Netflix Loses 800 Hours of A&E, History Channel Content

Aliens are somehow involved and the dropping of History Channel content is related to the cover up.

... as the sysadmin frantically selected the wrong array in an effort to restore his failing pronography collection.

No! I need my Ancient Aliens!

Like seriously, that show is awesome for all the wrong reasons.

If they want to maximize revenue, they are entitled to do that. Nobody is entitled to unlimited TV at $8/month.

Plus the cost of the Internet connection. Aside from ESPN, most of the content companies charge the providers less than $1/month per sub per channel. History Channel is on the order of $0.25 per month per sub. $8 buys you a lot for that.

It doesn't cost nearly as much as people pay their cable companies and if another company can offer it that cheap - I'm all for it. If they can expand their offerings, I'd pay $20/month for it. That's about all I'm willing to pay though. I mainly like their on demand style vs having to schedule my time around something just because the cable company has their own schedule. Sorry but no thanks.

There's a balance between revenue and charging a bit too much and the cable companies need to look in back of them at the line. They crossed it a long time ago. I voted with my wallet and majorly downsized to just local channels.

As did I. I use a mix of Netflix and the iTunes Store through an AppleTV. The iTunes Store will often have the newest episodes, generally available for purchase at midnight following the date of air, and Netflix has a nice amount of previous seasons of popular shows.

I spend about what you stated, $20 per month or so, depending on my iTunes purchases. Much more palatable than the $75 I was spending for DirecTV.

It was a difficult move to make at first because I was so used to turning the TV on it just feeding me content. I like my new way much better however.

Really it's a lousy 8 bucks a month.

For any that think it would be the end of the world if Netflix raised the rate to afford more content, my only response would be 'then fine piss off and pay 4-5 times more for it via cable so that they can tell you when to watch and what to watch at 1 episode a day, if that'.

Although, I won't really mind a loss of the History Channel to some extent. I mean there is as much History on History channel, as there is music on MTV. But I suppose 'Stupid Drivel' channel wouldn't sell as much as a meaningless term like History channel.

Why pay for it when half the shows are already on Youtube.

Aside from the masses, nobody that has anything to do with the content business from production to distribution (with the exception of unemployed arrested development actors, apparently) likes netflix- or anyone else who cheapens the value of content.

Huh? Is that a troll or sour grapes?

I may be easy to please, but I get most of my TV from Netflix, and I don't see how there's anything wrong with that.

Which Cable Company signs your paycheck?

A person can only watch one thing at a time even if ten TVs are running. when the cable was ran across the country (at Taxpayer Expense) the deal was if your antenna could pick it up,
It would be free to you forever over cable, these arguments are public record. Because They went to court and congress to force "Right of Ways" On private land, and Lobbied Home Owners Associations, Developers, and the like to get "no Antenna Clauses" in Deed Restrictions and Local No Antenna Ordinances, to name a few, they are still at fighting it out 40 years on!

Yes if You live in the US or Canada and Pay Taxes You are entitled to Unlimited TV at $8/month:
One just needs the basic of research skills to find out who paid for what. Do some research on who paid for the whole setup, and who pays what now.

Investors: Pay Corp Salaries,
Rate payers: Pay for Lobbyists, and the
Taxpayer: Pays the company Bills...
Infrastructure and Content.

and that is just the money. they changed Law and infringed on freedoms to get the stranglehold on rates they enjoy today.
the bait and switch has been forgotten as well the Tax money that paid for it all.

They sold cable to the VOTER by saying No more antenna trouble and NO BILL unless you bought a "PREMIUM" Channel, **all priced separately ** Like HBO ! ! { HBO was sold at the time OVER the AIR with an special antenna and converter box for $4.95 per month}
Congress allowed the "Bundle" that forces the purchase of 10 channels no one wants to get the one channel you do wish to see.

for the record I am not a disgruntled ex cable employee or upset at the cable company for a bill.

The way the whole thing got done is my problem. especially since most that were party to the whole thing are retired and in most cases dead. yet their mess lives on.

So much ignorance in such a small post. Impressive!

What does that translate into a percentage of the total hours of content they have? It's not 800 titles, it's 800 hours. For all I know that could be no more than 50 TV show titles with 20 episodes for each show.

First, it was Dish Network.. Now it's Netflix.

I wonder who will be next.

I think you've confused A & E with AMC.

Nope. Just google AMC and Dish Blackout. There's a ton of articles talking about it.

Yes, I do know that Dish lost AMC programming. But this thread is about A&E programming. And Dish hasn't lost any A&E programming.

The content is different but the concept is the same. AMC wanted a FAT increase and so does A&E.

That "fat" increase was not the reason Dish dropped AMC Networks. The ongoing VOOM lawsuit is the primary reason. You'll notice that Dish announced that they were dropping AMC right after they lost an important court ruling about them destroying evidence.

No it wasn't, it was the 30% increase AMC wanted and the fact that AMC only less of 40 hours of content a year that actually gets ratings.

You can believe Charlie and Co. regarding the increase being asked, if you want. But these are the same people who destroyed evidence in the VOOM lawsuit.

I believe Charlie because it has been his M.O. for eons now.

Hopefully EVERY outlet will stand up when confronted with massive price increases from content distributors.

Half the shows are sensationalized, half have nothing to do with history (obnoxious reality TV) and another half lack journalistic/scientific integrity. Yeah, in American TV three crappy halves equal a jam packed tri-crappy whole.

I watch documentary TV from the UK in almost real time. When you do this you realize so much of the content you see on the two history channels, for the matter on the Discover channels, and NatGeo, are retreads from the UK, BBC-2, BBC-4, Channel4, ITV, UK NatGeo, etc. Much of which we never see over here, and what we do in many cases has been repackaged.

A example is a show on Channel4 that aired several years ago called "Blitz House" it was presented by Tony Robinson and was shown in 3 episodes. They rebuild a section of London row houses such as you would have found in the UK in 1940. Bomb shelters used at the time where also constructed to see how they faired, not to well as it turned out. They simulated the affects of the various bomb sizes the German dropped on London. These houses where fully instrumented, had high speed video cameras etc. This had never been done before and a bunch of very important data was obtained for the science and engineering community.

The same show appeared a year or so ago on NatGeo it was edited down to one episode, and Tony Robinson was removed in favor of the usual disembodied narrator used in the States. It was horrible.

The BBC shows that Discovery/History run are about the only ones that have any scientific/journalistic integrity. Most of the American produced shows are highly sensationalized, essentially half-assed infotainment.

Agreed. I never understood what pawn shops had to do with history anyway. And History broadcasts many hours of pointless pawn shop shows.

Actually quite a bit of history can be learned from Pawn Stars. Often people come into the shop looking to sell some old artifact or trinket. Rick and the guys bring in one of their experts to look it over and make sure it’s legit and they give some background on the item and the events that surrounded it. I didn’t pay attention to History at all in high school. Putting it on TV with people making money off of stuff, now that’s something that interests me. I watch TV, and I do watch A LOT of TV, to be entertained, not to watch some boring dry lectures.

History has me for Pawn Stars and H2 has me for some of their Alien shows. I do watch quite a bit of A&E. Storage Wars, Shipping Wars, Barter Kings, The Glades and that new show, Longmire. Longmire is just friggen awesome! I also watch Crime & Investigation Network at times, but that’s mainly recycled A&E content. If I was a Netflix subscriber, I’d be pissed at losing all that content, but then again, I couldn’t even make it through my free month of their shitty service before I gave them the boot. As much as people praise el cheapo Netflix and their $8 price point, There is no substitute for all of the content on cable TV.

Can Netflix still stream the back-catalog of History channel, before they turned to crap? That seems like a unique strength of Netflix, showing old stuff, that the channels can't do.

When learned that I lost 800 hours of Pawn Stars, rednecks out shooting stuff in the face in a swamp, repeats of Modern Marvels from the 90's, Dog the Bounty Hunter and more on Netflix, I almost went and bought some fireworks in the next state over and set them off. Best news I have heard all day.

So what you're saying is all that crap is now...History?

The stuff that Netflix lost was reality programming. There is still content from A & E/History. I had The Glades in my queue and was worried that it was gone. But it's still there, and I can continue to watch. And while I'll miss Storage Wars and American Pickers, I can catch them almost anytime on A & E or History anyway.

I read that Netflix was dropping reality programs that didn't have much in the way of viewers. They would rather spend that money on scripted programs.

Of which are mostly scripted anyway!!

Take a good look, this sort of crap is what the future of cloud-delivered content will be like.

Cloud gaming will be the same way. License a game for a couple years, it gets popular, the company wants more money, the service refuses and the game gets pulls.

This is the future that people can't wait to embrace; Content that can vanish literally overnight.

Netflix is going to have to raise their prices. Plain and simple. They want to pay less, content owners want them to pay more. Content owners always win.

$8 per month is less than what I pay per month for Rhapsody for music. If Netflix raised their price to say, $10 per month, they would be better off. Sure they might lose some subscribers. But they will get more licensing deals and that would result in more things to watch and therefore more subscribers once again.

I'll admit I don't subscribe. But that's because my internet sucks too much for Netflix. But once I get a better connection in the Spring, I will definitely subscribe. And honestly I would rather pay $10 for better content than pay $8 for mediocre content.

Was pretty much bottom of the barrel nonsense content anyway, or at least the vast majority of it. Anyone that actually KNOWS history knows most of these docos are just plain wrong or sensationalized.

That aside, the content owners are cutting off their noses to spite their face. I, like most people I know, used to pirate every TV show I wanted to watch. When Netflix came around, that stopped for everything they and I could get on Netflix. If it's not available on Netflix, and I want to watch it, I pirate it and so do most younger people. Too bad so sad. Sorry, but nobody wants to go back to cable when they've enjoyed watching what they want when they want it with no obnoxious commercials.

I'm not a Netflix fanboy either by the way, I'd be happy to subscribe to another service that offers anywhere near the content and convenience that has a reasonable cost and doesn't require me to pay monthly for a cable connection I have no desire to use again. And before someone mentions Hulu, Hulu is made of fail. Commercials, horrid UI on game systems and boxes, lack of content and full seasons of shows makes it useless. I tried it out for the free month and stopped using it after the third day.

Cue the morality crusaders that I'll happily ignore.

Same here, when netflix came out online, I was able to ditch my old "habits", but now I am back at it.
Netflix needs to offer tiers, or packages. Just offer end-user choice of "package". I don't want History channel, but I would pick AMC shows.

The writing is on the wall. They and the big name broadcasters have been fighting with all their might, and they are still losing. The world is changing around them, and they want to stamp their feet and cling to the past.
They are alienating their "real" customer base - the end user. They are just driving people to torrents.

OK,

Heres the deal. There are a number of players out there. The content owners, content providers (Netflix, cable, youtube, etc), and the dying end user sales (itunes, amazon, walmart). As content gets fully digitized the sales channel will collapse.

In any case the theory that the content provider is running under to maximize profit is: shove ads in your face, and limit content exposure (artificial supply constraints). These are not the first to do this, nor will they be the last. The problem is that technology has outpaced the supply constraint so they try to fill the plug by passing laws by bribing congress to make it illegal to circumvent the artificial supply constraint (meaning higher prices).

The further theory that they operate on is that when content is newer it is more valuable and decrease in value over time. The way they got around that natural progression was syndication, and stuffing your cable channels with old content and forcing you to pay for it in an unnatural bundle.

This unnatural supply constraint has skewed a number of things, namely the cost per show, salaries (remember when acting on TV was a place to retire), sports programming costs have ballooned (making average players make more than $10m), and consolidation has reduced competition.

We are close to the breaking point (almost every major company has had a carriage dispute) and time warner and disney's assault on Netflix is proof that it is working.

The problem for the end user is bundling, which is illegal in almost every business case, except it seems cable and wireless which of course have the highest prices and least choice. If I wanted to get just internet, my fios would be over $70, and right now I pay $99 for 3 play. So I need to make a choice pay $30 for TV and phone, or just stick it to Verizon. But at the end of the day that internet feed costs them pennies while the TV is the most costly. I rarely even use the phone, but the 2 play was priced just as high or higher than the 3 play. Actuary foolishness.

Back to Netflix. Every year their new content keeps disappearing and the old stuff does too. So while there is a plethora of 80's and 90's shows to watch, getting newer ones or full series is a patchwork. But if I look at the value, bar none netflix is watched in my house at least 80% of the TV time for only $8 and I am dropping over $30 (probably closer to $50 sans bundling) for only 20% of TV time. The big gotcha and killer is data caps. Right now there aren't any but once that happens say goodbye to the cloud, until the sine wave bounces back and greed takes over again.

ill just pirate for free there crap....thanks for breaking them down
i wish everything would break down

I'm glad they removed it, most of the crap was about aliens or some other bizzaro history and if I wanna watch that youtube has an ample supply of the same things and subjects.

who cares? I won't watch their content if it isn't on netflix then

This makes no sense. It's not like you are forced to watch anything on Netflix. I don't care if they have shows about watching water evaporate in real time. I don't have to watch them if I don't want to.

...A&E and these other turds want to make their own channel apps and put on things like Xbox and Apple TV. Fox recently released an Xbox app. I was already to use it until they said I needed cable service with one of only two providers. HBO Go is the same way. These payola schemes have got to stop. I do not want to pay for my content twice! I dont have cable for a reason.

... Go Netflix.

ah poo. A and E shows are good too.

When will the studios and networks realize that ANY money garnered from the sale of an intangible product is better than none?

Seriously... its worth how much now? The market disagrees. In about six weeks it will be worth half or less anyway. It will be worth zilch should there be a catastrophic event (which is A LOT more likely nowadays than before). Why not take the $4 now for the supposed $7 product while you can? Its not like all the other consumers under contract are complaining about the $7 pricetag. Why not rake in $11 instead of just $7?
[Disclaimer for idiots: The above is an oversimplified example of my point.]

I am just waiting for a content consumer (Netflix, AppleTV, et al) to cry to the government about this. Oh no! Its a TV emergency! We must take over and regulate the sale of content to ensure "equal access" to piss poor TV! Ala healthcare... Bastards.

When i grew up we had 3 cdhannels no cell phones no internet we came inside when your mother yelled for supper or it got dark. i dotn lose anysleep over these big companies fighting at netflix. before you reply add up your cable cell and internet bills. its amazing how much we now shell out for these services

Dose anyone buy this content on DVD?
Dose anyone have the desire to watch this type of programing over and over?
Dose anyone not own a DVR or torrent client?

Who is loosening here? Not the end user or Netflix, they will still get my $8 a month for other programing. Broadcasters need to wake up and smell the hard drives.