper than owning and producing content.

If you're not interested with what's on the "channel" at all, you're probably mostly better off with just buying/renting a la carte.

I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.

I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.

A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.

This so many times. It gives me hope that humanity will eventually rise above what's going right now. There are also a lot more good lessons in TNG than I remembered as a kid. Great show :)

If you like that, you should give The Orville a try. A lot of people dismissed it thinking it was going to be full of crude humor, essentially "Family Guy in Space", because it was from Seth MacFarlane.

But that is not the case at all. What MacFarlane was going for exactly was that naive optimism, although from TOS not TNG. Later science fiction, he has said, has been a lot less optimistic.

Yes, The Orville has some comedy--sometimes quite funny, but it almost all fits in with the serious elements. The crew, at least for a long time, is not full of highly competent natural heroes like TOS or TNG, because The Orville is not the flagship of the fleet that everyone wants to be on and only the very best qualify. It is the opposite of that. It's a minor ship where you put average or below people who you don't expect much from, captained by a man who had problems in his personal life that tanked his career, given The Orville because some friends called in favors to get one more try to turn him around before kicking him out of the service.

The first season was a bit hit or miss for the first few episodes, as they figured out the right balance of comedy and drama, but it did not take long to get good. The second season continued on from that. That's all there was been so far, with a third season coming.

I agree on DS9. My one complaint is that I think they should have went another direction with the ending. It could have ended in a way that served as a launching point for the biggest Star Trek arc yet.

Much of the series involved the conflict between the Federation and the Founders from the gamma quadrant, with the Federation being the good guys. The Founders were perhaps not necessarily evil, but they had a strong distrust of others and a belief that the non-shapeshifters would wipe them out if they got a chance.

The thing about the Founders is that with their shapeshifting abilities they were pretty much the best spies and infiltrators in the galaxy. We know they infiltrated to the highest levels of Klingon government.

I don't remember if it was ever confirmed that they made it to high levels in the Federation, too, but you have to assume they did. But then they should be able to figure out that Federation really are the good guys. The Federation really wants peace between every intelligent species. They really should join the Federation rather than fear it.

So why didn't they?

Perhaps it is because they aren't the only ones who have infiltrated and placed people high in the Federation government? From TOS and TNG we know that others have tried or succeeded at that before.

So maybe the reason the Founders absolutely distrust the Federation is because they know that the people who appear to be in charge and are pushing the peace and unity message are actually not the ones running things. The peace and unity people are just clueless puppets of the real masters.

End DS9 with Sisko discovering the truth, the Federation's masters discovering that Sisko is on to them, and Sisko going on the run.

That sets up at least two more series.

The first one could cover Sisko on the run, working in the shadows to build up secret opposition to the Federation's evil masters, slowly spreading the word to others he can trust, like Picard on the Enterprise, and convincing Federation enemies like the Cardassians that they are better off with a Federation that really is what is claims to be rather than a Federation secretly run by evil aliens and so should help save the Federation.

The second series, "Star Trek: Civil War", could cover when matters get to a head, and open hostilities break out withing The Federation.

You could still have Voyager in there...have the civil war start while Voyager is lost. They can come back into the middle of it.

There's probably even plenty for a third series after Civil War.

I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?

It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.

It assumes that novelty is what drives people to the platform and increases/maintains the subscriber base.

However, Netflix's evident model is not capable of falsifying this assumption. By cancelling series as soon as they plateau (not even _decline_, given reporting (https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...) of its production cost escalator), they do not generate a large library of "complete series" for later viewing.

This also puzzles me, since it contradicts Netflix's willingness to pay a pretty penny for established series like Friends. Its current show-commissioning practices seem to be incapable of generating a new generational hit like that.

Ideally they should A/B test at least occasionally with different decision models to see if their assumptions are correct, but those are very expensive experiments to run when you're talking about the production of a TV series.

Also, a counter-argument to my proposition above is that broadcast TV through the mid-90s had a captive audience in a way that Netflix doesn't. To a limited extent, broadcast TV could force audiences to become familiar with a show, pushing an originally-marginal show over a threshold of popularity.

Netflix Decision Model Optimization (NDMO). The new SEO.

I have started to check if there is more than one season out before I watch a new show, and frequently there isn't.

Past obsessives moved to other newer things after a few days.

It's an incredibly curious thing and the opposite from the never ending marvel material that gets released.

GoT died because the writer was replaced by a pair of hacks when the writer couldn't write fast enough to keep up.

This is a great theory!

I think the creators of HBO's GOT ended the series because they were rushing to work on:

]] Benioff and Weiss inked a five-year, $250 million partnership with Netflix in August to make film and TV projects exclusively for the streaming service. The move was head-scratching at the time, considering the pair had already committed to producing Star Wars movies for Disney—an undertaking that was likely to take many years and leave little room for anything else.

https://qz.com/1737729/gots-benioff-and-weiss-picked-netflix...

I dunno, now that Endgame completed the movie storyline that had been building for a decade, and their spearhead TV show Agents of SHIELD is over, I've almost completely lost all interest in the MCU. I've seen similar sentiments pretty regularly elsewhere, and wouldn't be surprised if its prominence also fades despite continued releases.

One solution might be consumers use more data.