Somehow good shows tend to get cancelled, and it's not worth starting to watch something if it's likely going to have the same fate. https://decider.com/list/canceled-netflix-original-shows/

That and one of the great benefits of Netflix was that you could watch multiple seasons of a show, and that a season was 20 ish episodes.

Now they do 7 episodes and call it a season and frequently their shows only have one or two seasons.

And they have so many (non-'original') where they only have a few series available at the end or in the middle. I don't understand the licencing/purchasing decision that can lead to that. Seems to happen far too often for it to be different studios/licencors, obviously that happens sometimes.

BBC's QI is one example. I understand new series not being available on Netflix (in the UK) as the BBC now have their own subscription platform. But it's not just that, because Netflix don't have the earliest ones either, just a seemingly random set in the middle, perhaps even non-contiguous.

Seems like a bad example, QI doesn't have a storyline ergo you don't need earlier seasons.

That's an argument for it not mattering, maybe, but still not a reason to do it?

Why would you willingly not diversify your portfolio?

Buy what you can when you can afford it. It seems like good business strategy?

I found that to be one of the drawbacks of Netflix, and all other streaming services. A story that could easily be told in 100min or a few hours takes 10+ hours to slog through. Excessive sequences of characters getting high, or repeating tasks, or irrelevant side quests to pad the content time statistics, or make people feel like their monthly fees are worth it.

Yes, this is especially true for successful shows. They can be told in 2-3 seasons but they end up as 5 seasons. The pace of storytelling crawls to a halt in the middle seasons typically.

Short seasons are perfectly valid and have existed since before Netflix. I remember watching British TV shows in which a season consisted of six half-hour episodes, and feeling that more (and more interesting) things had happened in that time frame than a USA season of 24 one-hour episodes.

These days that’s even more of a plus. When someone recommends something to watch the first thing I check is how many seasons it’s up to, then the number of episodes, then the runtime. Shows with too many seasons of too many too long episodes are immediately ignored.

I prefer that to the older pattern—a significant fraction of phoned-in episodes out of 26 per year.

Good shows are usually expensive in their first season and always in later seasons.

Expensive is a word accounting, finance and investors really don’t like.

Who really likes the word expensive?

My wife.

But then why do the rug pull of making one or two seasons of a good show and then killing it? That serves to piss off everyone who took the time to watch and get interested in the show. If Netflix only wants to make reality tv they should just own that.

I stopped even considering Netflix shows with only one or two seasons because they almost always get killed mid-story. Which means I pretty much never watch Netflix now. Out of state relatives using the account is the main thing keeping me subscribed, so when that sharing gets cut off it'll be the end of my subscription.

It works short term to attract new subscriptions, which is what counted until last year.

Let's say you aren't alone in your subscription situation, to put it mildly.

You have to love that under "Why was X cancelled" they basically just compliment the show runner and actors for their work or cite "creative differences", rarely do they actually provide an actual explanation, such as "The show had to few viewers".

It's also becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shows get canceled before they can conclude, so I don't watch any Netflix shows now until after the final episode airs. But the final episode never airs because there weren't enough people watching the show while it was in production.

Long been there. 'Hello this is Netflix, you've been greenlit, how may I help you?' was a South Park meme years ago.

At least they were greenlighting interesting things as well back then. Now I think the main metric that gets you greenlit is being cheap to produce.

Seems like they never heard of the paradox of choice.

Their entire business model is that there is value in the long tail of possible choices. The paradox of choice is not a complete description of human behavior.

It is outdated. Streaming is now cable, which means the business model should revert back to be cable like. Get a couple of killer titles that carry the brand... Disney is doing this well with the Marvel titles. one ends, a new one starts, and they start putting ads of the "new" thing.

In short, without quality, there is no choice.

I almost feel it is a problem with the thumbnails. Everything looks so unappealing. I've liked a few Netflix shows in the past year (heck if I could name them though), I have a profile on my brother's account, but I primarily watch through an IPTV service. When I browse in the Netflix app I cannot find a single thing I want to watch.

I'm watching korean drama and fantasy, also chinese or spanish, they've got a different way of story telling, and I find the aesthetic appealing, can recommend sysyphus, or so, sci-fi and time-travel

Yeah I cancelled my Netflix. 3 of my friends also did.

None of us are interested in the kind of content they are pushing anymore.

The drop in the stock price was expected news for everyone familiar with the service, at least in my circle.

I feel the same way, it's becoming harder and harder to find something interesting. Just the other night we opened it up and couldn't find anything in 5 minutes browsing and just went to watch TV instead. That's not the experience you want your users to have.

Not in the long term, but in the short it means you save bandwidth fees.

To me it seems like Netflix is struggling to attract good script writers. Their productions are beautiful, but the scripts are terrible.

that's pretty much every script in Hollywood.. they hand out writing jobs via nepotism rather than merit

That's why your average nigh-unreadable dogpoo novel off the bargain bin has writing on par with an excellent TV show or movie

People are really sleeping on how amazing HBO Max is. Their catalog is so damn good.

their catalog isn't as good as used to be. They've cut a ton of content for seemingly zero reason recently (including their own shows like westworld).

What I like best about HBO is that they have an A-Z listing of every show they have (something people have been asking Netflix for since day one of their streaming service) and how peaceful it is to use their platform.

You can browse without anything auto-playing, you can pause a show for more than 3 seconds and ads don't start rapidly flashing on the screen, and shows don't immediately jump to more ads after credits start rolling so you can actually let an ending sink in without having to scramble for your remote.

I also really like their "last chance" section because things are leaving all the time and that gives you some warning.

HBO max is just much nicer to use than netflix.

> how peaceful it is to use their platform.

> You can browse without anything auto-playing

What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.

I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.

If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.

Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.

It doesn't help that their software changes so much from device to device. It's been pleasant to use on phone, PS5, and roku but I haven't tried apple+

Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.

If I could get HBO in Germany I would but alas I can't.

I have seen a single reality TV on Netlix. It is just not recommending them to me.

Cold case files, the first 48, unsolved mysteries, any cooking show - "reality TV" is a huge market. It's not all toddlers and tiaras and big brother, those were just the "huge, impossible to ignore" ones.

I never seen literally any of those. Even if they were suggested at some point, I do not recall seeing them.