over here in America, we had a friend in our group that outright refused to switch to signal. Not to make it seem like it’s the only factor, but that friend is no longer around, and we all use Signal.

I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.

It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.

Do they still put the latest releases in a .exe file?

I was going to mention this. If for no other reason than to make up for the fact that I was too lazy to switch and it eventually lead to me getting the boot from the private torrent community I was in. I’ll be switching to AirVPN and doing it right again soon.