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Netflix Is Betting On Exclusive Programming
An anonymous reader writes: You may have heard of the recent launch of the new Daredevil TV show, and possibly the hit shows House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. They're all original programming from Netflix — the company that used to just mail DVDs to your door. But Netflix is now running a lot more than just those three shows — it has 320 hours of original programming planned for this year. This article discusses how Netflix is betting big on original, exclusive content, and what that means for the future of television. "Traditionally, television networks needed to stand for something to carve out an audience, he said, whereas the Internet allows brands to mean different things to different people because the service can be personalized for individual viewers. That means that for a conservative Christian family, Netflix should stand for wholesome entertainment, and, for a 20-year-old New York college student, it should be much more on the edge, he said.... 'We've had 80 years of linear TV, and it's been amazing, and in its day the fax machine was amazing,' he said. "The next 20 years will be this transformation from linear TV to Internet TV.'"
Sorry if this offends comic fans, but Daredevil is meh. Reasonable plot/character development, interrupted by extended punchfests reminiscent of '60's Batman Pow! Blam! Zowie! kitsch.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yup, I'm all in on the Netflix bandwagon. It, along with other streaming services (I'm a huge anime fan so Crunchyroll is in that list) are all I watch these days.
On the other hand I hope Hulu dies in a fire. I'm ok with watching ads to pay for my TV, and I have no problem with paying for a service to stream TV. I do however have an issue with paying a service to stream TV and still having to watch ads. Hulu+ is a joke of a service being managed by the same corporate assholes who made me leave cable in the first place. Netflix just beats out Hulu in terms of where you can use it (just about every possible device runs Netflix, while there's a lot that won't handle Hulu+) Heck even Amazon Prime is beating Hulu in terms of devices I see which support it. I hope the Hulu people figure their shit out eventually since there's a handful of shows I would watch (like South Park) if they had a reasonable streaming service that didn't try to double dip with both ads and subscriptions.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I largely agree, but I'm not sold on the full season release part. It pretty much ruins any opportunity to discuss the show with friends or online communities.
It is news. Between Netflix and Amazon developing their own shows, and HBO converging to the same market from the other side by launching a standalone streaming service, it's increasingly clear that we're in the middle of a major shift in television.
It's not a single, discrete event, but few truly important stories are.
They're a company that wants to stay in business. TV's about as locked in as can be and even they're draining audiences in one form or another. The internet is an amazing levelling field, and even if terrestrial TV packed up and quit tomorrow, there'd be no firm reason NetFlix alone would dominate the internet markets. They're playing the same game by locking up good content behuind their platform so that if/when the sh hits the fan, they'll have something to keep loyal customers paying well for their services.
Bye!
While Netflix's distribution model and show quality make it a locally good thing, I think that in the larger scheme, having content production and content distribution tied together will ultimately continue the problems that the current system has. While some of this content is available through other distributors, they always have an incentive to give preferential treatment to their own distributor. I doubt we'll ever see House of Cards on Hulu Plus, for example.
Aside from having to subscribe to several services to hit all of the content that you're interested in, you also have the cases where, like HBO, they have conditions on subscribing and draconian restrictions on what devices they allow playback on (eg, until a couple of years ago, Android playback was locked out if you had an external display connected)
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
It's probably a good thing that companies like Netflix are making good original programming, but I've noticed that their catalog of classic films has shrunk significantly.
What I really want is a service like Netflix that is more Spotify-like, with an enormous catalog of old films, classic foreign films, art films, shorts, animation, etc.
I guess the fact that copyright trolls are scrambling to take old movies out of the public domain and congress has seen fit to extend copyright to ridiculous lengths makes that a problem. So even though I subscribe to Netflix, I find myself looking to torrent sites and the Internet Archive to scratch my film noir, King Vidor, Vittorio De Sica and Busby Berkely itch. Because sometimes Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve in "The April Fools" or Lee J Cobb in John Boorman's "Point Blank" is just what the movie doctor ordered. Sometimes, a creepy-as-hell Richard Widmark in the 1953 Sam Fuller classic, "Pickup on South Street" is preferable to watching Ryan Gosling try to create an expression on his face.
Hell, a little while ago, I just wanted to sit back and enjoy the 1973 blaxploitation classic, "The Mack" and learned that Netflix doesn't have it available for streaming (but you can get a DVD if you still use that legacy format). I mean, what the fuck. Who's gonna mess with physical media and snail mail just to watch a movie? Not only that, but they don't carry "Trouble Man" at all, and that has one of the greatest soundtracks ever by Curtis Mayfield.
In case you aren't familiar with cinematic masterpiece "The Mack", here's the scene where Goldy and Pretty Tony face off. Check the very young Richard Pryor: https://youtu.be/sdR_t5nsZqI
I'm spoiled because back in my university days, I worked as a projectionist at a revival house for seven years and got the most thorough education in film history one could ever hope for. But some of you younger folks might not know what came before The Avengers and Fast and Furious 7, and that makes me sad. Hell, the 1970s were a veritable golden age for independent films and hardly anybody gets to see those movies today. Even the "classic movie" channels on cable only play the same top forty old movies over and over again, never digging deep into back catalogs. There is so much cinema to be discovered. Don't fear the black and white or silent.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the only TV I watch anymore is Netflix and Amazon.
That's fine for people who don't watch live political news (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN) or live sports. Because the leagues still sell exclusive rights to particular matches to traditional TV networks, the leagues' streaming subscription services black out any match shown on broadcast, cable, or satellite TV in your area