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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 24 2017, @11:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-show-what-you-ain't-got dept.

Netflix is raising another $1.6bn (£1.2bn) from investors to finance new shows and possibly make acquisitions.

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:30PM (4 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:30PM (#587406) Journal

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 25 2017, @07:11PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @07:11PM (#587499)

    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)

      by goodie (1877) on Thursday October 26 2017, @12:29AM (#587636) Journal

      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

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:18AM (#587671)

        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

        by Aiwendil (531) on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:08AM (#587747) Journal

        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))