My wife and I live together, and we have a single Netflix account, using my email address.
Whenever my wife travels for work (3-4 weeks per quarter), her hotel room's TV has the Netflix app built in. When she logs in, she is often prompted to update the 'Netflix Household'. I then have to confirm this by clicking a link (assuming I see the notification in time! otherwise she just can't log in).
I contacted Netflix support and asked them this question:
If my wife is travelling to a hotel, and she logs into the Netflix app on the hotel TV, can I still watch Netflix on my home TV?
The support agent told me the answer is 'NO' (yes, they answered in capitals). This surprised me, because a Netflix help page says "A Netflix account is meant to be shared by people who live together in one household.".
This describes exactly our use of Netflix. My wife and I live together in one household. But she sometimes travels for work (obviously without me).
The support agent told me that to support this use case (one person using Netflix on a hotel TV whilst the other person is at home) I'd need to pay for an additional user.
(This wouldn't be an issue if she were watching on a phone or tablet, because portable devices apparently continue to work as long as they're used for Netflix at home at least once per month.)
You just explained the headline. Netflix has successfully weaponized edge cases for profit - the "success" part crucially hinging on surviving the initial news cycle and coming out the other side with their reputation intact. The money grab was spread across so many disparate demographics and use cases that none could coalesce to a single, easy-to-message gripe. All it cost them was a few key slices of trust from discerning customers. Take enough of those slices and your business will fade - but who cares, for this financial year?
The thing is... we subscribe to several TV streaming services, but IIRC Netflix is the only one whose app is on the TVs at this particular brand's hotels.
And it's become even more inconvenient to use external HDMI devices. At the last hotel I stayed at, the TV unit was permanently on 100% volume, and the effective volume was controlled by the external box.
This would be fine, except that:
- at low volumes, it was hard to hear voices clearly, as the audio signal coming from the box into the TV was really low, and the TV was amplifying not only that signal, but also background hum
- attaching an external device to the TV (like a TV stick) means the TV remote can no longer control the volume
but you control the volume on the external device via software
Yes, but:
1. If you're watching TV in bed, how do you change the volume on your laptop, that's several feet away from you? Do you just carry a very long HDMI cable, or do you use some remote control software to control your laptop volume?
Are you sure about the volume thing? Isn’t the entire signal chain of a normal TV digital and there’s only a conversion to Analog at the End? I don’t understand why the background hum would change volume with this setup.
I’ve mostly been staying at Hyatt hotels but what I like there is that TVs have chrome cast built in so I can cast from my phone, that could be a potential solution here?
I think it just comes down to being one of the better off many bad options. There are too many streaming services now and people are cutting back after trying many.
In the end, Netflix is about the best at a constant stream of new content while having good usability and quality. It's not a run of garbage reality TV.
I think Amazon Prime Video runs a close second and mostly for the tie in with delivery service. Though I'm not sure how well that will hold with a lot of people. Delivery effectiveness has slipped, with extra charges for the fastest delivery and now there's ads.
YouTube has a lot of new media and think it likely does well enough for subscriptions with the music and family plan.
Everything else looks sucks. HBO Max has slipped on original content and movies. Paramount is really hot or miss and heaven help you if you run a pihole or similar. NBC/Universal is almost worse. Disney is slipping, even though they're bundled with everything. Hulu has way too many ads, and the live TV option is just insanely expensive.
In the end, nobody is going to pay for more than 2-3 services for the most part. I'm the end, Netflix is still one of the better options for many.
I agree. For me, a person living in Southeast Asia, Prime Video is a great choice - very cheap monthly price combined with a decent number of good movies and shows from Hollywood as well as across the region. Disney+ is cheaper than Netflix but the content is disappointing, unless you have young children who like all things Disney. Personally, I subscribe to Netflix opportunistically, e.g., I'll do so when the latest season of Stranger Things start airing and discontinue after watching the episodes.
With the ongoing clusterf*ck of streaming services only getting worse over time, I've begun dropping out of using them at all anymore and reverting to previous means. Managing your own media, even if simple, has proven to be way superior to trusting a company that changes their ways at a whim and breaks years of trust.
How long until streaming media is just as infected with adverts as everything before it, that it was supposed to replace, and someone starts a whole new thing for ad-free media and we start the circle anew?
Most of us purchase these services, and pay happily, until the inevitable enshittification step, then it's back to the high seas, because I'm willing to pay for services, but I'm not willing to pay more, to get less, because some assclown has quarterly numbers to make.
HBO, aka Max, has gone downhill a bit now that they've mixed in Discovery channel reality-tv-filler with HBO cinematic offerings. It just doesn't fit together. Luckily, HBO is licensing to Netflix.
Most people on the planet dont have enough cash in their wallet to pay the rich to entertain them.
So the rich find abnormal routes to self delusion of sucess.
How do such such systems Scale when the majority dont have high disposable income?
1. "McDonaldization of Society" covers the path McDonalds took. Its drilled into anyone who goes to B-school.
2. Get Other corporations to subsidize consumption to make their crap sticky(loyalty programmes they call it) - so you have firms with massive cash mountains like AT&T/Comcast/Apple/Amazon/Reliance etc bundling content to push their trash
3. Total Attention available is a finite resource. As content exploded with the internet all corporations got sucked into wars of Attention Capture. So we get an era of Marketing/Advertising/Demand engineering budgets growing at faster rates than actual product design or product quality budgets. They have learnt attention capture or theft is enough to get corps to pay the bills. Quality is optional.
4. Dependence on low interest rates, global interest rate/corp tax rate/labour/forex arbitrage and Banks to issue high interest credit to the sub prime masses. M&A to swallow up competition. Basically Financilization, where financial engineering can allow firms to hit revenue/growth targets irrespective of quality of good or servive playing these games, naturally quality goes into background.
These have all become runaway processes that no one controls anymore.
- Earnings per share: $5.28 vs. $4.52 expected
- Revenue: $9.37 billion vs. $9.28 billion expected
- Total memberships: 269.6 million vs. 264.2 million expected
- Net income of $2.33 billion, or $5.28 per share, versus $1.30 billion, or $2.88 per share, in the prior-year period.
The Tencent version is overly long and drawn out, has mediocre visual effects and production, censors key parts from the book, has bad english-speaking actors, but has decent writing and is interesting to watch.
The Netflix version has awful writing for the scientist protagonists, dumbs down or omits parts of the book (the audience is too stupid to learn what the CMB is for instance, and barely any time is spent in the vr game), zips through the story real fast because they decided to cram all of the first book and part of the sequel into 8 episodes for some reason, but has great visual effects.
The Netflix one is trash. The Tencent one is fairly close to the book.
Downside is there is definetly some "rah-rah" nationalism and the pacing isn't the greatest, but all in all I'd say the Tencent one is a pretty strong adaption.
If an abridged version of the Tencent adaption was bought by Netflix it would have done very well.
Not really? It both overexplains simple concepts (e.g. the billiard table scene) and underexplains important concepts.
The Netflix show just has awful writing, and only cares about visuals. My favorite example of bad writing is the very last scene, where three characters are having a conversation, then one of them suddenly gets up and says "let me show you something". So they drive for (seemingly) hours, apparently in perfect silence, only to get out of the car, look over a field, and deliver a handful of pithy lines, followed immediately by "okay let's go back". (For book readers: this is the "bugs vs. humans speech").
Anyway, they're both ephemeral garbage. I guess 3BP will be like Dune, where it takes decades for a decent adaptation to show up.
TL;DR If you want see people act out the book, watch the Tencent version. If you're open to a new and interesting take on the story told in the book, watch the Netflix version.
It very much depends on what you consider a good adaptation. Netflix is a much more open adaptation of the story. They create some new characters, move most of the action out of China, move some scenes from the later books into the first seasons and generally streamline the story. The Tencent version is basically a scene by scene retelling of the book with hardly anything added or omitted.
Personally I preferred the Netflix version (full disclosure, I did a lot of skipping in the Tencent version). It told a new version of the same story in a slightly different way, sticking close to the important themes and beats while still offered something new and interesting along the way.
The Tencent version offered nothing interesting over what the book offered. If I have 30 hours to spare I'd rather re-read the books than watch the Tencent adaptation.
The only real casualty of reimagining the story in England is the Zhang Behai character. Works so much better as a political officer from a communist military.
AvenueX on YT had a pretty good comparison and review for both. TL;DW the Netflix one fails to use its budget for anything, and instead tries to appeal to its audience (or at least who Netflix thinks is their audience) with sex scenes, romance and dumbed down concepts. She also comments a bit about how Netflix politically charged it (which is an unfortunate thing to hapoen to Three-Body). I was personally a great enjoyer of the TC 三体 since I liked the calmer pacing (I feel it is mostly the western audience who have a problem with it).
I felt that the amount and type of "romantic/sexual drama" in the show wasn't that different from what we got in the later books, and on the whole done a lot better.
Yeah, I had to do a double take at that... Or maybe we both somehow missed an episode.
I will say it has the americana filling of violence/gore though (if gore is the right word for the boat scenes).
If you like movies with "calmer pacing", try watching American movies, but ones that are more than 30 years old, especially stuff from the 70s or earlier. It's mind-blowing watching those and seeing how different they are from modern Hollywood movies. An old Hitchcock movie, for instance, was considered a thriller when it was new, but modern Americans would probably be bored watching it because the pacing is much slower than the latest Marvel movie.
I don’t know if I’m alone here, but I feel like the only sci-fi I like is really more like science realism.
Like I really loved the Martian and Project Hail Mary.
I’m also a really big fan of Tolkien. I couldn’t get into Game of Thrones though. I also didn’t really like Orson Scott cards works, except for Ender’s Game.. once he started world-building I got bored.
Whenever my wife travels for work (3-4 weeks per quarter), her hotel room's TV has the Netflix app built in. When she logs in, she is often prompted to update the 'Netflix Household'. I then have to confirm this by clicking a link (assuming I see the notification in time! otherwise she just can't log in).
I contacted Netflix support and asked them this question:
The support agent told me the answer is 'NO' (yes, they answered in capitals). This surprised me, because a Netflix help page says "A Netflix account is meant to be shared by people who live together in one household.".This describes exactly our use of Netflix. My wife and I live together in one household. But she sometimes travels for work (obviously without me).
The support agent told me that to support this use case (one person using Netflix on a hotel TV whilst the other person is at home) I'd need to pay for an additional user.
(This wouldn't be an issue if she were watching on a phone or tablet, because portable devices apparently continue to work as long as they're used for Netflix at home at least once per month.)