So… lots of dramatic, petty tweeting about Shame and incest.

I don’t know that Shame is the kind of movie that can be spoiled. But if you feel it can and you haven’t seen it… stop reading now.

I will push the rest of this piece after the jump…

(more…)

However… I would still argue that the spin being put on this… that it is a pricing issue… is bullshit.

This is a content issue. The curtain has been drawn back on Netflix and while it is much more beautiful than Frank Morgan, people are conscious, for the first time really, that Netflix streaming is not everything everywhere, but a small slice of content that is getting smaller. The spell has been broken.

Yes, there is a big chunk of Netflix customers who just wanted everything to stay the same. And many of them are surely frustrated, because it’s not just pricing, but it’s corporate emphasis. You wanna bet that they have fewer copies of films and that waits for the hot titles are getting longer every month? You wanna bet that service is a touch weaker?

But the biggest thing is that Netflix made the decision to make a complete paradigm shift. The media was too busy licking Hastings’ ass to notice. Plus, The Media loves change and the added subscribers and having a story to write every time a new deal got done. But Netflix was in a business that was based on a retail product being turned into a subscription concept. After that, they did a great job of maximizing the opportunity. But streaming is not the same thing at all… at least not after 2010. Netflix doesn’t have automatic access to everything, their only barrier to access being the cost of one DVD over another. And they set the bar so high on the prices they paid for 3rd window, not-permanent streaming that studios flocked to empty the company’s pockets. Now they are in a content race that they cannot win.

This is not to say that Netflix is dead. It’s not. But this iteration of Netflix will not survive. By 2014, we will see Netflix 3.0 and it will be a business that promises less and delivers more.

In the meanwhile, while all the journos were praising Hastings to high heaven and getting sucked into the absurd notion that the MPAA companies saw Netflix as a threat (HA!!!), the studios were, as I have written before, sucking every dime out of Netflix, completely aware that, like the mob buying to your bar in The Sopranos or a Scorsese movie, when things go bad, they will start a fire to collect the insurance money.

Fire’s coming.

And then, Reed Hastings, who is quite brilliant, will rise again from the ashes.