Netflix Discussion - failure and success

Discussion in 'Random Thoughts' started by purr1n, May 13, 2022.

  1. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    Another thing I forgot to mention is filmmakers and their work are getting monopolized by streaming services. It’s great that Scorsese and the rest get thrown tons of money to make a movie. But if people want to watch that they have to subscribe. A far as I know Netflix and Prime don’t put their originals on physical media or rental services. If I want to watch Jaws I have many legal avenues to do so. If I want to watch The Irishman I have one: Netflix. And I’m not subscribed and have no plans to do so. In other words the filmmakers and the streaming service become one entity and their art is monopolized. I wonder if Scorsese even understand this.
     
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  2. Cspirou

    Cspirou They call me Sparky

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    I’m often downloading things I already bought. It’s just the DVD/Blu-rays are are stored somewhere at my parents house
     
  3. Tchoupitoulas

    Tchoupitoulas Friend

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    We do this and ditched Netflix a while ago. Having just turned it back on again, my recommendations and "My List" were still preserved. They make it very easy to binge, cancel, restart and repeat. After holiday bingeing, we'll nuke it again in the new year. Edit: $20 is a great bargain for 30 or 40 hours of content (for my wife and I) over a month.
     
  4. Cspirou

    Cspirou They call me Sparky

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    Recently Disney+ has said they have no plans for physical releases of their Marvel shows

    By chance though I did find a way around this. At my local library they have a used bookstore associated with it. When I went to the video section I saw tons of Netflix movies on DVD. There seems to be someone that’s an Academy member that lives nearby and they still get screeners on disc to review. They have no use for them after reviewing so they just donate it to the bookstore.
     
  5. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    Back when CDs were just becoming a thing, I decided to replace my vinyl collection with digital, both for durability and convenience (and those TDA 1541s back then actually sounded really good too). There are days I regret getting rid of the vinyl, but that is for another discussion. Anyway, I've replaced most of what I originally had with bought CD, but I've also downloaded some albums that just can't be found anywhere now (and I've also payed crazy prices for some really hard to find stuff on Discogs). There is still a big market for actual DVD/BD discs and CDs. Content that does not even require the internet - call it antiquated but one day it will be the new black.
     
    Last edited: Dec 3, 2022
  6. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    Shhh. Don't tell anyone.
     
  7. edd

    edd Almost "Made"

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    I believe Scorsese went with Netflix bc that movie went way, way over budget and was in development for many years and there weren’t many interested parties. I tried watching it. Couldn’t make it through. So I understand why there wasn’t a great deal of interest from the typical studios.
     
  8. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    So Hollywood is finally acknowledging the obvious: The economics of streaming don't make sense.

    Wall Street Recession Fears Dent Hollywood’s Streaming Ambitions – The Hollywood Reporter

    You can't have infinite growth and you certainly can't have it when you're spending far more money than you're bringing in. Streaming was always meant to be an ancillary thing, like physical media and rental services, but it's become Hollywood's primary business model outside of theatrical releases, which don't stay in theaters long enough to make any real money anymore.
     
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  9. dasman66

    dasman66 Self proclaimed lazy ass - friend

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    ^^^^ This. Everytime my wife and I want to go see a movie in the theatre, it's already gone (or moved to the smallest screen in the corner of the complex). It used to be that movies were in the theatres for many weeks, if not many months. Now, they're here and gone before you know it.

    And the theatre's are mostly empty...
     
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  10. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    Yeah, some movies used to stay in theaters nearly a year... like Pulp Fiction, Titanic, Star Wars, E.T. (which was in theaters a year and a half!) etc... it's how they made so much profit, actual profit, because inflation and budgets were much lower. Nowdays production and marketing budgets are so high that even if you crack a billion you are barely making a profit.

    A few years ago, Spielberg prophesized the film business would implode after a few large scale movies tanked (Steven Spielberg Predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry – The Hollywood Reporter)... I could see where he was coming from, even if he got the details a bit wrong. I feel like we are in that period, where inflation meets a bursting streaming bubble, meets franchise fatigue, etc, for a perfect storm. Marvel is absolutely tanking, with none of the movies this year making any real profit and some outright bombing horrifically. Star Wars is a disaster, with no movies on the horizon and garbage TV content that looks cheaper and more hastily thrown together than ever.

    The only thing that seems to breakout anymore are nostalgia fests like Top Gun Maverick, but with Hollywood cannibalizing its catalog and not making any new hits or original franchises that catch the zeitgeist, they will run out of nostalgia to bait people with. Clueless, risk averse executives with no creative instincts continue to destroy their own business, because Hollywood isn't like Wall Street or tech... good product can't be think-tanked... artists built that town... creative visionary filmmakers and cigar chomping studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer, Daryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Saul Santz, Alan Ladd Jr. (who LITERALLY said he didn't understand Star Wars, but greenlit it anyway because he believed in Lucas' talent! Imagine that! Never happens anymore!). Toxic masculinity! Nowdays it's random Millennial, soyboy dumbass vice president who has no vision, and will be fired in 6 months anyway and replaced with the next NPC moron, so why take a chance and give talented filmmakers any power? Just give terrible notes and keep schmoozing at cocktail parties trying to f**k dumb wannabe actresses and models.
     
  11. mkozlows

    mkozlows Friend

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    Netflix has actually partnered with Criterion to release a lot of their more interesting movies on disc. The Irishman is one of them, and there are a lot more. Now that Criterion does UHD-BD, they've been releasing recent ones in that format, too.

    (This sort of "partner with a boutique label for physical release" model is getting more common as physical media becomes a smaller niche of the market.)
     
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  12. Pharmaboy

    Pharmaboy Friend

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    I just rated your post "Epic" because this is really epic news. Bombshell news. Something that's missing from many streaming services is quality cinema from past decades: things like Nouvelle Vague, ground-breaking Australian cinema from 30-40 yrs ago, series on great directors worldwide, blah-blah-blah (ie, Critereon territory). If I could find this stuff on Netflix, even just a semi-regular taste of it, I'd never dump Netflix (something I perenially contemplate).
     
  13. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    A step in the right direction. Netflix after all started as a physical media company.
     
  14. Pharmaboy

    Pharmaboy Friend

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    As we all remember, years ago it was commonplace for smaller, lower budget films in various genres (not tentpole/big budget epics) to open in theaters all around the country. Now that's quite rare.

    I just added one such film to my Netflix queue: EMILY THE CRIMINAL, starring Audrey Piazza. I saw in the theater this summer, really liked it (she's a fascinating, unpredictable actress given good material here), and will enjoy it a second time on the big OLED. Why these films have largely disappeared from theaters is one of the subtexts of our various posts here.

    Interestingly (even bizarrely), a counter-trend has been that films in the horror genre have been coming on strong, with solid opening by a number of well reviewed and attended horror films just this year (PEARL; X; BARBARIAN; SMILE; THE BLACK PHONE; many others). It has been decades since the last "horror moment," and while I'm puzzled how these worthy films are making it through the script/budget/green light shoals with studios, I'm very pleased that it's happening at all.
     
  15. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    Horror is probably the only genre right now that is worth a damn. Horror has always been interesting because of its ability to make deep psychological themes and subtext physically realized (with Cronenberg being a master at this). But it's also been the trashiest genre because of its exploitative and sensationalist tendencies, so alot of people don't take it seriously... fear also being a big barrier to entry for many people.

    But this year has been quite successful for horror. And it comes down to the studios making them... I find that people involved in horror tend to be more super fans of cinema, and alot of the smarter ones have good taste, are well studied and the budgets are low enough to take chances. Barbarian was a masterclass in minimalism. But then you have occasional stupidity, as Barbarian was pitched to Blumhouse, but Jason Blum said he didn't want to do it because "it's hard to do monsters now/make them interesting/not silly" (paraphrasing)... every successful movie always had someone initially turn in down for some odd reasoning.
     
  16. zonto

    zonto Friend

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    Re: the Netflix --> disc discussion above, I found this today: https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/list-of-netflix-originals-available-on-dvds-blu-rays/.

    Not a ton of movies available here. I searched up Cobra Kai and saw blu-ray releases, but they are Region B/2 so not compatible with U.S. players without a region-free code. Others are just on DVD, despite the show being at least HD (I don't have a 4K TV, so don't know for sure but imagine some were released on Netflix in 4K).

    Hopefully the trend of releasing things on physical media continues as streaming service providers realize that people aren't going to pay for a billion different services anymore. I wonder if streaming providers are hesitant to do so in part because then it will show how poor their compressed streams look in comparison and bring their bandwidth saving tactics under further scrutiny?
     
  17. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    When I had netflix their 4K/HDR content was very high quality visually... you could still see slight compression artifacts here and there, but it was the best of the streamers I used by a significant margin...bright, vivid, good contrast, deep blacks, with HD content being slightly behind, but watchable. Prime flat out sucks, even 4K... flat/bland images, milky blacks, none of it "popped" like netflix content. HBO Max is a hair behind netflix, quite good, but not perfect. I had Apple briefly and it was very good, but there were always glitches in the stream, to the point where it was unwatchable. Same with Hulu, and their image quality was decent.

    I was using the internal app on my LG OLED btw, no idea how a Roku/Apple TV box might change things. Although I found the internal app to be leagues better than the Panasonic 4K bluray player I was using (not physical media but for streaming).
     
  18. Pharmaboy

    Pharmaboy Friend

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    Very interesting post. I have a 77" LG C2, which is one of the best OLEDs around. I find it pretty easy to distinquish the look of a native 4K blu ray from streaming 4K (the former is better--more solidity, saturation, even better black levels). But I hadn't noticed any significant differences between 4K content on Prime vs Netflix. I've found the 4K on both to be sufficiently good that I just forget to check out the video "plankton" and dive into watching.

    On the topic of how video looks, I recently helped my cousin get a 65" TV. He wanted the best he could get w/o having to sell a kidney. I ended up recommending the TOTL Samsung 65" QN90A w/full array local dimming. While dialing in the setting w/4K content from Netflix, I easily saw 2 things:
    • These LCD/LED TVs have come a long way in a short time. Full array local dimming (100s of mini-LED backlights in the array) makes a real difference
    • When a TV like this is informally adjusted by eye (not calibrated, but w/the excessive top brightness dialed back; best-looking video mode selected; and all automatic/AI driven picture adjustments shut off), the look is pleasing. There's a pearlescent "glow" and subtle top-lit quality to the image, and black levels are way better than they used to be
    On the other hand, it's also pretty easy to see how much better a similarly dialed in OLED looks. No comparison, really. I willingly pay the inconvenience price of using OLED (ie, avoid burn-in, no cable sports, no cable shows w/static logos or chyrons) to get that deep, rich look on content that matters to me.
     
  19. zonto

    zonto Friend

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    Based solely on subjective quality, I'd rate the services I use in the following order with respect to HD content: Apple iTunes rentals > Netflix > Disney+ >= HBO Max >>> Amazon Prime. I use an AppleTV 4K (2021) with a Samsung F8500 1080p plasma, professionally calibrated about five years ago. Streamer is hard-wired with to a gigabit switch, then to router gigabit port, Blue Jeans Cable Cat6A cables throughout. Even still, every time I throw a Blu-ray disc in, I'm amazed at how much better it looks. Even upscaled widescreen DVDs approach or exceed the bandwidth HD streams get sometimes. I think the transfer and encoding process matters more than the resolution honestly.

    An aside on TV quality:

    Last fall I visited my in-laws who have an older LG OLED and was horrified that their brightness was cranked to near-painful levels (even for night viewing) and no other settings had really been optimized). I spent some time tweaking in line with recommendations I found online and it was much more pleasing. The main thing that stood out to me is the true black and increased contrast ratio. However, I didn't really feel like I was missing much. I thought my plasma screen had better motion handling on average and the colors just seemed more natural to me.

    When I've gone to Best Buy and looked around the Sony OLEDs always look the best to me. My wife actually prefers the look of the Sony LEDs next to the OLED in-store. Obviously those settings aren't optimized for cinema viewing in a dark room, but still. Sony colors and motion seem a bit more natural to me than the LGs, even though they probably use the same panel. Maybe Sony's image processor.

    Anywho, I'm in no rush to upgrade my plasma. I've dealt with image retention from playing Mario Kart repeatedly, but that's gone away and I just run the light scrolling periodically to even out any uneven fading from movie bars or the like. This plasma TV cost around $800 on closeout in fall 2014 and is still going strong after over 8 years, so I figure I owe it to it to use it until it breaks and can't be fixed. :)
     
  20. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    I almost got a Sony OLED before settling on my LG as I felt the Sony was special, and I honestly can't remember why I changed my mind. No complaints about my LG though. Pre-HD, Sony TVs were always better, and I remember seeking them out more than any other... especially their Trinitron line. I think the gap is much closer now in the UHD era, with many of the panels being the same or similar.
     
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