I've been with Netflix from the very beginning. For the longest time I was a frequent Blockbuster customer, as I'm sure lots of us were. I joined Netflix back when their whole business was built around shipping DVDs. You had to go onto their website, order a single DVD at a time and wait two business days for it to arrive. God forbid you pick a bad movie though because then you had to repeat the whole process over again just to watch a new one.
At one point, some genius Netflix executive thought that it was a silly idea to make people wait two days to get a DVD when they could just go to the Blockbuster down the street to get a movie. That's where streaming came into play. Try and remember the very first time you opened Netflix and realized you could basically watch anything you wanted without hesitation. It was amazing. And the best part? If they didn't have a movie available to stream, you could just order the DVD and you'd have it in a couple of days. No problem.
Except some genius at Netflix decided it would be a smart idea to separate those services and therefore make them two different subscriptions. Not a big deal because at that point, Netflix had begun to amass such a large number of movies and TV shows on their streaming service that the choices seemed endless. I even gritted my teeth when they raised the price of streaming, because once again, there was nowhere else you could find such a great selection at that value.
And then the harsh reality of licensing contracts set in. I was watching a movie one night and decided to leave the last 30 minutes for the next day only to come back and find the movie had been taken off the platform entirely. But now Netflix has been focusing mostly on their own original content, which has been hit or miss to say the least. Every once in a while they come out with some gems (Stranger Things, Orange Is The New Black, Ozark) but they are definitely prone to some duds.
And that's my main problem with Netflix, they're not going to give an honest assessment of their own content and they haven't done so thus far. I just don't have time to sit down and figure out what's actually good so I end up just waiting for a pop culture phenomenon to come out of the blue and just watch that. They've flooded their own market so badly there's just too many choices. The comedian Bill Burr said it best. When talking about comedy specials, they're not really considered "special" anymore because every comedian has one now.
There is such a thing as over saturation, especially when it comes to content like TV shows and movies. As time goes on and Netflix has to continue to shovel out millions of dollars to keep certain shows online, something will have to give eventually. Maybe it's time to give HULU a try.
