Each day in India’s capital, New Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people take a quiet subway across the crowded suburbs to reach their work. The relative calm is interrupted every few minutes as the train reaches a station and an ever-growing population jostles to find a seat. Seconds later, everyone returns their attention to their smartphone screen, resuming the comedy sketch they were watching on YouTube.
More than 7,500 miles away, executives at Netflix are scrambling for new strategies to court this audience. Earlier this year, CEO Reed Hastings, who has identified sleep as the biggest competition to his service on multiple occasions, wondered out loud if the next 100 million Netflix subscribers are in India.
They probably are, but YouTube, not sleep, has already claimed them.
The story posits that YouTube is overtaking Netflix because it is more mobile-friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:03PM (4 children)
Youtube has started interrupting videos every hour or so with an 'are you still watching' prompt. It is getting unusable. I mean they probably dont care much about me since im adblocking anyway but this is gunna annoy tons of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:09PM
Just direct a botnet to "watch" YouTube, and thereby drain Google of its resources.
Also, how many people use YouTube to fall asleep, like TV of yore? It used to be a feature to have a TV that would start a countdown every so often, and then shut itself off unless interrupted. YouTube has the same idea, I suppose, but it's even more important for them, because that's one less connection they need to handle.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:33PM (2 children)
I haven't seen anything like that with my adblocker in place. Are you logged in while watching?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:51PM (1 child)
I dont have an account. Using firefox 63 and ublock origin w youtube open in a secondary monitor playing music. So it may have to do with how often you interact with the page. They may also be AB testing this new 'feature'.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:57PM
Google Gaslighting.
I have a Google account logged in while using YouTube, but no actual YouTube account/channel. That might have something to do with it.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:05PM (10 children)
However, I can publish via YouTube. That alone makes YouTube much more interesting.
YouTube has just one problem: It's algorithms are designed to promote material deemed suitable for proles, and to hide material that is not; just visit the YouTube homepage with a fresh browser, and you'll be greeted with the most contemptible pablum you could possibly imagine.
All of the gems are lost in a frothy foam of intellectual flimflam.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:31PM (3 children)
Netflix and YouTube are two completely different content bases, end of story.
It's like comparing whether whitewater rafting kayaks are overtaking subcompact commuter cars.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:37PM (2 children)
Content makes no difference; it's a not a point of fundamental differentiation.
Money goes in (somehow), and A/V data comes out.
They are exactly the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:00PM
Reductio ad absurdum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @08:16PM
Mmmh, I smell autism.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday December 15 2018, @05:41PM
Yes. Google even "worries" that some users go off the hook by being exposed only to certain content typically through interest groups on social media. Google is actively working on ways to prevent this and make users watching habits more uniform across political spectrum. Mostly it means more liberal content has to be pushed.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:41PM (2 children)
because it has better content.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 15 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
And here I am thinking it's because it's free... How silly
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Sunday December 16 2018, @01:18AM
I don't know how it compares with netflix, but most movies on prime aren't worth watching.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
I just wish YouTube would stop trying to suggest to me videos I've already watched. Even when I click on the "Not Interested" -> "Tell Us Why" -> "I've already seen this video", they keep popping up.
Apparently my interests are so outside the mainstream of YouTube watchers that it doesn't have anything else to suggest to me but the same handful of videos.
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Sunday December 16 2018, @01:45AM
It's almost like there isn't anyone there listening to you...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:19PM (3 children)
Netflix sems to have become more concerned about stuff like 'diversity' than producing good content for a fair price:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/new-netflix-executive-to-help-make-staff-as-diverse-as-its-users [bloomberg.com]
Diversity is great when it arises naturally due to successful cooperation between people of different backgrounds, but once you make it a metric and start trying to enforce it everything gets crappier and crappier. I started shorting netflix stock shortly after I saw this news and its worked out great: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-NFLX/ [tradingview.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:24PM
I wouldn't short it but I also wouldn't hold any company that thinks you can judge people based on their sex, skin color, or such. Which is exactly what making decisions based on any of the above is saying.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
What? Do You mean like making a character in a fantasy setting dark brown where the rest of her race is white as lily flowers and think the viewers won't be distracted? Lime as in wtf is a Dark Elf doing living with the surface elves?
How about making a white main character in a series black where one of the major plot points is racism? Invert everything?
They speak of white washing. With God reason. Now we have black washing.
Ohh I know. Let's Invert the characters sex and attributes in another major book to film conversion just so a major awesome super star can pretend to act and really piss of the kiddies who were expecting the movie to be somewhat similar to the book.
No. Can't do that. Must black wash the cast. Must have gender balance.
Should we just have laws that say that all novels and movies must have gender and race and age and sexual alignment balance. Minimum of one blind person per series. A major role must be assigned to a person with appropriate disabilities. One role at least for a gender neutral person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @02:48AM
This is inspirational. Could be a book. A world where the disabled, redundant and the unwanted at discarded.
Hit by a car? Crippled? Born with a disability? Prove your worth to society or die horribly.
Choose between a quick death paid for by your family or a sponsor, or entry into the Game of Games where the prize is to live another day.
Winners can buy their way out of the game. Even win the right to breed again.
Losers die.
The blind, the crippled, the unlucky, the colorblind, all go into the ring.
Who will survive today?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:19PM
s/You/Red/
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by CZB on Saturday December 15 2018, @05:56PM
Does Netflix have daily news shows from indie reporters? Are there hit serial dramas on YT? I'm not interested in what netflix sells.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GeminiDomino on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:07PM
When I finally cancelled, it was because that seemed to be where the next ten million netflix offerings are coming from, so chances are good he's right.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @06:09AM (3 children)
If I want to watch something to fall asleep it keeps auto-playing more episodes, which ruins my sleep. With Amazon Prime, you can disable that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @07:28AM (2 children)
You can disable autoplay on Netflix, too.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 17 2018, @02:23AM
There's always the "Netflix socks":
https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-socks-turn-off-the-show-when-you-fall-asleep-2015-12 [businessinsider.com]
http://makeit.netflix.com/projects/socks [netflix.com]
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:34PM
How?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
there's a netflix competitor in asia: iFlix. they sell "time" via scratch cards. what they don't tell you after spending money on the cards, is that you need to register your phone number with them before you can use the code on the card.
also, it has a dedicated app on android but the "customer care" stuff happens via external email address. they can transport gigatons of random data to a gazillion people but cannot be bothered to integrate "customer care" and "feddback" into the app itself?
after giving you my money, i can give you my time to remember a username and password and be bothered to enter a ass-long unlock code scratched free (instead of using the barcode reader feature of the camera) but else stop pestering me.
will not use again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @02:53AM
Netflix credit can be purchased at stores now. Buy the card, it is activated at the counter, enter the info to update the credit on your Netflix account. Easy.
Netflix don't need to do credit card processing. I don't need to put my credit card info across the Internet. The local store gets a cut. Everyone wins.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday December 17 2018, @06:44PM
IMO, YouTube vs Netflix are totally different markets.
YouTube is replacing what used to be TV -- the stuff you watch every day, but generally don't care too much about. The stuff you can tune out for twenty minutes and won't really miss anything important. The stuff where you can pick up a series on the 100th (or for YouTube, 500th) episode and not really have any problem understanding what's going on. The stuff that people play as background noise when they're mostly focused on something else.
Netflix is replacing the traditional movie market -- stuff where you plan to actually sit down and pay attention. Stuff where you want to have a complex plot that actually forces you to pay attention and think about what's going on.
Sure, Netflix produces a lot of "television shows", but they're not television as we've known it in the past. Or at least the stuff I'm watching isn't. They expect you to binge it in a week. It's written more like a ten hour long movie. There's no "Previously on..." that fills up half the episode. There's no "To be continued..." -- EVERY episode is to be continued. All of a sudden I find myself rewinding if I lose focus for even five minutes -- I've never really done that before, but I have to now because some of these shows are freakin DENSE.
YouTube is what you watch when you want to zone out and not think too much. Yeah, there's a lot of science and stuff, even some pretty great stuff along the lines of the old Discovery Channel shows, but if you zone out for ten minutes, you miss that video, you pick up the next one. These are the new sitcoms. The only real difference is that you don't have to accept reruns anymore.