A man came up to him, a Marine, with tears in his eyes, who said, “Sir, I’ve never cried in my whole life until now, but I’ve never seen anyone with such good syphilis as you. You’re an inspiration to everyone I know to get syphilis. Thank you.”
You could be right, but my understanding was that content owners pulled content from Netflix because they thought they could make more money setting up their own streaming services. Most are at worst losing money, and at best not bringing in projected profits, so they’re moving content back to Netflix and taking the licensing money.
The bit about AI Bill Cosby made me laugh the hardest. “You get all of the Cosby jokes with none of the Cosby rapes!”
See, I disagree. Someone retelling their memory of some of his bits, or your nephew performing at his birthday party would be telling old George Carlin jokes. This was new material and was topical, which I think is cool. It’s hard to know what George would really think about today’s climate, but I can’t imagine it would be too far off from the this.
Was it perfect? No. But if I know what it is going in, I can sit back and just enjoy it for what it is - entertainment.
Y’know, I was a pretty big Carlin fan, I had a few of his albums and even saw him live in concert once. I listened to the whole thing while driving, and I thought this was okay. It’s obviously not George Carlin, but it sounded a lot like him, and I can imagine he would approve of many of the jokes. It wasn’t a laugh-a-minute, but I did get lost in it a couple of times and forget that it wasn’t really him, and I did laugh out loud a few times as well. (The joke about the best comedian for AI being Bill Cosby got me!)
Carlin’s comedy was very topical, which doesn’t always translate to today, so having new, up-to-date Carlin bits are actually cool. I can understand his daughter’s apprehension, but at least people are talking about her dad again, so I would think that’s a good thing.
This isn’t about cable, they’re sinking themselves by burying their head in the sand and pretending like streaming isn’t a threat - all while bleeding subscribers.
As for Netflix, you’ve got your take backwards. Netflix was licensing all of the content and paying the content owners fees. NBC, CBS, Paramount, HBO (now Max), AMC, Disney… they all got greedy. They saw the money Netflix was making, and they thought they could make more by keeping the content, creating their own services, and raking in the cash. Unfortunately that created a glut of new problems. Some of these providers don’t have enough content to justify their price to consumers. Consumers struggle to find shows they want to watch now because content is spread so thin, so they give up. Most importantly, consumers feel nickeled & dimed. They don’t want to pay for numerous services, so it becomes a game of “which one(s) am I going to subscribe to, and which am I going to ignore?”. Many of these services have struggled and lost money, so they’ve decided that it’s easier to license the content back to Netflix, let Netflix handle pricing, infrastructure, subscriber retention, etc., and they can cash the licensing checks.
I’ve never heard of it, and my wife & I are on Netflix multiple times a week.
As a side note, other streaming services that took their stuff off of Netflix to make their own service because “hurr durr we want that money!”, have discovered that it’s hard to run and not always profitable. There are a LOT of things that have been gone off of Netflix for awhile that have suddenly started to show back up because content owners have discovered that it’s much easier to let Netflix deal with the infrastructure and just get paid. I remember when Netflix had almost everything you could want to watch in one place, and it was glorious! If you’ve cancelled over the lack of content, maybe give it another look. If you cancelled over the cost, maybe it’s more worth it now?
I’m not a Netflix shill, I just remember the days when it was awesome because of the massive selection, and I’m hopefully seeing it slowly coming back around.
A tangle of cables? I’ll feel right at home! …and right at work! 🤣
Read all about it in this month’s issue of DUH.