I struggle to find anything worth watching on Netflix anymore these days. I guess over the years I didn't realize how near completely reliant they were on other people's content in order to be something that you could log into and find something easily to watch that was worth seeing.
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A lot of people will blame their downfall on the "woke" content and political indoctrination and while that certainly didn't help matters much it never really bothered me a great deal. It is always your choice whether or not you want to watch something and we all have the ability to just turn it off if we disagree with the material in some sort of religious or political capacity. I don't really understand people complaining about that.
The real reason why Netflix is failing badly is because of the fact that while they were once a singular player in the streaming game and paved the road for many others to follow, those days are behind us. Streaming has become what we all hated about pay-per-channel cable and I think that a lot of the world, including me, are very soon going to return to piracy.
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This is reflected in Netflix's share price and overall market capitalization which has been in seeming free-fall for almost all of 2022. Netflix used to throw money at almost anything and honestly, had too much content. This was due to the fact that they really didn't have any competition in the marketplace and any new services like Paramount, HBO, Hulu, Amazon, and even Disney was going to have a tough mountain to climb in order to get anywhere near the amount of subscribers that Netflix has.
Netflix has two kinds of content available: Original content that they produced and content that was made by other "brands" that Netflix paid to have available on their streaming service for a fee. These contracts were always for a limited time and in many cases were a year or so behind the actual releases on their original creators networks. In the past year we have seen a lot of these shows and movies disappear from Netflix, presumably forever as they go and find their new homes on other services that either already own the shows, or were willing to pay more for it to be on their streaming service.
This was more obvious with other shows like Family Guy which is owned primarily by Fox but when it came to Rick and Morty it was a little more difficult to find out.
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As it turns out Cartoon Network is owned by AT&T Time Warner, AKA Warner Media, who also owns HBO. So I theorize that this is where the show is headed and will never appear on Netflix again. This is a real shame, but not at all surprising. Of course Warner wants to keep all of the content they own, especially the popular stuff, on their own network. The sad thing for Warner is that the type of people that love Rick and Morty tend to be the kind of people that are very adept at using torrents and I don't think that this will have any influence over the number of subscribers over at HBO.
Rick and Morty isn't for everyone and most people either seem to love it or hate it. Initially I was in the "I don't get why people like this" category but over time I returned to it, listened to it intently and now it is one of my favorite shows ever made by anyone and the only frustrating thing is that it takes so long for them to make new seasons... sometimes multiple years.
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stats from end of 2021, it's probably changed a lot since then
I suspect by the end of the year that Netflix' dominance on the streaming industry will be fully at a close because these days it seems that HBO, Amazon, and even Paramount is producing much better original content. I don't think that Netflix subscribers will move over to other services, I think they will walk away from legal streaming altogether for the most part.
It was fun while it lasted but at this point if it weren't for the fact that I was piggy-backing on someone else's account, I would not be involved with Netflix at all.