You ever look at a corporation and think, “What is going on in their head?”
The answer of course is yes, you do, because corporations are making increasingly erratic decisions that don’t make any sense in any direction. Like, yeah, every decision ever made by a corporation is one that’s going to ruin lives and the planet, that’s old news, whatever.
But now they’re doing things that actively seem to be hurting their own company’s bottom line and while it’s hilarious it’s also concerning because it’s like…what’s going on? Do you know something we don’t? If you guys are going to burn the Amazon can you at least make obscene amounts of money doing it so something is happening here? Please?
Anyway, you’d think this is about Twitter but it’s actually about Netflix. I don’t know what – if anything – is going on inside Elon’s head at any given moment but it’s clear the man is some combination of stupid and insane and while this doesn’t excuse his actions it does explain them.
I have no idea who’s at the rudder at Netflix and don’t care to find out but I think they need some therapy and maybe some business classes because what the fuck.
Like, yeah, the password sharing thing. They’ve been threatening to crackdown on password sharing for a decade now. Always the same. It’s like your mother constantly threatening to get rid of your dad’s project car in the garage but it never goes anywhere because it’s way more hassle to actually get rid of it so it just leaks oil onto the cement forever. They’ve been bitching about all the money Millennials are ‘stealing’ by sharing passwords for forever but doing fuck all about it because they know the second they do a bunch of people who are already pissed off are simply going to cancel their subscription.
And why are they pissed off? Maybe it’s because they decided to add a Basic plan with advertising after years of never having advertising. And I know, Netflix, you were super jealous that other streaming services like Hulu and Amazon always had ads in their services and no one was complaining about that! First of all: yes, they fucking were. Second of all: you fucking started this shit, and you started it without ads, so of course people are going to be pissed if you add them to your cheapest option and then bump the price on the non-advertising option because – and I know this is going to be a shock to you corporate bungholes – humanity as a whole is so entirely exhausted of being advertised to from every single corner of existence that if anyone ever manages to get an ad on the moon I’m fairly confident the whole thing will be blown out of existence within the week.
Surprise, surprise – that Basic plan is doing nothing for their bottom line because fuck you, that’s why.
At least the Basic plan with ads people can ignore. At least you kept the plans without ads, even if you do jack up the price occasionally. Whatever. I’ll keep pretending ‘inflation’ is something that’s currently happening naturally and isn’t those same corporate bungholes raising prices simply because they can because our entire government – the Entire. Fucking. Thing. – is beholden to you flaming fucknards. At least I can still pay the going rate to not have to watch white people having fun in the desert, or at the beach, or in an abandoned subway while second-tier pop music plays and then the Pepsi logo graces us with its ugly presence. At least I don’t have to listen to a Sam Elliot-type choke on all his lines trying to equate buying a big Fuck Off truck with being Super Patriotic and Strong and Manly and Big-Dicked. At least I can bribe these losers to let me watch Wednesday in peace without having to sit through some famous celebrity pretending crypto isn’t a giant scam in a constant state of imploding in on itself.
But I can’t fucking watch anything if Netflix keeps canceling shit.
I really don’t get it. This is the part that’s baffling to me. Why go to all the trouble of listening to the pitch for a show, approving the show, paying the money for people to make the show, advertising the show, and finally putting the show on your app only to pull it in a matter of weeks, sometimes days? If you want to burn money, you know you can just do that, right? There isn’t a law about it. Get all your ill-gotten gains printed up in sequential one hundreds, pile it all up in a warehouse or on a beach or in the middle of a forest, douse it all in kerosene and let that baby rip. Who the fuck cares? Not Netflix, clearly.
This article from Forbes (fun fact! If you hit that ‘I disabled my ad blocker’ button enough times without actually disabling your adblocker, the message gives up and goes away) goes into how Netflix is screwing themselves in the long run, curating a selection of shows that has essentially turned into Russian roulette. Anytime someone in the future wants to start a Netflix show the first thing they’ll have to do is research if it got cancelled on a cliffhanger lest they be burned.
I can only come up with two possibilities here, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is that Netflix isn’t interested in creating a selection of complete shows people can enjoy for years to come. No, the only thing Netflix wants is a Mega Hit. Another Stranger Things. A show with a small but devoted fanbase is completely uninteresting to them, and they’ve never even heard the phrase ‘sleeper hit’ before. They want the hype machine and they want it immediately, and like a little kid with a box of Russel Stover they will take a bite out of every chocolate and toss them if they don’t find the caramel inside.
The other thing I think is going on got brought to my attention by author and expert Tumblr shitposter Neil Gaiman over the summer after The Sandman was released:
It’s a perfect example of the first point: the only thing Netflix seems to want is everyone to be so fucking jazzed for their new show that they can’t help but watch the entire ten-ish hours in a single sitting. It’s a model they championed back when they were the only game in town and releasing an entire show at the same time was a novelty.
I don’t know if viewers in general are over binging, but I’m getting the sense that the other streaming services out there now aren’t about it. Disney+ has been releasing their biggest Marvel and Star Wars shows weekly since they got started. Amazon, if I remember correctly, used to drop their shows at once but in the past year or two have switched to a weekly release model with their big stuff. Hulu and HBO both have a stronger relationship with traditional television models and I’m not sure either have ever released everything at the same time.
I could be wrong, don’t fucking quote me on any of the last paragraph.
Dropping a show all at once seemed like it was the way of the future with television, but its increasingly starting to look like it was simply a fad and I don’t think Netflix likes that. In fact, I think they’re digging their heels into the mud and being an absolute bitch about it. It would be one thing if they continued to drop entire seasons of a show and simply let viewers figure out how they wanted to watch. But no. They’re going to drop the whole damn season, and you’re going to watch the whole thing this weekend, because if you don’t that means you don’t love it and you don’t deserve it and fuck it! It’s already cancelled! Fuck!
This plan is terrible for the long run. And terrible for the short run, too, because people are getting real sick of their shit. So for when, exactly, is this plan for? What is happening here? Who is making these decisions? Do they think they’re good ideas? Is the entire planet run by nepo-babies and we’re just starting to find out what that actually means for everyone?
I don’t know, but I do think it’s fucking rich that Netflix made a show about Blockbuster hanging on by a thread when they can’t even stop cutting their own fucking rope.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 