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The video streaming service plans to spend up to $8bn on content next year to compete with fast-growing rivals.
Netflix will issue bonds to investors, although the interest rate it will pay has yet to be decided, the company said in a statement.
Netflix plans to release 80 films next year, but some analysts are wary about its cash burn and debt interest costs.
The company's latest debt fundraising is its largest so far, and the fourth time in three years it has raised more than $1bn by issuing bonds.
Earlier this month, Netflix said it would raise prices in countries including the UK and US for the first time in two years.
Has Netflix added enough original material to make up for the licensed content they've dropped and the price increase they mean to enact?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fishybell on Wednesday October 25 2017, @12:39AM (11 children)
As apparently the only one here willing to admit they watch Netflix, I guess I'll add my two cents:
No. They need to stop dropping non-original content. Their original content can be great (see Stranger Things), but I subscribe for mostly non-original content.
I don't mind waiting a year for the content to arrive on Netflix, but I am annoyed when a show I've been watching for years just up and leaves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Wednesday October 25 2017, @01:09AM (5 children)
Yep, same here. If the stuff I want to watch was not being removed in a regular basis, then I'd be much happier (my kids would also like to know why suddenly entire seasons of their cartoons disappear, leaving me trying to explain a 3 and a 5 year old that I'm not the one responsible for this :D). Yes they are increasing rates on a regular basis but we are still ways behind standard cable fees for a lot of ad-free content.
I speculate that eventually Netflix will have ads, except for premium customers or something like that. Then premium customers will have fewer ads than others etc. As far as I am concerned, their original content is, in most cases, not that impressive. There are exceptions that have been really successful (Stranger things, House of cards etc.) but there is also a lot of stuff that sucks in my opinion.
A few years back they had a lot of lesser known movies and series that I loved to watch. I discovered Scrotal Recall this way and really dug that show. Same with Korean and other ASian movies. A lot of the good stuff has been removed and is replaced by mainstream crap that most Netflix viewers probably don't watch after seeing the preview image.
Anyway, still miles better than cable. Every time I travel and turn on a tv in a hotel, I am baffled by the level of the crap they show and the amount of ads and their frequency. I am very happy I moved out of that 5 years ago :).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:30PM (4 children)
That's partly why we dropped Netflix, too. It wasn't expensive, but pulling it up every other day to find the thing the kids wanted to watch had vanished produced caterwauling to wake the dead. We had Amazon Prime on the Roky by default, so switched to that. It, too, has been completely mined out now so we tell the kids to go read books or do crafts.
We had this experience as well. It was fun seeing productions from cultures that you usually don't get to see in the US. But all that content kept inexplicably vanishing, too. We would have kept Netflix had they kept that sort of content around.
All in all it feels like passive entertainment has reached its limit, though. Gaming, VR may step in and fill the entertainment void, but there's also an outside chance people may switch all that off and go outside and have real adventures instead.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 25 2017, @07:11PM (3 children)
It wasn't expensive, but pulling it up every other day to find the thing the kids wanted to watch had vanished produced caterwauling to wake the dead.
It, too, has been completely mined out now so we tell the kids to go read books or do crafts.
These are all good and well, but you do seem to be forgetting one fairly reliable way of getting video content where you don't have to worry about it disappearing: BT. Of course it's not nearly as convenient, but once you have it, you'll always have it unless your HD crashes and you didn't bother doing backups.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday October 26 2017, @12:29AM (2 children)
See as much as I agree, this is one area where Netflix managed to do a good job at making me stop doing BT. Back then, I bought a Roku 3, hooked it up with my universal remote, put the Netflix channel on it, and done. I also have a pi that I use to store my ripped DVDs and it's all good and well but curating a library takes time when you have a backlog of stuff. So it's not really pretty. And I haven'T had the time to set up the remote because I don'T have a dongle for USB-IR. 10 years ago I would have loved to hack it up. Now, with work, kids etc. this is not where I want to invest my time. But BT, newgroups etc. I haven't touched that stuff for 5 years at least. And I don't miss it. My download cap would not allow me to download real blu-ray rips on a regular basis anyway.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:18AM
I don't disagree about the convenience that Netflix offered. But it just isn't as good any more; too much content has disappeared, and they're focusing more on their own in-house stuff. So for some, that could very well drive them back to BT.
Also, I'm not sure how "curating a library" takes much time. Finding stuff and downloading it takes some time, but once it's downloaded, you just stick it on your media server or whatever and you're done with it. But yeah, setting up a fancy system with remote to view that library would take some time to set up. Surely a Roku or something like that could connect to a NAS and give you library access that way?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:08AM
USB-IR isn't really necessary on the RPi unless you want to do something fancy. My RPi w Kodi is controlled with the unused buttons on my TV remote* (or via the Kodi smartphone app (kodi official remote, used to use yatsee until its UI downgrade a year ago).
* = lirc and an ir-reciever is enough, I used this guide [alexba.in] and it took me less than half an hour (via ssh from smartphone) to set it up (actually used an IR-kit fir arduino, similar to the Adafruit kit [adafruit.com]).
(Ok, I really have it set up for four remotes: tv, my old dvd-player remote, one of the programmable modes on the hifi-remote and the crappy remote that came with the reciever [copied it into a better remote] (takes 2-5minutes per remote you want to set up after the first))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @01:35AM
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday October 25 2017, @10:29AM
Another thing they should do is to add public domain movies
(In case anyone wonders if this will matter - in parts of the world* world this will cover the silent movie era, and for that matter quite a few Akira Kurosawa** movies, and also pretty much all german movies made before 1945 (spoils of war, however restoration and such are a different matter)
* = in usa the cutoff before it gets flakey is 1923, so most of the era covered even there
** = japan considers the cutoff to be 1953 so for instance Roshomon is in PD there.)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 25 2017, @06:21PM (2 children)
Disagree. Most of what I watch these days are either Netflix originals or Amazon originals, and I know the Amazon stuff wouldn't be hitting Netflix no matter what since they're in pretty direct competition. There's one or two decent shows on major networks still but not much. I watch more original content from either Netflix OR Amazon than from every traditional network combined.
What I'd really love is for Netflix to drop the TV mimicry. It's not a television network, people are binging entire seasons at once, so what exactly is the purpose of dividing into segments of exactly 23 or 48 minutes? Gimme a 6 hour chunk of video with embedded tags marking what the director considers to be natural stopping points. You could even have different kinds of tags -- so I can tell it "Play until 9pm and end on a cliffhanger" or "Play around 50 minutes and stop somewhere with fewer loose ends". Plus that would probably help Netflix make piracy a bit more difficult...existing media library software wouldn't be able to break those files up, the stopping points wouldn't be as easily copied as the video itself, you'd have to download the entire season at once instead of getting individual episodes OR you'd have different and incompatible pirated versions splitting things at different points...I really don't understand why nobody has tried that yet...
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 25 2017, @07:19PM
I think there's a reason TV shows are usually 30 or 60 minutes, and movies are usually 90-120, and it's not just because of business efficiency. For evening entertainment, an hour is frequently about as long as people want to sit down and watch something, or perhaps 2. For a shorter story, an hour is a good amount of time to tell the story without being too rushed, and 2 hours is good for longer stories ("movies"). Notice that not that many movies push far past the 2-hour mark, and when they do, they're usually some kind of big-budget epic like LotR, not some kind of comedy. Most people just don't want to spend that much time watching a movie.
I don't think you're going to see a substantial change from the easily-digested 1-hour episode format any time soon. It's not too short, not too long, and makes it easy to remember where you were.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday October 25 2017, @10:10PM
The "stopping points" would just be mapped out as timestamps (kinda like how dvd-chapters are - see mkv).
Also, since most movies (with the exception of an Andy Warhol all the movies I've seen are) tend to be divided into natural chapters this will be the natural point to split it.
And it wouldn't take long until files got named with timestamps and players parsing it and just preload the next file to switch over when reaching the time indicated by the next file (this practice isn't that uncommon if you split and merge movie-files and good players don't even shut down the video out in between [so with a fast enough drive (or smart buffering) this is seamless]).
So, no issue for pirates.
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But the suggestion has three other advantages [in addition to the flexible playmodes] 1) only one intro to skip. 2) fewer "in previous epusode" 3) fewer "in next episode"