Purpose Depleted, Customer Defeated

God, isn’t Netflix great? Well, it’s alright, but back in 2013-2015, it was incredible. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Marco Polo, Sense8, Narcos. Some of the top shows of the 2010s, all in one place, subtitled, dubbed, easy to view, on all platforms.

They were good – good enough to put Netflix far above Hulu and for some people, regular television. The movies and the series you want to see AND hot-off-the-presses bangers? Who would even argue against that?

But that was then, and a lot has changed in 6 years. Netflix lost streaming rights to a gargantuan amount of content and the company has traded producing a small, top-quality batch of shows for a slew of garbage. It traded objective ratings on shows for “liking” or “disliking” shows as a measure of communicating with the algorithm.

But the algorithm is piping-hot garbage at suggesting shows and movies to me; the “Netflix Originals” are piping-hot garbage; the ENTIRE SELECTION is piping-hot garbage, and – yup, they’re charging more for all of it. 12$ a year more for the “basic” plan and 24$ for the standard and premium plans. The absolute balls on these guys.

The result of all of this is that I don’t even bother looking for a movie on Netflix anymore. I just stream it on a free website or pirate it. A platform that was meant to be the all-in-one, simple-to-use, quality “Torrent Killer” has literally become the Crunchyroll of Western TV – an overpriced, limited, hard to use, clunky, piece of shit.

But, wait! A ton of platforms popped up, and they have better prices, and… oh… they have their own “exclusives”… oh, no, no, no… they each have a fraction of the content Netflix used to offer and they flaunt the one or two decent-to-good shows they managed to snag the exclusivity to.
This is something gamers are extremely familiar with, since Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have been doing this for over 15 years, paying off game companies to intentionally not release PC games and instead re-orient their PC game to fit a crappier, more narrow platform.

So what? Developers have to work a bit harder, too bad.
Well, as is fairly evident after all of these years, in this scenario of “Platform War”, not only is the customer paying more just to have less choice, the customer pays more for a product that he doesn’t need, never asked for, and didn’t want.

I hopped on the Netflix train when they showed me Marco Polo – they cancelled that. My expectations were blown through the roof when I saw Sense8 – they cancelled that. House of Cards lost steam halfway through and was left without a real ending – and yes, there’s the Kevin Spacey problem there, okay, alright.
The Marvel shows started out with a bang as Daredevil showed you don’t need big flashy effects to be interesting, but as with all the other Marvel+Netflix shows it ended up fizzling into irrelevance.
Master of None, Santa Clarita Diet, Maniac, B: The Beginning, Bill Nye Saves The World all had a lot of potential but ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

And yes, I know, they’re still producing bangers – just look at Russian Doll, Ozark, and Devilman Crybaby. But I don’t go on Netflix to look at “Netflix Does Hits, Sometimes, And Cancels Them Maybe”. I go on Netflix to find shows and movies like Luther, Juno, Fargo, Groundhog Day, Thank You For Smoking, and so on.. (these *were* on Netflix, and no longer are).

And so here we are – Netflix no longer has the catalogue necessary to be a real streaming service, and does not produce enough programs to be a real production platform like HBO. The giant that has dominated the streamosphere for so many years no longer fulfills the checks that made it what it was – and not only is there no one to replace it currently, competitors like CBS, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Showtime are opting to snatch exclusives from eachother, flaunting them hoping people will forget there’s nothing else on their platforms that are worth watching.

This creates a lose-lose scenario where ironically the best option for the customer is to subscribe for a single month to the platform that intrigues them, binge watch the Game of Thrones, the Narcos, the Handmaid’s Tales, and so on, while micromanaging their subscriptions to make sure they don’t get screwed with auto-renewals…
…
Or, you know, just torrent the files, watch them whenever they want, at the pace they want, in the quality they want. Yeah. Like the original reason that made people swap from torrents to Netflix in the first place.

What a complete and utter waste of time.