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74% of Netflix Subscribers Would Rather Cancel Their Subscription Than See Ads (allflicks.net)
An anonymous reader writes: AllFlicks conducted a survey of more than 1,200 people on Reddit, asking them a series of questions regarding ads on Netflix. "Would you rather pay more for Netflix or see advertisements while you stream?" they asked. Of more than 1,200 respondents, an incredible 90% said they'd prefer a price hike to ads. "The sweet spot appears to be $1-2 [more], which 57% of respondents chose as their upper bound. A further 22% said they could go as high as $2-3 more, and less than a quarter were willing to go higher." The next question they asked: "If Netflix started showing ads, would you cancel your subscription?" Nearly 74% said they'd be done with Netflix if ads debuted on the service. AllFlicks writes, "Netflix's users are sending the service a pretty clear message: if the service starts selling ads, customers would consider leaving." In early May, CordCutting.com crunched some numbers and found that each Netflix subscriber saves themselves about 158.5 hours of commercials per year.
People forget that when cable was first offered the big selling point was there were no ads
As someone who was alive and old enough to have paid attention... no .
The selling points were:
clear reception in all weather, and
more channels.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Their strategy is original content and older back catalog stuff you might have in the past seen on stations like TBS. I think that is working. It would be suicidal of them to implement ads though. They have to have observed what happened once Hulu offered ad free service -usage skyrocketed.
The ads are bad enough, but it's the stupid behaviors that get put in to make sure that you are forced to watch the ads (think VOD from cable companies that disallow fast forwarding). Watch something half-way through and want to resume it later? Not only will you have to watch the ads, but you will also have to sit through the content you have already watched. This move will cripple the user experience and drive users to other means to watch their movies online.
Yep. I would consider it for exactly the length of time it took to click on the "Delete Account" link.
The first run theater content is generally only available on disc though. It seems antiquated, but it works.
How cute. Until streaming comes anywhere near BD quality, I will continue with discs. I would rather not watch blocky blurred stuttering video with crappy audio.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I think I read something once that said that even if you consciously think that, subconsciously it might still work.
Then again, I might have just read something that made me think that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
not to mention actual content.
No, the original reason for cable television systems wasn't for "actual content". It was for better reception of the existing broadcast television signals. MATV (master antenna) and CATV (community antenna) were two early acronyms. People who lived in dense apartment buildings had a hard time getting a good signal; the landlord (or tenants) would pay for a "community antenna" on the roof to deliver the RF signal to their indoor sets. Or a rural community would do the same thing for the residents.
It wasn't until someone got the bright idea of distributing content via satellite (and the costs became reasonable) that "cable TV" started selling distribution of non-broadcast content. Ted Turner and TBS was one of the pioneers, and all he did was distribute a satellite feed of his WTBS independent station in Atlanta. And yes, you got to see the Atlanta ads, until they got national advertiser's attention and could sell ads that replaced them in the national feed.
Anyone who claims that "cable TV was created to sell ad-free content" is ignoring all the history prior to HBO. It would be like trying to explain to someone why all of the area codes used to have either 0 or 1 as the middle digit. Or to people who have never read the RFC for mailboxes what all the valid characters are in an email address, and they assume since they've never seen a '+' or a '!' in one that those certainly must be illegal.
You are wrong. They will license anything they can that's being offered at reasonable prices. There are studio's that refuse to license anything and there are others that offer it at such a high price that it's economically impossible for Netflix to license the material. They've moved to producing their own content to act as a counter this licensing problem.
Personally I'd like to see congress make licensing compulsory if the content is owned by a internet provider (ie cable or telephone company). Many of these companies are the ones that are refusing to provide licenses because they are using it to actively harm the competition Netflix provides. These actions are anti-competitive and harm the free market. Until there is compulsory licensing at a fixed price regardless of size the market will remain broken and Netflix can only develop their own content to use as leverage in these deals.
It would be suicidal of them to implement ads though.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the whole point of cable TV was that by paying a fixed fee every month, we were spared the annoyance of ads.
It'll come. Sooner or later, probably sooner, streaming content will be just as ad-choked and invasive as broadcast TV and cable/dish services.
The Lehigh Valley (Allentown/Bethlehem) had one of the first Cable Companies -- Service Electric, founded around 1948 if I remember correctly. The Lehigh Valley had a hard time receiving signals from Philly, New York City, or Scranton/Wilkes Barre because of the mountains, so antennas were put on top of the mountain(s) and the signals from NYC, Philly, and Scranton/Wilkes Barre were re-transmitted. When we first got cable (around 1970) that is all it was. Then around late 1972 or early 1973 Service Electric started offering a new pay service - Home Box Office. A special box was required to receive it because it was placed on a cable channel between channels 6 and 7 (some TVs could had tuners that could receive HBO). A few years later, they began scrambling HBO, and added Cinemax, PRISM, and The Disney Channel (the original version) -- all scrambled. By the late 70's news channels (the forerunners to CNN) began appearing, and by the 80's Nickelodeon, MTV, and other channels began appearing, all on the new cable channels. The pay channels (HBO, Skinamax, PRISM, etc.) were commercial free, but the other "premium" channels always had commercials, but not in the quantities that we have them today.
Beware of Sleestak
Not in practice, no. This might be why you're having problems believing that modern streaming is any good.
10Mbps is the maximum bitrate of DVD, not the average. Generally the average is around 3-4Mbps (if it wasn't, you wouldn't see any single layer single sided DVDs containing more than 80 minutes of content...)
But it doesn't stop there. That 3Mbps stream doesn't just include the video, it includes the audio. And on most DVDs, that's the core 5.1 stream in DTS (either 768kbps or 1.44Mbps) and/or DD (around 384kbps), plus the Spanish version (usually at least 384kbps), plus the director's commentary. So around 1-2Mbps of that 3-4Mbps (up to half!) is audio - and mostly redundant audio!
And the video... well, the video is compressed using MPEG 2 on a DVD. And MPEG 2 is difficult to optimize. Just look at the supposedly black background on the closing credits for example,
Now, with streaming, they've changed the codec to H.264 for the video, which addresses more causes of artifacts than MPEG 2. It obviously depends on the content, but bit for bit, the general consensus is that you can easily get equivalent or better quality out of H.264 over MPEG2 for half the bitrate.
And with streaming, they're only streaming one audio channel. They only need to stream one, as they already know which one you're going to listen to. So instead of including 1-2Mbps of audio in the stream, they only need to include 384kbps (less if you're listening in bi-speaker stereo.)
All of which means that they can go for a much lower streaming speed than you'd expect based upon extrapolating DVD video rates, and achieve much, much, higher quality.
I'm not going to argue that it's Blu-ray quality: when streaming, there's obviously the risk that your available bandwidth will drop and force the video to pause (Vudu) or drop to a lower quality (Amazon), but I would argue that, when I've watched videos without temporary bandwidth problems on, for example, Vudu (which doesn't implement dynamic bandwidth/streaming quality), the quality is good enough that 99% of people will never be able to tell the difference. It's a shame the Roku doesn't contain a hard disk, as it would be nice to tell the system what movie you want to watch, go off and make something to eat, come back, and watch it, knowing there's no risk of temporary bandwidth issues causing problems.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.