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So, after watching two episodes of House of Cards from The Pirate Bay, I think to myself «hey, I would like to watch more of this – I should try paying Netflix for access to all the episodes!»

Turns out, Netflix doesn't actually hire web people, and they only have this one guy who can sort of get something working, but it's still utter shit. Does anyone know if they have the same user interface globally, or if I'm being subjected to a terrible UI experiment? It has a language menu that does nothing except warn me that not all contents is available in English, and even if I confirm my choice, everything is still in Norwegian. Every time I start watching a new thing, it reverts to showing Norwegian subtitles. Storing my selection somewhere would be like the first assignment in any web development class. Also, it keeps fucking using half the screen to nag me about connecting to fucking Facebook. The video stuff itself works fine – everything else I feel I could do better in a few weeks.

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I mainly watch it through my Apple TV, but when I've used the web interface it hasn't seemed too nagging or buggy. :\

On a side note, I have also seen the first two episodes of House of Cards, and loving it as well.

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The interface is also pretty shit on 360. I hear it's great on Apple TV. The iOS version is also fine.

Never really used the web interface. On 360 after I first said No to Facebook, it just defaulted to that. Subtitles are defaulted to none, I think, on 360 (I wish it were the other way around, actually)

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Toblix, it's endearing how you keep throwing yourself against the cliffs in an effort to legitimately watch stuff, only to encounter time and time again how awful the official services are.

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You know this is all just fake preemptive evidence for if he ever gets arrested by the FBI for his copious amounts of piracy, right?

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I'm guess I'm torn between my principles, my desire to watch great stuff, my desire to actually pay for a great service, my frustration and contempt for today's big media corporations and my frustration with the incompetency and cluelessness with which they're approaching the post-internet world, especially contrasted with the extreme gusto and perseverance they're displaying in trying to keep the old, outdated ways of things in place. I want to pay money to watch this great show House of Cards, for example, but I feel like paying Netflix is saying «hey your service is sweet,» when I really hate almost everything about it. They could so easily turn it into a fantastic service, but apparently don't care, and deliver something half-assed. So, I shouldn't pay, and thus shouldn't watch the show. But I want to watch it, and I'm weak. So I do some pirating and some buying and feel sort of okay.

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I'm guess I'm torn between my principles, my desire to watch great stuff, my desire to actually pay for a great service, my frustration and contempt for today's big media corporations and my frustration with the incompetency and cluelessness with which they're approaching the post-internet world, especially contrasted with the extreme gusto and perseverance they're displaying in trying to keep the old, outdated ways of things in place. I want to pay money to watch this great show House of Cards, for example, but I feel like paying Netflix is saying «hey your service is sweet,» when I really hate almost everything about it. They could so easily turn it into a fantastic service, but apparently don't care, and deliver something half-assed. So, I shouldn't pay, and thus shouldn't watch the show. But I want to watch it, and I'm weak. So I do some pirating and some buying and feel sort of okay.

Or you could wait for the DVD release.

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I tried checking if there would be a Blu-ray release, but couldn't find one and figured Netflix intended to keep it streaming only.

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I don't get how Netflix is this big media giant, who doesn't care about its service, in your eyes, toblix. Netflix are, from what I can tell, putting all their eggs in the streaming basket. Their service isn't perfect, but it's pretty good, stable and cheap (maybe the web stuff is awful?). I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but they seem to try their best at securing deals to offer more new content and are now making steps towards their own original content (and making some pretty good choices in that department)

What bothers me are the actual big media giant, Time Warner, Comcast, Viacom who are doing their best to keep us stuck in the 20th century as far as digital content goes (at least, outside of the US)

From a European standpoint I'd say Netflix are the only ones who are trying to change how we watch TV. I think paying $14 to watch House of Cards doesn't sound like such a bad deal.

I also feel like not paying for your entertainment is saying "no matter the quality of your content, it's not worth the money"

I don't know, maybe I just don't put as much weight on the service (or find it as horrible) as you do, toblix. I like putting money in the hands of people that make good decisions and produce quality shows, in the hopes that they produce more of it.

As an aside, if pirating weren't free, would you pay for that? Are there any advantages to piracy, besides it being free?

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They probably will at some point, unless it's a huge disaster. But this is their big push towards their new television dynamic, so they won't announce it for a while yet.

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I don't get how Netflix is this big media giant, who doesn't care about its service, in your eyes, toblix. Netflix are, from what I can tell, putting all their eggs in the streaming basket. Their service isn't perfect, but it's pretty good, stable and cheap (maybe the web stuff is awful?). I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but they seem to try their best at securing deals to offer more new content and are now making steps towards their own original content (and making some pretty good choices in that department)
Sure, they have some good stuff on there, like House of Cards and Arrested Development, Mad Men, etc. The streaming also works fine – I select a movie/episode and a couple of seconds later, I'm watching it. The user interface is terrible, though, which annoys me terribly, perhaps unreasonably much. It just feels like they're doing the bare minimum to get video on my screen, and nothing more.
What bothers me are the actual big media giant, Time Warner, Comcast, Viacom who are doing their best to keep us stuck in the 20th century as far as digital content goes (at least, outside of the US)
Yeah, I was being unclear – I definitely don't consider Netflix a big huge evil media giant. In fact, I quite like the thing they're trying out with making television without the television (House of Cards, Arrested Development.) I was thinking more of the other stuff I find myself pirating, like most television shows. There is literally nothing preventing them from letting me buy/subscribe to high quality episodes and movies the moment they're ready, except hundreds of lawyers and suits and distribution agreements and other stuff I don't fully understand but still totally hate.
From a European standpoint I'd say Netflix are the only ones who are trying to change how we watch TV. I think paying $14 to watch House of Cards doesn't sound like such a bad deal.
You're right. Content-wise, Netflix are doing some neat things, and most problems people have with their contents is due to the aforementioned dinosaur lawyers and agreements. The closed-alpha-like user interface is still unbelievable to me, though.
I also feel like not paying for your entertainment is saying "no matter the quality of your content, it's not worth the money"
It's a moot point, though. Whatever I'm "saying" with paying/not paying or pirating/buying/not watching at all, nobody hears or cares – all these companies can do is look at the numbers and try to figure out what's going on.
As an aside, if pirating weren't free, would you pay for that? Are there any advantages to piracy, besides it being free?
Totally. When I pirate a TV show

or a movie, I get a h264 .mkv file I can watch in my bedroom or living room whenever I want, regardless of internet connectivity. I can play it on whatever platform I want, like, say, Linux, and I can use great video player software like VLC or MPC that has tons of nerd settings for video and audio processing. When I buy a TV show or a movie, I get streaming-only video of varying (often lower) quality that I can only play in their shitty Flash applet video player. If I buy a movie on Blu-ray, I get long loading times, forced advertisements and forced «you wouldn't steal a car» videos. It's like the games piracy discussion: the honest customer gets to deal with shitty rootkit DRM, and the pirates don't, because they're pirates.

To be clear, I'm not saying piracy is the right thing to do – it's against my principles. I'm never able to stick to my principles though.

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Totally. When I pirate a TV show or a movie, I get a h264 .mkv file I can watch in my bedroom or living room whenever I want, regardless of internet connectivity. I can play it on whatever platform I want, like, say, Linux, and I can use great video player software like VLC or MPC that has tons of nerd settings for video and audio processing. When I buy a TV show or a movie, I get streaming-only video of varying (often lower) quality that I can only play in their shitty Flash applet video player. If I buy a movie on Blu-ray, I get long loading times, forced advertisements and forced «you wouldn't steal a car» videos. It's like the games piracy discussion: the honest customer gets to deal with shitty rootkit DRM, and the pirates don't, because they're pirates.

To be clear, I'm not saying piracy is the right thing to do – it's against my principles. I'm never able to stick to my principles though.

I don't subscribe to Netflix, but I do buy lots of physical media, and this totally captures my feelings. Without a doubt, the pirates are delivering the superior product. It's delivered faster and more easily, with higher quality, than anything I could pay for. It's even worse with anime, where free fan translations for Japanese Blu-ray rips are routinely head-and-shoulders above what even the most successful anime distros offer. I have several burned DVDs with fansubs of series I already own, just because the free version is so much better.

If there were suddenly a five-dollar fee attached to pirating a twelve-episode cour, I would pay it in a second. I know it's easy to dismiss that statement as the bluster of someone already compromised by pirating, but I spend a lot on media, more than any of my friends who watch all their shows legally through Netflix or Hulu. Yet I'm fully aware that companies could get even more money out of me if their digital efforts weren't so awful.

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Steam did it with video games. If I could legally download 1080p video files of shows or movies I would pay out of my ass. If someone provided a service that let me get home from work and find nice, legal .mkv files automatically downloaded, I would give them so much money. Of course, realistically speaking, they would have to have some sort of DRM on them, but I bet there are plenty of container formats and open standards available that would allow this.

If a part of the Blu-ray standard had been that there would always be a way of just bypassing everything and go straight to the movie, I would buy lots of Blu-rays.

Maybe the thing with Steam is that it literally provides an alternative that's better than piracy. Buying, downloading and installing a game on Steam is much easier than having to deal with different no-cd cracks for different patch versions or whatever it is game pirates have to do these days. I literally can't remember the last time I pirated a game, and my Steam library is packed. And that's video games – shouldn't doing the same thing with video be that much simpler to figure out?

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I think it's indicative of the mentality out there that .mkv is such a powerful and useful format, but companies like Sony didn't support it for half a decade because they declared it the format for pirates. Even now, although their most recent round of Blu-ray players supports .mkv in theory, updates routinely break that support and bork basic things like font rendering. It's like 1960s record execs trying to downplay the success of the Beatles.

And yeah, ads before DVD and Blu-ray menus are ludicrous. I actually put a disc in this weekend with five minutes of previews that "menu", "skip", and "fast-forward" all didn't work on. I nearly took the disc out right there. Fuck that.

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I agree. When it comes to physical media vs torrents, legal customers are being fucked.

But we're talking about Netflix! And that's when I think it comes down to preference. I love streaming, because it keeps hard disks uncluttered, I don't have to worry about bringing my collection with me, moving it from device to device, and assuming you have either a console, Smart TV or an Apple TV, it's simple to start watching on TV. I need to check out the web interface again, because that's the only negative thing I can think of.

Contrast that with torrents, where it needs to download first, then either move it to a hard disk / device, or set up a stream server, sometimes re-encode it to make if compatible for the recipient device.. I wouldn't pay for that. It's too much of a hassle, for me.

I still pirate stuff. But I actually only do it if it is legally unavailable in my country. Breaking Bad, for example, is being shown for the first time in Denmark next weekend. Five years too late.

If you have a legal, reasonable way to watch something, then really.. there's no excuse!

But like you said, you don't have as much of a problem with Netflix alone, more just the entire video industry. And I agree with that! The sooner they realize that they could make even more money by not being old farts about digital downloads/streaming, the better.

Also, for clarification, I meant literally paying for pirating.. So you'd be paying the guys who encode/rip the stuff? Pay for their "services" instead of Netflix. It was a stupid hypothetical question..

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I can't remember seeing a single Facebook-related thing in Netflix ever. Maybe it's there and I just never noticed? The interface has always seemed fine to me. I click a movie or TV show, and a few seconds later it starts playing. If it's a TV show, at the end it queues up the next episode. I don't know how much more I'd need.

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I think the Facebook thing is a feature of the European version of Netflix, for some reason.

Maybe you answered it, toblix, butane watching House of Cards legally? If not, I think UI complaints is a silly reason to go torrent it, honestly.

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I like using http://instantwatcher.com/ to find streaming content on Netflix. It has some useful features like, separating film and tv content, and sorting by whats been added to Netflix recently. I also use it to keep an eye on what content is expiring.

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I can't remember seeing a single Facebook-related thing in Netflix ever. Maybe it's there and I just never noticed? The interface has always seemed fine to me. I click a movie or TV show, and a few seconds later it starts playing. If it's a TV show, at the end it queues up the next episode. I don't know how much more I'd need.

Just to try to clarify my experience, imagine that a third of the opening screen is covered in a message saying «HEY YOU FORGOT TO LINK YOUR NETFLIX TO YOUR FACEBOOK, » and that every time you start to play a video it has Norwegian subtitles turned on, and sometimes you can't even turn them off. It's not the end of the world, but you would maybe wonder why they can't fix these minor things. It remembers exactly where you left off in all the videos, so why can't it remember that you never want subtitles, right? I totally get how this wouldn't really bother most people at all, much less throw them into a fit of pirating internet rage, and I figure that a good compromise is subscribing to Netflix (and HBO too, then,) and then just torrenting the stuff those services can't provide. So I'll be a nice pirate, like in Monkey Island.

But we're talking about Netflix! And that's when I think it comes down to preference. I love streaming, because it keeps hard disks uncluttered, I don't have to worry about bringing my collection with me, moving it from device to device, and assuming you have either a console, Smart TV or an Apple TV, it's simple to start watching on TV. I need to check out the web interface again, because that's the only negative thing I can think of.

Contrast that with torrents, where it needs to download first, then either move it to a hard disk / device, or set up a stream server, sometimes re-encode it to make if compatible for the recipient device.. I wouldn't pay for that. It's too much of a hassle, for me.

Yup, I'm sorry for mixing my general big media hate into this. I guess our situtations are different, as I only have experience (and use for) the web interface, and never need to do anything with the torrented files. In your case, the legal, paid-for option is also the most convenient, which is sweet.

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What I don't get is why certain shows aren't coming out on Blu-ray... Even though they were shot in HD! I would love to own Community and Arrested Development on Blu-ray. My only option to get shows like that in HD is through iTunes, but then it's way more expensive AND you don't get special features. Great.

I don't want to fork out for the DVDs, either, incase a Blu-ray release ever appears.

We're a long way from where we should be. It's no wonder the Pirate Bay is still going strong.

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I'm happy you're going to be a nice pirate, toblix. (Also, I am too, so I'm not judging you, or anything)

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Just to try to clarify my experience, imagine that a third of the opening screen is covered in a message saying «HEY YOU FORGOT TO LINK YOUR NETFLIX TO YOUR FACEBOOK, » and that every time you start to play a video it has Norwegian subtitles turned on, and sometimes you can't even turn them off. It's not the end of the world, but you would maybe wonder why they can't fix these minor things. It remembers exactly where you left off in all the videos, so why can't it remember that you never want subtitles, right?

I'm guessing it's more like someone dropped the ball localizing it for Norway than the Netflix service itself. I mean it is the service itself, but it could be a shoddy 3rd party contract job. I've never encountered Netflix bothering me about Facebook and I guess North America just doesn't have to deal with auto subtitles unless the movie isn't in English. It's really not fair how they are running it in your country, but maybe if you were vocal to Netflix, some things might get passed on and changed?

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I'm guessing it's more like someone dropped the ball localizing it for Norway than the Netflix service itself.

To me, that is the service. I don't care about whatever they've got going on behind the scenes, and who they hire to do what, and whether the US version is tremendous – I pay Netflix to get to watch their stuff, and, as I said, I'm happy with the content, but not with the presentation. I've let them know through many channels, so we'll see.

In hindsight, I started this thread in one of my many fits of exploding internet rage. I shouldn't be that surprised that a big internet company provides a bad user experience. At least I didn't call the thread «Netflix?! More like Net dicks!» or something.

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