TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until the end of prominent network TV shows.

TV show creators understood and planned for people watching their shows in a variety of environments, with varying degrees and kinds of attention. A lot of what made for example X-files and Sopranos compelling was a willingness to break this convention, so it was still firmly in place by the late 90s.

You could also maybe reasonably claim that all TV shows before those were bad as well. But then you need to view netflix as reverting to the norm rather than being a novel travesty. We are simply exiting a 20 year anomaly where TV was good.

I'm not quite making that argument here though. I think there was good TV before the 90s, so I think this is a constraint on the form that good creators can work through and still make compelling art. Why netflix can't is an interesting question but I think this avenue is a dead end for understanding it.

Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.

Netflix has shows made for really watching too. I don't know if they are rebellious acts from their makers, brought without an option, or actual choices, but Netflix does have them.

My impression is that Netflix cornered themselves into the same AAA race to death that the major movie studios are in. Everything is too expensive, so they can't accept risks, so nothing is really good (nor really bad). Micromanaging is just one more visible consequence of that, between lots and lots that stay hidden but are as important to the final result.

The reality is the average person's time to watch TV/unwind is also going to be spent doing chores. This was always the case. When I was a kid, we watched shows that could be followed along by whoever was cooking dinner/doing dishes as well as the people sitting in front of the set. People don't have all that much extra free time.

Movies were an experience because... they were an experience. They weren't constantly on. They were a rare treat, not something consumed nightly.

There is money in that, it just fundamentally doesn't make sense to build a subscription service for it. There are still good movies being made, but they cost money to make, and someone needs to pay for them. They cannot exist if they get thrown on a streaming service where they'll earn a pittance. HN seems to believe they have a fundamental right to watch all the movies and tv ever made for $8/month, but that was only possible due to very special circumstances that have since evaporated.

Netflix is slowly succumbing to it's inevitable fate of turning into daytime tv. That's the only space where it makes sense economically to pay a fixed subscription fee regardless of how much you consume. If you want an all you can eat buffet, don't act surprised when it isn't michelin starred.

There is still good cinema and television, it's just shockingly difficult to find.

The first person who figures out how to sort the wheat from the chaff and does so with no interior motive could be a millionaire immediately.

I mean it is also somewhat dependent on how much bandwidth you have free while doing laundry, some people can handle watching the complicated stuff while doing their daily tasks and I guess those people also hate these half-assed shows.

> YouTube and TikTok are their real competition

Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.

Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.

> Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game.

Inadvertently an Inglorious Basterds paraphrase?

_Brief him._

Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i look at it in disgust.

I love apocalyptic movies (even ones that are not considered great) but the few I started watching on Netflix were really bad.

Jokes on them, my thing is bad movies.

The Mandalorian, oh my lawd, the dialogue was just narrative explanation. Just terrible.

Terribly terrible.

If people aren’t watching the show why not just make it a radio play?

LOOK BOTTLES

We're converging on audiobooks

Kill Jester!

"I see you have Chekhov's gun hanging on your wall"

"I see you have the words 'Kaiser' and 'Soasay' on the wall... what a coincidence, that was the name of the boss!"

One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.

Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.

This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.

Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.

Man. I like that you’re bringing opera into the conversation, but I don’t think comparing two different mediums that way is useful.

Die Zauberflote is easy to understand because it’s a fairly light work, and you’re meant to be staring at the lavish staging and costumes. The performers narrate the action because that’s the convention for the genre - it’s a sung story. They break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)

In Mozart's time what was happening on the stage was a footnote to eating, talking, flirting, seeing, and being seen. Opera was a social event with background music.

Treating art with reverence and rapt attention didn't get to be a thing until the late Enlightenment. Before that the kind of art you took seriously was religious, and the idea that you were supposed to reverent about it could be considered a carry-over from religion.

Talking over things and not paying attention is almost the default. Sitting still and concentrating on a performance of any kind is a relatively recent idea.

None of this makes the crapification of Netflix (and related trends in other media touched by streaming and tech) any less annoying.

Really enjoy this curveball you threw, casts this whole conversation in a new light doesn't it?

It is true that a lot of old plays, operas etc do exactly what Netflix is accused of here. What is a monologue? Was Shakespeare guilty of creating casual viewing content when he wrote Hamlet's monologue? Shouldn't he have just showed Hamlet's ambivalence???

Enough of this and you get a Wagner reinventing the medium altogether.

Those lines are from a song, and a significant part of the audience at the time wouldn't be listening in their native language; it's not really a fair comparison.

This was actually pioneered by Bruce Willis. He would get paid a lot to show up in a couple of introductory scenes for really low budget films. They'd put his face on the movie poster, they'd pay him like half the budget of the film, then he'd move on to the next one.

(Unfortunately, it turns out he was struggling with dementia and it seems he was trying to cash out before he couldn't act at all)

sounds like the nonsense at the end of 2001.

In my experience, when technology advances, and the original thing to be replaced still holds some value, it doesn't continue existing as such, it may survive binging on momentum, habits or nostalgia.

But then it splits, the useless aspect discarded and the useful merged with other old and new fragments, in combinations tried by the experimental startup ecosystem.

In the end we may have for example entertainment venues for both playing arcades and watching movies and theater plays, perhaps with dinner for example. (We already have this actually.)

I remember going to the physical cinema one day to see "Air". I didn't think the movie was that great, and I wonder if the "Amazon Studios" logo at the beginning made me more critical.

> And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.

This.

Netflix does have good productions. But they are often surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.

Stopped subscribing to N over a year ago and haven't missed it a single bit.

It’s amazing the checkboxes that stick out: having a dog for no reason for dog lovers; the relationship slop that appeals to women; the violence and sex slop to appeal to men.

McDonaldization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ

I think the best modern productions are now the series rather than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story and have room for characters to breathe etc.

Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.

As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.

If you’re curious to try arthouse/international cinema, give Mubi a try. There is less to choose from, but the selection rotates.

This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.

What I hate is that the slop killed the netflix DVD service, where I used to get the "real" movies to watch.

It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and everyone goes the same slow speed.

Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the attention span of a puppy golden retriever

The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts

Let's be real here look at the movies that make a billion at the box office. It's never the highbrow stuff.

Yet you watch these instead of the ones with "soul".

Seems to me they provide what the market wants.

>Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme version of "telling" for ages.

From a european perspective that is what US TV series and movies have been doing for 4 decades already as well as following the very same mechanics. In most shows you can tell in advance what is about to happen next at any point in time this is embarassing. I used to think US people had to be super dumb for that reason then realized they gradually started doing it on euro stuff. I guess we just use the lowest baseline possible because the people who spend the most time passively i front of a screen happen to also be the dumbest ones.

> You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15 hours long

You most certainly can, though it relies on trusting the audience.

Flow (2024)

Sasquatch Sunset (2024)

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

I know precisely what you mean. I randomly stumbled upon the anime Solo Leveling, which also follows the 100% tell style. The main character reads out everything, narrates every scene, and explains his own thought processes and emotions at every step.

It is weirdly addicting, perhaps only because I'm bored of the show-don't-tell style and it's refreshing to see something going contrary to that.

Some Turkish TV soap operas have 3 hour long episodes which cost $1 mil each. And are really well acted, with very good drama, humor, etc

Honestly, the more I read, the less I appreciate the "show, don't tell" rule/guideline/mantra.

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.

> 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.

> The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.

They could add a tag saying if you need to pay attention to the show or not. Currently it isn't very different from the other stuff just disappearing.

Exactly. The one example they use gets a 5.2 on IMDB and 42% on rotten tomatoes.

Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It’s for a certain audience. We’ve had crappy made-for-TV movies since long before streaming and it hasn’t been the death of cinema.

The article listed lots of examples... It's an exceptionally long article so you'd be forgiven for missing them, but there are definitely many examples given.

In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this article - the point it's making is a good one but the article is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.

I didn’t and never will watch that fillum. But jaysus did the trailer make me laugh so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

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A number is enough. You just need know which of the 5 movie templates they used.

Don't worry, they have got the perfect solution for you. That cool series you just heard about but haven't had time to watch yet? It's cancelled. That's it. That's the story. Now you don't even need to watch it!

I sort of unironically agree with this. Time is limited and most tv and films don’t fit my criteria for “worth watching”, so I will read the plot synopsis for media that I think may be terrible, so I don’t have to find out later.

I do constantly have to tap out with the stress in many programs, takes me ages to pick up and finish programs. Many people need tension to drive a narrative forwards, but for me it often gets too much.

I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to have used this more and more.

The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV personalities.

They should bring back the prologue and the chorus.

True, but plots are only half the story. I'd be very grateful if they could give me some sample scenes (ideally automatically, so I don't have to go through the trouble of starting them every single time). I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?

You should ask an AI to watch it for you

I just wish they wouldn‘t so disproportionally often drift off into extreme sillyness (That, I can take.) or extreme brutality and gore (That, I find revolting. When did showing so much splatter on a regular basis start being considered good film making outside of the occasional Tarantino?).

Can you quickly elaborate on the media sources where you do know what is going to happen?

I didn't read it that way at all. It felt to me like the author thought video stores were terrible too, just in a different way, and the main point of the article was the different incentive structures for the pre-streaming movie companies (high ticket sales and people watching the entire movie without distractions) vs Netflix (recurring monthly revenue from people who are just satisifed enough not to cancel their subscription). They're both focused on numbers, but the meanings of those numbers are very different. (I'm not sure I entirely agree with that - I think the pre-streaming movie companies were hyper-focused on the bottom line too - but I think that's what the article was trying to say).

I think you just wandered into today's HN "Good Old Days" article. It's just nostalgia vibes, not really a space meant for critical thinking.

I remember very fondly 2 video stores from my youth, mostly because of the knowledge (and frankly very nerdy) employees.

My breadth of viewing and thus my subsequent taste was extremely impacted by them. And I e yet to find an algorithmic equivalent (nor music or books).

But this is just a bias. Most of the video stores I ever used were garbage.

I presume soda fountains were the same but that didn’t stop my grandfather from bemoaning the loss of the soda jerk.

I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording, encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images[1]. My wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me the ones that she likes) and I'm baffled by how many are just scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).

[1] https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066

A common misconception. Autistic people have emotions and empathy- perhaps more than other people. They just keep it inside. Also no Seinfeld is not funny.

As someone with autism, the second paragraph is entirely incorrect.

I watch/listen to stuff when I do chores at home. If I am going to iron 30 things or knead a dough for 15 minutes, then it's nice to have some entertainment while doing it, even if I can't focus on it all the time. Not sure I fit into any of the two audiences you mention.

Agreed, previously, seeing Netflix Original would be like seeing a Lexus in a sea of Toyotas. Now I just think "store brand".

I feel like the "Netflix original" label started to decline around the time they started disingenuously applying it to things that they merely distributed, not created. That was a sign that the company was willing to water down its brand quality to get people to watch stuff.

Many years ago when I was in college, one of my professors wrote a Star Trek Next Generation script, and she talked about how the producers pretty much destroyed her story by insisting she stick to the formula such as "between X and Y minutes, the Enterprise or one of the main characters must be in danger. That danger must be resolved by minute Z." Sigh.

That sounds like something Harlan Ellison would grouch about.

Netflix’s own produced content is the poison that’s killing Netflix’s value proposition, not its golden goose.

It’s the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply because it makes them more money. But making them more money doesn’t entertain me so I unsubscribed.

I don't think their first-party content ever was a golden goose, I feel like it has always been their way to pad space between the good shows they bought from others.

People have predicted that for years, but so far it looks like Netflix is still one of the few that manage to do streaming profitably.

Turns out that catering to dumb consumer zombies is still a safe bet.

That doesn't make sense. Netflix has access to the scripts.

Aha that's a really interesting tinfoil hat theory! I doubt it's true but reminds me of the recent YouTube drama about Google using the transcript to train their AI. Seeing Spotify generate ai music to bloat their library it is a nice harmless conspiracy theory for fun if nothing else.

This seems to be more of a feature of British TV in this case. Black Doves faithfully follows all the recent cliches.

Exactly the opposite of the experience I am looking for, with a video projector, in the dark.

I guess netflix is really competing against youtube and twitch here.

There is very little good or "main" content these days on Netflix. Every single time without fail whenever I have an urge to watch a specific show or movie, sometimes an old one, it's never available on Netflix. And even if they did have it, they "licensed" it for a year and no longer have it. What good is that for me?

So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having something playing on the side or background while we go about daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler that you don't need to pay attention to.

I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be give them money.

Sometimes, I like watching the narrated movies meant for the visually impaired. It feels almost like an audiobook. Changing the content to make it more radio-like -- that's not something I'm a fan of. It's the whole "abstraction layers vs. tight coupling", except this time it's content.

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If you like him, try nerdrotic. Be mindful of their weird antiwoke MAGA bent though.

>reliable TV or movie critics

>critical drinker

enshittification is an established term

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

But gestures at the approaching tsunami of AI-generated video content

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Content made for disengaged viewers is disengaging.

I thought that was for visually impaired people to help them get a better sense of what's on the screen. Makes sense it can be used for "casual viewing" though.

Enshittification - they switched to artificial sweetener.

That article has a lot of quality but it also has a lot of telling the history of Netflix. Of the eight sections, I'd only really recommend the first plus a paragraph, then 6-8, maybe 5-8.

I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.

belated note: we changed the URL from https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr... to the article it is reporting on. Thanks!

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This article is very informative article, but it is funny that it seems to imply that Netflix is somehow essentially evil, compared to the artsy heros of the 90s, such as Harvey Weinstein's Miramax.

Thanks, this is a much better article!

The shorter article is better.