The tech industry has such bizarre economics. If I told you I had a business with:
- $120M in annual revenue
- 1M fiercely loyal customers who paid every month
- 5 distribution centers spread across the country
- 100 happy employees, each with a tenure of a decade or longer
You'd probably say that I had achieved the definition of success in the business world and should be proud of myself. To Netflix, on the other hand, this business is so irrelevant that they'd rather take it out back and shoot it in the head just to save the bother of continuing to run it.
Just 3-years ago, the DVD business was generating $200M in revenue.
Today, it’s only $120m.
That means total revenues are down 66% in just 3-years.
You can’t fault Netflix for wanting to divest a business that is rapidly declining.
And that doesn’t even speak to the profitably of that business unit which is fair to assume to be losing money when you have such rapid revenue decline.
It's not a natural death. They've done nothing to maintain it. They reduced distribution centres (thus increasing wait times) and they haven't replaced many of the titles that have become damaged, so they are unavailable. It's no wonder people are leaving in large rates, because what they used to offer was unparalleled access to films and TV. 100k titles. No streamer has that.
If the DVD and Blu-ray rental userbase is dropping, I could cut that division's budget in half and move it to another division that is generating much stronger traction (eg. Netflix Korea and their KDrama acquisitions making Netflix a market leader in Asia).
The TAM of the DVD/Blu-Ray rental market has fallen, so as a company, it's best for me to fire those customers - either by slowly degrading the service so they change to the mainstream service, or deprecating the entire service.
> 100k titles. No streamer has that.
But
1. Do does a large enough userbase actually want that?
2. Can that large enough userbase spend enough margins on that service to generate a healthy profit?
3. Are my operating costs for that division rising faster than the revenue from that division?
If all 3 of those answers aren't satisfactory, you end up shutting down an initiative.
Also, there's always FMovies or Pirating for those who really really want it.
It's a chicken and egg argument, we don't have access to the internal metrics to really know which came first, sliding users or diversion of resources to quietly kill the project.
I'm not particularly shocked dedicated player sales are down given how ubiquitous DVD players are in basically everything (laptops, desktops and game consoles) and how long they last. Also that doesn't really answer how that trend was spooling out to the mail order rental business over the recent past, people have been using streaming a lot for ages but the business still made sense to keep going before so what in the near term finally made the lines cross?
Have costs actually increased for the kind of small packages Netflix is sending disks in? The rate for large shipments by the container load have fallen back to around their pre pandemic levels from what I'm seeing in a quick search. That's not really relevant to the kind of shipping costs Netflix would be seeing for it's disk service though but I'm not really finding a chart tracking that.
Ok, but my point is you can't just claim the revenue is shrinking as evidence there was no demand when the service itself is getting worse. Perhaps that alone explains most of the reduction. People using the disc service in 2020 had ample time to move to streaming so clearly there was something about the disc service that they found worthwhile.
> revenue is shrinking as evidence there was no demand
Revenue shrinking means there isn't monetary demand. Consistent YoY shrinkage is enough reason to shut down an initiative.
Brownie point initiatives only make sense during a low interest rate environment. If revenue is dropping significantly with no foreseeable market growth, that money can be better deployed in other growth opportunities, or kept in a bank, or given back to investors via stock buybacks or dividends to ensure stronger investor relations and higher valuations.
If you feel there is actual market demand that can be satiated, feel free to build your own alternative. Maybe the economics work for you. This is a forum maintained by YCombinator...
I can't watch DVDs in most of the places I want to consume media any more, and that's increasingly common. Other DVD suppliers are also seeing a big drop in revenue, not just Netflix.
Can you even get a 15" laptop with a dvd drive these days?
You can get an external blu ray drive powered off the USB connection for not much, maybe $50 but I haven't checked recently. I was recently in a vacation rental and easily plugged my laptop via HDMI cable to the large screen TV, worked great for watching disc-based movies.
Yup. People fail to realize that the question is not "can I use $100 to run a business that will generate $140 of profit over 7 years", but "in 7 years, what gives me the most return for my $100".
It has been a decade since I owned a computer with a dvd drive and similarly long since I had to use a dvd at all, and I'm much more of a techie than the average person.
The simple fact is that most people by now don't even have the means to play dvds.
You say you're more of a techie than the average person, so it follows that you have no use for a DVD drive. What about the millions of other people that have had a perfectly fine DVD player in their homes for several years?
It isn't just DVD players. I've never purchased a standalone player, it came built in on my Playstation. It's only in the most modern generation of consoles that you have a choice to buy a disc drive-less version.
The counter point to that is that DVDs look terrible on modern 60" TVs. You don't have to be a techie to have one of those. Even my 93 year old grandmother has one.
Movies and TV shows before 2008 weren't commercially available in resolution above DVD quality, unless special efforts were made to upscale and re-release them.
"Upscale" is the wrong word here. The film is scanned at a higher resolution. If it was shot on tape then yes it has to be upscaled but almost no films were shot on tape.
By more of a techie, I mean to say that I am capable of buying an external reader and dealing with many more hurdles if needed to get something done (eg to read a dvd). So not having a built-in drive would've been less of a hurdle for me, if I had needed to read a dvd.
I have never been a TV console gamer (always been a handheld person), so I concede that point.
I don't think the Netflix DVD customer base is on the go all that much. If anything I would guess they are the segment most likely to still have a cable TV subscription, and do all their media watching at home on a TV.
Being a "techie" is irrelevant. It is straightforward to get a disc player if someone wants it. You clearly don't want it. But if someone does, the lack of tech knowledge is barely a barrier. I would guess people that are less tech savvy are more likely to still use discs to be honest.
I was pointing to being a 'techie' because in my experience, with non-techies, it isn't that obvious to just buy a reader/player.
My parents for instance were surprised to learn that the reader didn't need to be built into the laptop and could be a separate usb thing. They just figured that they'd need to pay for a service to get the discs converted to files on a flash drive similar to how they had previously done for taped videos rather than thinking that they can just buy a reader.
How do you maintain distribution centers with a rapidly declining customer base? Distribution centers closed because customers canceled their subscriptions.
Streamers do have unparalleled access to films and TV. Instantly. No waiting for DVDs that are out of stock.
Ignore the fact that streaming costs more. Why does that matter? It’s a better product.
Spotify disrupted a free product in pirated music.
Price is not the only consideration when it comes to product choice.
The US alone has almost a half a million active streaming service subscriptions. Netflix DVD has 1/500th of that subscriber base.
and yet companies can make a successful business out of vinyl, and even cassette tapes - just not at the scale that Netflix demands. This is the OP's point I think.
Not even profitability, but growth. Even if it wasn't profitable now it could be worth doing for a growing market, but surely the market for physical discs is shrinking and will continue to do so.
It baffles me so much when people put ecology out of the question. Great Netflix is shutting down the business that produces so much unneeded plastic. Sad others would gladly keep that business forever when it makes money. Fuck the planet, hell yeah.
Streaming video is completely controlled and customers have to hunt down each specific movie - if available - from specific streaming services.
Meanwhile DVDs are relatively democratic and unencumbered way of distributing video. Netflix can make any movie available via dvd without licensing or asking permission.
I found it to be a very good way of getting high quality movies from the largest selection.
But your complaint seems to sidestep all this, sort of like complaining that paper money wastes so many unneeded trees without acknowledging the huge benefits.
Going off on a tangent, it's actually not that much trees wasted on paper money. Some of it is made of plastic but a lot of it should be called rather cloth money - at least the US dollar and euro are made of cotton and linen fiber instead of cellulose from wood pulp.
Terrible argument. First stop pretending data centres have no impact on the environment. They do. Second, this is a great use of discs. They are being reused. They aren't just plastic that goes into a dump, it's something people rent and return for others. Plastic in of itself is not a bad material, it's that it's being mismanaged. One use plastics are the biggest offenders, and the amount people use those dwarfs the amount they get from reused rented discs.
It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.
Transportation of the disc to the house would probably use more resources than streaming it from a datacenter. But yea, disks could be reused. Spent gas - not.
> The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020.
> New passenger cars generally emit from 90 (smaller cars) to 150 (larger cars) grams of CO2 (yes, it's the weight of the whole carbon dioxide, not just the carbon in it) per kilometer.
Disks could be still better, if you rent 20 of them at once.
> Great Netflix is shutting down the business that produces so much unneeded plastic.
I'm baffled to see such an innumerate take on HackerNews of all places. Yearly US per capita plastic consumption is a few hundred kg. How much do you think a netflix subscription adds to that?
Honestly this sort of climate & environment tokenism frustrates me - spending a lot of energy trying to reduce and elimate things that barely matter (or even actually make things worse by displacement), while ignoring the big ticket items. At best it's innumerate, at worst it's greenwashing.
But nobody was doing that in this thread. Walteweiss was just pointing that Netflix DVD service closing has a significant positive side - less trash generated. Pointing it was called as "innumerate".
There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).
I replied in the other comment, but I thought I’ll mention you as well. I agree that this is a tiny drop into the ocean, but I thing it’s still a positive change.
How much plastic does this actually produce? The DVDs are reused multiple times, as are the boxes. They are comparatively unlikely to end up in the environment, since they are in a closed and controlled environment - people are unlikely to just throw them out in the garbage. Packaging may be an issue. But there are many better ways to reduce plastic pollution - for example just driving a few miles less per year, or driving a lighter car: Tires are a much bigger source of plastic pollution and they shed microplastic directly into the environment and water runoff: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...
I'd rather have people kick back on their couch and watch a Netflix DVD instead of feeling great that they saved so much plastic, and then smugly drive their SUV to the next shopping mall.
I wonder if the total amount of energy required to stream the same movie from a datacenter across the country might even lead to more CO2-emissions in total. The internet isn't carbon neutral yet.
Plastic consumption only consists of lots of equally important tiny things like Netflix DVD subscriptions if you unable or unwilling to do basic arithmetic (i.e. are innumerate).
In reality of course there are a few big things that matter, and lots of tiny things (like Netflix DVD rentals) that don't. Two of the main sources of plastic waste are the packaging and textile industries. If you have a fast fashion habit it's pretty easy (and, at often single-digit $ prices per item, widely affordable) to rack up a few kg of plastic waste per year (a non-trivial fraction as micro-plastics). Now how much plastic waste do you estimate a Netflix DVD habit creates in comparison?
The best case scenario of the innumerate and self-righteous setting environmental agendas is that rather than addressing the big problems, attention gets frittered away on non-problems.
Often, of course what happens is that you end up with something that's much worse than doing nothing. Like for example the bogus plastic recycling policies enthusiastically enacted in much of the Western world, which saw to it that a lot of stuff which would have ended up harmlessly in landfills was loving hand-cleaned and shipped around half the world to Asia to be then dumped into the Oceans. Or “Green” politicians building brown coal plants like crazy.
You added "equally" to misrepresent my argument -> straw man.
You are comparing single DVD rental company with whole textile industry -> fallacy of relative privation.
Some of us just see a positive that less trash will be produced, less stuff will be moved around and you start mentioning "setting environmental agendas". How are those thing related? We cannot be happy until in single stroke we fix over 50% of a global problem? That will never happen.
You mention plastic recycling - I agree it is either pointless or harmful, depending how you look at. it. Do you really consider that not producing trash is also a failed policy? If not why are you doing this comparison?
Such a flame bait hot take. While you are right in a vacuum, it is completely off topic: if this was a growing market, like the person you are replying to was saying, Netflix would give a rat's arse about ecology and happily ship its plastic.
I’m sad to say that it feels like you are right. I didn’t mean that Netflix is all good, I just meant that we also have an ecology question here that’s involved, not just the money. If it generates tons of money but also generates tons of waste— do we really need it?
I know it’s some naïve idealism, but I would love to see the world where we, as human race, choose to do nothing rather than trash our planet even more. I may sound like a crazy ecology fanatic (I’m not yet), yet I’m becoming more and more worried over all this. While the other commenter legitimately pointed out that servers aren’t free (ecology wise) either, I think they can be optimised over time. Shipping physical disks, I don’t see as rational these days. Even when it gets you money, discard half of your customers and the other half would switch to subscription anyway, you just push them to do that earlier.
We don't need it - that's why it's closing. It's been replaced by digital services.
I don't understand this comment - it might make sense as a (bad) pitch for digitising Netflix in the 2000s, but the millions of FTE days to do that have already been pitched, paid for and worked. What is this adding?
How? Define "need" and "replace." If something is not available on a digital service, it's not replacing anything. And if you want something and the only available place is that service, then you "need" that service to watch it.
If Netflix didn't exist, we'd all be fine. That's how we know we don't need it.
Replace - I'm not sure how much I can add on top of what we've already said, that Netflix has been replacing its mail order business with digital for the last 15 years or so.
In my personal opinion, we should fix this in the streaming market -- basically force media producers to be blind as to the buyer (as with DVDs), if they sell at $X per unit, in order to maintain their copyright then $X is the sale price and any distributor can acquire a license to redistribute (for private use) a work at that price.
I would give a grace period to allow for exclusives; 2 years from release, maybe.
Popcorn Time (free torrenting service) but with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible. Instead of subscription to lots of expensive services.
IPR is a system maintained by the democratic government, make it work for the people.
Can you give some more details? "The Scene" is a very common name. Presumably you're taking about first-sale doctrine in USA, is that relevant to re-broadcasting?
The DVDs avoid all the licensing issues that properly licensed streaming media has because the profit and control for the rights holder ends when the sale of the media happens.
Similarly, the profit and control of the media ends for the rights holder when it enters The Scene for release amongst their myriad distribution channels.
> I can't remember the last time I wanted to watch something…
…filmed in the USA, I assume? There’s a tremendous amount of content from other countries that’s not available on any major streaming platform. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of the USA movies that have never been streamed as well.
> You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
I don’t think there’s a legal way to watch the majority of movies that have ever been filmed.
If your only issue is price then I'm happy, market will decide that surely, I'm not suggesting prices be changed from what they are now just distribution monopolies would be removed.
That said, how much should I pay for an episode of a TV show from 30 years ago where the producers are dead and the other creators are mostly comfortably living in retirement having already earned their living and been paid for their work? The offspring of the people working on the show in many cases probably don't even know that their forbears did such work.
Well, many of us know that popular phrase ‘piracy, it just works.’
When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. Same as I own a DVD disk. It’s just the medium that is different. E.g. I have a collection of Friends on disks, which is legal, I own it. But when it’s ripped as files and stored on an old hdd so I could rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB. I assume it is likely to be illegal.
The thing is, copyright holders think it’s wrong, and they want us to rent the content, not own it. I mean it could be done other way technologically, avoiding physical medium and still making it legal somehow. It could be done if the party was interested in it. The problem is not in the physical medium itself.
> [Piracy:] When I download a movie this way, I truly own it.
When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright).
> Same as I own a DVD disk.
That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.)
> [...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB
Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.
Ripping is pretty much undetectable though unless they decide to torrent it for others. So in practice they own it.
As to the 2nd point, it's not really 1:1, a more accurate equivalent would be a netflix dvd rather than a bought one.
> When you (or Netflix) buys a disk, you own it. It’s yours.
Only because the laws say that physical media is treated differently. If the law said that you could buy a disk and then stream as many copies as you have of the disk, it would completely change the business model.
And? As if the law in these things has no relevance. Of course it does. You can't just discount this because it's in the law. Good luck seeing these kinds of laws applying to digital media. It's just not treated the same.
Yes, we could have compulsory licensing, like with music on the radio.
If radio stations have a copy of a song, then provided they pay the legally-mandated royalties to the rightsholder, they can play it. They don't need to negotiate with the rightsholder, and the rightsholder cannot prevent them from playing it.
We have a working model for how it can work, so we could do the same thing with TV shows and movies on OTA/cable/streaming... but we just don't.
None of it is "legally" mandated, i.e. there are no laws specifying what a recording artist should get paid. All of it is a complex series of contracts and rights agreements between various corporate entities that have generally become standardized, in order to eliminate negotiations for every song or every artist. But that doesn't mean these agreements are necessarily fair or equitable to all parties.
On the other hand those data centers don't run on "normal" air, they need lots of cooling and lots of electricity.
Plus, a stagnating movie/TV shows market based on physical disks only (and on previous theatrical releases) is surely a lot more friendly to the environment compared to a always-going-up movie/TV shows market, a market which has to create a lot more content compared to past times. Creating that content is not friendly to the environment, those film crews don't live based on air alone.
It’s much more ecological than every customer buying their own discs. It’s keeping that plastic in circulation instead of being trashed, and Netflix can ensure that defective discs are properly recycled, which consumers often won’t do.
Streaming unfortunately is not a replacement, mostly due to the limited selection of titles and, in the case of Blu-ray/UHD discs, reduced quality.
Streaming is also bad for the planet, it needs a ton of servers which all need energy to run and produce emissions. I don't have figures to mind right now but it wasn't nothing. I'm not sure how it compares to distribution though.
It is much cheaper. A server can easily handle hundreds to thousands of simultaneous streams. Even if the server is requiring 1kW of power for that, it makes a worst case of 10W per client. Maybe double it if you want to count in the datacenter overhead (like AC), but realistically Netflix is doing more like 4 digits of concurrent streams than 3 digits, so 10W as an upper bound feel wrong.
That's less than an end users TV will utilize, and it's probably also less than a standalone DVD player requires.
Or energy costs of producing hardware to serve from, buildings to house those servers, ship them around, replace and fix them, cool them down...
It is likely still more efficient to stream than ship on DVDs (I wonder how much it changes with eg. USB flash drives, SD cards or other rewriteable media), but have upfront energy costs that are harder to estimate.
We're only talking about the discs, right? Maybe they've changed in the last 10 years but IIRC the envelopes were all paper. One disc probably contains less plastic than the average Chinese takeout order, and surely even at Netflix the lifetime of that disc is measured in years. That's downright eco-friendly compared to all the disposable plastic consumed by our society.
LOL. Imagine the amount of plastic created by Netflix DVD. How many people you can rent one DVD to and how much plastic is in one DVD compared to the packaging in your trash can right now.
And the postal service, to a rough approximation, already goes by every mailbox every day. Adding an envelope has a smaller impact than a bicycle delivery.
It’s still not free to deliver, as something other can be delivered by that car. You’re right, saying ‘plastic’ was slightly incorrect, as it’s not just the plastic involved. But also the management of the disk itself, its delivery and the people involved. I agree that we have other wasteful things to care about. They just don’t make that extra disk also free (ecology wise), we’re just so immersed in the waste that it’s truly a tiny drop into the ocean.
Every penny you redirect from ownership to renting will be treated with contempt by your new owner. And the only thing your new owner hates more than you is the planet.
This is what I mean by "ordered and well-functioning". Geoengineering and climate engineering should be improved. We worked in our lab for too long without cleaning up our mess.
The planet is helped if this shutdown actually does reduce plastic and/or gasoline use. For many people the alternative to Netflix dvd/bluray rental is buying their own copies of discs instead.
In my case I have a very good video rental store nearby but now I need to drive somewhere I wasn’t driving before.
Netflix requires high bandwidth, ever new high performance servers and routers and all the jazz, and thanks to DRM requires newer equipment to watch content. The pollution created by the digital Netflix is WAY higher than the physical one, it's not even a comparison.
This is valid statement. But I assume that will get much better over time, as computers are getting more energy efficient, which could change a lot en masse. Delivery of disks is harder to optimise, as you cannot just teleport them as easily.
In practice it doesn't though. Greater efficiency just leads to higher usage, if you look into it. Total emissions go up, this is why we can't just technology our way out of this thing. We need to actually reduce total emissions not just per unit.
US residential electricity usage per capita has been relatively flat for a decade or two[1] so I think efficiency increases can offset higher usage.
In regards to Netflix I suspect there's a streaming bandwidth plateau we will hit (if we have not already): there are only so many hours per day people can watch content, population growth isn't that strong (and can't increase forever), and video resolution then becomes the driver of increased data use (and that probably can't increase forever either).
In the US pollution per capita is one of the highest on the planet. So flat electricity consumption is not really sufficient to save the planet. A significant reduction would be needed.
I guess the fundamental problem is that there is money in showing webpages for the sake of it, due to ads.
It is like litter.
Paper ads are somewhat limited due to consumer complaining about having their mailboxes filled with them and someone has to go there and put it in and can't avoid a homeowner guarding the mailbox if they would force the issue.
Using e.g. uBlock Origin might be the most impact for no effort environmentally friendly thing you could possibly do.
I would assume in a direct comparison - streaming a couple gb from a data center is probably much more environmentally friendly than moving a physical disk across the country.
Only if you need to stream/ship it a huge number of times.
It would depend on the specifics of each implementation, but shipping 10 discs total over a year is likely to be more efficient than to keep streaming infrastructure up and running for that one movie.
Obviously, the same streaming infrastructure would be used for other content, but how many (unpopular) shows are only watched a few times a year yet they take valuable infrastructure capacity?
And then we get into lack of popularity leading into obsolecence, and we are now talking a much wider topic.
>(And that a significant part is wasted on running ads doesn't make it any better.)
Right, which is why it's a moral imperative to use an ad-blocker. Ad-blockers avoid displaying ads, which reduces CPU usage for displaying those ads, thus reducing power wastage, and helping the planet.
> Right, which is why it's a moral imperative to use an ad-blocker. Ad-blockers avoid displaying ads, which reduces CPU usage for displaying those ads, thus reducing power wastage, and helping the planet.
You shouldn't be special-casing the ads that pay for the pages you visit. All of the tech behind the page is equally good or bad in this sense.
They're not special-casing ads, surely. the page content is desired by the user, creating a benefit. The ad "content" is not desired, create a deficit, paying with CPU time for a deficit is moronic.
Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
> the page content is desired by the user, creating a benefit
That doesn't mean there isn't by the OP's logic a moral imperative to not look at that content, due to the environmental impact. My point is that same imperative should apply equally.
> Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
That's a bad analogy, unless someone holding a flyer out pays for a service you consumed.
Suppose you go to some kind of event, and it's paid for by an advertiser. At the event, the advertiser walks around and hands out booklets for whatever they're selling, and insists you spend some time reading the booklet.
Are you obligated to actually read the booklet? Or is "no thanks" OK?
And selecting the pages you visit. I have yet to see ads on HN, Wikipedia and similar :) Yes, I do visit pages with few ads. But tye worst offenders are on my mental black list. I just don't visit them. And I pay for ad-free versions of what I really find worth paying for (Unfortunately that's still not offered widely enough, and sometimes a yearly subscription seems overhead. I mean in the old days people bought a magazine or journal at the station just because the felt like reading it occasionally. But now in our great internet this is typically not possible.)
Even given all that it seems totally possible to make profits for years to come. Managing a shrinking business might not be as sexy as managing a growing one but there's still money in it.
Here's the hole in your logic: even if Netflix has no desire to operate a particular business anymore (despite presumed profitability), if the business was, in the general sense, desirable (i.e. because profitability), then it would be worthwhile to Netflix to simply sell the business to another entity. Surely, for a desirable business, Netflix should be able to find a buyer for $1 or higher. That would let Netflix liquidate the asset / business while keeping the business running.
Tech industry economics are besides the point. Suppose tech industry economics expects (for the sake of argument, insanely) an internal rate of return of 300% on every dollar spent, while the IRR of the disc business is some measly fraction of that. By liquidating the disc business, Netflix gets to take whatever proceeds from the liquidation - even if it's only $1 - and put it towards other internal usages that it expects that 300% IRR from.
A price like $1 is so small that, presumably, you would go to whoever the current salaried worker is responsible for managing the disc business, offer them ownership for $1, and the manager-worker would happily take the opportunity to become a manager-owner of the desirable business that employs him at a price that anyone could afford.
Of course, in the real world, there are various costs involved. So presumably, (a) the costs associated with liquidation are lower than the costs associated with spinning off the disc business, and (b) whatever the cost associated with spinning off the disc business, no buyer could be found for at least the sum of that cost plus $1; that such costs are indeed above what the salaried manager-worker of the current disc business could afford.
Maybe that's bullshit, maybe not, I don't understand enough about Netflix's disc business to know. But Hanlon's Razor is the better guide here. Either Netflix's board is going where the money is leading them to go, or they're leaving money on the table for malicious reasons, and the second doesn't make sense since it would expose them to shareholder lawsuits.
Such a disc-renting business would be a competitor to Netflix, both directly (especially in the hands of somebody who tried to focus on it, rather than reluctantly maintaining it, as Netflix has been doing recently) or because it could eventually try to repeat Netflix's own pivot into streaming. Consequently, selling it off would be rather risky.
The start-up costs and need of name-recognition are probably sufficient that it'd be hard for a new company try to fill this niche, but if they bought Netflix's distribution network they could likely manage.
Too busy: what typically happens is that the concern of the spin-off of the disc business would be delegated to one / a few board members whose responsibility would be to examine the issue and make a recommendation to the rest of the board. The board member(s) themselves are rarely the people doing the analysis of the options; instead they delegate to salaried workers (either of Netflix, a contractor, or working directly for the board member) who do the legwork. So the amount of time that a board member themself will spend on the deal is either zero (they're not a member of the committee responsible for sourcing the recommendations) or fairly minimal.
Mistaken is another form of stupid.
And do you really think you get to be on the board of a ~$168 billion market cap public company by being stupid?
Boards of private companies or public companies with $168 billion market caps?
Private companies, sure. Boards of private companies often have an iron grip on shareholders and are often unaccountable. But the boards of public companies need to worry about shareholder activists, hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits. The margin of error to keep outright stupid, corrupt, nepotists is much smaller on large public company boards.
> then it would be worthwhile to Netflix to simply sell the business to another entity
This assumes there was a buyer who was able to pay.
As someone who has worked on this kind of stuff, I guarantee the leadership team at Netflix considered and did their due diligence, but didn't find a satisfactory buyer or didn't even find a buyer.
Shareholders like VCs generally want growth and even if Redbox could gobble up Netflix's DVD rental market share, the market itself is stagnant if not shrinking at this point so a short-lived growth opportunity is not particularly appealing. Redbox could monopolize the DVD rental market and investors still wouldn't be excited because it can't move anywhere from there and it would end up plateauing in a very boring niche.
Investors don't care about profit of the business, they care about profit of their investment (ROI). Whether a company is profitable or bleeding money only matters as part of the prediction on where the share price will go.
> VCs generally want growth and even if Redbox could gobble up Netflix's DVD rental market share, the market itself is stagnant
Netflix IPOed in 2002 and Redbox's parent company is a penny stock (Chicken Soup of the Soul Entertainment // NASDAQ: CSSE)
VCs do not invest in public entities.
The companies that invest in public entities are Investment Banks and Private Equity, both of which are different industries with different norms and regulations from Venture Capital
>You would think Netflix getting out of the business should be a sign for shares to go up.
A massively corp with many experienced analysts considers a market no longer capable of producing a profit... to me that is a sign that the sector is dying.
There's probably a [small] steady-state business in there, but investors want growth.
Internet penetration is only estimated at 65% today (5.3 billion people), so I can quite confidently say that billions of people will still not have Internet access in 2033.
There are still places without running water and sewage, never mind electricity and Internet access. I'm going to guess that everyone you know has a smartphone, if not a laptop, kindle, and a tablet, plus home Internet access. But not everyone is so lucky, and even in the US, there are poor areas. Huge swaths still don't have cell phone service, never mind 5G. $500 for a Starlink disk, with a monthly service charge, ain't happening.
Some of these places are intentionally devoid of Internet - there are places in Napa, outside of San Francisco, where none of the landowners will allow cell-phone towers in the hilly region, because they don't want it, so there's still no cell access. 10 years won't change that.
Whether that's enough to sustain Redbox, specifically, is a different question, and sure, more people will have Internet access in 10 years than today, but "dying business" is just a perception. Just because you don't have a use case for it doesn't mean that others won't. OG tech company Yahoo! could be called a "dying business", but they did $280 million in revenue for Q2, 2023.
Yes you are! You’ve let IP rights holders rot your brain.
Are you aware that there are publicly funded buildings in most towns in the US that permit you to rent one or multiple books without a monthly subscription fee? And that the late fees charged by those institutions do not share any of those revenues with the author? And that this model has been around for hundreds of years?
Ok, it seems you are right. But it is not as obvious as you make it sound. I looked into this a little bit more. So, apparently software and audio recordings cannot be rented out and are excluded from the first sale exception to copyright. Movies studios tried to do get congress to do the same for movies but were unsuccessful. So, movies can actually be purchased and then rented out as you stated. But one can still not do whatever one wants with a DVD e.g. public performances (even free of charge) are not legal unless one buys the appropriate license.
millions of people rented nintendo/sega cartridges in the nineties. N actually tried suing blockbuster https://www.nintendotimes.com/1989/08/19/nintendo-sues-block... but couldnt on game lending grounds so went for xeroxing manuals. Blockbuster in return switched to third party manuals, but lawsuit failed.
It's not a growth market so any copycats are likely too small and boring to have received any attention. The licensing landscape also means it's not something you can easily bootstrap. It's a bad example really because while it would have been easy for Netflix to keep around as a profitable but shrinking side business, it isn't something that at this point in history lends itself to creating a new businesses around.
It's worse than that, they want it dead. Presumably because it competes with (and is better than?) the streaming service. IIRC, Redbox offered to buy it. No interest.
That is correct, the missing piece is that companies are not valued only on their current p&l they are also valued on the future that is P/E ratio
Netflix has P/E ratio of around 40, when the stock doesn’t look like it’s meeting the ratio why would I buy the stock at that price, I’d buy it (your point) but at a lower price
Stopping services for loyal and long time consumers is insane. Even if your profit margin is lower in that business you keep it alive because you respect people who have carried you to where you are now. The hubris...
> Stopping services for loyal and long time consumers is insane
it's not, unfortunately. If the business isn't making _enough_ money (where "enough" actually means maximum possible out of all of possibilities), then you are better off switching the investment to the other investment that is returning more.
Netflix is a public company, so that investment tradeoff decision is being made about allocating money not between online netflix and mail netflix, but more like borax and mail netflix.
120M in annual revenue for 100 employees is not that high. That's only about 1.2M in revenue per employee.
Netflix's main business makes 2.4M per employee (31.6 billion for 12k employees), and given the nature of such businesses, is almost certainly much more profitable per employee.
You're not thinking of "tech", you're thinking of late stage capitalism. "Tech" is just one of the clearest manifestations of that because the revenue per employee is less tightly bounded than in manufacturing or direct services, especially now that rent-seeking has replaced selling.
Netflix is such an interesting company. They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. Netflix pays their engineers a ton of money, no equity. We're talking 300-500k cash. As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs. I absolutely dreamed that one day I'd be capable enough to work for Netflix or Pixar on high end network lowest throughput-we-can-accomplish infra. Now it's all a joke to me. I don't even have Netflix account anymore. I've attempted to launcha a multitude of Netflix OSS projects like ConsoleMe and Conductor. I have never ever, and I'm saying this as someone who hopped onto Kubernetes version 1.1 in 2015. I have never had a worse open source experience than Netflix OSS projects. They basically shoot them out then abandon them and never touch them again.
This post made me hit up their Github again and there are (possible) gems like Zuul, Falcor, Chaosmonkey.. but seriously, go try and deploy them. It's embarassing.
Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
In a sense, Wall St. is creating "economic activity" in the hope of future growth and rewards which ends up benefiting common man with digital abundance. Whether Govt does it directly or indirectly in a top down manner, the end result is the same. This is like building digital roads.
> They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office.
Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone".
I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though.
> As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs
The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so.
It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.
> I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA.
How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc.
Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.
True, especially Los Altos Hills. But how do you research the wrong city when you’re house hunting? Wouldn’t you be checking distances to the office and realize that everything is 25 mins away, on the freeway?
Seems all true to me. Apart from being I did not find Netflix projects gem. In my usage and looking at their code, they seem like overwrought Java enterprise projects. The place I work they are slowly replacing Netflix OSS with other products.
Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.
My resume has the (dis)pleasure of converting all of Netflixes OSS projects to run in containers. JVM or not. I have golang services that run at 80Mb, I have rust services that run at 20Mb. Every JVM service? I have to literally define its memory consumption with command line flags (-jvmx? I forget, its my weekend) on each deployment. Running JVMs in k8s is hilarious. I'm not grey beard Linux level yet (soon) but my god. It's hilarious how poorly they perform.
Agree. I maybe wrong but I think it was Netflix first which normalized generating one web service call generating 1MB worth of logs. In our place finance is kind of whopping ass of teams which are generating extensive logging and monitoring as Splunk cost goes through roof.
It amazes me, that Netflix is capable of such top of the line engineering things (really mindblowing stuff, one machine that streams nearly 1 Terabit pers second), but is for the love of god unable to stream HD Content to my iPhone (newest firmware, all up2date). Tried everything gigabit wifi, cellular, multiple ISPs ...
It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience.
I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.
I was an OG subscriber while in college. I can't remember what I was paying- was it $4.99 a month? And you could have out 3 DVD's at a time... so what I would do to maximize my bandwidth was rent 3 DVD's, and as soon as they'd arrive I'd toss them in a PC dedicated to ripping discs. One drive to read from and one DVD-RW drive to burn. I'd then send the DVD's back the next morning on my way out my dorm, and I think there was a queue to send more out as soon as they got those 3 back in the mail, which took 4-5 days for where I lived, unfortunately.
I did this for a year or so. The movies went in one of those giant zip-up trapper-keeper things for CD's. All in total, I think I ripped about 80 DVDs.
And a lot of them I don't think I ever actually got around to watching...
You're not the first person I've seen with more of a movie-ripping than movie-watching habit. The thrill is feeling like you've gotten one over on the system. The reality is that you made more money for the creator of the film than they would have otherwise gotten from you ($0).
This was me in college also. I remember finding 3rd party or not-quite-matching oem firmware for my pc's dvd drive to speed up reading and burning. I think I had a Pioneer driver, all sorts of stuff was available for it.
My college had a few different collection times, and the apartment usually delivered in the morning. So I could get a DVD in the mail, rip it, drop it off, and it would be picked up same-day. Netflix would get it the next morning.
Is it unprofitable? The article seemed to imply the business was still profitable, it was just small relative to the success of streaming. Or perhaps it suffers from adverse selection... the only people still using the service are the least profitable heavy users? I wish the article delved into that instead of being a Netflix puff piece.
Right? With $60 million in revenue, that's quite a few customers (and if they haven't switched to streaming by now, those are loyal customers indeed). If there's any profit in it at all, that's a lifestyle business waiting to happen.
Even DVD to be honest; the resolution of the stream is basically unimportant, what really matters is the bitrate, and DVD is high, Blu-ray is insane (10.08 Mbit/s vs 40-100Mbit/s).
Ironically, with 4K on a good OLED TV, I actually find HDR to be a bigger deal than the res. The res works both ways...stuff that was shot well is gorgeous...but stuff that wasn't filmed so well - you're going to see tons of grain, any dirt on the print, etc.
Black and white films in HDR are gorgeous.. and filmic in a way they've never looked before on home media.
Usually on 4K discs they've been rescanned and restored, but not always, and sometimes even a good restoration job leaves a lot behind.
This might be it - some of the content that was mastered for DVD feels better (admittedly upscaled DVD content via the player) than badly remastered "HD" content where you end up seeing things you're not really supposed to see.
You're right that bit-rate is king, but for most content, AV1 and HEVC will have superior subjective perceptual quality. Most content lends itself to being heavily compressed with minimal loss of quality.
Resolution stops mattering much at a certain point, but that point is higher than a slightly widened standard definition.
And other people mentioned that codec matters, but not the full extent. Not only is the encoding on a DVD about 10x worse than a modern codec, 10Mbps is a peak you're unlikely to ever see. I'm skeptical that a well-encoded 1Mbps 720p stream would ever lose to a DVD, and I'm confident that at 2Mbps you'd leave the DVD in the dust.
> Good call!! Also people that want the original music on older TV shows.
A DVD rental service won't necessarily get you that either. For some stuff filmed before buying DVD sets was a thing, you may only be able to get the original music from a tape someone made off of TV. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen....
Actually, are you sure they're legit? It LOOKS scammy as hell, too, and copy like "No Black-out period...why wait up to 56 days! Rentals ship same day as the official Blu-ray!" doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
The link to check their SSL certificate is also invalid. '
There is no readily available contact info, or corporate info.
Funny enough, they’ve been around for 12 years and I’ve been a member for 5.
They feel like a one person shop. The turn around is slow and the system isn’t the slickest, however, it was the only place to get 4k discs for a very long time.
It would be less than 1% of their revenue. So imagine a programmer on $100k/y, who makes $600/y on a side hustle, that $600 cannot grow but needs to do extra tax paperwork, devote attention to it. And the customers of that hustle will leave if they sell the business on. At the same time they are on an upward trajectory at work and expect to get to $500k/y and are putting their focus into that.
I'm not arguing that it isn't a negligible percentage of Netflix's profit, I'm arguing that this is a service with high demonstrated demand and it's a shame to see it shut down despite that demand.
I would love to see a survey, but my guess of those customers is that streaming is not a viable option. An unfathomably large percentage of the USA still has meager internet connections.
Personally I'm in a metropolitan area, but I just liked the far greater selection on the DVD service, and the availability of French and Spanish language tracks.
They tried to spin the DVD business off in 2011 (as “Qwikster”) and the user base revolted. I wonder if it would be more successful if they tried it today.
Regardless, that's not why people "revolted"; people were annoyed that their legacy subscriptions (streaming + DVDs) would no longer exist and that they would have to buy two 10usd subscriptions, essentially doubling the price overnight.
I signed up for Netflix around the time I got my first DVD player in the late 90s. I watched a lot of cool movies I would never have otherwise had access to. It was fun to discover indie and foreign cinema that were not available in my local video rental stores.
When they released streaming it was truly awesome. Not only was the seleciton great, they also had things like the concept of "friends" and you could let your friends see what you watched. The joy of discovering new movies could have gone the way of something like letterboxd except where you can actually see the movies. The Netflix challenge was cool too because it really seemed like they wanted to get you to find the perfect movie for _you_.
But when the studios started to wise up and pull their content they chose the most user-hostile and pessimistic ways of dealing with it. Netflix used to be more than just a content pipe, they added value the form of the recommendation engine and were starting to add value in a social network of sorts. But instead they chose deception to hide the fact that their library was getting hollowed out. They killed off the budding social-media aspect.
I guess content is the foundation upon which you build all of these things and when their content got yanked they had to focus on maximizing viewer experience within those limitations. But a part of me does wonder if I could find something I really like within the huge library of unknown garbage they have. The problem is that they don't seem to care about that kind of experience anymore. So that's why I am no longer a subscriber.
> It started as a brainstorm between Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, successful businessmen looking to reinvent the DVD rental business.
It definitely did not. Reed always had the online streaming business as main goal, but internet was not as fast yet.
He cites Andrew Tanenbaum’s Networking book as inspiration. There’s a page in the book that says “don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of data tapes”.
(I used the same textbook at Uni and I remember clearly reading that page as well, crazy)
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) circa 1985) via https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
I also remember one from Silberschatz's OS textbook about Deadlock that mentioned an old law which said that whenever two trains approached an intersection, they both had to come to a full stop and none could move until the other one had left.
For those in the UK, check out https://www.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/. So nice to be able to order the movies/series you want instead of being restricted to Netflix junk.
The greatest loss is the innocence and aligned incentives DvD Netflix had. They pioneered eerily accurate recommendations (anyone remember the Netflix recommendation challenges?). You rated all the movies out of 5 stars and Netflix recommended the best movies without any limits. Because they more or less had every movie ever made in their library! Their only incentive was to make you discover the best movie you wanted to watch! Irony was that dvd Netflix still maintained this rating system at least a few years back when I used it. I paid and kept it more for the list and recommendations than the discs themselves.
When streaming started Netflix’s incentives changed: if you had a rank ordered personal watchlist, you’ll notice if the movie you added left the service. Back then they were also playing this game of circling the expensive movies in and out of the service every six months or a year - if your watchlist was unordered, you eventually saw the movie you wanted to watch in that list and could see it. They end up paying only half the license fees.
In the end their recommendation system couldn’t be honest because they basically couldn’t stream the best movie you’d like to see. Not to mention they’d have to openly say the movies they commissioned are likely not going to be enjoyable for you personally. So they completely gutted the recommendation system into the ghastly crap we have today which is designed to hide their selection flaws than to serve you honestly.
The other frustrating thing for me to see online is when people criticize Netflix for bad design decisions - till Hastings was running the ship, I felt every bad UX move they made was in genuine service of hiding the flaws necessitated by their limited licensing abilities. And they were damn smart about it too. Netflix’s greatest downfall was their content strategy which seems to be some idea of data driven predictive crap. They likely got buoyed by the success of the first few shows into thinking they can do everything with data. For the budget Netflix has nowadays if they actually got their content act together theyd be a much larger powerhouse. Hope they do it before it’s too late.
I imagine Netflix was less innocent than you might think.
As they could only send out DVDs they have in stock, they were more likely to recommend things that they had a surplus of.
While the list model did allow for even popular titles to be queued up, they wouldn't want a situation where a customer had nothing but new/popular titles on their list with a long wait time.
Netflix completely lost its original business, which was to deliver hollywood movies to customers. Nowadays they are in the business of creating new titles, just like Disney. I much prefer the old days where I could rent practically any movie in existence. That's why I don't even bother paying for Netflix anymore.
Unfortunately, as Netflix grew, it was largely inevitable that the big networks / studios were going to think that licensing their content to Netflix was a worse option than spinning up their own streaming services, they want to, at the end of the day, own as much of the relationship and the pipeline to the customer as possible, and they weren't going to get that with Netflix.
Netflix ended up in a race to acquire content defensively against the dwindling prospects of major licensing renewals, for example, Disney pulled out of Netflix almost completely.
The honeymoon period of just about everything being on Netflix was either dead or near dead by 2020.
Business idea I've casually had for a while now: would it be legal to build an enormous DVD jukebox, "rent" a DVD out to a subscriber on demand, and stream the physical DVD to them with the navigation menus and everything?
Aereo did the TV version of this, renting each user an antenna instead of renting DVDs. Its outcome may be instructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo: …the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Aereo's services breached copyright laws. It ruled that, "viewed in terms of Congress’ regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly", and that "insofar as there are differences, those differences concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service."
Aereo had this ludicrous legal defense of "one antenna per customer" which was clearly bogus. Their "antennas" were tiny and inside datacenters. There was no way they actually worked, and they clearly had one real antenna on the roof somewhere.
The sad thing is technologically their argument was 100% bulletproof and system indeed worked. "antenna" was whole tuner system outputting digitized video feed, one per customer - USB TV tuners have been single digit dollar cheap for last 10 years.
Supreme Court (donors/lobbyists) simply didnt like the business model. 'these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems' means it doesnt matter how you provide content as long as end effect is similar to cable TV. Imo bad ruling.
> The sad thing is technologically their argument was 100% bulletproof
Engineers often think the law is a computer program. You put the same inputs in and get the same inputs out. If you find a bug, then you can exploit that until the bug is fixed via a new version.
It's not. The spirit of what the law is supposed to do is far more important than the letter of the law.
The suggestion in the parent comment is a bit different because one would think that the first sale doctrine applies. Unfortunately the courts are chipping at it more and more every year.
First sale doctrine doesn’t give you at right to publicly perform something any more than tuning in with an antenna does. Wouldn’t make a difference here.
> The court held that the defendants were transmitting and publicly performing the plaintiffs' copyrighted works, and thus granted plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction.
There's been a couple of attempts, but that wouldn't service the same customers. Most customers still using Netflix DVDs by mail are in rural areas without adequate internet or just not interested in streaming.
Netflix has been around since 1997. At that time, directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world. As a non-American, how were you watching movies in 1997?
And yeah TikTok/etc didn't exist then. No one hard smartphones and the Internet was text/GIF only.
That said, we used to have the America's Funniest Home Videos show. People mailed in VHS recordings of their kids/pets doing cute, funny, or cringe things. This aired on TV and people voted to pick a winner. People could win $10k-100k in prize money. So yeah, proto YT or whatever was a thing, just scaled to available tech at the time.
EDIT: Just realized AFHV is still around, and will outlive Netflix DVDs. *That* certainly feels like a joke. How does a network television meme show still exist in 2023???
I did not think they were streaming movies in 1997 and I did not say I thought they were streaming movies in 1997. I thought they simply did not exist until years later when they started streaming. This should have been obvious from what I said, I'm not a total moron.
Last time they tried to spin it off it did not go well in terms of PR. Maybe it is easier to shut off a feature than it is to ask for it to be a paid feature?
Not to be smug, but my feeling at the time of Qwikster was that if they didn't spin it off they would shut it down. Didn't expect it to live on for another decade though.
In comparison, in about < 1 day of TV use I somehow downloaded (streamed) > 115 GBs of data. Mostly Netflix and other streaming services. Insane how far we have come, compared to a 4-9 GB DVD disc!
To what extent would it be legal to purchase individual copies of media and rent them out to view on a per license basis distributed digitally, not physically?
