In recent days I’m reading all over the news how Netflix is losing huge amount of subscribers. You may wonder what they are citing as reason for this drop? Garbage interface? Useless search engine they have? Poor selection of content? Rubbish regional content restrictions? Nope, none of that, they are blaming Netflix password account sharing. I’m getting flashbacks of dumb companies in late 90’s whining over piracy for any failure they made.
Not only Netflix initially encouraged password sharing to boost the viewership, main reason they are losing subscribers is because the service is just shit. And it has been for years. How shit you may say? Well, let me tell you…
Shit interface
The horizontally scrolling movies/series in a vertically scrolling categories is just idiotic. Not only it’s incredibly hard to navigate as it is, bunch of categories share exact same damn movies and series that scroll in a frigging loop so you hardly know hwere is the start and where is the end. just to make it seem like there is so much content to watch…
Poor content selection
Reality is, there is hardly any. And to make matters worse, if you live anywhere but in US, you get less content by default because yay, fucking regional content is somehow still a thing in year 2022. I thought we left that shit behind back in 2003… And no, I’m no going to pay extra for a fucking VPN just so I could watch some regionally blocked bullshit. This is really a primary reason. There is just so very little to watch on Netflix that you’re done with it in few months of not that intensive watching and then there is very little left to even care about and the sporadic additions just don’t make it any better. Only stuff I can really think of being good from top of my head was “Love, Death and Robots”, “Black Mirror” and “The Expanse”. And that’s about it from their entire library. They don’t have a single frigging iconic movie on it. No Aliens franchise, no Jurassic Park franchise, no Die Hard, no Home Alone, nothing. I’d totally binge watch entire Alien franchise right now. Nope, just frigging can’t because there isn’t any. I also love old action movies from 80’s and 90’s, just sort of to relive the nostalgia. Nope, nothing. The fact I listed 3 Netflix’s own productions and nothing else is telling. And don’t think everything they make is gold. It really isn’t. Most of their movies and series always leave you with a hardon and with conclusion that is best described as “fuck you”. Most of their movies have no conclusion in the end, no real satisfaction, no explanations of anything (especially since there won’t ever be any continuation of that movie), it’s just wtf I just watched most of the time. And the fact competition is now on the market, it just makes it even worse for the consumers, not better…
Garbage support for even when you were paying for it
For a while I was paying for the HD tier. Not 4K, just HD one because it was suppose to give me 1080p video. Just to soon realize image is kinda crap most of the time on my monitor. I soon realized dumbass Netflix only serves me 720p video in Firefox. You know, because that happens to be my primary browser and I really don’t like to use dumb clumsy useless Windows Netflix app. You’re already using Widevine DRM bullshit, why the fuck do you need me to use Edge to get 1080p video I’m fucking paying for? Eh? Are you clowns entirely and totally incompetent. I very quickly downgraded my account to SD because it wasn’t that much worse than 720p I was getting anyways.
Competition
We’re expected to be subscribed to all these services because each and every wants to have some fucking exclusive shit on their service. I’m still pissed when I wanted to watch Rogue One on Netflix, I have fucking seen it there, but a week later I come in finally ready to watch it and it was just… gone. Turns out Disney snatched all Star Wars content from Netflix and put it on their Disney+. Upon visiting Disney+ webpage I was informed the service is not available in my country. Well, fuck you too then.
Idiotic categories and search
What really pissed me off every time is how stupid categories are and how useless the search is. I already mentioned how it’s clumsy to navigate, but even when you picked a dedicated category, for example “Sci Fi” because I like fucking Sci Fi, the dumb thing didn’t spit out anything useful and it insisted on “recommending” me things I couldn’t give two fucks about and kept recommending me shit I already watched ages ago. Dafuck!? It always felt like it’s confused or something. Search was even bigger fuck you. I’m sure anyone has experienced it how you typed a movie name into Netflix’s search and the thing started recommending you the movie names based on few letters you’ve typed so far. All excited, if it found the name, I’ll be watching the movie in no time, just for the search engine in Netflix to spit out “No match”. Are you fucking shitting me? You literally recommended me an exact movie name of a movie I was looking for and now you’re saying there is no such movie? Then why the fuck were you recommending me its full name? Absolutely insane.
How will Netflix counter loss of subscribers?
Apparently Netflix’s brilliant idea to counter massive bleeding of subscribers is to seriously crack down on account sharing. Because people who were so cheap to not buy their own account will now totally rush to pay for one. Totally!
Second brilliant idea was including a cheaper tier with ads. Yes, because cheaper tier with more shit too look at (ads) will totally fix all the fucking shit I was complaining about above. It’s so bad I wouldn’t use Netflix even if it was just 1€ a month. Hell, given how pissed I am over their useless service and what kind of monumental victim they are portraying themselves this moment, I wouldn’t want to use it even if it was free. I shit you not. There just isn’t anything to watch on it, so why would I even use it for free?
I just don’t understand the movie industry…
As a response to movie industry constantly whining over piracy and loss of viewers and revenue/profits, I always like to point out the state of gaming industry. When Steam was launched, it changed the industry. Games suddenly became super accessible and their delivery absolutely painless. Want pretty much any game in existence? Well, I just come to Steam and in few clicks I’m downloading game that I’ll enjoy in matter of minutes. Fully legally. Want old game that you loved in your childhood? No problem, visit GOG. GOG became so popular with resurrection of old games that Steam also started adopting this resurrection of old games with compatibility for new operating systems. There are some exclusive games on few other services that are exclusive to certain publisher/game studio, but for 99% of games, you can get it on Steam, totally pain free. Experience is so painless it hasn’t crossed my mind to pirate any game for years. In fact I’ll soon be able to state that as “decades”. Plural. Something being so consumer friendly, painless and convenient you stop thinking of stealing the stuff. Imagine that!
And movie industry? Well, it hasn’t really changed at all since 1950’s really. Instead of bringing content closer to the consumers like Valve did with Steam, they keep on fucking it up and making it harder to consume the content. I don’t want to be permanently subscribed to 8 streaming services and paying hundreds of € every month and still not be able to watch anything I want. It’s idiotic. Especially since you watch movie once and that’s about it. Maybe I’ll rewatch it again after 5 or 10 years, but it’s not like games that offer endless supply of fun that doesn’t start repeating that quickly. I’ve said many times I’d gladly pay a cinema ticket price just to watch a blockbuster movie in comfort of my home, on my terms when I’ll want to watch it. I was hoping for that to happen for decades now and it seems it’ll never happen. So, I’m really not surprised why people still pirate movies and series and do “absurd” things like share account access. Why wouldn’t you when people offering them to consumers behave like absolute baboons who are entirely disconnected from reality? Ultimately, it’s not just Netflix. It’s the entire god damn industry. When downloading and watching a torrented movie is more convenient than bothering with idiocies of the legal one and for free, who the hell wouldn’t do it? However, if it was as accessible and convenient as it is for games, I’d watch tons of movies. Instead I rather just replay a game from few years ago or simply buy whatever just roughly excites me, even if it’ll ultimately end up in a backlog. Games are so fucking accessible people buy them ahead of time even though we often know we won’t be able to play them for months or often ever. Mind blown to pay for content you won’t even consume. But with movies and series, you often throw money at their face and they are like “Sorry, no”. 
You deserve to be pirated for fucks sake. You really do.
Angry Sheep Blog 