[HN Gopher] Casual Viewing - Why Netflix looks like that
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Casual Viewing - Why Netflix looks like that
Author : exitb
Score : 261 points
Date : 2024-12-28 09:32 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nplusonemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nplusonemag.com)
| SunlitCat wrote:
| Oof. What's next? Announcing what they see? What items are around
| them and how they could interact with them (or not)?
|
| Like "Protagonist: I walked north and I entered a mysterious
| room, full of different bottles. They don't look like I could use
| them, but maybe I should take one with me?"
| rzzzt wrote:
| LOOK BOTTLES
| sourcepluck wrote:
| THE WIZARD WENT WEST THROUGH THE DOOR AND INTO THE GARDEN
| jahnu wrote:
| Kill Jester!
| manarth wrote:
| "I see you have Chekhov's gun hanging on your wall"
| ghostDancer wrote:
| "Let me show you my beautiful MacGuffin suitcase, it's the
| latest trend. "
| technothrasher wrote:
| Or The Young Ones equivalent, "I'd best conceal this sticky
| bun by placing it precariously on the edge of this box. [Dun
| dun duuun]"
| thrwthsnw wrote:
| If people aren't watching the show why not just make it a radio
| play?
| mst wrote:
| I think because people are 'watching' in a situation where
| twenty years ago they'd've put the radio on but now they
| default to 'fire something up on Netflix' and so Netflix
| wants to make things amenable to those customers.
|
| I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it does at least make
| sense in terms of why Netflix are doing so.
| nprateem wrote:
| "I see you have the words 'Kaiser' and 'Soasay' on the wall...
| what a coincidence, that was the name of the boss!"
| cdot2 wrote:
| We're converging on audiobooks
| whoisstan wrote:
| Podcasts, brrrrr
|
| Audio works on the subway, on the bike, while riding a bike,
| cleaning the house and the big one, driving a car. To get
| into a situation where you can both watch and listen is much
| rarer.
| ghaff wrote:
| The car is pretty much the only time I listen to non-music
| audio. And I don't drive enough to listen to audiobooks for
| the most part.
| cdot2 wrote:
| I'll listen to audiobooks while running on a treadmill
| but not when running outside.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, although transparency on current AirPods is
| good, I really just am not comfortable with having music
| or other audio playing in my ears when I'm moving around
| outside--and certainly not in an urban setting.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The Mandalorian, oh my lawd, the dialogue was just narrative
| explanation. Just terrible.
|
| Terribly terrible.
| xnx wrote:
| Covering the main character's face in a helmet isn't great
| for drama.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Sylvester Stallone thought the same about Judge Dredd. That
| was such a great movie because of the decision.
|
| https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/judge-dredd-1995
| thih9 wrote:
| I prefer the later version with Karl Urban - and to me it
| was expressive too.
|
| Here's a fun interview that includes a related question:
|
| > Did having the helmet affect your acting at all? How
| did you maneuver around wearing that for the entire
| movie, and could you see through it?
|
| > Oh yea [I could see through it], it took a bit to
| figure it out, it really did, and it was a challenge, you
| know, the challenge was how to communicate with an
| audience. And not only because my eyes weren't visible,
| but because of the fact that the character of Dredd
| operates within a very narrow bandwidth, he is a man who
| has been trained to keep his emotions in check, so
| consequently it was very important for me to identify how
| I could humanize the character as much as possible. The
| sense of humor became very important, that dry, laconic
| sense of humor, and finding out where's this character's
| compassion? Where does his empathy lie?
|
| NOTE: minor generic plot references follow.
|
| https://reelreactions.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/reel-
| reaction...
| langsoul-com wrote:
| At least we know Netflix first party content is not for anyone
| who wants a good watch. But rather for background noise and
| moving pictures.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'd call that "endumbification". Netflix already lost giant
| chunks of its catalog as everyone and their dog now wants/has
| their own streaming shop (a worse situation than with cable TV
| now...), and it seems like they're going completely off the
| rails...
| 0points wrote:
| enshittification is an established term
|
| > Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform
| decay, is a pattern in which online products and services
| decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality
| offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings
| to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their
| services to users and business customers to maximize profits
| for shareholders.
| polotics wrote:
| and before that the term "quality fade" was well established
| and could be used in all contexts... damn you Cory
| Doctorow!!!
| spencerflem wrote:
| IMO that only applies to sites like Facebook or other
| "platforms" that have a lot of lock-in.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Netflix execs have been telling their screenwriters to have
| characters "announce what they're doing" so that viewers who have
| a program on in the background can follow along without having to
| miss plot strands.
|
| That's the critical bit of context, this is essentially radio you
| have on in the background while you do whatever.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Exactly the opposite of the experience I am looking for, with a
| video projector, in the dark.
|
| I guess netflix is really competing against youtube and twitch
| here.
| numpy-thagoras wrote:
| Sometimes, I like watching the narrated movies meant for the
| visually impaired. It feels almost like an audiobook. Changing
| the content to make it more radio-like -- that's not something
| I'm a fan of. It's the whole "abstraction layers vs. tight
| coupling", except this time it's content.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Wes Anderson recently did a few short films from Roald Dahl
| stories that feel very strangely "wrong" in their almost 100%
| simply reading the stories out loud to actors miming along.
| It is so broken that it's fascinating and entirely works.
| zo1 wrote:
| There is very little good or "main" content these days on
| Netflix. Every single time without fail whenever I have an urge
| to watch a specific show or movie, sometimes an old one, it's
| never available on Netflix. And even if they did have it, they
| "licensed" it for a year and no longer have it. What good is
| that for me?
|
| So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having
| something playing on the side or background while we go about
| daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler
| that you don't need to pay attention to.
|
| I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to
| Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too
| precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright
| holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be
| give them money.
| chgs wrote:
| Why do you need something on in the background?
| zo1 wrote:
| Personally it helps me sleep having "TV" playing in the
| background. But my SO uses it while she works, having
| something to break the monotony as music is distracting.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Personally it helps me sleep having "TV" playing in the
| background.
|
| That's fascinating to me, as I could not ever sleep with
| the TV on. Anything that has spoken voices keeps my brain
| turned on decoding the language and sleep is just not
| possible.
| katamari-damacy wrote:
| it's for training AI.... easier done that way, I think
| ginko wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Netflix has access to the scripts.
| katamari-damacy wrote:
| I don't get it. The whole point of asking the actors to say
| something is to have it end up in the script. I'm suggesting
| that whatever they want them to say is relevant to training
| some AI. Just a theory but in its hypothetical context it
| does make sense.
| bilekas wrote:
| Aha that's a really interesting tinfoil hat theory! I doubt
| it's true but reminds me of the recent YouTube drama about
| Google using the transcript to train their AI. Seeing Spotify
| generate ai music to bloat their library it is a nice harmless
| conspiracy theory for fun if nothing else.
| katamari-damacy wrote:
| Yeah we specialise in nice harmless conspiracy theories that
| are fun and delicate
| infinitedata wrote:
| Inadvertently, this will also help AI training a ton! But some
| Execs didn't even see that
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Netflix is going to kill their golden goose. It's already dying
| slowly, but they really should be just taking more risks. It's a
| streaming company run by people who seem to hate movies or tv.
| usrnm wrote:
| I don't think their first-party content ever was a golden
| goose, I feel like it has always been their way to pad space
| between the good shows they bought from others.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Their golden goose was being the first to do streaming well.
| They just need to fund films and TV shows and then back them
| for longer than a season. The SV style thinking is what's
| killing potentially good shows.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Netflix's own produced content is the poison that's killing
| Netflix's value proposition, not its golden goose.
|
| It's the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time
| it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply
| because it makes them more money. But making them more money
| doesn't entertain me so I unsubscribed.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| People have predicted that for years, but so far it looks like
| Netflix is still one of the few that manage to do streaming
| profitably.
|
| Turns out that catering to dumb consumer zombies is still a
| safe bet.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I find it very stressful when watching Netflix because I don't
| know what is going to happen. Maybe they could include the full
| story line at the start of the series, so I can read it ahead of
| time and remove all suspense and surprise.
| kleiba wrote:
| True, but plots are only half the story. I'd be very grateful
| if they could give me some sample scenes (ideally
| automatically, so I don't have to go through the trouble of
| starting them every single time). I mean, how do people even
| decide whether a movie might be for them without having first
| inspected a good portion of it?
| bondant wrote:
| > I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be
| for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
|
| You can read review of journalists you usually agree with,
| ask for advice from your friends, check if you liked other
| movies from the same filmmaker, check if the movie has been
| displayed in your favorite movie theater or in the movie
| theater you dislike (but okay, won't work for netflix
| movies).
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be
| for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
|
| You're describing watching the movie. Which is what most
| people do. If the movie is terrible then you just stop
| watching it, or if you finish it you can then decide if you
| liked it or not.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| It's weird to me how the first two replies to this comment
| completely missed the sarcasm.
|
| Do we need to start using the "/s" tag here like became
| necessary on reddit? I don't like the thought, but maybe it's
| a different issue in this case-- more of a non-native-English
| or on-the-spectrum thing than an inexperienced teenager
| thing? I hope so.
| mst wrote:
| Being English-as-in-UK I often run into situations where my
| dry/sarcastic humour completely fails to be clear to
| USians.
|
| Then again from the UK POV the leftpondians barely count as
| native English speakers anyway ;)
| Brybry wrote:
| Yet you'll find sources that claim spoken American
| English is closer to historical British English, because
| of some aspects like rhoticity. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-
| americans-p...
| mst wrote:
| Those are all claims about the accent (my understanding
| of said claims is basically "sounds reasonable but also I
| have no idea what I'm talking about").
|
| I was more thinking about the words/grammar/idiom etc.
|
| (also as a Lancastrian I find e.g. Deep Somerset barely
| comprehensible, especially when the speaker is a few
| pints in, but their wording is still usually closer to
| mine than the USians' is)
| euroderf wrote:
| (So I guess "Rightpondia" would be Airstrip One?)
| mst wrote:
| We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia.
| tomrod wrote:
| So strange. As a non-brit, every comment I read uses John
| Oliver or Diane Morgan as an internal monologue and is
| incredibly witty and sarcastic.
|
| To be fair, I'm probably less informed for doing so.
| mst wrote:
| You would likely be better with, say, Ian Hislop for me
| in terms of sarcasm, though while he's definitely a wit,
| no matter how hard I try I only ever seem to get half
| way.
| gilleain wrote:
| Hmm. As a born Britisher I used to have this attitude
| until I read 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson. He's an
| American who moved to the UK and has a good handle on the
| differences between American and British english.
| yodon wrote:
| Any time one is tempted to post a sarcastic comment, it's
| good to re-read Poe's law[0] first. It does in fact always
| apply when posting on the internet.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| binary132 wrote:
| I'm afraid that the risk of failing to understand my
| sarcasm is one my readers will have to take, unaided by
| sarctags and helpful expositions
| yodon wrote:
| What you seem to be missing is that people are reading
| your post in a non-sarcastic, non-ironic manner and
| agreeing with it. As Poe's law points out, that will
| always be the case.
|
| Poe's law speaks to the size of the population on the
| internet and of the range of viewpoints it hosts as a
| result.
| binary132 wrote:
| I am not OP; my simple point is that I don't really care
| how "people" interpret my comments, and I will continue
| to write for those who _are_ clever enough to comprehend
| my intent (which one might imagine most people on this
| forum to be).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| /s is would be more of an tone indicator for those who
| struggle to understand word communication portrayed by
| text.
|
| In this case understanding the context of being sarcasm.
| It's annoying as you now have messages ending in /hj /lh.
|
| Discord especially where the audience is young; but as we
| now cater to a world audience of those with disabilities
| and those without where do you tow the line?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_indicator
| delecti wrote:
| > It's weird to me how [...]
|
| Counterpoint, it's weird to me to be surprised to encounter
| a problem when you knowingly avoid preventing that problem.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That's where piracy shines. You can scrub freely. You can
| watch 2 seasons in an afternoon just skimming.
|
| You can award the content exactly as much time as it deserves
| according to you.
| morkalork wrote:
| Don't worry, they have got the perfect solution for you. That
| cool series you just heard about but haven't had time to watch
| yet? It's cancelled. That's it. That's the story. Now you don't
| even need to watch it!
| wiredfool wrote:
| They should bring back the prologue and the chorus.
| manarth wrote:
| And the intermission! They should call it "popcorn time"
| blooalien wrote:
| | And the intermission! They should call it "popcorn time"
|
| /me sings "Let's all go to the lobby! Let's all go to the
| lobby! Let's all go to the _lobby_ ... and get ourselves a
| snack! "
|
| Anyone else remember the dancing cartoon popcorn and coca-
| cola cup?
| 0xEF wrote:
| I have them on a tin sign! My wife originally got it at
| Hobby Lobby, I think. I see them for sale on eBay if you
| are in need. Ours hangs directly above our tv.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/167000652001
| stavros wrote:
| What, this?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWvt3E5a-AA
| replygirl wrote:
| https://youtu.be/OAca0JsIQe4
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I dearly miss intermissions at movie theaters. The theater
| I went to as a kid had them, and I can't understand why
| nobody else does. It's so useful to have the chance to get
| up and use the bathroom, or get a snack/drink, without
| missing part of the movie.
| adaml_623 wrote:
| Can you quickly elaborate on the media sources where you do
| know what is going to happen?
| jsnell wrote:
| The GP was being sarcastic.
| zeristor wrote:
| I do constantly have to tap out with the stress in many
| programs, takes me ages to pick up and finish programs. Many
| people need tension to drive a narrative forwards, but for me
| it often gets too much.
|
| I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a
| connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to
| have used this more and more.
|
| The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so
| inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV
| personalities.
| timthorn wrote:
| The irony of your comment is that Horizon famously went
| through a phase of making programmes that were all about doom
| a while ago. Asteroids hitting the Earth, Global warming,
| food supply collapse, tsunamis, volcanos, etc - and all with
| portentious narration.
| tomrod wrote:
| In a world where things happened...
| zeristor wrote:
| Yes I remember, that and episodes on cosmetic surgery to
| broaden the appeal
| fzeindl wrote:
| I just wish they wouldn't so disproportionally often drift off
| into extreme sillyness (That, I can take.) or extreme brutality
| and gore (That, I find revolting. When did showing so much
| splatter on a regular basis start being considered good film
| making outside of the occasional Tarantino?).
| rapnie wrote:
| A number is enough. You just need know which of the 5 movie
| templates they used.
| seydor wrote:
| You should ask an AI to watch it for you
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Now you're really on to something - someone give this person
| some VC money, please!
| ignoramous wrote:
| You kid, but I find myself doing this often for long-form
| videos on YouTube with Gemini / NotebookLM. Works nicely.
| bitzun wrote:
| I sort of unironically agree with this. Time is limited and
| most tv and films don't fit my criteria for "worth watching",
| so I will read the plot synopsis for media that I think may be
| terrible, so I don't have to find out later.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I suspect this appeals to two types of audiences. The first being
| people who play on their phones instead of watching the show. You
| can blame phone addiction and ADHD type behaviors for this but it
| feels like a slippery slope of stupidity in the face of good
| writing/acting as opposed to constant cartoon like action. (the
| wife and I do it too).
|
| The second set of audience this would appeal to are people with
| autism. Sitcoms have always done this. Some people really need to
| be told when to laugh and what people are thinking because they
| have no ability to read body language, zero empathy, and cannot
| read the room. Once you encounter it regularly it's mind blowing
| and that a significant portion of the population commonly lives
| with this sort of mental blindness.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I watch/listen to stuff when I do chores at home. If I am going
| to iron 30 things or knead a dough for 15 minutes, then it's
| nice to have some entertainment while doing it, even if I can't
| focus on it all the time. Not sure I fit into any of the two
| audiences you mention.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| By the downvote I suspect you find this description of
| inattention, or chores, offensive. How is that, the complete
| inability to focus and the emotional hostility you imagine
| about it, not a form of ADHD?
| keiferski wrote:
| Try doing chores for multiple people, hours a day, years on
| end, first. I'm guessing you haven't done that, or you
| wouldn't suggest that people who like having a little
| entertainment while doing chores have a form of ADHD.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What a strange interpretation of what they said.
| keiferski wrote:
| What interpretation did you have?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That you're having ""ADHD"" _toward_ the show, not that
| you have it by _wanting_ a show.
| keiferski wrote:
| Well then the comment chain was clearer to you than me,
| because I read the last two comments as 1) a defense of
| watching shows while doing chores and 2) a criticism of
| doing that, implying that it's a lack of focus on doing
| the chore
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I suspect the confusion is the concept of white noise.
| Some people can focus on some form media and a work/chore
| equally at the same such that neither is background
| noise. I enjoy playing music while I drive or doing
| dishes only because I enjoy the music. The work effort is
| accomplished in the same time with the same quality
| either way, but some people need the background noise to
| help focus on what would otherwise be a slow and painful
| effort marked by continuous interruption and slipping
| precision.
|
| That is the distinction of ADHD. Self reflection, the bit
| about offense, is important because for the person
| without attention disruption there isn't a performance
| difference to reflect upon, but for other people there is
| an issue of concern.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think white noise has anything to do with the
| topic. Some people get bored doing chores and therefore
| watch a movie or listen to a podcast in the background.
|
| It has nothing to do with optimizing performance of a
| task. Doing the laundry for your family for the 10,000th
| time is a chore, not a task that is optimized.
|
| This is a pretty common thing to do, so I'm not sure why
| this is so confusing.
| dageshi wrote:
| I dunno, I like to listen to the radio when I'm driving, am
| I exhibiting ADHD or Autistic related behaviour?
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I think that listening to radio while driving is less of
| an indication of autistic behavior than thinking that
| someone listening to the radio is exhibiting autistic
| behavior.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I have never downvoted any comment on this site. So no, I
| didn't downvote you.
|
| So you imagine that I downvoted you, and then you claim
| that I imagine emotional hostility and as a result diagnose
| me with some form of ADHD?
|
| Wild.
| Arch485 wrote:
| As someone with autism, the second paragraph is entirely
| incorrect.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I have a child with autism and coworkers with autistic
| children and in-laws with autism. That second paragraph was
| the polite and mild description.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Entirely?
|
| They're using the word empathy wrong but trouble reading
| emotion sounds accurate enough.
| Yeul wrote:
| A common misconception. Autistic people have emotions and
| empathy- perhaps more than other people. They just keep it
| inside. Also no Seinfeld is not funny.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I just hope they don't butcher 5th season of Stranger Things,
| after that they can rot in piss.
| keiferski wrote:
| Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at
| their own film game. But in the process they realized that it's
| not actually a game worth winning, and more importantly, that
| YouTube and TikTok are their real competition, not Hollywood.
|
| The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix
| probably understands this and is trying to get away from the
| historical model as _movies you watch online_ and closer to the
| optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant
| in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| > Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at
| their own film game.
|
| Inadvertently an Inglorious Basterds paraphrase?
|
| _Brief him._
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of
| youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe
| it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i
| look at it in disgust.
| keiferski wrote:
| Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many
| other content types that I wouldn't characterize that way: 3+
| hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie
| musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc.
| YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of
| different kinds of content.
|
| My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a
| world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump
| in and out of watching videos.
|
| Netflix isn't, because it is still using the "old" model of
| sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.
|
| I'm not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth
| getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it's
| probably not the future of video content for most people.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I can see this working for individuals but what about
| families? And although i dont feel thinking too much about
| netflixes business it raises the question if this would
| requre to adapt their model to an ad based model rather
| than subscription.
|
| Anyhow- i see a gigantic problem coming towards us caused
| by rapidly decreasing attention capacities and this does
| not help.
| keiferski wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by families, but I would be
| willing to bet that most families today already let their
| children watch more YouTube family content than Netflix
| content.
|
| And I do believe Netflix introduced a cheaper ad tier
| recently?
| relaxing wrote:
| Every parent I know forbids Youtube, for obvious reasons.
| Even the content on the Kids service is utter crap (I
| know several who tried the service and dropped it.)
| keiferski wrote:
| The app has 2.5 million reviews and 131 million
| downloads, so it is obviously used by a lot of parents.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251942/global-
| youtube-k...
| binary132 wrote:
| we've all seen the people with the kid glued to youtube
| and clearly self-navigating. just because there are many
| people doing this doesn't mean it's a good thing.
| keiferski wrote:
| I didn't claim it was a good thing, I just said it was
| popular.
| cloverich wrote:
| (Also a parent) there are two ways to use Youtube. One is
| to let the child choose what to watch and, I agree, this
| is a disaster. There's no possible guardrails that would
| work with their current algorithmic models. The other is
| to find things they (or I) are interested in,
| particularly tutorials, and then watch them together and
| then apply that to real life. It is a fantastic tutorial
| device and my kids have learned how to do things I
| wouldn't have known how to do or teach myself. I don't
| think there is a better substitute for this use case.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Anecdote is not data. We have data
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1301730/us-time-
| spent-ch...
| mattkevan wrote:
| Yep, YouTube is banned for our daughter except for pre-
| vetted videos as the content and ads can't be trusted. We
| tried the Kids app but the content was 99% terrible.
|
| I do recommend The Kid Should See This though, a really
| good selection of curated videos.
|
| https://thekidshouldseethis.com/
| jacobolus wrote:
| My kids routinely watch YouTube (with me): videos about
| carpentry, pottery, machining, robotics, electronics,
| chemistry, microbiology, recreational mathematics, visual
| effects, history, ...
| wiredfool wrote:
| It's really hard to (really truly) ban YouTube and not
| ban any search engine.
|
| You might find your child spending 2 hours a day on ddg.
| binary132 wrote:
| Unfortunately all content is being optimized for
| increasingly brief attention spans and availability /
| focus.
| keiferski wrote:
| Interestingly it's not all content. Super long videos are
| doing well too, particularly interviews and video
| podcasts.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume some of this is the same trend of people putting
| long content on and half watching it in the background.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Youtube still has massive variety and quality of production.
| I've largely been able to avoid the clickbait-optimized
| videos by curating my subscriptions. I've found about a dozen
| creators who's content I regularly watch. Many of them create
| YouTube videos as secondary to some other hobby or
| profession. Most are trending towards the clickbait
| thumbnail, but few are actually changing their content in
| that direction.
| astura wrote:
| YouTube is optimized for unattended children.
| warner25 wrote:
| > YouTube and TikTok are their real competition
|
| Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook
| Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch
| something on Netflix together.
|
| Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked
| about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff
| from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are
| Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience
| is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are
| exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make
| sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most
| popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon
| with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed
| on whatever they first heard during their high school or
| college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service
| that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say,
| 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.
| nottorp wrote:
| Wait. They're turning movies into audio books. That's a good
| first step.
|
| Next to save bandwidth they'll drop video and just display text
| on screen.
| warner25 wrote:
| I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording,
| encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video
| itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as
| effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study
| of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos"
| (i.e. _billions_ of videos) contained only still images[1]. My
| wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me
| the ones that she likes) and I 'm baffled by how many are just
| scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people
| holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera
| (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).
|
| [1] https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066
| nottorp wrote:
| > A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15%
| of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still
| images
|
| Talking heads are equivalent to (badly written) text only
| content too.
| occz wrote:
| Any video streaming application worth its salt will stop
| downloading the video track if the user backgrounds the
| application, turns off the screen or otherwise makes the
| video surface not visible, so there's no bandwidth wasted in
| that particular scenario. This is of course somewhat
| diminished by people not actually turning the video off in
| many scenarios - and I'm not even sure Netflix supports
| backgrounded playback, for that matter.
|
| Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably
| well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same
| size as the video track.
| warner25 wrote:
| These are good points. You've made me feel a bit better
| about how much is really being wasted.
| acka wrote:
| As I cannot read the article without tapping 'Accept' on the
| monstrously big cookie pop-up (tapping "Manage Settings" leads to
| an even bigger pop-up whose presumed buttons are outside of the
| (non-scrollable) viewport), I'm going to comment without having
| read TFA, only the comments on here.
|
| I am surprised that no one mentions these extra narrations as
| providing very valuable audio descriptions for visually impaired
| users. This in my opinion is a much more important use case, as
| long as it remains optional, selectable as a separate audio
| channel for example.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Streaming with a subscription is fundamentally a bad thing for
| cinema, especially when combined with the streamer also producing
| content. That's because it shifts the optimized variable from
| quality of individual movie/show to maximum time spent on
| platform. But the latter can accept the lowering of the quality
| of individual movies, so you get a regression towards average
| instead of a striving for excellence.
|
| Never paid for a subscription and never will, precisely because I
| want to pay for _individual_ movies to reward them for being good
| movies.
| redserk wrote:
| This is less of a streaming subscription issue as much as a
| Netflix issue. Netflix doesn't _have_ to use the metric of
| "time spent on platform". Their goal seems to want to be the
| everything-streaming-app and are willing to produce mountains
| of swill to get there.
|
| For example with their TV-style content, Netflix starting
| churning out _tons_ of cheaply produced baking and cooking
| competition shows during the pandemic -- probably due to the
| popularity of "The Great British Bake-off". Whatever they were
| going for, they didn't capture the magic of it, nor did their
| cooking competition shows capture the magic of "Iron Chef"
| despite the blatant struggle to do so.
|
| Compare this to HBO. HBO has been subscription far before
| streaming was a thing and they have an excellent track record
| of regularly producing quality series with a subscription
| model.
|
| In HBO's TV era post-2000, you have The Wire, Sopranos,
| Entourage, Boardwalk Empire, among many others. As things moved
| to streaming (2012-), there's Game of Thrones, Succession,
| Barry, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Veep, etc. It seems, on average,
| every year there's a new must-watch series that ranks well with
| both critics and viewers.
|
| While there's skepticism about HBO maintaining it's legacy
| after the Discovery-Warner merger, Apple TV seems to be filling
| HBO's shoes.
|
| Perhaps Netflix ought to consider cutting back the number of
| series it's churning out.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > maximum time spent on platform
|
| Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping
| subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is
| just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan,
| which was the only option until recently. It is completely
| different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which
| get most of their revenue from ads.
|
| They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they
| do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the
| rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel
| their subscriptions.
|
| If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for
| the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course,
| then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's
| what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not
| for the better though.
| ghaff wrote:
| >If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe
| for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of
| course, then unsubscribe.
|
| Most people are probably lazier and less organized than you
| give them credit for. If subscribe/unsubscribe cycles were
| really that prevalent I think you'd see a lot more incentives
| to sign up for, say, annual subscriptions.
|
| A lot of people basically use TV as background and,
| especially if they don't have live TV, that means a lot of
| streaming content.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| In the beginning they were not, but it is changing. With
| Netflix price hikes (about +40% in 10 years, inflation
| adjusted), competing streaming platforms, each with their
| own exclusives, and crackdowns on shared accounts,
| "pausing" is becoming more and more common.
|
| People don't need more than one streaming platform for
| "background noise", and switching to the one with the most
| popular shows of the month makes a lot of economic sense.
| At the end of the year, it can easily save you hundreds of
| dollars, and the bigger the amount, the more people are
| going to do the maths.
|
| Maybe an annual Netflix subscription is planned.
| ryanackley wrote:
| This is likely being blown way out of proportion. I'm not
| defending this behavior but the article listed exactly one
| example: Irish Wish. I'm sure it appeals to a certain audience
| but it's not what I, personally, would call peak cinema.
|
| My guess is that this guidance was given to a specific writer or
| person in charge of a specific genre.
| jahnu wrote:
| I didn't and never will watch that fillum. But jaysus did the
| trailer make me laugh so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
| paulgb wrote:
| Exactly. The one example they use gets a 5.2 on IMDB and 42% on
| rotten tomatoes.
|
| Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It's for a
| certain audience. We've had crappy made-for-TV movies since
| long before streaming and it hasn't been the death of cinema.
| briandear wrote:
| 42% means that some professional critics considered it
| "fresh." That's scary to me.
| paulgb wrote:
| To be fair to the professional critics, they are writing
| prose that helps their readers decide if they will like a
| movie, not just giving it a good/bad review. Looking at the
| reviews that RT considers fresh, most of them are honest
| with their readers about what the movie is ("hallmark",
| "formulaic"), but consider it a watchable entry in that
| genre.
|
| https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/irish_wish/reviews
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Who are you to say that is wrong? Everyone has their own
| preference for what they like to see in art, and one man's
| preference is no more correct than another.
| wavemode wrote:
| The article listed lots of examples... It's an exceptionally
| long article so you'd be forgiven for missing them, but there
| are definitely many examples given.
|
| In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this
| article - the point it's making is a good one but the article
| is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| The original link was
| https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-
| wr... which is probably what your parent is commenting on.
| Some people complained that that's basically a blogspam
| article that recycles n+1's article, others disagreed and
| argued there's value in a focused short article - it seems
| like mods agree with the complainers and changed the link
| silently to the current one.
| wavemode wrote:
| Thanks, that clears up the confusion!
| lynguist wrote:
| It's supposedly ragebait but it's not actually bad.
|
| - Netflix produces the casual viewing content next to other
| niches, and just serves this as well. The other stuff doesn't go
| away, this is in addition.
|
| - This is something you can put on during long car trips, no need
| to focus on the screen, just focus on the audio, and it's easier
| to listen to than an audiobook (which is just a narrated actual
| book).
|
| - It has nothing to do with "endumbification", even it it appears
| to be framed that way. People are still smart.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The other stuff doesn't go away, this is in addition.
|
| They could add a tag saying if you need to pay attention to the
| show or not. Currently it isn't very different from the other
| stuff just disappearing.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I am convinced that if we design media to be consumed while doing
| something else it will ultimately be to the detriment of the
| media itself. What will happen next is netflix shifting even more
| towards reality-tv and then end up just like MTV.
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm not going to bother with any new Netflix originals since they
| rug-pulled Inside Job, but I don't think this is the end of the
| world if it's done well. Rocky & Bullwinkle is like this and it
| only enhances it. Put this on in the background and see:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7fbc9gMiE
| 0xFEE1DEAD wrote:
| So the day, Netflix became the villain they were trying to fight,
| finally came.
|
| I do like trading stocks but it does seem like it's the #1 reason
| for companies to turn into shit.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| It's just slop par excellence. I've been watching a number of
| movies with my wife over Christmas. Everything is so bland,
| repetitive and 'design by committee'. It goes further than merely
| announcing what the characters are doing (in that new wannabe Die
| Hard movie we hear that they are expecting a baby three times in
| 5 minutes), you just know there are certain metrics used for
| every genre of movie accounting for every minute: "if it's an
| action film with no action scene in the first 10 minutes then the
| audience loses interest". They are all so soulless.
|
| And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-
| to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to
| admit.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Yet you watch these instead of the ones with "soul".
|
| Seems to me they provide what the market wants.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| My wife chooses the Netflix ones unfortunately. What ones are
| good?
| mingus88 wrote:
| There are a ton of great Christmas movies on Netflix. We
| just watched Christmas Chronicles again last night. Klaus
| is great. The Wallace and Gromit ones...I could go on
|
| Maybe you aren't being suggested kids movies. Most Xmas
| productions are. The hallmark/romance style of Xmas movie
| seems to be for housewives.
|
| And there are lots of people who just want background
| noise. Before streaming it was just leaving the TV on while
| you did other stuff. Before that it was radio. Daytime
| programming has always been like this.
|
| It's not a Netflix invention.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Some that I've enjoyed recently (or rewatched):
|
| Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
|
| Strange Darling (2023)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
|
| The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
|
| The Night House (2020)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
|
| The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
|
| Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
|
| Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
|
| Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
|
| Welcome the Stranger (2018)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
|
| Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
|
| Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
|
| A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
|
| I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
|
| Midnight Special (2016)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
|
| The Devil's Candy (2015)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
|
| Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
|
| The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
|
| A Most Wanted Man (2014)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
|
| Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
|
| Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
|
| Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
|
| The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
|
| In a Savage Land (1999)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
|
| Office Space (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
|
| The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765/
|
| Don't have Netflix so not sure what's available there, and
| several might not be wife-friendly. Also I enjoy weird, so
| YMMV.
| verisimi wrote:
| You do know that its ok to turn off the TV too? Lol
| magicalhippo wrote:
| ok recently was stretching it, I've watched these over
| the past year or so.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Wow, great to see The Fall is on Mubi. That's one I had
| to pirate as it wasn't available anywhere.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| It's getting a 4k Blu-ray release soon AFAIK. Will
| definitely pick it up.
| stavros wrote:
| My god I did not get the double life of Veronique at all.
| She was sleeping for 50% of the film, and random other
| stuff happened for the rest. However, it's worth it just
| for Preisner's score, SBI 152 is a masterpiece.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| Are you asking in general which recent (past few years)
| movies were good? Or movies on Netflix? Or Netflix
| productions?
| openplatypus wrote:
| > And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces
| direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they
| refuse to admit.
|
| This.
|
| Netflix does have good productions. But they are often
| surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.
|
| Stopped subscribing to N over a year ago and haven't missed it
| a single bit.
| motorest wrote:
| > Netflix does have good productions. But they are often
| surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.
|
| Isn't it true for the whole film industry? Among the highest
| grossing movies from recent years, how many follow a
| different approach?
| foobarqux wrote:
| It's amazing the checkboxes that stick out: having a dog for no
| reason for dog lovers; the relationship slop that appeals to
| women; the violence and sex slop to appeal to men.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm curious if heavy pornography consumption has become so
| prevalent that men care less about getting that thrill from
| feature films.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I wouldn't describe myself as a "heavy pornography
| consumer", but I certainly get bored by the gratuitous sex
| scenes in many shows and movies these days, thinking, "I
| can get this and much more any time I want, so can we stop
| with it and move the plot and/or character development
| along please?"
| relaxing wrote:
| You're meant to be watching it with a romantic partner,
| "and chill"-style.
| whycome wrote:
| The new Superman movie seems to be built on such checkboxes.
| jasdi wrote:
| McDonaldization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the
| attention span of a puppy golden retriever
|
| The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts
| for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing
| but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the
| obvious parts
| stevage wrote:
| I would love to see movies come in many different flavours.
| Long, short, dial up the violence, or down, etc etc.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| That would probably make every such movie rated 18+, unless
| you limit the controls somehow and they find a way to make
| sure nothing too violent happens on any given setting, or
| pre-render every single configuration and have reviewers
| check them all.
| thrwthsnw wrote:
| We should just get rid of the ratings. They're a stupid
| system that hasn't worked anyways.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more.
|
| They're not fine-grained enough IMO - IMDB's "parent's
| guide" is great for detailed content information.
|
| Similarly, with game ratings (video- and boardgames, as
| it happens), I appreciate them, but often they're trying
| to do two things, rate the game content and the gameplay.
| They fail often, and I buy outside the ratings, but I'm
| happier having them than not having any information in
| that space.
|
| I wouldn't want no ratings for film/TV as that would mean
| I'd have to seek out spoiler-level information before
| finding if media was right for what I wanted to consume
| (or take friends/family to consume). I try my best to see
| little about the plot of films I'm keen to watch.
| pastureofplenty wrote:
| This was actually something that was tried with music in
| the early 90s, by Philips and Sony with the CD-i. The
| musician/producer Todd Rundgren made an album specifically
| for this format called "No World Order" where the songs
| were all broken up into "modules", so to speak, and the
| user could configure them however they'd like.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_World_Order
| Vespasian wrote:
| That is actually an idea for AI in movie making that I could
| get behind.
|
| I don't think it's possible yet by a very very very long shot
| but if it were it would be a better idea than "write your own
| movies".
|
| My stories probably suck outside a captive, very young and
| related "audience" which is fine because I'm not script
| writer.
|
| But I would pay quite a lot of money for a "get to the point"
| button.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > But I would pay quite a lot of money for a "get to the
| point" button.
|
| then you're missing the point of storytelling.
| superjan wrote:
| If you're curious to try arthouse/international cinema, give
| Mubi a try. There is less to choose from, but the selection
| rotates.
| bpye wrote:
| Mubi has some great cinema! Definitely more of the sort of
| cinema you'd see at a film festival than mainstream.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I wish they'd fix their Chromecast support (they apparently
| only support recent versions).
| Yeul wrote:
| Let's be real here look at the movies that make a billion at
| the box office. It's never the highbrow stuff.
| Retric wrote:
| Highbrow and soulless are different axes. Disney may be a
| giant soulless company, but they do employ actual artists who
| sometimes make decent movies which in general do vastly
| better at the box office.
|
| Handing a talented team enough time, freedom, and budget
| doesn't guarantee success but it's definitely a prerequisite
| for success.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm more interested in movies that make money through the
| long tail of DVD sales. Box office numbers have always
| favoured blockbusters. The long tail content tends to be
| better, less one-size-fits-all, and allows room for multiple
| films trying different things, across different genres. That
| era appears to be over however.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I think the best modern productions are now the series rather
| than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story
| and have room for characters to breathe etc.
|
| Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in
| both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of
| "showing, not telling" on display there.
|
| As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the
| other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals)
| trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in
| the entire film.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| I don't doubt that, but from what I've been reading Arcane is
| notorious for having songs in the background exactly
| describing the action onscreen.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I haven't heard that at all. As I understand it, the music
| is written to go with certain scenes, but it complements
| the action and adds a lot of emotional beats. I can't think
| of an example where it's simply describing what's going on
| on-screen.
|
| The music is a huge part of Arcane though, and complements
| the emotional content.
|
| e.g. The Line (Twenty-One Pilots) was written after Tyler
| Joseph witnessed the passing of his grandmother and is
| written from her viewpoint - incredibly powerful and
| poignant, but also fits in wonderfully with what is
| happening with Victor (Arcane character).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Rj2gQAyPA
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Maybe 5 years ago but can't say I agree any more. Netflix in
| particular stretches 2-hour scripts into 10-hour limited
| series. I'm trying to watch Black Doves right now and
| continually get bored at how much exposition and background
| there is. There was clearly a tight, fun script in there
| somewhere before the committee performed surgery on it. I
| don't need everything explored and explained to death, give
| me something with rhythm instead.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Maybe it's a problem with Netflix series.
|
| Some of my favourite recent series haven't been from
| Netflix - Slow Horses, Day of the Jackal etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| I like Black Doves but don't really disagree with your
| broader point in some cases.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That's just reminded me of an article I read recently about
| "What We Do In The Shadows", where Clement/Waititi
| originally thought that the idea was a ten minute sketch
| ("vampires, but they're stupid") that they managed to
| stretch out into a whole film. Of course, then they
| stretched it out even further into 6 seasons of a series
| (not counting Wellington Paranormal).
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the
| usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've
| come to expect from mainstream productions.
|
| A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes
| Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays
| League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to
| say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the
| usual drivel", but they insisted it was _really_ good.
|
| And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself:
| "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no
| avail!
|
| I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or
| "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place,
| in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for
| me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident
| culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Sorry you didn't enjoy it. If I recall correctly, that
| scene was an animated cameo by Imagine Dragons who do the
| theme tune (Enemy) for Arcane.
|
| Personally, I hadn't had any contact with League of Legends
| and knew none of the lore before watching Arcane, but was
| thoroughly taken with the incredible art and story-telling.
| What I find surprising is the amount of character
| development they manage to incorporate - the first season
| had meaningful character arcs for almost all the characters
| (maybe two side characters were left out). The second
| season feels a bit more rushed though.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of
| entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying
| to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld
| stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people
| who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what
| makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.
| m463 wrote:
| What I hate is that the slop killed the netflix DVD service,
| where I used to get the "real" movies to watch.
|
| It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded
| and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day
| they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and
| everyone goes the same slow speed.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Valentine to Harry Hart, "You know what this is like? It's like
| those old movies we both love. Now, I'm going to tell you my
| whole plan, and then I'm going to come up with some absurd and
| convoluted way to kill you, and you'll find an equally convoluted
| way to escape."
| fabioborellini wrote:
| My wife considers "show, don't tell" shows confusing and just
| bad. More dialogue, better the show.
|
| She chooses to watch shows in which characters address each other
| with full names and say their intentions out loud. My brain
| hurts.
| strogonoff wrote:
| One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.
|
| Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything
| about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the
| same here. You like it or you don't.
|
| This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything.
| The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise
| given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have
| no names or no full names. No situation in which they would
| formally introduce themselves takes place.
|
| Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it
| once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite.
| Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make
| conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I enjoyed Upstream Color a lot as well, but yeah it's
| certainly not for everyone.
|
| And agreed on not being spoon fed.
|
| A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker,
| spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The
| movie would have been _so much better_ if they had cut that
| entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all
| surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the
| apartment.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking
| out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't
| already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make
| full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and
| no hand-holding.
|
| Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what
| happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Seen Primer first, though it's 100% due a rewatch. I think
| it lacks certain poetry that Upstream Color has.
|
| I don't know if we should denounce the art if the artist
| turns out to be a bad person in some ways, previously had
| some thoughts about it but forgot what they were. Maybe the
| answer is "we should if we know about it". However, no
| person is unchanging, and by that logic the person who
| creates the art is not the same entity as the person who
| does bad things, unless it happens in close enough
| proximity or relation to each other.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I do generally separate the art from the artist, it just
| sucks given that Seimetz starred in Upstream Color, which
| is definitely proximal.
|
| For example, I recently watched It Ends with Us, a book-
| turned-movie about a woman, played by Blake Lively,
| dealing with physical and sexual abuse from her
| boyfriend, played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed
| the movie. Well, it just came out that he and other staff
| sexually harassed her constantly throughout the filming
| of the movie. That would make any rewatch significantly
| more difficult for me, as I know that Lively did not
| enjoy the process and that the director, someone with
| power over her, treated her as such.
|
| Personal issues aside, Carruth ultimately had a
| professional responsibility to Seimetz which he broke,
| and his subsequent behavior and general rejection of the
| Hollywood apparatus means we likely won't get any more
| films from him.
|
| However, I don't want to derail the discussion away from
| Upstream Color or Carruth's other work. Just mentioned
| that because it saddened me.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I'm thinking about unsubscribing from Netflix, only my wife
| discovered they have Friends. So I'm not.
|
| It's not the new stuff that pulls me into Netflix. Instead I go
| to Paramount+. As it turns out, these guys actually know how to
| tell a compelling story. Nobody is more surprised than me!
| jsnell wrote:
| The source, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-
| viewing/, seems like a much better article.
|
| But it is hilarious in a meta kind of way that a bottom feeder
| "summarize real writing done by others, and slap on a clickbait
| headline" website pretends to have the moral high ground on this
| issue. I wonder what the guidance they give t to their writers
| is, and what metrics they're pushed to improve.
| paulgb wrote:
| Thanks, this is a much better article!
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That article has a lot of quality but it also has a _lot_ of
| telling the history of Netflix. Of the eight sections, I 'd
| only really recommend the first plus a paragraph, then 6-8,
| _maybe_ 5-8.
|
| I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for
| the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.
| thrwthsnw wrote:
| The shorter article is better.
| macleginn wrote:
| This article is very informative article, but it is funny that
| it seems to imply that Netflix is somehow essentially evil,
| compared to the artsy heros of the 90s, such as Harvey
| Weinstein's Miramax.
| foobarqux wrote:
| I don't remember the program but in the years of broadcast TV
| there was a writer on a nightly talk show explaining why all TV
| episodes were so bland. He said that he wrote an intricate plot
| for TV which was rejected because the show had to be watchable by
| someone doing this dishes. So this isn't a phenomenon new to the
| Netflix era.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Many years ago when I was in college, one of my professors
| wrote a Star Trek Next Generation script, and she talked about
| how the producers pretty much destroyed her story by insisting
| she stick to the formula such as "between X and Y minutes, the
| Enterprise or one of the main characters must be in danger.
| That danger must be resolved by minute Z." Sigh.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Since not every episode follows that formula, I wonder if
| that's a requirement specifically of spec script writers
| because they'd want to keep the more important/interesting
| episodes written by staff.
| atombender wrote:
| That sounds like something Harlan Ellison would grouch about.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The elevation of the present and the demotion of the past and
| memory.
| egeozcan wrote:
| You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15
| hours long. It's always about balance, and it's probably one of
| the hardest challenges in scriptwriting and directing. Netflix
| movies have always leaned more toward the "tell" side, and this
| feels like an open acknowledgment of it.
|
| Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme
| version of "telling" for ages. I've been watching the cheesiest
| ones with my wife as she uses them to unwind (I do the same with
| YouTube videos). In these shows, characters don't just say what
| they're doing, they also explain how they feel, what they plan to
| do, and how they'll feel afterward. It's oddly addictive, like
| watching a bad movie on purpose, and somehow, you end up
| completely hooked.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I know precisely what you mean. I randomly stumbled upon the
| anime Solo Leveling, which also follows the 100% tell style.
| The main character reads out everything, narrates every scene,
| and explains his own thought processes and emotions at every
| step.
|
| It _is_ weirdly addicting, perhaps only because I 'm bored of
| the show-don't-tell style and it's refreshing to see something
| going contrary to that.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Just to note, Solo Leveling is Korean.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Thanks for the correction.
| prmoustache wrote:
| >Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme
| version of "telling" for ages.
|
| From a european perspective that is what US TV series and
| movies have been doing for 4 decades already as well as
| following the very same mechanics. In most shows you can tell
| in advance what is about to happen next at any point in time
| this is embarassing. I used to think US people had to be super
| dumb for that reason then realized they gradually started doing
| it on euro stuff. I guess we just use the lowest baseline
| possible because the people who spend the most time passively i
| front of a screen happen to also be the dumbest ones.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15
| hours long
|
| You most certainly can, though it relies on trusting the
| audience.
|
| Flow (2024)
|
| Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
|
| Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
| ghaff wrote:
| It also probably depends on having a generally undistracted
| audience which you probably don't have a lot of the time
| especially outside of a movie theater.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I watch a lot of films and series (mainly SciFi) at home
| and I find that when I start to get bored is when I'll pick
| up my phone and half-watch the TV. It's one sign of a great
| show that I'll be paying it 100% attention and not mucking
| around with a phone.
| ghaff wrote:
| I admit I find the long complicated series (yes, often SF
| or fantasy) a bit exhausting, have a definite limit, and
| I try to avoid interleaving too much.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
|
| Hundreds of Beavers! So pleased that someone else here has
| seen this awesome film
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon
| raincole wrote:
| Honestly, the more I read, the less I appreciate the "show,
| don't tell" rule/guideline/mantra.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Some Turkish TV soap operas have 3 hour long episodes which
| cost $1 mil each. And are really well acted, with very good
| drama, humor, etc
| phartenfeller wrote:
| Definitely not surprising. The quality of Netflix originals is on
| a decline for years. I see this label as a warning nowadays.
| There are enough good quality movies and shows. My life is too
| short to spend it with mediocre entertainment that leaves no
| lasting impression or thoughts. I don't need to pass time I want
| to make most out of it.
| rchaud wrote:
| Agreed, previously, seeing Netflix Original would be like
| seeing a Lexus in a sea of Toyotas. Now I just think "store
| brand".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I feel like the "Netflix original" label started to decline
| around the time they started disingenuously applying it to
| things that they merely distributed, not created. That was a
| sign that the company was willing to water down its brand
| quality to get people to watch stuff.
| genezeta wrote:
| I was just wondering a bit about this. I read some of your
| comments here and, as I sometimes do, writing and discarding
| before submitting my response.
|
| But it just occurred to me... Maybe Netflix should do _half-
| movies_ next. The movie is designed to be appealing on the menu,
| to have a good but not too engrossing first 30 minutes, and then
| start ramping down the budget drastically for the remaining of
| the film, which -it seems- people aren 't watching any more. Like
| don't bother with FX, then just don't bother with actors, then
| just insert shots of the storyboard or don't even bother with the
| story at all and just insert stock video, etc. Maybe at the end
| add a narrated summary of what happened (or didn't happen).
| habitue wrote:
| This was actually pioneered by Bruce Willis. He would get paid
| a lot to show up in a couple of introductory scenes for really
| low budget films. They'd put his face on the movie poster,
| they'd pay him like half the budget of the film, then he'd move
| on to the next one.
|
| (Unfortunately, it turns out he was struggling with dementia
| and it seems he was trying to cash out before he couldn't act
| at all)
| m463 wrote:
| sounds like the nonsense at the end of 2001.
| drcongo wrote:
| I watched the Netflix series Black Doves recently, nine episodes
| of fairly entertaining stuff, followed by a final episode of
| full-on Basil Exposition with characters literally explaining
| what happened in the previous episodes like the reveal at the end
| of Scooby-Doo. I've mostly given up on Netflix for exactly this
| kind of dumbing down.
| macleginn wrote:
| This seems to be more of a feature of British TV in this case.
| Black Doves faithfully follows all the recent cliches.
| newsclues wrote:
| The opposite of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell
|
| Why must all content turn to crap?
| Filligree wrote:
| Maybe they could start by having actors enunciate properly.
|
| I have an easier time understanding _Japanese_ movies than
| English ones, because at least in the former they 're speaking to
| the audience. English actors have a habit of mumbling everything.
| deskr wrote:
| Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Netflix and we can
| go back to having good films again.
| sandy_coyote wrote:
| But _gestures at the approaching tsunami of AI-generated video
| content_
| fnord77 wrote:
| Amazon already has this but as a 2nd audio track
|
| noticed this when watching Stargate SG1 the other day
| hiatus wrote:
| I thought that was for visually impaired people to help them
| get a better sense of what's on the screen. Makes sense it can
| be used for "casual viewing" though.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| > Oh help me! Oh, help me! My life is in danger!
|
| > Oh help me! Oh, help me! My life is in danger!
|
| > The venomous monster is drawing upon me
|
| > And I can't escape him.
|
| > How near is his bite,
|
| > With teeth sharp and white!
|
| > Oh gods above!
|
| > Why can't you hear my mortal cry?
|
| > Destroy the beast or I will die!
|
| > Or surely, I will die!
|
| The opening lines to The Magic Flute (which continues in a
| similarly expository tone for the duration). Seems like there
| have always been scripts which were easy to understand while also
| staring at your phone, though that doesn't stop the ushers at
| English National Opera getting narky at you if you try!
| cynicalkane wrote:
| Those lines are from a song, and a significant part of the
| audience at the time wouldn't be listening in their native
| language; it's not really a fair comparison.
| relaxing wrote:
| ? It was written in German for the German-speaking audience
| in Vienna.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| Vienna was an international city; and Mozart and
| Shickhander were seeking international fame. The Magic
| Flute was a relatively low-brow 'singspiel' in the native
| language but its creators wanted foreigners to be able to
| see it and like it. (It was common for the wealthy and
| educated to speak many languages, not necessarily very
| well.) In music history you see critics criticize some
| operas for being difficult to understand, and remarking if
| the audience seemed lost.
|
| International audiences nonwithstanding, it's just hard for
| many people to hear song lyrics, and a very common choice
| to make song lyrics simple, and hearing lyrics is critical
| for opera in a way it isn't if you're singing Goethe at a
| small salon concert.
|
| The original point is it's silly to compare opera lyrics to
| spoken dialogue. Songs with belabored and repetitive lyrics
| can easily be interesting, spoken word with this property
| is banal.
| relaxing wrote:
| Man. I like that you're bringing opera into the conversation,
| but I don't think comparing two different mediums that way is
| useful.
|
| Die Zauberflote is easy to understand because it's a fairly
| light work, and you're meant to be staring at the lavish
| staging and costumes. The performers narrate the action because
| that's the convention for the genre - it's a sung story. They
| break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative
| sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > They break into more conventional dialogue for the
| recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with
| Verdi.)
|
| The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were contemporary to
| Verdi's work and still feature lots of dialogue, so they are
| very approachable. You still won't be able to use your phone,
| though - you'll be too busy laughing!
|
| My recommendation for an introduction would be the 1982
| Canadian production of _The Mikado_ by the Stratford
| Festival. It is currently available in its entirety on
| YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbpUzCFCy_8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6y6n98O00
| relaxing wrote:
| Comic Operas are a different genre, for the most part you
| won't find them in the repertory for the major world
| operas. Gilbert and Sullivan only overlapped with the end
| of Verdi's career -- they were very much a retrograde move
| in the artistic evolution of the medium.
| cco wrote:
| Really enjoy this curveball you threw, casts this whole
| conversation in a new light doesn't it?
|
| It is true that a lot of old plays, operas etc do exactly what
| Netflix is accused of here. What is a monologue? Was
| Shakespeare guilty of creating casual viewing content when he
| wrote Hamlet's monologue? Shouldn't he have just showed
| Hamlet's ambivalence???
| 134245CET wrote:
| I believe this, feels like streaming platforms shows are made to
| be watched while you browse your phone. Even if I like a show I
| often feel like it could've been a 2h movie instead of 8h show
| and nothing would be lost.
|
| There is still so much good stuff (especially films) being
| created still, but nowdays if it is Produced-by-streaming-corp,
| I'll just assume its going to have a inflated length to keep
| people from unsubscribing.
|
| The main feeling you'll get out of a Streaming show is being
| sedated
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| This is definitely because people are looking at their phone
| while "watching".
| alephxyz wrote:
| It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Content made for disengaged
| viewers is disengaging.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Great to see Netflix being derided, I instantly feel soothed.
|
| One other curious and quite insufferable thing which exists now
| is when a show/movie/game will give an unmistakeable and unsubtle
| nod to some other bit of media or information, either from the
| show/movie/game itself, or some other show/movie/game/cultural
| artefact.
|
| And the learned and informed modern-media-gooner who is "in-the-
| know" will go: "aaaaaaha!" and "oooooh, clever!"
|
| How has this happened? How is it considered so substantive and
| sophisticated for a show to make surface-level nods to other
| media? Please, someone explain this phenomenon to me.
|
| I think Rick and Morty do a good job ridiculing this trope, but
| it doesn't seem to have been effective at slowing the tide. When
| a movie or a rap song alludes to something outside of itself or
| makes a meta-comment about itself, or breaks the fourth wall in
| some way, people are titillated beyond belief, I find.
|
| What exactly is tickling them so hard?
| smallnix wrote:
| > For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was
| straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money
| the studios made.
|
| I thought Hollywood (Disney) long before Netflix tapped into
| other revenue such as merchandise.
| atoav wrote:
| As a young film student I was once going to a film industry
| meeting on behalf of my professor who was fed up with TV
| executives at that point. It was essentially a fancy dinner with
| all kinds of people from the German TV industry explaining why
| the stuff they do is so bad and why it has to be. It was
| incredibly fatalistic.
|
| Money quote of the evening: "Our average viewer is between 60 and
| 65 and they are not 100% there mentally when viewing, so it needs
| to be so simple that you can still follow along while you are
| ironing your shirts."
|
| Nobody there believed they were making good entertainment,
| everbody in fact hated it and yet they all said it has to be that
| way. Theh knew they are losing the young audiences, but didn't
| know what to do.
| whycome wrote:
| I started the movie Twisters. The exposition and acting in the
| first five minutes was so jarring that I stopped it to leave it
| for another day
| cs702 wrote:
| Nowadays, whenever I browse Netflix, I feel like that Bruce
| Springsteen song, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)."[a] Sure, there
| are lots of choices, but they all kinda _suck_. I find myself
| wondering, why? The OP weaves an insightful, opinionated
| narrative that explains how we got here. Much of it rings true.
| This passage, in particular struck a chord with me:
|
| > Several screenwriters who've worked for the streamer told me a
| common note from company executives is "have this character
| announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program
| on in the background can follow along." [...] One tag among
| Netflix's thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name
| for this kind of dreck: "casual viewing." Usually reserved for
| breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature
| documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix's film
| catalog -- movies that go down best when you're not paying
| attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas,
| a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, "another Netflix
| movie made to half-watch while doing laundry."
|
| In other words, people like me, who want to focus on and
| experience a _great_ film or series, are no longer the target
| audience.
|
| Apparently, there's no money in targeting people who want to pay
| attention.
|
| ---
|
| [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_Channels_(And_Nothin'_On)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I mean it is also somewhat dependent on how much bandwidth you
| have free while doing laundry, some people can handle watching
| the complicated stuff while doing their daily tasks and I guess
| those people also hate these half-assed shows.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I think it depends on which kind of bandwidth we're talking
| about. I can follow a talk-show no problem while doing
| laundry / the dishes / vacuum / iron. Keyword being "talk".
| But I can't _look_ at the screen too often.
|
| So, watching a sitcom or similar where the characters' body
| language or facial expressions are important is an exercise
| in frustration.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, so that's what radio is for (including in recorded
| form, aka podcasts).
|
| Making video (more complicated than "talking heads") so
| nobody watches it is such a waste... (so is non peer to
| peer mass streaming, come to think of it).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you
| learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were
| adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio
| play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure
| and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until
| the end of prominent network TV shows.
|
| TV show creators understood and planned for people watching
| their shows in a variety of environments, with varying degrees
| and kinds of attention. A lot of what made for example X-files
| and Sopranos compelling was a willingness to break this
| convention, so it was still firmly in place by the late 90s.
|
| You could also maybe reasonably claim that all TV shows before
| those were bad as well. But then you need to view netflix as
| reverting to the norm rather than being a novel travesty. We
| are simply exiting a 20 year anomaly where TV was good.
|
| I'm not quite making that argument here though. I think there
| was good TV before the 90s, so I think this is a _constraint_
| on the form that good creators can work through and still make
| compelling art. Why netflix can 't is an interesting question
| but I think this avenue is a dead end for understanding it.
| cs702 wrote:
| My completely unscientific impression is that other services
| _are making the effort_ to produce high-quality films and
| series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All
| Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max /HBO (Barry, Curb Your
| Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear,
| The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul,
| Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you
| think of the quality of shows in those services, they at
| least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
| rat87 wrote:
| Yeah most of those services aren't as popular as Netflix so
| they have to compete for eyeballs. Also for Apple/Amazon TV
| is a minor side business. The show you listed for HBO are
| largely HBO shows developed for HBO some arguably back when
| watching HBO under a cable subscription was the norm.
| Breaking Bad was made for tv first.
| Loughla wrote:
| There is still good cinema and television, it's just shockingly
| difficult to find.
|
| The first person who figures out how to sort the wheat from the
| chaff and does so with no interior motive could be a
| millionaire immediately.
| rchaud wrote:
| "could be a millionnaire immediately" is precisely the kind
| of techbro ulterior motive that creates these situations in
| the first place.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Exactly. Value extraction posing as value creation :)
| emptiestplace wrote:
| This App Store review makes Mubi sound promising:
|
| "MUBI IS TERRIBLE! *---- 6y ago * Nick2866 MUBI is terrible
| there's no good action or horror films it's crazy because
| almost all of the movies on the app I haven't even heard of
| and I'm a big movie buff. So just don't waste your time with
| MUBI just get Netflix or amazon prime."
| geoelectric wrote:
| Mubi has a truly fantastic art house selection along with a
| few more accessible films like the recent critically
| acclaimed horror, The Substance.
|
| It's worth checking out on trial, or at least browsing the
| catalog, but the collection was too esoteric for me to keep
| a subscription. If you like art house, though, and
| especially if you're cool with diving into unknown titles,
| it's pretty impressive.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You mean like the $ million given for the Netflix Prize ?
|
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/122585
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for
| them too.
|
| Netflix has shows made for really watching too. I don't know if
| they are rebellious acts from their makers, brought without an
| option, or actual choices, but Netflix does have them.
|
| My impression is that Netflix cornered themselves into the same
| AAA race to death that the major movie studios are in.
| Everything is too expensive, so they can't accept risks, so
| nothing is really good (nor really bad). Micromanaging is just
| one more visible consequence of that, between lots and lots
| that stay hidden but are as important to the final result.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| > Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made
| for them too.
|
| What? No they don't. Film and television are visual art forms
| that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate
| attention. There's already plenty of mediocre television out
| there you can use as background noise; we don't need to
| intentionally lower the bar for the media that's being made.
| As the article mentions, Netflix has already played its part
| in ruining the job landscape for writers and actors. I guess
| they see a need to play their part in devaluing the work that
| remains.
| internet101010 wrote:
| 6.5/10 movies only deserve 65% attention, and 6.5/10 is the
| target imdb rating for all streamers. Not bad, not great,
| but good enough to avoid controversy and maintain subs.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| " Film and television are visual art forms that are meant
| to be viewed and given the appropriate attention."
|
| According to who...?
|
| There's not even a universally agreed upon definition of
| 'art' last time I checked.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Don't worry, very, very soon the crappy shows that people
| half-watch will no longer be produced. By humans.
|
| We'll still need people to create actually good content,
| but that crappy filler stuff will be generated.
|
| It will be a special kind of hell, but there will probably
| be some way to find out what to actually spend your time
| watching.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| > no they don't. ... > meant to be viewed and given the
| appropriate attention
|
| I think the person choosing to spend a few hours of their
| one life with some audio/visual media, whether they're
| doing their laundry or not, is the one who gets to decide
| whether or not it's art, and how much attention it
| deserves. Anything else leads to some uncomfortable places.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The reality is the average person's time to watch TV/unwind is
| also going to be spent doing chores. This was always the case.
| When I was a kid, we watched shows that could be followed along
| by whoever was cooking dinner/doing dishes as well as the
| people sitting in front of the set. People don't have all that
| much extra free time.
|
| Movies were an experience because... they were an experience.
| They weren't constantly on. They were a rare treat, not
| something consumed nightly.
| Retric wrote:
| It's very true this drives watch time, but I doubt it drives
| subscriptions.
|
| My guess is some internal metrics favor watch time over
| quality and is just quietly killing their business.
| Uw7yTcf36gTc wrote:
| As most of their revenue becomes advertising revenue
| instead of subscriptions then watch time is all they care
| about. It's what happened with cable TV.
| niyyou wrote:
| I almost believed it was a trick to generate labelled data to
| train AI systems down the line
| abcde777666 wrote:
| Whilst I do like having shows and movies on to the side as I
| code... it's on the condition they're actually interesting and
| have good writing. Otherwise I just can't bring myself to be
| interested.
| zebomon wrote:
| This article is a fascinating explication of the core reason
| that, without any respect paid to my millennial nostalgia at all,
| we need to preserve the physical cinema. The digital "attention
| economy" introduces such immense layers of abstraction between
| the audience and the business that none of us should feel
| confident that it will allow us to express our tastes for
| entertainment with anything close to intentionality. If we want
| to keep getting any modicum of entertainment that we actually
| like -- what a high bar! -- then we need to maintain our right to
| vote audibly with our dollars.
| TZubiri wrote:
| In my experience, when technology advances, and the original
| thing to be replaced still holds some value, it doesn't
| continue existing as such, it may survive binging on momentum,
| habits or nostalgia.
|
| But then it splits, the useless aspect discarded and the useful
| merged with other old and new fragments, in combinations tried
| by the experimental startup ecosystem.
|
| In the end we may have for example entertainment venues for
| both playing arcades and watching movies and theater plays,
| perhaps with dinner for example. (We already have this
| actually.)
| m463 wrote:
| One nice thing about the movie theater, is that nobody can
| pull up her phone in the middle and start scrolling through
| stuff. And then we have to rewind later. Not pointing fingers
| here. :)
| m463 wrote:
| I remember going to the physical cinema one day to see "Air". I
| didn't think the movie was that great, and I wonder if the
| "Amazon Studios" logo at the beginning made me more critical.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think this also applies:
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/netflix-the-crap-you-put-up...
|
| >A signature characteristic of Netflix's strategy over the years
| has been to define genres into microscopic sub-genres and develop
| content on very specific customer likes -- for example "Urban
| teen geniuses who invent time travel"
|
| >There is an unfortunate issue with making things bad and to
| somebody's taste -- the person whose taste you are courting may
| be happy to be courted but if all they ever get of things to
| their taste are things that are bad representations of that taste
| they may come to sour on what they once loved.
|
| and that is I think what happens a lot with Netflix, they produce
| approximations of the thing you love, and by doing this bad half-
| assed version with the wires sticking out and everything, in the
| end you don't love that thing anymore.
|
| Netflix in the hunt for quick engagement eats the seed corn of
| fandom, and are left with nothing to build on.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I love apocalyptic movies (even ones that are not considered
| great) but the few I started watching on Netflix were really
| bad.
| Loughla wrote:
| Can you name a good apocalyptic movie? I'm really struggling
| to come up with one. Twister, sort of, and that's neither
| good nor apocalyptic really.
|
| Edit: Twelve Monkeys. I think that counts.
| dijit wrote:
| There are loads, some skirt the horror genre for obvious
| reasons.
|
| A quiet place, 28 days later, Children of Men
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Apocalypse Now, Apocalypto
| atombender wrote:
| Threads (1984) -- fair warning: brutal and traumatic
|
| Snowpiercer (2013)
|
| Melancholia (2011)
|
| When the Wind Blows (1986)
| salgernon wrote:
| Mad Max, obviously, Night of the Comet, The Quiet Earth, A
| boy and his dog. I think the early 80s was a good time for
| the genre.
|
| Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and that other Charleton
| Heston movie with zombies that I can't remember (not a huge
| fan of zombies)
|
| The Road is a fairly recent movie that fits.
|
| British TV had Space 1999, lots of early Doctor Who and an
| attempt at the Tripods series by John Christopher. By far
| my favorite was "Survivors" written by Terry Nation - who
| needs zombies when you've got actual problems to deal with!
| dagw wrote:
| _British TV had Space 1999_
|
| Not be confused with Spaced (1999) :)
| MrMember wrote:
| Also an incredible show but for very different reasons.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| > and that other Charleton Heston movie with zombies that
| I can't remember
|
| The Omega Man probably. The first adaptation of Mathesons
| "I am Legend". Though some people might disagree about
| the "Zombie" part.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The Road? Not something you ever need to watch more than
| once but if you want to internalize bleakness it worked for
| me.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Jokes on them, my thing is bad movies.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| most bad movies will be unintentionally hilarious, Netflix'
| bad movies will be intentionally worth a chuckle or two.
| askafriend wrote:
| > A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
|
| Wait, what's wrong with Tide Pods?
| sincerecook wrote:
| Does anyone have recommendations for reliable TV or movie critics
| whose opinion is based on writing quality in the movie or show
| rather than the social message it's trying to force on you?
| Something like the critical drinker but in print form and that
| covers a wider sample?
| alephxyz wrote:
| >reliable TV or movie critics
|
| >critical drinker
| sincerecook wrote:
| What, is critical drinker not high brow enough or something?
| Feel free to make a better suggestion.
| dizhn wrote:
| If you like him, try nerdrotic. Be mindful of their weird
| antiwoke MAGA bent though.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Netflix has been fine for me. My wife and I watch maybe 3h of TV
| a week and across all the streaming channels I usually find
| something. Arcane was the last show we saw and it's a Netflix
| original and it's quite good.
|
| Plus Netflix has a lot of anime and I like that.
| Finnucane wrote:
| We gave up on Netflix last year. The price kept going up and the
| value going down.
| new_user_final wrote:
| So basically Indian TV serial where instead of facial expressions
| and other action, actors/actress think out loud. Good for low IQ
| and average people.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament
| for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed
| Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that
| triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I
| care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month
| theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad.
| Things are better now.
|
| In all these kinds of stories that revolve around how much crap
| there is on Netflix, there are two things you have to keep in
| mind:
|
| * Netflix didn't invent shlock and probably didn't even
| accelerate it; if anything, Netflix probably _reversed_ the trend
| away from scripted and towards "reality".
|
| * What distinguishes Netflix more than anything else is its
| efficiency getting content to viewers, which means that there's
| more of everything on Netflix, and in its catalog of originals.
| There's more schlock, which is very noticeable, and, compared to
| pre-Netflix-streaming outputs of places like HBO, also more solid
| original films. But 99% of everything is crap, so if the only way
| you have to engage with the Netflix catalog is browsing their
| interface, that's most of what you're going to see.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think you just wandered into today's HN "Good Old Days"
| article. It's just nostalgia vibes, not really a space meant
| for critical thinking.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525340
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| The nice thing about casual viewers like me is I can rewatch and
| catch something new.
| wglass wrote:
| Holy moly. I don't think I've ever read an article so angry.
| Every paragraph has a sensational opinion or put down posing as
| fact.
|
| There's some fascinating industry trends here but the analysis in
| the article is overwhelmed by the cacophony of anecdotes about b
| movies and bland tv shows all encouraged by the corrupt and evil
| parent company. Not helpful.
|
| My take on the quality of shows-- there's a huge volume of
| mediocre stuff but that's always been the case with TV. (There's
| literally hundreds of forgotten sitcoms on broadcast tv from the
| 70s to 90s). But there have been many gems in the past decade.
|
| A random list of fantastic or innovative shows I saw first on
| NetFlix. - House of Cards, season 1 and 2 - Russian Doll - Squid
| Game - Queens Gambit - Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Arcane - Kaos
|
| Only the first was mentioned in the article, and with negative
| comment.
|
| Overall, a poorly written article and a waste of time to read it.
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