Netflix says its brief Apple TV app integration was a mistake
Comments
imagetic
bsimpson
My Netflix subscription ends today after 15y.
I watched it plenty in the late 00s when it had awesome content, and I was afraid to cancel even if I wasn't actively using it because it had the best recommendations.
Since then, they've constantly hiked the price and have lost their content edge. My parents watched my account though, so I kept it around as a gift to them + a way to have something to do on overnight flights. They finally locked my parents out (after talking it up in the press for months), so they've lost any reason to stay on my credit card.
Feels like there's been generational churn in leadership among the places that were great in the 00s - Netflix and Google both come to mind. The people who did cool, novel stuff have retired, and the traditional execs who will squeeze every dime they can out of customers (and employee perks) have shown up.
I don't like it.
EA-3167
Netflix is by far one of the worst streaming services in terms of what they have, although they're still running a very slick interface, who cares if what it leads to is garbage? Even when you find something good, especially a series, you can't expect that it'll go anywhere: Netflix loves to cancel.
coliveira
They figured out that additional seasons of successful series also command high costs and actor salaries. So they prefer to spin just another cheap TV series that will keep people binge watching.
speed_spread
Funnily that's the opposite of the neverending Hollywood sequels like Marvel drivel.
coliveira
Even the Marvel sequels are ending, they had to rehire a new cast to slash costs.
andybak
Marvel's quality is varied and has dipped in the last couple of years. It's not high art by any means but I find calling it "drivel" in such a dismissive way to be a shallow take.
beezlewax
Os the interface slick though? It's maybe visually slick over actually being good ux. It loudly autoplays it's slow and the expanding animations are nauseating
0x457
Netflix UI in my opinion has two issues:
- "Continue Watching" is always in a different place
- Autoplaying trailers
Everything else is alright. Every other service besides Apple TV has much worse issues with UI and UX.
vinni2
And yet their stock price is all time high!
TheCraiggers
> Netflix wants to get those views and autoplays. It's all about the stats boosts.
I'm confused why this would be the case. Can you explain further?
It seems to me that what Netflix actually wants is paying subscribers that don't watch anything. Bandwidth and CDNs aren't free after all.
coliveira
No, they want you to watch all the time and continue interested in the stuff they're releasing. It is their way to make sure Netflix is relevant to subscribers and they'll keep talking about the content in the platform.
The problem is the quality of that content. The op is right, Netflix became a factory of cheap series that keep people binge watching. The original idea of a service to watch movies is completely lost. I stoped paying a long time ago and don't want to go back.
madeofpalk
Ideally, but not realistically.
Subscribers who don't watch Netflix are at the greatest risk of churning. Netflix needs you to continue seeing value out of paying/watching ads.
eeixlk
Netflix streaming was originally a free perk of being a dvd subscriber, because the hosting service was so much more efficient than the cost of mailing a physical object to your house and back. Now many ISPs have dedicated netflix storage appliances on site that further reduce bandwidth.
Also if you are on an ad based plan they would want you to use the service more.
actionfromafar
Gotta be marginal
daft_pink
I’ve really been enjoying just buying classic movies and shows on Apple TV to binge watch instead of having a ton of subscriptions. The quality is always the best available and I have a collection of awesome content to watch that I have never seen in 4k with awesome sound from an awesome device. I feel its money better spent than a subscription.
heraldgeezer
>It became a made-for-tv content sausage factory with the occasional gem.
So just like Apple TV TV then?
frantathefranta
If you mean Apple TV+ (the streaming service), there is a day and night difference between it and Netflix with regards to the average quality of shows.
josteink
Maybe I’m weird, but to me all the Apple TV+ shows really comes off with the same (to me at least) vibe, like it was made in the same factory, following the same recipe.
It instantly degrades what could/might be art to mere «content» and it’s a huge turn off.
I don’t think I’ve ever finished more than 1 full season of a Apple TV+ show.
That said, I’m not claiming Netflix is any better.
gorlilla
You're not weird, unless we both are, which is equally possible.
dlcarrier
Yeah, Apple doesn't want Netflix recommending their own shows for free, when Apple could be recommending their own shows, are charging Netflix to recommend theirs.
Of course Netflix doesn't want Apple to have control of the interface to the Netflix streaming service, just as much as Apple doesn't want Netflix to have control of the interface to Apple's streaming service.
dyauspitr
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marssaxman
This puts me in mind of the classic George Carlin bit about other drivers all being either idiots or maniacs, and how you can use their relative proportions in the population to understand what other people probably think of your own driving.
jusonchan81
I thought what you are seeing is personalized for you.
Pommo88
[flagged]
duxup
I'm going to perhaps be foolish and say, I honestly don't feel like I've seen any "feminist drivel"...
Pommo88
[flagged]
dyauspitr
I like all the other propaganda, just not the feminist/LGBTQ stuff.
Pommo88
[flagged]
dyauspitr
I mean I still hate Nazis, I just don’t like runaway feminism.
Pommo88
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jglamine
Makes sense. They want customers to browse using the Netflix app where they can promote their own content. If customers get in the habit of browsing in Apple TV, Apple can promote their own shows and eventually cut Netflix out.
Same reason when you open Netflix it shows new recommendations first, with the option to continue in-progress shows below. Most users will choose the latter, but they don't put it first because it hurts product metrics.
basisword
>> but they don't put it first because it hurts product metrics.
It's so depressing that instead of making products be the best product they can be for users, we inconvenience users at the expense of 'metrics'. It's a pervasive attitude at tech companies. Apple used to be _mostly_ an exception but even they are doing it now.
scyzoryk_xyz
Considering how much producing the content costs, it’s baked into all showbiz to try and get as much of the audience hooked on the same thing at the same time by design.
How the UI gets everyone watching shows A, B, and C but not the hundreds of others is a real thing I believe. Part of the “product” if you think about it.
(I’m not a fan of their product and it’s all TPB for me so I’m a cynic)
johnnyanmac
>it’s baked into all showbiz to try and get as much of the audience hooked on the same thing at the same time by design.
Yes, and that's why a la carte streaming of pretty much any media was a mistake. It's an open secret that none of them are profitable. But everyone was chasing that 2010's ZIRP with no plan whatsoever on how to actually recoup those costs. crashed the market before it really began. So the only answer was to enshittify the service once they had the numbers but not the money.
That's why I really hope games resist this model. It's the exact same honeytrap.
lotsofpulp
> It's an open secret that none of them are profitable
Netflix is:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...
Disney is also profitable:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
Apple and Amazon don’t really need to be “profitable”, because the purpose is selling Apple One and Prime bundles.
Warner Bros Discovery could have been profitable too, if ATT had not loaded it up with massive debt by overpaying for it.
johnnyanmac
Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"? As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products. That's pretty much what all companies have done for the past two years
It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".
lotsofpulp
> Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"
Profit = revenue minus expenses, so not sure what this could even mean. It is a function of both variables.
> As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products.
WBD has yet to show a profit since Zaslav got involved. He has personally lost a ton of wealth due to declining prices of the equity. But, of course, WBD is not a simple case of a media business not being able to sell media, it is a complicated due to the extreme debt it has, which doesn’t say anything about streaming businesses in general.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBD/warner-bros-di...
> It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".
Back to Netflix, their financial trends show a very successful business. Just check their growth in revenue, profit, and profit margins, for 10+ years.
duxup
They might want me in their app but I swear the content Netflix actually encourages me to watch is maybe a hundred titles or so and maybe they rotate in and out a few, but what they want to sell me on always feels the same regardless of my preferences.
They also suffer from "Oh you liked that high quality classic western? how about some garbage westerns?" No man....
I feel like I have to hunt for content on Netflix and I'm boxing with Netflix's suggestions.
giancarlostoro
> where they can promote their own content
Sounds to me like Apple should allow them to pick a handful of shows to promote as an incentive to integrate into their app.
amazingamazing
> Same reason when you open Netflix it shows new recommendations first
This seriously annoyed me to the point where I actually just use plex now.
CuriousRose
Somebody I know has gone back to torrenting. They state it’s far easier to do that than find content among their combined $100 monthly subscriptions, most of which has modern movie slop catalogues, while great classic films you need to pay for separately anyway. The execs will never learn.
mvanbaak
Imagine you are born and raised in brasil. You have a netflix subscription there and you can watch the things you want with brasilian audio and/or subs. Now, you move to another continent. You can watch the same content, but not with the audio/subtitles in a language you understand. When this person torrents this content, each and every language audio and/or subtitle is simply available and thus this person can watch the content, they were willing to pay for, without problems.
Once this problem is solved, we get to the 'problem' of having content available scattered over 584778964 apps or available in one.
WhyNotHugo
The language restrictions are absurd. When I visited friends in Germany, there’s lots of content on Netflix that we can’t watch together because subs are only available in German.
I really don’t get what they intend to gain by geo-restricting languages, but it seems to have slipped their minds that people travel or migrate.
CuriousRose
I would assume it's to prevent buying accounts in locations with cheaper pricing due to local affordability and using them internationally. A Turkish or African continent country would be a significantly cheaper subscription price than say Singapore or Switzerland.
WhyNotHugo
You can still do that. The subtitle languages are restricted to your current location, not to your account's associated country.
mvanbaak
It's probably a side-effect of licensing deals in regions. Besides the audio/video content, the subs are also included in those (at least I think, it being the reason makes the most sense)
All those region regulations worked ok-ish back when globalisation was not a thing. They are very outdated in the current times. But hey, they still make the big players a lot of money so nobody wants to change.
josteink
While this may sound exaggerated, I’ve actually on occasion torrented a show because I thought I had to if I wanted to see it, only to later turn out I could have watched on one of the streaming services I’m already paying for.
And that’s just crazy really.
moribvndvs
One of the worst streaming experiences of all the services (although Prime is giving it a run for the money by overriding the scrub feature and a few other things), abysmal exclusives, and they constantly hike rates while shrinking the catalog. My partner is the holdout but they are close to breaking, can’t wait to kill that sub.
giancarlostoro
Apple TV aggregating everything is what I want. Shame on Netflix.
russellbeattie
You can't blame Netflix for not wanting to be disintermediated. Take away their UI, and Netflix is just a bunch of video files in the cloud.
lotsofpulp
Netflix is an organization that coordinates numerous other businesses and people such that it results in the creation of video files in the cloud that people sufficiently desire to watch such that they are willing to pay Netflix.
And while video files in the cloud sounds not so exemplary, simultaneously delivering video files to hundreds of millions of devices is not trivial.
WesolyKubeczek
That feeling when an Apple engineer just wants to fix a typo in a source file and accidentally implements a Netflix integration. An honest mistake, could happen to anyone.
lol768
I mean, somebody must have implemented this .. right?
I'd be curious as to what had happened internally here.
xyst
RUMINT indicates native features that Apple offers can be enabled/disabled in NFLX apps via a feature flag.
Maybe devops engineer fat fingered it and enabled it by accident. Doesn’t break anything besides make the C-suite cry. So would make sense as to why there were no red flags, press releases or anything like that.
As a consumer, I hate using NFLX or Paramount, or even Amazon Prime UI. As much as I hate Apple, I do admit the aggregated view is nice. I can search for whatever show and presents me with options. If I am subscribed to the service it’s locked behind, then it opens the right app, and content starts playing.
mvanbaak
My dream is that all them offer catalogus and/or video via API. You have one global app, and you add the services you have (oauth link) and the moment you add a service their api will be added and you will get updates etc. When you click 'play' it will simply grab the video from one of the services you have and there you go.
If this was a thing, I would start to think about some subscriptions again. Till then, watching content in a legit way is simply so much more complicated then alternatives ;P
johnnyanmac
Sadly that goes against competition's mentality to try and crush all others. They don't want to share the limelight, even if they may in fact be the most profitable move. That's a small part of why everyone started pulling out of Netflix; It was pretty close to a monopoly and other companies didn't want to pay in.
Alternative methods rely on sacrificing convinience for time setting up and maintaining your own pipeline. So (perhaps luckily), it will always be a niche solution
vinni2
I turned off auto update let’s see how long it lasts.
giancarlostoro
I hate this because their app is garbage for finding anything for me. I can't even look through categories to find meaningful things. They just auto suggest categories, and none of them ever match what I'm in the mood for. You can't algorithm someone's watch mood.
callumjones
Another theory is this was meant to launch with the Apple announcement on Tuesday.
8bitben
I sense Netflix worries about the algorithms used by aggregators like Apple TV. It seems like their strategy is mostly quantity over quality, way too much low-value one-season-and-done series to try to keep people hooked.
basisword
I don't think there's any 'algorithm' at play with this integration that would concern them. When using Apple TV the search bar will search all the integrated services. So if you search for a movie it'll try and find it on one of the streaming apps you have installed before falling back on iTunes for rental/purchase. The Home Screen also shows the media you are currently watching or have queued to watch at some point. I think from Netflix perspective they want you to go into their app so they can try and keep you there. If they enable this integration suddenly you're launching Netflix content from the Home Screen and you may instead choose in your watchlist that's on another service. As a user, I basically stopped using Netflix because of it. The Apple TV app and integration with services is killer.
lotsofpulp
>As a user, I basically stopped using Netflix because of it. The Apple TV app and integration with services is killer.
I won’t pay for Netflix solely because of this issue. Netflix has probably bet correctly that customers like me are negligible, though.
init2null
But it sure makes it easier to forget about. If someone never watches Netflix, will they keep paying for it? They're missing out on an opportunity to prove value.
conductr
I’ve found opposite to be true. Several instances where I was shown only paid rentals via Apple search result but then found I had it available for free on one of my existing subscriptions. I basically lost trust in Apple search results and stopped using it.
basisword
Was that streaming service integrated with Apple TV? As the Netflix case shows you not only need the app, but it needs to integrate with the TV app to show in the search results.
conductr
The fact I am unaware of integration status of each app also renders the feature rather useless
madeofpalk
Not sure whether its naivete or not, but considering how poorly Apple does at things like search, I'm much more inclined to believe this is just incompetence.
The implementation of services on Apple TV has been a awesome. We open one app when we sit down to watch our shows. It works with little-to-no technical understanding or effort.
But we don't browse for stuff to watch very often. Netflix wants to get those views and autoplays. It's all about the stats boosts.
We dropped Netflix a long time ago. It became a made-for-tv content sausage factory with the occasional gem. Once a year we fire it up to binge the stuff our friends talk about all the time. Each time we are consistently reminded it's not worth the higher subscription price.