zlacker

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.

>>vouaob+(OP)
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.

>>vouaob+(OP)
> 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.

>>GuB-42+Qa
>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.

>>ghaff+oi
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.