Comment by duped
5 hours ago
Consumers don't care so much about consolidation as they care about not getting ripped off. When Netflix and Hulu were the only streaming platforms you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted. Now you pay more for a worse experience.
Netflix at least has technical chops. Other studios (looking at you, Paramount-) put out barely functional apps because they know consumers ultimately will pay for their content.
Netflix may have the technical ability, but they don't deliver. Their UI just gets worse and worse in terms of usability and they keep cutting features on top of steadfastly refusing to provide features people have been asking for since they started steaming movies.
Basically every streaming app is minimally functional and obnoxious in their own ways. netflix isn't the worst of them, but it's no exception and getting worse all the time.
>you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted
Depends what you wanted.
Both a deep back catalog of TV and film more generally were always pretty lacking on all-you-could-eat streaming services. Frankly, my biggest complaint with Netflix is that they basically drove local video rental out of business and then shut their own rental down.
This. I loved the DVD service and I don't think I was alone. Younger folks didn't perhaps use it as much as some, but for those who don't have the best internet speed or service, they were great.
Even when I had good service/speeds the DVD service was amazing because it had way more options than streaming does even now, including some pretty hard to find DVDs, and you got the extra features! It was also nice to regularly get something in my mailbox besides spam...