Mike Flanagan Says Netflix Was "Actively Hostile" Towards the Idea of Releasing Physical Media: "It Became Clear Very Fast That Their Only Priority Was Subs"

So say I buy The Matrix on DVD. I can watch it whenever I like..

If I stop paying for Netflix, then I can’t watch it anymore so I have to keep signing up again. What about when the matrix isn’t on a Netflix, I then have to go sign up for Apple TV.

Isn’t capitalism supposed to weed out the companies without a viable business? If you can’t keep improving your product or you’ve got saturation with users then that’s your ceiling. Down like it, close down.

Kinda weird take from you to be honest. Like why won’t we think about the poor struggling corporations. Perhaps they would be in a better position if they didn’t go so long with losses trying to capture the market with a view to rinse us all later down the line.

I have exactly one monthly subscription and that’s for AppleCare+ on my phone. Fuck death my a thousand paper cuts.

yeah I hate owning things that I can keep and hold on to without someone revoking it away from me.

That's allowed. You have many options for digital media. I don't like spicy food. Upsets my tum tum. But if corporations were actively keeping spicy food off the market, I wouldn't say "Well that's great, because I hate spicy food." That would just be ridiculous.

Why?

Same. I understand all of the reasons why people prefer physical media, but after buying the same movie across three generations of physical media between VHS / DVD / Blueray / 4K UHD and now Dolby, I’d just prefer to have it once and get access to the best copy modern technology allows.

It’s also supremely easier to download a purchased digital copy instead of buying physical media, rip it, find increasing storage, find a player like Plex, maintain my own Plex server and hardware, and then download it.

I’ve done Plex for years with physical media, downloading a digital copy is simply a better consumer experience.

Netflix. Its how their business started. DVD rentals via mail.

Nokia started as a paper mill company and sold toilet paper. With the release of the Nokia 9 PureView smartphone, nobody expected Nokia to release bog roll along with it.

More like dead format. I haven't had a dvd player in my home for over a decade

Not only a dead format, but a unstable shelf life format. CDs and DVDs were always marketed as storage for good. But technically that was never possible, not the way it was actually manufactured. The used plastics and metal laminates had a rough expected life of 15 years or thereabouts, at best. Obviously a massive increase from magnetic tapes that started degrading as soon as the recording stopped and got slowly more damaged the more you played them. But still not a permanent solution. No organized data is stored forever, entropy won't allow this. Most if not all original compact discs are probably gone by now, and some end user burnables had even worse chemistry in their data layers than original prints.

Only actively making new copies of digital goods in new storage media regularly keeps those goods alive. We need new storage mediums that are resilient in the measure of centuries and not just a decade or so. We need commercial glass 3D optical storage now.

They are in the business of streaming, and are making art to maintain a fresh library to stream. Just like broadcasters and movie theaters before them.

TV shows and movies on physical media was a huge change for those that required a shift in priorities that took decades and for phyiscal media to be profitable. Netflix is still making bank doing what they know how to do, which is streaming. Switching to physical media would need to be more reliably profitable for them than limiting it to streaming to encourage subs to make the switch.

I would prefer the physical media option too, but their reluctance is understandable.

Don't worry. Just because you can't pay for something doesn't mean it's gone away. Netflix (and basically all media companies) are just shooting themselves in the foot trying to lock everyone into a bunch of subscription services. If I could pay them a couple bucks to download a movie or show with no DRM I would. Instead they get $0 from me and I do it anyway.

Ok. But if they're footing the bill, that's their choice. The content creators don't need to go to Netflix for their funding, there are many other options.

Not to be that guy, but the McRib going away is a bit of a cultural thing because that's a food that only the USA could come up with and get people to eat. That being said, I fully understand and agree with your point.

If you feel that way, then you should pay to support them, just like the mcribbers

Okay. Don't consume that media? Artists are not forced into contracts with Netflix. They can do what thousands of artists did before Netflix ever existed. Will they hit the same level of audience that Netflix pulls? No. People like streaming and it's popular as hell. Why would they be entitled to that though? Artists, creators of any type really, have agency to do as they wish with their art. Consumers have a choice in the art they consume. If either chooses to engage with Netflix, why would it not be on the terms that Netflix has openly set and asked you whether you wanted to partake in?

I just do not understand this viewpoint and it's all over the thread. To be clear, Netflix does other stuff that sucks, like killing shows and underpaying artists. Be mad at them for that all you like, I'll be right there with ya. Insinuating Netflix is doing something ethically bad by pivoting to streaming, which the vast majority of the world's population would rather use than physical media, just does not make a lick of sense to me. Why should Netflix pay employees, rent factory space, set up an entire vertical they've gotten out of, just to produce CDs that history showed hardly anyone bought after the transition to streaming?

And Netflix isn't the one killing it, they're just following trends. We are killing physical media because we don't use or buy it.

Man's destroying my hopes and dreams here x'D

Nah jk, i seriously didn't think of the implications yet.

Do you know how copyshops work?

Even though my wife subscribes to Netflix, I would buy Midnight Mass on Blu-ray. They are missing out on taking our money twice.

Netflix has a lot of great shows and movies. But the point of those is to sell Netflix.

Mostly I am thinking of stuff like the final season of Game of Thrones that had a lot of "dark" scenes that looked like dogshit without HDR. Or even Andor which had a few striking shots that very much suffered from compression artifacts (and is why I am so glad there was a blu ray of that).

Yes, that particular costume was the cover picture the entire time before I watched it (Netflix). It switched to a couple other shots of that character as I progressed but I don't know if it was related. As a Halloween enthusiast, I have studied this picture a lot and I'm always excited to see it. In my opinion, it (and other moments with this costume) is just perfectly unsettling. I guess because of the very clean seams around the mask, perfectly masking the wearer's identity. The eyes are so perfectly black and the face so perfectly pointed at the viewer. It's probably also fueled by the sex appeal, tricking me into the danger zone. That's even before I found out how unsettling the scene actually is. It caused me concern in a daily activity for a couple weeks (no spoilers).

Anyway, as for the show, I really enjoyed it as well. It's a series of separate events being retold by daddy/grandpa Usher, leading up to the present. It's horror and fairly gruesome without toouch gore, but, imo, tells a damn good story. I greatly enjoyed the pacing of the reveals and the action. I would say it resembles American Horror Story as a genre, but without as much senseless violence and horror - or maybe it tells you it isn't so senseless. Maybe a little more sexually driven but certainly less gory.

It was also cool, as a Battlestar Galactica fan, see two BSG actors come up. Mary MacDonell as a titular series character, and Michael Trucco as an episode character. I enjoyed the music, both the soundtrack and score, so much that I was surprised it wasn't Bear McCreary.

Like I said, I'm just here to talk about The Fall of the House of Usher. I recommend it as an 8-episode self-contained series. I enjoyed the placement and delivery of all the actors in their roles.