nerdrage

The novel isn’t exactly a laff riot.

Might be interesting to compare the characters. The Lynch movie features some highly memorable Harkonnens (including Feyd, a key character yet to be seen in these new movies). But Paul seems too serene and too old vs how Chalamet played him, and Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto is basically perfect.

Warners wants a franchise, trust me. All the studios do. That’s where the money is. They want something they can make into more movies, streaming series, games, merchandise and theme park rides. And I think they got it. Cue the sandworm ride!

They’re getting the story that Lucas ripped off for Star Wars. Lucas took Dune and dumbed down/sanitized it for the kiddies. If your kids are sophisticated for their age, they may like it anyway.

Dune will be a streaming series on HBO Max. They’re working on a Bene Gesserit series. That probably won’t be the last. They should avoid making Paul the main character of course and keep him for the movies. The Mandalorian doesn’t star Luke Skywalker. Dune is a big playground with a lot of story potential.

It will be interesting to see if they have 111 million new subscribers…

If Asimov was weak on characterization, that’s something for the series to address. From what I’ve heard this show sounds likes a slog. Lots else out there to watch instead.

Nowadays it’s up to us to show some common sense in isolating ourselves from the idiots. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter etc due to this policy. Others just need to start showing similar discretion.

Anyone who uses terms like "decision-point meeting" or "C-level executives" is automatically assumed to be a lying corporate toady. I think this a corollary of Godwin’s Law.

They’re just scummiest in America but the rest of the world is striving to catch up.

Network TV programs have never had the ability to count global views very well. They did get those views – Baywatch and CSI were always big global hits – but stats were hard to come by. Now Netflix can garner those stats with ease. For all we know, Baywatch and CSI global totals make Netflix’s 82M households look shabby.

Netflix has a lot of ways to push the content they want on people. For instance, how many people have bothered to deactivate autoplay? You can turn Show A into a hit over Show B just by putting Show A on autoplay. You can put it on the trending list too, which will ensure it gets on the top ten and then lo and behold it’s a "hit."

They recommend certain titles as being "99%" matches to your taste or similar nonsense. I sometimes check those out and boom after 5 minutes I’m bored and it’s gone. What did that 99% mean? Nothing, except that Netflix wanted to bump viewership.

Netflix used to have a way of organizing your queue with just a small thumbnail and text name list. I could order the list any way I chose. Well they nuked that and now I just see thumbnails in some sort of order I didn’t want. Netflix’s order. That’s another way they attempt to push some content and not others.

Why do this? Maybe they get more lucrative deals from certain shows. Maybe they are trying to mollify governments and their quotas. If the French government is being a pest, Netflix can turn Lupin into a hit by promoting it more and suddenly their problems are greatly reduced.

I’ll bet non-Netflix content should be on the list but Netflix wants to pretend that they don’t need licensed content now that it’s hard to get anyone to license stuff to them.

Seinfeld is an exception, being owned by Sony, which is the sole holdout among major studios (or their parent companies) in the streaming wars.

Yes, they’re largely garbage. Netflix is a demented social experiment in revealing how bad the world’s taste really is.

It depends on what metric Netflix thinks is valuable. They can see if there’s a strong correlation between watching X, Y or Z minutes and finishing and if the correlation kicks in at minute X, then why bother with Y or Z?

Maybe this isn’t about finishing but about retaining customers. Even if customers don’t finish shows or movies, they still have some retention effect.

Netflix is such a black box that it’s hard to judge what their numbers mean and whether it’s all just PR fluff or only largely PR fluff with some reality mixed in.

Or Apple, or Amazon – they could do a good version.

Even Netflix or Disney would be preferable!

If only current Star Trek were as "crappy" as DS9, sigh.

Nice to see the War Without End will never die. In these troubled and uncertain times, it’s nice to see such stability.

Streaming is also frequently ad-supported. I think a big growth area will be the free, ad-supported streaming apps. But that just steals the audience even more from OTA. Who needs broadcast when there are 100 broadcast-mimic apps?

It’s not "should" die, it’s that it will die or rather wind down to a minimal level with just the cheapest crap content.

Live TV has no value except for sports and I guess news too, but nobody below AARP age will pay for news so that means it’s just sports keeping cable and cable-mimics like YouTubeTV. When some good streaming solution for sports emerges (Fubo maybe?) then cable and cable-mimicking streaming will finally be history.

If you’re talking about the psychological need to feel that some show is "live" and therefore more worth watching than another one that’s just sitting there with 7 seasons waiting for you to click, then maybe the likes of Netflix should address that need in their interface better. They already made a stab at it with their random-content generator. It’s just a short step from designating that Stranger Things is "live" at 6pm and then it’s Ozark at 7pm etc.

People should just get a Roku TV, the apps are all easily available in the interface, no more burdensome than jumping to another app on an iPhone. I prefer keeping all this stuff separate anyway rather than doing bundles that can unexpectedly go south.

Cowboy Bebop has an interesting title sequence. Other than that…ehh I guess I’ll catch up on Ozark and Stranger Things eventually. Kind of underwhelming really. Netflix needs to work on something, anything that will rise above the general morass.