- cross-posted to:
- bbc@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- bbc@rss.ponder.cat
Netflix is starting to raise prices in some countries as growth spurred by its crackdown on password sharing starts to fade.
The film and TV streaming giant said it had already lifted subscription fees in Japan and parts of Europe as well as the Middle East and Africa over the last month.
Changes in Italy and Spain are now being rolled-out.
In its latest results, Netflix announced that it had added 5.1 million subscribers between July and September - ahead of forecasts but the smallest gain in more than a year.
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See, the problem with publicly traded corporations is, they’ve got to constantly not only be making as much money this year as they did the previous year, but they’ve got to increase shareholder value, which means, raising prices, or reducing the product to save costs, we have termed that last bit enshitification. I mean, they don’t HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel, and those fuckers are raking in the big bucks, and really really like their 3rd vacation homes in Aspen, so you pay more, or you get less, and sometimes you pay more AND you get less. And the beat goes on.
I mean, they don’t HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel
If the board doesn’t maximize profit, the shareholders can sue them, so functionally they do have to.
Specifically, the Board and thus the CEO must maximize company VALUE not profit.
There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.
But in the 1970s you get a guy named Milton Friedman who comes along with the concept of shareholder value in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”.[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.
So there’s been a lot of argument against it since esp as of late, but the economic hegemony still adheres to Friedman’s economic principles.
There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.
Can you name some examples? I’m not very familiar with economics.
A bigger market share (or just market size if it’s something new-fangled) at the expense of current profit, because that can turn into future profits. See most modern tech companies, which make a loss but still have value. For example, Uber just made a profit for the first time, and since they’re everywhere that’s a great position for a shareholder. People bought in in the past in hopes that this would eventually happen.
OP is a little off, BTW. US law - and it’s probably the same elsewhere - says that the C-suite has to work in the interests of shareholders, who they represent as fiduciaries. It’s just that there’s only a few things a million APPL shareholders have in common, so in practice that interest is value and dividends. In a privately-owned company other things might factor in, for better or for worse.
IANAL
I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.
That sir, is communism. And we all learned from 80s action movies that communism is bad.
In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.
So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets
And for quite a lot of human history the best system we had come up with was Feudalism, until we started doing something better.
Just because Capitalism is the best we’ve come up with so far doesn’t mean we should just accept it, or that 1000 years from now people won’t look at the Capitalism with the same disdain we look at Feudalism.
There’s a reason I said “so far”. I’m open to the idea that there might be newer and better systems in the future. So far though, they haven’t been invented yet.
Plenty of privately owned companies do the same things so I don’t think it can be chalked up to an issue with publicly traded companies.
The minor difference is private can choose what they want to do. public has a fuduciary duty to increase value
public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.
You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.
Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.
That’s generally false. But even if it’s true, all the boss has to do is argue that medium-term profits will be generated by whatever policy they want to adopt. Since nobody knows the future, they might be right, and they’re legally rock solid.
In other words, the duty to increase value produces unfalsifiable policy claims. So it is meaningless.
They legally don’t. It’s just expected.
It’s all about who owns it and is sitting on the board.
Bunch of old money type people? They don’t care too much about a bad year, more important to weather the storms and keep the generational money intact.
Venture capitalists? Jack Welch this dogshit company and get us some short term gains!
TBF small businesses do this too on average. There’s some that don’t, but then there’s also some that straight up do crime, usually against employees.
To solve this, you either want a well-regulated market, or no market (however that would work).
Publically traded companies only exist because capitalists willed it so. Capitalism will always seek the path to greatest profits for the capitalist class with little to no regard for the consequences of that
lol - I love that I canned all my paid subs that were fucking me up the arse like this, and then used the savings to setup a half-decent Plex server for my family. Fuck those greedy cunts.
I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection
Especially if you’re fine with the low image quality of streaming services. Equivalent video files aren’t particularly big.
Its about ~2-3GB for a movie for me. The Quality isnt great but still better than Netflix streams.
I would recommend “spending” about 6 GB on a 1080p x265 encoding of a movie, if you can. The quality is much better, good enough to be viewed up close on a large screen, unless there’s a large amount of high frequency detail, like in recent animated or very CGI-heavy movies - or unless it’s an older film with strong film grain and/or large mass scenes (think Lawrence of Arabia). Those do benefit from higher bitrates and resolutions, even if your screen isn’t 4K.
These owners forgot that media is 100% discretionary spend AND has superior alternative that can be had close to free and a bit of labour…
I know owners thinks we are all brain dead and only able to consoom… Is we tho?
Pretty much the only one i’m still happy with is crunchyroll. They don’t fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.
Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I’m already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.
Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don’t even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.
Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That’s ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.
Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server’s app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn’t need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i’d go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It’s nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don’t get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.
Crunchyroll has its own bullshit too tbh. It just happens to be that the industry is worse than their bs, so Crunchyrolls shenanigans is really just the anime industry.
Our household has gone full in on Plex. Bought an 8 TB hardrive to run the sever off my 10 year old gaming PC. Wife and I have been binging Downton Abbey. Digitized the series off blue-rays from the local local. However the blue-ray set didn’t have the Christmas Specials. My wife did not want to wait til I tracked down the specials. So we started to watch the specials on Amazon Prime Video. The picture encoding was awful. Not to mention all the bloody annoying ads. Not able to stomach the horrible picture quality anymore I hurriedly found a 1080p file and added it to our plex server. It was like night and day. I am not a high definition snob. Honestly I cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. But the fact that I can stream better video quality from my 10 year old PC than through a multi billion dollar company is absurd.
Hmm, it appears if we squeeze tighter, more blood will come out. Surely there is no natural limit to this principle.
Friendly reminder that the high seas are always an option. Download stremio, install the torrentio addon, and you are good to go.
Only use torrents if you know what you’re doing. In the developed world, this usually ends with a very expensive letter in your mailbox.
You can get a VPN or seedbox to avoid those letters. They are a lot cheaper than a single streaming service.
I guess Canada must be undeveloped, cause I’ve never seen one of those “expensive letters” in my mailbox
Using a VPN solved this problem for me. If you don’t want to pay for a VPN, then use OpenVPN Connect.
How does that get around paying? You don’t pay for the clients but their servers.
Whoops! I forgot to mention that I have a tech friend that gave me a free profile/account that I use with the OpenVPN client.
So, if you don’t want to pay for a VPN get someone to give you access to theirs for free?
I had, simply, forgotten that my friend had given me a free account.
Absolutely my dude, stremio is fantastic. The only reason I still have Netflix is for my youngish kid and I haven’t found parental options for stremio yet
You know what? I’m gonna Sonarr and Jellyfin even harder
You know what it means
I love that they think upping prices will keep people around to pay those prices?
TBH it has been working so far…
Yeah, Lemmy loves to talk about how this won’t work and they’ve moved to Plex, but overall it’s been working great for Netflix.
Eventually the bubble will burst and people will start to drop Netflix, but that’s a way off.
The price is still elastic because many people have another streaming service they can drop. But as they all raise prices, they’ll all be whittled down to just one. And then possibly none.
No doubt but if people would be a little more proactive… We coulda already squeezed the corpo trash
About once a year, we get a Netflix subscription for about two months. Catch up on everything we want to watch, then cancel it.
After 6 months, Netflix forgets about you. Does that mean we count as a new subscriber every year? How many people like us are inflating their new subscriber number?
Obviously Netfilx wants to tell the stock holders how many “new subscribers” they have every quarter. Nobody stopped to think what those numbers actually mean.
Quality down, prices up. How long is this trend going to last?
Until it stops increasing profits.
Beatings continue until morale improves
I feel like this has been the case for everything the past few years. Grocery prices seem to be following the same trend
Companies will charge what the market will bear. If Netflix increases prices and lowers quality and people keep paying the higher price for lower quality, then Netflix will keep doing it. It’s up to consumers to not pay for enshittification in order to stop it.
Netflix’s content has gotten so much worse too. I don’t think there are many people left that have a subscription for more than one or two shows. And this seems to be a trend across all the different apps. Makes me glad I set up automatic torrenting for everything I’m interested in, and all it costs me is $5/month for Proton VPN
I don’t know about you but content has gotten better for me.
Ranma 1/2, Squid Games, Super Mario Bros Movie, new season of Arcane. I felt like every 1-2 months, there was always something interesting.
Also note that I don’t pay for Netflix. I do own stock.
BUY MORE NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTIONS…
For added convenience, skip the VPN and get a seedbox. If you consider the cost savings in hardware you spend even less.
Any recommendations? Can you link jellyfin directly to a seedbox?
Many seed boxes allow you to install Jellyfin and the Arr stack on the seedbox itself. Some even make installation a one click operation.
Recommendations?
They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. They burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn’t sustainable.
The company is under pressure to show investors what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.
LOL i think the only potential “new subscribers” remaining are the people who never had and never will have a netflix sub. at this point one of the many reasons i’ll never sign up is because fuck shareholders in general
Just idea that they expect growth where there is none is strange. This business are at the limit and have no way to grow faster than economic situation of many people around the world gets better.
Sad part is fir them it is better to destroy service trying to increase growth in meaningless ways, than to just find a way to keep the business that is working.
Idea of infinite growth is ruining us.
The Pirate Bay will always be with us.
It’s not me, Netflix, it’s you.
The for profit model was probably created by idiots. Just because something like the market and economy are complex doesn’t mean it was put together by smart people.
Capitalism is cannibalism. Cannibalism of resources, of your job, of your society.
Idiots put the system together and idiots are holding it together.
Yeah, but I’ve yet to see a detailed alternate proposal. When people talk about anarchism it gets really handwavy really fast, and the other kind of socialism has history of being vapourware.
… or gulagware.
No, vapourware. If their thing worked but also had remote prisons this would be a totally different (and ethically abstract) conversation, so that’s not the important detail.
In practice, their thing didn’t work, and still ran on market-style money transactions, albeit with multiple currencies and a lot of random red tape. And then a huge unofficial market cropped up as well to close the gaps from it not working.
What kind of details can you not fathom in a functioning sustainable system? It shouldn’t be more difficult than “more! MORE AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYBODY ELSE!”
I’m having a bit of trouble following that. Are you anti-socialism and complaining that it’s just stealing, or pro-socialism and asking me what details I’m missing?
I am pro socialism and asking what kind of details is missing in pro-socialist arguments that you find capitalists explain well?
Modern industrial economies are really complicated. I like trains. To make trains, you need parts, labour, equipment and power. They themselves need to be made, which uses parts, labour, equipment and power, and meanwhile you have competing uses of all those things for making, I dunno, printing presses, or for completely different things like farming or art curating. If you drew it all out as a diagram it would get super interconnected super fast.
Meanwhile, even a simple binary choice like which of two lots a rehab center should go on can be very politically complicated. Anarchists like to handwave it away with “we’ll figure it out together”, and I really don’t find that convincing.
Markets offer a system that’s proven to work insofar as if you need to buy a train or a hair clip or lunch someone’s always selling it. How do you guarantee that, or something similar?
Don’t be a pleb. Sail the high seas!
