Similarly first time I see a youtube ad, I'll cancel my youtube premium subscription.
If anything the need for piracy or ad blocking led to a lot of people learning tech skills they would otherwise be completely uninterested in.
Netflix already contains advertising, btw. Its content does, such as product placement (a good example of which being Nokia in the original The Matrix though not Netflix specific). Heck, even Disney+ is advertising: for their merchandise. My kid digs 'Mini Mouse'.
What I am not interesting in is wasting my time on ads. I sort of accept it on Prime because I got Prime cheap, and its Prime Video products only. They're testing my limits though, I can tell you that much, and I can also tell you the ads are usually not appropriate for me (although I do have Prime for the Prime specific content, I find it on my own). The moment Netflix starts to waste my time with ads, it becomes less valuable. Because ads is the reason I avoid cable TV. I CBA with wasting my time on BS I don't want (to see). Its the reason I got Netflix in the first place. It makes the product less convenient, and pirating is already very convenient. It just feels better to pay for something while watching the people you paid for acting.
I think WWW and streaming ads are too different to allow much meaningful cross inference.
On a web page with ads the ads are visible while you are trying to read the content, sometimes even overlaying it, and sometimes making noise and playing distracting animations.
On streaming (and on broadcast) the ad breaks usually alternate with the content or occur between acts in the content. When the content is actually playing the ads are not there.
This makes a huge difference. When an ad comes on between acts in a show, I simply pick up a book or my iPad until the next act starts in the show. I've always got things I want to do that I can make progress on in 2 or 3 minute segments so it is no big deal.
If I have to reach for my credit card to view your content, you have to put the ads away. There is no in between for me. If you pull out ads on me, I will drop your service.
Youtube has ads for the lower tiers, yet you’re still subscribed.
This article is explicitly not arguing that Netflix should show ads to existing subscribers like yourself.
The article also argues that Netflix is constantly bumping up their prices, and this would further justify that by making the higher tiers seem more attractive.
You can turn off auto-skipping to next episode, but depending on the platform you are watching on, it might still autopay trailers after a movie has finished.
In your situation I'd use the sleep timer setting on the TV itself to automatically turn it off after a given time. It shouldn't be too hard to align it to match the end of the show.
the job of Netflix is to provide a product its customers want. i don't think OP is in a tiny minority of people who want an option to disable autoplay; it's a desire i've heard expressed quite often. hell, fucking YouTube, a service that exists to play ads and that plays more as you watch more videos, has an option to disable autoplay
Netflix gets away without doing this because it doesn't immediately lose them customers, and implementing it wouldn't really gain them any, but i am always quite at people who declare that it's therefore good. i need to figure out some tech service that's growth positive as a function to sacrificing its users' children to Moloch, just to watch the HN crowd cry "well, it's not the service's job to /not/ sacrifice your children to Moloch, and you can put them in an anti-Moloch safe room, so I personally don't see why they shouldn't keep sacrificing to Moloch the children of those that don't bother to go the extra mile to avoid it"
Most sleep timers works in hours, maybe half hour increment. Looking up the length of a show, estimating when Netflix will interrupt end-credits, is completely unreasonable workaround.
It's like the income tax. First for only the wealthy, then the tax "trickles down" to everyone.
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and ads."
It's difficult for me to see Netflix as being any different. I'm already not getting that much value from the service, so why should I pay if there where ads?
One fact which is often overlooked in the non-US markets is the lack of ads. For a service like YouTube, it's the same five ads over and over. There simply isn't enough inventory in the ad space to supply something like Netflix.
You pay for electricity and TV companies have never compensated you for the electricity used during their commercials.
There are lots of occasions that we don't get compensated for things that have costs. For example, let's say you're driving in traffic. There's a stop light. Two cars from the other direction turn onto your street after their light has turned red ("it's been yellow for 3 seconds, but I don't wanna wait"). Your light turns green and a couple cars get through, but you have to wait another light cycle because of those two cars that illegally ran the red light. That's another minute or two of idle fuel usage. You don't get compensated for that and what the other drivers did was illegal. At least with Netflix you'd be agreeing to the ads and a price with a very real option of just not subscribing.
There are so many things that you pay for that you don't get compensated for in that micro-accounting way. Heavier vehicles destroy roads requiring them to be repaved a lot more, but the drivers of those heavier vehicles don't pay for that. We all do. It costs way more to deliver things to people in rural areas, but the USPS and many online stores will charge the same shipping for someone in Alaska or rural Montana as someone in NYC despite the fact that the person in Alaska might be only accessible by air and the person in rural Montana might be the only person receiving a package for 5 miles. They might be using $1 worth of fuel just on the end delivery for one person in an area like that, never mind the amount of time that it takes to deliver the packages in such a rural area. ($4/gallon of gas, 20 MPG fuel economy, and a 5 mile distance would be $1)
I'm not sure what your situation is (maybe you're on a really bandwidth restricted connection like HugesNet), but "we consumers pay for the bandwidth" is probably one of the smallest pieces of this world to worry about getting compensated for.
But...
They should play them after you've watch an episode of something, and the "Play next episode" button should immediately skip the ad. The ad volume should be normalized to the same as the episode (or lower), and the ads should have to match the same production specifications as Netflix shows. They should be like small, very short, unobtrusive films that advertise something.
So long as I remain in control of what I'm watching, I don't have to watch an ad to access content, the ad is high quality, and the ad comes after the thing I chose, then I'd accept ads on Netflix in the same way I would accept a trailer for a Netflix show.
I imagine that bar is probably set too high though.