Netflix Pays Six Cents to Stream You a Movie?

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Wait, Netflix is paying only six cents per movie to stream it to your home? No wonder they like this so much more than actually paying for roundtrip shipping!

Assuming that Netflix pays 3 cents per gigabyte transferred, the movie provider pays 6 cents to deliver an SD movie (1.8GB) and 9 cents to deliver an HD movie (3GB)—less if the film is under two hours, and less when streaming to PCs rather than Roku or Xbox 360 (since the PC stream uses lower bitrates).
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What's it cost wireless carriers to process text messages? Oh, right. Nothing!
 
Exavior said:
How do you figure that?
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Because the bandwidth for messaging already existed. It doesn't cost them a damn thing, yet they charge $.20+ per message for people not on unlimited messaging plans. Article.

Anyway, this thread isn't about messaging. Just wanted to say it doesn't top wireless carriers gouging over messaging.
 
Haha maybe Sony needs to talk to Netflix on how to keep their bandwidth costs down. I hope developers see this.
 
yesterday we sent 34520 sms's to let people know that they will be billed more since they are roaming internationally. Imagine that at $0.10 or so per for one of us.
 
That only covers the bandwidth though. Who knows what they need to pay in the way of licensing fees?

I love Netflix, but their streaming selection blows.
 
I tried the streaming free trial a few weeks ago, on a 12Mbps connection, with Windows 7, and I gotta say the picture quality absolutely fucking sucks. I tried a few older flicks, some nearly new ones (that should obviously have superior image clarity and quality) and cancelled it within 20 mins for two reasons:

1) The picture quality sucks, it's worse than standard DVD quality, and I find that simply unacceptable in today's high bandwidth world. I watched a lot of Olympic events last year using Silverlight, streamed live (some events) and I swear, those videos were absolutely stunning in terms of quality, I wouldn't hesitate to even use the word "breathtaking" depending on what I was watching. It just jumped right out of the screen with colors and motion. If Netflix fixes - ok so it ain't broken, it just looks like shit to me - their quality I might have reconsidered keeping it or signing up again, except for...

2) They don't support subtitles for the movies they have streaming. That's just the deal breaker for me and my Wife - she's deaf - and I'm not going to be watching most any movie I want knowing she can't watch it with me, that just isn't going to work. I find it funny that Netflix says they recently gained 10 million new subscribers just by enabling streaming to the Xbox 360. Well guess what, Netflix:

Enable the subtitles in the streams you offer (it's a piece of cake from a technical standpoint as Silverlight and most any other streaming format supports it inherently, including QuickTime now as well) and you'll get 10 million new subscribers IN LESS THAN A MONTH because the Deaf community, while small, is well aware of such things and word would spread like a brushfire through it that you've finally made a smart move.

It's not like enabling the subtitles would break that bandwidth or jack up that 3 cents a gig cost... I mean really. :)

I've talked with a Netflix streaming engineer I know, he showed me just how simple it would be to get the subs enabled (Netflix gets their digital content from the publishers/movie studios, and pretty much 99.9% of the content available as of today has subs or at the least closed captions embedded). He's made several requests to enable it himself - he's got a cousin that's deaf and she has one child that's deaf - but.. and here's the biggest irony of all:

His requests seem to fall on deaf ears...

Go figure.
 
That's much better than shipping - though of course it's not all the costs

They still have license fees to deal with as well as infrastructure.
 
i enjoy netflix too, but their streaming selection is only older crap..... i need to get my media pc hooked back up to the tv.......i think their pricing is just fine considering itsa stinkin $5 to rent a new release and then only get it for 2or 3 days
 
Joe Average said:
I tried the streaming free trial a few weeks ago
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Sorry it didn't work out for you. I decided to give it a try on my 360 and I absolutely love the service. Quality has been better than I was expecting, and even with the limited selection I've managed to find plenty of stuff to watch. (Plus the foreign stuff has static subs. I just watched Luc Besson's Angel-A yesterday afternoon, and I doubt I would have stumbled across it any other way.)

For $10 a month, it's been well worth it to me. And I get one optical disc at a time as a bonus. :D
 
Joe Average said:
Enable the subtitles in the streams you offer (it's a piece of cake from a technical standpoint as Silverlight and most any other streaming format supports it inherently, including QuickTime now as well) and you'll get 10 million new subscribers IN LESS THAN A MONTH because the Deaf community, while small, is well aware of such things and word would spread like a brushfire through it that you've finally made a smart move.

It's not like enabling the subtitles would break that bandwidth or jack up that 3 cents a gig cost... I mean really. :)
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I completely agree with this. I have trouble understanding spoken language in scenes with a lot of backgroun noise, so I have the subtitles on all the time which watching movies or TV. The fact they are not supported in a lot of streaming media gets kinda annoying to me and I think the Deaf have every reason to be very upset about that (or the generally crappy transcription of a lot of TV shows).
 
Oh yeah, there is actually an entry on the Netflix blog somewhere from 2008 where they polled people on the subtitles possibility; iirc it was 60% deaf people responding and the rest were people that had hearing difficulties, primarily elderly people, or folks that just wanted the ability to watch movies "with the sound off" and keep up with what's going on.

It's ridiculous to think that doing this is a tough thing, and the raw bandwidth required to add a subtitle or closed caption stream... meaningless, it's a few bytes a second... it's 100 steps past even being trivial...

Bleh.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Because the bandwidth for messaging already existed. It doesn't cost them a damn thing, yet they charge $.20+ per message for people not on unlimited messaging plans. Article.

Anyway, this thread isn't about messaging. Just wanted to say it doesn't top wireless carriers gouging over messaging.
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No doubt that they are gouging us, and in my opinion there is probably some collusion going on, but to say the upkeep of SMS is nothing is flawed conclusion at best. It will always cost something to provide a service, even if it is just in storage, maintenance, energy, training. That being said it would be hard to say what a message would cost on a unit basis if they offered the service to you at cost, but I'm betting an order of magnitude less than what they charge now if not two.
 
Wow, I am surprised how many people need streaming subs.

I use subs because I cant hear dialog over my treadmill. I love Blueray discs because they are getting better with subs by placing them near the person speaking it, so it is easier to follow a busier conversation.

As for the OP, I am counting down for a corporate denial including a little wining about extra digital licensing costs and finger pointing.
 
Joe Average said:
1) The picture quality sucks, it's worse than standard DVD quality, and I find that simply unacceptable in today's high bandwidth world. I watched a lot of Olympic events last year using Silverlight, streamed live (some events) and I swear, those videos were absolutely stunning in terms of quality, I wouldn't hesitate to even use the word "breathtaking" depending on what I was watching. It just jumped right out of the screen with colors and motion. If Netflix fixes - ok so it ain't broken, it just looks like shit to me - their quality I might have reconsidered keeping it or signing up again, except for...
Go figure.
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I get excellent picture quality with most of the titles I stream on my Cable (12mbps).
 
Joe Average said:
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I agree. I'm hearing-impaired and won't touch Netflix with a 10 foot pole until they actually implement CC in their programming. Hulu.com does CC for some of their programming so it works. At least it's free with the minor annoyances (advertising).
 
devman said:
No doubt that they are gouging us, and in my opinion there is probably some collusion going on, but to say the upkeep of SMS is nothing is flawed conclusion at best. It will always cost something to provide a service, even if it is just in storage, maintenance, energy, training. That being said it would be hard to say what a message would cost on a unit basis if they offered the service to you at cost, but I'm betting an order of magnitude less than what they charge now if not two.
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devman, I think you're getting mixed up posting about the text messages on phones in this thread which is about Netflix. :) I know subs/captions are just another form of "text messaging" but but but... totally different concepts, two different threads. :D
 
As a netflix user, I love the streaming. I do wish they would improve the quality and bandwidth so you got a more consistant experience each time. You can definately tell when Netflix is getting hammered because of the wait times and quality.
 
[T5K]thrasher;1033886130 said:
3 cents a gig is a pretty good deal :p
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Yeah, no kidding, I'd pay 3 cents per gig internet fees if I could get the speed that's makes streaming movies possible!

it all starts with this
Assuming that Netflix pays 3 cents per gigabyte transferred
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What if we assume Netflix pays 0.3 cents per gigabyte? Then it'd be less than a penny per movie!

However that being said, that might be a usage charge, how much are they paying for the ability having massive upload bandwidth available??
 
MavericK96 said:
Why is that, exactly? :confused:
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well, the move to silverlight was solely to get all netflix streams done on cpu alone (less problems, more compatibility with older slower pc's), so im guessing the only reason could be the cpu decoding power of the xbox360 is lower then your average pc... but im not sure if thats the case.
 
MavericK96 said:
Why is that, exactly? :confused:
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well, the move to silverlight was solely to get all netflix streams done on cpu alone (less problems, more compatibility with older slower pc's), so im guessing the only reason could be the cpu decoding power of the xbox360 is lower then your average pc... but im not sure if thats the case.

edit- i say that because im thinking the lower bitrate means the same quality, but it takes more power to decode it on the fly.... its more compressed. i could be so wrong on this though (or it might have to do with system ram available too)
 
I have netflix and I don't notice much problems with streaming. Althouh my normaly internet speed is about 6Mbps. Now I find Hulu to be complete shit on a 60Mbps connection. I mean for fucks sake it couldn't let me watch family guy without getting all pixelated. However with netflix most of the HD shows that I watch look just as good as if I was watching them on tv. Same with standard def shows. As far as selection, they have been getting better recently. There were having a lot of issues getting content, but have started working that out.
 
hulu uses flash i think... it goes through the video card and a general mess of codecs and shit for it to work right. netflix is silverlight- its all cpu bound. which means the picture quality will be the same on one system to the next...
 
I guess I should clarify my issue with the quality:

It's not a question of the bandwidth as the movies didn't skip when I tried them, that's not the concern. The concern was the quality of the video itself, it was blurry, crappy to be honest, and definitely not something I'd consider. I was watching them on an HP 23" 1920x1200 S-IPS color calibrated LCD panel, so not your ordinary everyday bargain basement LCD. Colors were washed out, clarity simply wasn't there, it was... well... ugh.

I can download full HD clips online nowadays at 1280x720 from TV shows that have superior image quality to what those things are giving and at less bandwidth during playback.

Maybe Silverlight or such tools aren't what's needed for proper streaming, who knows. I just know I was extremely disappointed as soon as the movies were playing. I'd skip around in the stream by jumping to points on the timeline thinking hey it might improve, but no such luck. :)

We'll get there someday, but for now, I'll stick with grabbing stuff and subs for the Wife to watch. We just got a 'new' cable TV system installed in our apartment building today (we get it included with our rent/lease) and now we've got TV again for the first time in months, with all 5 Encore movie channels and a bunch of other stuff, great picture considering the wiring in this building is decades upon decades old too. :D
 
Joe Average said:
I guess I should clarify my issue with the quality:

It's not a question of the bandwidth as the movies didn't skip when I tried them, that's not the concern. The concern was the quality of the video itself, it was blurry, crappy to be honest, and definitely not something I'd consider. I was watching them on an HP 23" 1920x1200 S-IPS color calibrated LCD panel, so not your ordinary everyday bargain basement LCD. Colors were washed out, clarity simply wasn't there, it was... well... ugh.

I can download full HD clips online nowadays at 1280x720 from TV shows that have superior image quality to what those things are giving and at less bandwidth during playback.

Maybe Silverlight or such tools aren't what's needed for proper streaming, who knows. I just know I was extremely disappointed as soon as the movies were playing. I'd skip around in the stream by jumping to points on the timeline thinking hey it might improve, but no such luck. :)

We'll get there someday, but for now, I'll stick with grabbing stuff and subs for the Wife to watch. We just got a 'new' cable TV system installed in our apartment building today (we get it included with our rent/lease) and now we've got TV again for the first time in months, with all 5 Encore movie channels and a bunch of other stuff, great picture considering the wiring in this building is decades upon decades old too. :D
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With Netflix you won't ever have choppy playback as it will autodetect the best quality it can give you while giving you smooth playback. So if you have a slower connection it will drop the quality down to give you semidecent quality and smooth playback over decent playback but choppy playback. So in your case you must have just not had good enough bandwidth that day to get the good playback. For me it looks just as clear and sharp and as directv station. The only "bad" thing about this is that when the quality drops it will not try to make it better again later on. The ony way to do that is to stop playing the movie and then restart it and letting it resume where you where.
 
GJSNeptune said:
What's it cost wireless carriers to process text messages? Oh, right. Nothing!
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What you're saying is not exactly true. Yes, it travels over the signaling path, but SMS does require infrastructure changes. It'd be nice if Airwide and Huawei gave their boxes away for free, but they don't....and I know we had to pay for customization to get them to work for our network.

Nevertheless, the prices charged for SMS are ridiculously high.
 
Steve said:
Wait, Netflix is paying only six cents per movie to stream it to your home? No wonder they like this so much more than actually paying for roundtrip shipping!
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What I find incredible about this is just how much money Apple is making on each song on iTunes. Jobs always said they basically broke even, but given that roughly 50% of the sale goes to Apple, that means that their half is almost 100% profit.

Hell, if apple sold an album for 10 bucks, kept 5 and every album was delivered in a lossless format, they'd still make more than $4.95. Poor old labels get robbed even when they're selling their wares ;)
 
you guys shouldnt complain. Your netflix is 10 times better than what we get here in aus

no streaming at all and none of this unlimited movies in a month stuff. :(
 
nilepez said:
Nevertheless, the prices charged for SMS are ridiculously high.
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Well, you live in a capitalistic society....so don't use it. If nobody uses it, the prices will drop. The price is what the economy will bear. And thus...you agree that it is worth that high price by using it. I really hate it when people think they should have the right to dictate what something should cost even though they use it like crack.
 
Joe Average said:
I guess I should clarify my issue with the quality:

It's not a question of the bandwidth as the movies didn't skip when I tried them, that's not the concern. The concern was the quality of the video itself, it was blurry, crappy to be honest, and definitely not something I'd consider. I was watching them on an HP 23" 1920x1200 S-IPS color calibrated LCD panel, so not your ordinary everyday bargain basement LCD. Colors were washed out, clarity simply wasn't there, it was... well... ugh.

I can download full HD clips online nowadays at 1280x720 from TV shows that have superior image quality to what those things are giving and at less bandwidth during playback.

Maybe Silverlight or such tools aren't what's needed for proper streaming, who knows. I just know I was extremely disappointed as soon as the movies were playing. I'd skip around in the stream by jumping to points on the timeline thinking hey it might improve, but no such luck. :)

We'll get there someday, but for now, I'll stick with grabbing stuff and subs for the Wife to watch. We just got a 'new' cable TV system installed in our apartment building today (we get it included with our rent/lease) and now we've got TV again for the first time in months, with all 5 Encore movie channels and a bunch of other stuff, great picture considering the wiring in this building is decades upon decades old too. :D
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Netflix image quality is perfectly fine for me on my 5gig connection. Right at DVD-level, maybe a little above at times. The stuff CBS and NBC put up every week looks very good. I love that I'm able to watch Heroes, CSI, and other shows within a day or two of them airing on TV especially as I don't have cable. Their selection could use some work (come on, get all of Dead Like Me Season 2), but I don't blame Netflix for that.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Well, you live in a capitalistic society....so don't use it. If nobody uses it, the prices will drop. The price is what the economy will bear. And thus...you agree that it is worth that high price by using it. I really hate it when people think they should have the right to dictate what something should cost even though they use it like crack.
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I agree with you.

I think it's stupid that people complain about things simply because it's marked up and it doesn't cost them any money. Well, welcome to the real world.

I bet most of these individuals would be shocked if they actually know how much things are marked up. For example, Starbucks coffee is 2 cents to make, a big mac combo is 25 cents, an entire steering column with the wheel + ignition + finger functions $125.

Everything is marked up like mad, it's part of the game. We "say" to these companies that this is okay simply by supporting it. Once we stop to support it, we "say" to them to lower the price...supply/demand/economics.
 
I Love the netflix streaming...would love it even more if they had some decent content.
My 6 year old gettting to watch Voltron (LIONS FTW!!) makes it worth it for now but...I agree with the aboe poster...
Their streaming selection blows
 
CopyThat said:
I Love the netflix streaming...would love it even more if they had some decent content.
My 6 year old gettting to watch Voltron (LIONS FTW!!) makes it worth it for now but...I agree with the aboe poster...
Their streaming selection blows
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Just because it doesn't have everything you'd ever want to watch it blows? They have a large and varied selection. It could be better, but its FAR from "blowing".
 
Exavior said:
I have netflix and I don't notice much problems with streaming. Althouh my normaly internet speed is about 6Mbps. Now I find Hulu to be complete shit on a 60Mbps connection. I mean for fucks sake it couldn't let me watch family guy without getting all pixelated. However with netflix most of the HD shows that I watch look just as good as if I was watching them on tv. Same with standard def shows. As far as selection, they have been getting better recently. There were having a lot of issues getting content, but have started working that out.
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Its only 480p. Also, I'm pretty sure Hulu would probably want to stream better quality version of new episodes if the content providers would let them.
 
Where can I find a provider that charges 3 cents a GB upstream? And how much upstream bandwidth does Netflix have? Maybe it's 3 cents a minute for data, but $30,000 a month for the lines, hardware, and management?
 
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