- I recently realized I had only turned on my TV just about 4 - 5 times in about 6 months and yet I was paying close to $140 per month, so I downgraded my cable subscription to the minimal (combined cable & internet is cheaper than only internet).

- Also realized I rarely watched Netflix (hadn't watched in months) cos I no longer found shows that I liked and I was paying $15.49 per month. And then I saw HBO Max was $9.99 a month. So I canceled Netflix and signed on to HBO Max. There's also the psychological part that HBO Max allows me to pay for the whole year upfront (Netflix doesn't) so I can close my eyes and just pay them $100 and be done with it.

- I also realized I rarely have time to watch long form content except for weekends. This is one advantage that Amazon Prime has - apart from it being 'free' to me since I already paid for prime, I can rent movies for $2.99 for those few times that I need to be 'entertained'. Maybe I spend $6 in one month and $0 in others. It's still better than $15.49 (or $140) without watching at all.

- It's possible that lots of people have a variation of these reasons. I understand that Netflix had to raise their prices given how much they were spending on content. It looks to me like they 'overspent' on content without taking into consideration that they would have to recoup the cost from increased subscription fees and this might not be palatable to their members given that there are now multiple alternatives

Interesting. My behavior has been that when someone recommends a show on Netflix and I decide I want to watch it it subscribe and cancel which means I pay for 1 month. I watch the show. I've tried browsing for others but hate browsing on Netflix. I'm happy that "I'm done with it" immediately and that I'm not billed anymore. Netflix makes it super easy to start again, and to cancel and also like that having it cancelled provides a tiny hurdle against binging random stuff.

Is this Netflix or do you hate browsing on other streaming services as well?

Regarding UI IMO Netflix is still top. Disney+ is somewhat close in handling but noticeably slower and you notice its focus on movies. Series are not as easily navigatable as on Netflix.

Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

Part of people's problem with netflix is that it shows them maybe 100 different shows out of the couple thousand they have at any given time, for the rest you basically have to use a 3rd party to discover them. Sure its prettier than it was back when they put everything in a giant tree/list, but now its a dozen or so vertical categories with 20 or so horizontal items and it doesn't even bother to deduplicate shows out of multiple similar rows.

The best netflixy way for me to discover new shows is to log into my wife's profile where she has a 100 different romance/etc movies. Otherwise "whats-on-netflix.com" for example does a better job than netflix itself, including showing a complete list of new additions, and removals, etc.

Perhaps because the UI varies from device to device.

But with the mute button this is easy mitigated. The mute button is one of the most used buttons on my remote anyway.

It feels like they're making decisions to suit themselves rather than me and it winds me up considering they are the more expensive subscription.

However it is irritating that shows I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store occasionally lose their blessed status§ and I can neither put them in up next nor even have the show’s page open to the episode I last watched. Unless I binge the whole show in one sitting I’m gonna be scrolling horizontally past a lot of episodes every time I sit down to watch.

§ my hypothesis is that it is when the package I bought them in gets taken off iTunes (e.g. I got the complete Downton Abbey, but for a few weeks they were doing a every episode and the movie package and you couldn’t buy just all the seasons together, that one even lost its blessed status while I was watching the show, which was a mystifying experience)

I haven't noticed this in France. For a given series, there's a "season" dropdown that has all the seasons, even some which may be unavailable.

However, I hate dubbed movies and series, and I hate that I can't filter out those titles that, for some reason, only offer a French dubbed version.

The dubbing is also horribly done with bored voices that don't match the actors at all. Yet native language (+ subs if native is not English) is often unavailable. Especially on prime

I love a lot of HBO Max content (especially Turner Classic Movies) but the app is experience is painful.

Things that rustle me... - recommending movies/shows I've already watched. There are very few shows I want to rewatch. - recommending trash reality shows. I rarely watch them. - recommending too many shows that are in a foreign language. I will watch foreign shows, but most of my viewing it's just background noise while I workout or something else where I can't easily watch subtitles. - Auto-playing trailers. It's annoying and loud.

Isn’t that right for Switzerland? What’s the issue?

Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.

What's the huge issue? Is preferring German and being presented French some kind of slight?

Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.

That surprises me - Netflix seem pretty good at accommodating UK culture as a contrast. Local shows like The Crown, for example.

Maybe it's both, I suppose.

For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.

Well, there are places in Switzerland like Bern that are officially and pragmatically bilingual.

It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.

My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.

I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.

It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.

My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.

The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.

Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.

I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.

For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.

I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.

For me, if I want to get the package (in general and not for a specific instance), I'd rather pay upfront (so far as it's not expensive) than the monthly subscription. Psychologically, I feel like - 'I just eat the cost and I'm done'. So I'd rather just pay you $100 for the entire year or say $60 for the entire year of Sirius XM than a monthly thing.

Theoretically you could then resell the same discs if you don't care for copyright law, but I'm too lazy.

What if Amazon instead of Prime Video had an open content marketplace? Sure there would be a lot of rubbish, but with a good recommendation system could outdo Netflix in matching content with consumers, which was Netflix's core competency until they decided otherwise.

Be careful. Its not cheaper after they include local programming fees.

I miss the days where I could binge watch a series on release date. Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.

All the qualities that drew me into streaming have slowly faded away.

I recall hearing a discussion on the extreme desire humans have to hear a story's ending, even when they aren't that interested in the story. There is simply a need to know how it ends. I've caught myself to often watching something I think is a waste of time but needing to know how it ends. This is as much of a weakness as the reciprocity rule.

Netflix burned me to many times on this. It's bad taste to re-use the same story time & time again to pump out tons of content. It's unforgiveable to not finish the story though.

Anyhow, he passed before writing the next book, and it literally bugs me at least once or twice a year, and yet I read it 20? 25? years ago.

So yes, at least here endings matter.

Not to repeat myself, but we all clearly need a little perspective, because for several generations the norm has been television shows being cancelled without closure. To have an expectation that all shows, or even most shows, should have proper conclusions is completely out of line with reality.

*exceptions for shows, mainly anime, where a season is a self contained story. And Firefly, cause it's Firefly.

People surging ahead leads to a difficulty in conversation that week-to-week episodes do not.

Once everyone is split into various streaming camps, the talking between friends begins to drop.

That said, I mostly don't binge watch and maybe it would bug me more if I did.

Once a week episode is good for episodic content, nit for something with good writing.

Haha this just means that I have to wait longer to resubscribe.

I cancelled it when they raised their prices, it made me think about how much I watch things on there. Which was rarely - my guess was around 1 show/month on average.

> Now all the streaming services also seem to rate limit each episode to once a week.

Yeah, screw that noise. Torrents are still their primary competitor, and the operative issue is not cost, it is convenience.

To be fair, that was the fate of almost every television show ever made. In fact, your entire first paragraph is just describing what we used to call "television".

They don't make it easy to discover content. They still have quite a lot of good original content that isn't promoted and a slew of third party things that aren't promoted or discoverable at all unless they happen to make the trending list

The majority of their original, promoted content is watered down crap designed for mass appeal.

For TV shows, when they do produce something of quality they often dump it if it doesn't find an audience immediately or it doesn't drive "new subscribers". Leaving a bunch of stories half told doesn't give me the confidence that it's worth the investment to start on their new content. This is especially problematic because it is a vicious cycle where since they aggressively cancel stuff that isn't performing, people don't invest their time in new stuff because of the expectation it gets canceled, means more new stuff underperforms, leading to more cancelations, and further eroding the trust of viewers. It's also negatively impacted by poor discoverability.

Their UI is seemingly optimized to shove their latest broad appeal stuff in my face and seems to deliberately make it hard to find anything else.

this has 100% been the reason my time spent on Netflix has gone down. seems like everything they make is algo-optimizing shlock designed to appeal to the average consumer.

Or they make a second season so atrocious that they lose the entire audience. For example, the first season of Altered Carbon is one of the best "hard" sci-fi I've ever seen in a TV show. The second season was supposed to have a much bigger budget and had an A-list lead. But it was so horrible that I couldn't even finish watching it.

- Netflix with 4K and 4 streaming devices costs 17.99€ here ($19.50), while Disney+ only costs €8.99 with the same features.

- Netflix made and continues to make good content, but since major producers have been removing their content from Netflix and into their own services, Netflix here almost survives on old local shows and new in-house content. Feels like there's almost nothing new to watch. I have rewatched Gilmore Girls 4 times. Disney+ gets you Marvel, Disney, Pixar, FOX, NatGeo, StarWars, Star (lots of ABC content)

-Netflix decided to crackdown on password-sharing: my brother moved away some months ago and has been using our Netflix account, and we don't want him to pay Netflix for himself.

-There have been some rumors of ads on the platform to boost revenue. Hell to the no.

oh geez, that would be the death knell for netflix. that was one of the big benefits they had over cable ten years ago when streaming was still new. i cant imagine paying $18 a month and still being forced to watch ads.

on a side note, im extremely pissed at paramount because their "ad-free" plan was updated to force viewers to watch a 30 second spot at the beginning of every show. if star trek strange new worlds doesnt turn out to be a million times better than picard and discovery i just might cancel because im so pissed i have to watch ads on the premium plan.

It's been stated elsewhere here but worth reiterating: the current description of this idea is to give customers the option to have ads in exchange for a lower overall subscription cost and not just shoehorn them into the existing plans.

At least that's the stated intent. I can definitely see where it can lead to a slippery slope where it's easier to just give ads to everyone when they need another revenue bump.

I think we're going to see a price increase to stay ad free or an option to have the same price with advertising. So it will be a price increase to keep your same service ad free.

"Reed Hastings said Netflix is exploring ways to add lower-priced advertising-supported subscription tiers"

https://www.investopedia.com/netflix-q1-fy2022-earnings-repo...

So you're upset that you are no longer able to freely breach a conract you agreed to, and have to pay for services you consume?

now, they may have previously ignored breaches of this contract, but that didn't stop them being breaches. you are well within your rights to cancel your contract, all i point out is that it is unreasonable of you to be upset. this is business as usual, and to be expected, therefore a good thing.

lol, lmao, et cetera.

1) Netflix has much more streaming competition now.

2) Availability of good content has gone down as networks reserve it for their own new platforms, and as production was halted by covid.

3) Greater scarcity gives studios pricing power to increase Netflix's cost to acquire the few good shows available.

4) Netflix tried to counter (2) and (3) by making their own shows, but a lot of it is trash.

5) Netflix raised customer prices aggressively, while there's not much on their platform to justify the higher prices.

6) Customers are increasingly savvy about binge-watching what good shows there are on one platform, then cancelling it and rotating through other platforms.

7) Loyalty is for suckers. Churn, baby, churn.

I finally cancelled when I realized that whenever I did go look at it to see what's available it felt like there was more agenda pushing than entertainment, which itself made me check for content less often in the first place. Netflix won't miss my money, I may be in a small minority. It may be they get more subscribers for their politics than they lose (I'm sure they think so).

It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.

> We can't possibly know or being able to sample or extrapolate what motivation 200,000 had

Speculation on the causes of major changes for which we have no hard data is the basis of the original article and pretty much every comment on this thread. Nobody here is giving investment advice, so I don't know how it's irresponsible.

> It sounds more like you'd like the reasons not to be one of or a combination of those, which would be fair.

My personal guess (also note the use of 'probably' in my original comment) is when it comes to things like paid streaming services, personal economics is the biggest factor in the decision to subscribe/cancel for most people, and other rationales are mostly tangential. In my experience, the bottom line is what matters in the end.

Is Netflix more "woke" or "less scifi" or "prone to pirating" or "annoying about UI and recommendations" than Disney+ or HBO Max? (Ok, HBO Max has had a lot of cinema-quality sci-fi and similar genre content land recently, so maybe on that one?)

Those services are gaining subscribers faster so any backlash seems less likely, compared to "there is a lot more serious competition than their used to be, Netflix costs the most, and has a far less proven content model."

Netflix is increasingly only worth it for their originals, and now those are head to head against Disney and HBO+Warner cinema originals.

You'll have better luck asking for prayers.

I'd have no problem paying for the kind of TV we had with Mad Men or Breaking Bad. I'm not aware of any streaming service of that kind.

The biggest change last quarter is that Netflix went from having 700,000 customers in Russia down to 0. In other words, they actually had a net gain of 500,000 subscribers in the parts of the world where they still operate.

The fact that they drew a line in the sand is why I have brand loyalty. If they cross that line, I'll no longer be "supporting a company bringing a moral perspective on content delivery" and turn off autorenew: just pick up a month or two a year.

They want to everyone, or the premier tiers. It's a conflict that can never be resolved.

Bottom line: if they think it will improve the bottom line, they will do it.

Incidentally, all this talk of how badly they're doing just reminded me to cancel, which I did, minutes ago.

Edit: missed a "the"

And I also agree that the internet sentiment of "omg too many services, I'm just gonna pirate" is such a minor part of the equation. Social media loves overrepresenting its just world fallacy and thinking that everyone is as invested to screw over companies as they are on twitter or whatnot.

Bottom line is Netflix has too much competition from cheaper platforms with better content.

I find the alternative universe quite interesting in itself.

Increasingly, I just go somewhere else.

Additionally to get people to think twice before unsubscribing increase the price for new subscribers but keep existing subs at the lower rate. You cancel you can't get that rate back.

They are; HBOMax, Discovery+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Peacock, Vudu, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Espn+

I still have Hulu, HBOMax and Disney, so in 6 months or so I'll probably drop one of those and return to Netflix to look for new content before they delete my viewing history. I've been with Netflix since when they were DVD-only, so they have a lot of history on me.

I imagine that before long, the streaming providers will get tired of people rotating through and will require 1 year contracts.

However, I don't know to what extent Netflix are relying on India for growth. At INR 650/month it's definitely not cheap. Disney + Hotstar, at INR 1499/year is, five times less expensive.

For me, Netflix content is "OK" overall. But so is content on most of the other streaming services. And I don't really watch a huge amount of video so it makes sense for me to pick a few services and maybe dip in and out. Netflix is probably the one delivering the least bang for the buck to me right now so I'll probably watch a few things and drop it at some point.

I do like their DVD service, though.

Don't sugar coat a poorly run company with equally opinionated reasoning.

Money is tight. People are closing their wallets. Frivolous luxury expenses are the ones that will be cut the first.

But yeah, the rate hikes are also hitting hard. Targeting account sharing more aggressively than they already do will lead to more cancellations. And the day Netflix shows me an ad, I will never use it again.

It means new subscribers are now outnumbered by cancelling subscribers for the first time.

Changes in post-pandemic behavior, prices increases, more competition, arguably decrease in quality, and no long-term contracts. Doesn't seem like rocket science why they're loosing customers.

So Quibi was right! ;)

As a non-white person, I get tired of hearing people blame white people for every other ill. Or if it’s not blame, it’s an attempt to shoehorn white supremacy as some prevailing ideology into every discussion.

Netflix does this constantly in their originals. They just can’t help themselves. And the usual suspects play coy about it when anyone complains. Go see a therapist, etc. for daring to notice the constant browbeating in Netflix programming and saying anything about it. If I watch tv, it’s to escape reality, including to not get proselytized to for thirty minutes of my life.