Netflix kills casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs

I wish there was a service like steam for videos: not subscription but high confidence purchase of video content available "forever" (even if they remove it from the purchasing options, license would remain).

Personally I watch so little tv/movies that any subscription was always overpaying. I still did it for a while, because the price wasn't high enough to push me to seek out other options.

I'm no longer subbing and moved on, but the right holders are seriously detached from reality if they think this is a sane business strategy

Not to mention everyone and their moms building own streaming service only to lose money, cut down the catalogue, increase prices and find that is still not enough. So now add ads in some paid tiers. With everyone needing that ad revenue and profiling data to "personalize experience" I think it is cleaner to just sail the high seas.

Between this, the ads on paid plans, and the fragmentation of catalogues, we've come full circle.

the difference of course being that valve /has/ to keep their customers happy because their average user is savvy at least with browsing the internet, the same can't be said of streaming consumers, many whom I know are emigres from the now-decaying cable infrastructure. Netflix knows this and squeezes their customer base, and while I would like to assume the altruism of Steam, whether by their own design or the will of the public, a solution with friction that low is all that works with that target market.

This is no joke. I tried watching the latest episode of Plur1bus on Apple TV+ on my laptop and here's the steps I went through:

1. Start chrome, navigate to tv.apple.com, click on the #1 show of the day (no problem)

2. The site tells me I can sign up for the TV service that I already have instead of offering a play button.

3. I click on the "sign up" which pauses for 10 seconds then tells me I'm already subscribed why did I hit the button you idiot.

4. I back arrow to the original page, it still asks me to sign up, hit F5 a couple of times to no effect.

5. Reload tv.apple.com from the start and navigate to the page, now it finally shows a play button.

6. Hit the play button but it gives me a popup saying that I need to verify the three digits off of the back of my credit card. I enter the digits and click the next button, but nothing happens.

7. Off to Google where I learn that if that happens you can log into accounts.apple.com first to avoid it.

8. I go through the login process on apple's site, which involves pulling out my phone to scan a QR code.

9. On the Apple site I try to go to the AppleTV+ options, which requires a second QR scan on my phone because it's apparently a different account.

10. On the site I verify that it shows the ATV+ subscription is active.

11. Return to tv.apple.com and click on the show to see that it again says I need to sign up to the service.

12. Click on the sign up button again to be told that I'm already subscribed.

13. Go back and reload the page entirely again so the play button reappears.

14. Click on the play button and get asked for the three digits again. Groan.

15. This time the next button actually works (miracle!) and it loads a second page talking about parental controls with another non-working button on the bottom.

16. I close the window and click on my profile in the upper right, verify that the parental controls are off.

17. Attempt to watch again, but again get stuck doing the 3 digit verify and get stuck on the parental controls window.

18. Go back to the settings and try turning on parental controls, which requires setting a PIN and doing another account verification, but leaving them on the most permissive settings.

19. Return to the site, to discover that it asks for the 3 digits yet again and then send me to that parental controls screen again.

20. Go back to settings and turn off parental controls because that didn't help.

21. Hit up Google again and find a person who suggests that switching browsers might help. I'm running the most common browser with no extensions that I use for these streaming sites because they can be such a pain in the ass, but sure.

22. Fire up Firefox with uMatrix and Adblock+ and have to do the login stuff yet again, but this time the show actually plays.

So to watch an hour of TV I had to spend over 30 minutes faffing about with the stupid website. It made me pine for the days of piracy when this was all so easy. I also downplayed how many times I had to do the reload dance to even get the play button to appear, going back to the start only worked about 1 time out of 3.

This isn't the only time I've struggled with streaming sites. Acorn for example simply refused to stream to my home. My wife is really into British mystery series and was pretty excited about it, but we had to drop it because their website simply refused to deliver the video and their tech support was completely unhelpful.

Same - I've been using an Intel NUC with Windows 10 for many years. It does everything I want:

- Netflix

- Youtube without ads via Firefox+uBlock Origin

- Ripping DVDs and converting to .mp4

Those Small Form Factor PCs have only gotten cheaper over time - the most powerful PC I've ever owned in 30+ years is a $300 Minisforum (16 Cores, 16GB RAM) that's doing similar duty in the garage.

That's also rather shit, unless you're using a prescribed browser and operating system.

We've rebuilt cable boxes, but somehow they're even shittier than before.

What OS do you run? I was thinking of doing this with SteamOS.

BitTorrent → Local Media Player App

Still the best way to watch movies and shows.

Even if we pay $100 dollars every month to streaming services they will never not be too dumb to know how to make a convenient player that isn't hostile to its users.

> The change was first spotted by users on Reddit and confirmed in an updated Netflix support page (via Android Authority), which now states that the streaming service no longer supports casting from mobile devices to most TVs and TV-streaming devices. Users are instead directed to use the remote that came with their TV hardware and use its native Netflix app.

My guess is that adblock became too easy on smartphones, so by forcing people use the app on the TV it makes harder for people to bypass the ads.

That's pure speculation, as I don't have any subscription from netflix. But I've used this method with the HBO app and it works 90% of the time, so I'm assuming netflix has the same issue.

aye matey

As with so much technology, the technology exists in part to provide a service to the customer, but more and more it exists to direct the customer into the behaviors desired by the technology owner and its advertising partners. This isn't always so evil or insidious, but the point stands that Netflix (or almost any modern service) doesn't want you to do what _you_ want with your devices. It wants to direct you towards whatever is most beneficial to Netflix. These companies don't really serve their customers, except confusingly, customers keep paying for these services.

there was an ad, or a presentation in a conference keynote, from when microsoft built phones, showing a user leaving the house and continuing what was he doing in the car in a very futuristic way. I can't find it now, but was something crazy by then, the continuum idea was also a good one, but here we are, walled gardens and nothing smart about them.

It's notable that often we have protocols to tie things together. UPnP/DLNA/Miracast have existed for a long time now & have included standards for media playing, light control, others. And many TV's have even implemented!!

I feel like what has always been trickier is control and coordination. There haven't been many people to step up and own the higher level, the thing that coordinates devices.

It's notable to me that recent successful cast protocols (like Netflix+YouTube's original DIAL, Chromecast) have really simplified. Are bottom up flows. They have allowed the phone (second screen) apps to have a direct way to cast, inside the app. To one other screen, to such an extent that multi-room audio works by first making a group that then presents in the app as one device. (Sonos' proprietary casting is the notable exception.) Where-as historically casting was possible but often used dedicated apps, a UPnP Control Point, that talked to a different UPnP Media Renderer to point it at various UPnP Media Servers. A tri-part system, with control as the third point.

Netflix hypothetically could have used the UPnP to do casting. Phone acts as a Media Server (but serves up one-time-use URLs on the net for actual media) to the movie on question. Then act as a UPnP control point to control media playback. But they made DIAL, which reduced it to a two system network. And to have more resident native apps running (with rest channels open between the devices).

It's interesting seeing what folks do with Google Home and Home Assistant. Orchestrating routines and triggers and what not is kind of neat, in some ways wildly hard to imagine from "back then", but also feels so short in other ways. Is such a primitive level of control. It feels like the task of making actual systems coordinateable and orchestrateable, the real dream of ubicomp, is indeed quite far away, unowned, even though in many cases we have advanced computer protocols afforded to us.

It's interesting to look back at the times when these concepts and sci-fi lit were written.

A lot of it was in the postwar period. You had a booming population that offered the opportunity for easy corporate revenue growth. If you wanted to make more money, you just sold your good or service to a person who didn't have it yet. That was simple enough because there were people - a lot of them - aging into your market. Let's say that the microwave was the smart home appliance of the late 60s/early 70s. You want to sell them. Well, that's easy, because there are a bunch of people building first homes who want to update their kitchens. Make the case that your microwave belongs in it due to the convenience it brings.

You're a futurist. What would that microwave look like in the future? Well, surely it would just be purchased, you'd put it in your home, and it'd have all sorts of features to make your life even more convenient.

These stories were written with the assumption that, at least in the West, that would continue forever. The Baby Boomers would have enough kids to justify the same sort of marketing strategy. And then those kids would have enough kids. And so on and so forth.

That didn't happen. The birthrate began to plummet in the 1970s and hasn't increased meaningfully since. There are fewer people naturally aging into your market, to say nothing of resources becoming more scarce as time goes on.

So what do you do if you are charged with providing shareholders ever-increasing returns on their investments by selling goods and services? Well, you try to extract more sales - or value - out of a smaller number of people. You don't just sell a smart home device; you require it to be tied to a subscription that must be paid monthly, and make the person using it buy a new one every so often to keep the revenue coming in. You could also collect the data on how they use the device and sell that to people looking to influence the purchase of further goods and services.

The microwave is now a "smart" device that will do all sorts of things... but you'll need to keep paying for it, over and over.

Same with music players, lighting fixtures, televisions, laundry machines, and everything else we've seen get the "smart home" treatment.

Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account that part. It was about the consumer, not the supplier, but the consumer can only be made to consume so much based on organic growth.

Any vision of the future that doesn’t include realistic incentives of human beings won’t happen.

Offering such a flexible smart home requires a huge amount of coordination work, customer support, and just taking the blame sometimes for the inevitable bugs.

Yeah competent companies are willing to take on all that, if you pay them a lot, which is why high end smart homes are flourishing.

I never watch Netflix but I kept their highest tier account to share with my family (not in same household). They really started nickle-and-diming this quarter and I cancelled. I know I could add another user for additional charge but it motivated me to cancel.

If you think they nickel and dime customers, you should see what they do to TV and streaming device makers. They can make basically any demand they want because you can't ship with Netflix.

I’ve helped several elderly neighbors get setup with casting to their TVs as well. Just a debacle that’s going to frustrate a bunch of people for no good reason. Really wish the teams that implement ‘features’ like this were forced to deal with the consequences. At least in the olden days, they’d get feedback in the form of calls and complaints to their help line but now it’s just “Too bad, app changed, deal with it.”

Apple TV has a Netflix app already. Plus you can use your iPhone as a remote.

> Not sure the full motivation behind this

This feature was one of the main reasons how Netflix movies/shows could be captured/uploaded to piracy sites in full quality as soon as they were released. People recorded the video output and uploaded them. This is to remove that path. Kinda obvious if you ask.

All this app stuff is so annoying. I reverted back a while ago. Now when i want the radio on i just switch it on. With an actual switch. Same with my lights— an actual real switch! Theres no benefit to chaining all your behind someapp the needs updated installed, logged in passwords, managed, ooo you haven’t logged in for 90 days lets send you an email to update your password- bro i just want to increase my heating. Its all nonsense. Sooner people realise the better.

>I'd prefer video streaming apps be required to support Casting/AirPlay.

Do you mean required by law?

Probably to drive people to piracy

> this is very annoying for a parent with kids

But the parents without kids, will they at least continue to be leafs? (Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry...)

[flagged]

Corporate garbagespeak, has no relation to reality whatsoever.

The reason isn't meant to be true/correct/verifiable. It's meant to be a positive sounding soundbite.

Statements like those are meant for you to just bounce off of them and fuck off. They don't care about the truth and they know you don't care enough to do anything about their lying. It's an entire business model.

It doesn't. They're just lying.

This is why I take a Chromecast with me on vacation. Put in the WiFi password and job done. Works better and faster than most smart TVs.

Sometimes when I cast from apps to a TV it logs me into the TV. incredibly annoying.

Just setup different profiles on the in-laws tv? A kids profile and problem solved!

But then how would they charge you extra for being at a second location?

It's very understandable. they want to upsell their existing customer base.

like you said, money grubbing. they need to grow this quarter, remember?

> Them refusing to work with the Apple TV app

Not that I think Netflix is being anything other than shitty here. But Apple TV is equally egregious in not supporting Chromecast.

> Netflix seems to basically do everything in their power to own the experience of using Netflix as much as possible, short of making a device and OS themselves.

I'm suddenly feeling that the next step for Netflix is making a dedicated streaming hardware device solely for Netflix. Subsidized by ads of course. Like the reverse of Roku.

Out of all the dead Google products so far, I'm probably going to mourn for it the most once the existing ones are basically unusable, which I know is coming someday. I've always loathed the idea of giving TVs themselves internet for various reasons. The various boxes are marginally better, but the Chromecast felt revolutionary to me when it launched, because the TV didn't need to be complicated by UI or a remote with a million buttons, it was all in the phone. Also to me personally this user hostile act feels like a betrayal because in the early days of Chromecast Netflix's app seems to have the least number of issues with Chromecast. Even if that was just my subjective experience, it was still the app I used most with Chromecast when I got my first one because Netflix was a different beast then.

I still have my dead 1st gen and I look at it with fondness. I'm not surprised the mega corporations don't have the same feeling, but it still feels bad when they want to take away something they made that I actually liked.

What was the Texas patent case?

>By “directs to remote” does it mean the TV remote? I feel like I’m missing something here, it’s just saying “use the smart tv’s built in app”? Directing someone to the remote seems like an overcomplicated way of indicating this?

Yes, that's what it means.

Some other streaming apps encourage using their mobile app as a remote, so I would imagine they are making it clear that the app should not be used at all here.

I’m really leaning towards them being an asshole in this specific case.

Chromecast works in my EV for every other streaming app, so the licensing seems to be a solved problem for them. Netflix, however, never worked and my EV manufacturer had to release a support page specifically for Netflix not working.

I suspect this is just more account security. I remember paying $20/mo for a premium plan with a set number of screens on the contract…but one day their side changed and those screens had to be on my WiFi. I was no longer paying per screen. I was now paying per-household, but I never agreed to that change.

I cancelled Netflix after 15 years (DVD era) and have never looked back. Just hostile decision after hostile decision.

I suspect this too; between licensing and ads I bet there's a "screen type" (mobile vs. fixed/TV) that needs to be "correct" for some contract reason, and casting is skewing their numbers enough that someone called them on it.

Thank you. The idea that this is due to ads makes complete sense, as there's a lot of indication that Netflix charges more for ads showing on a TV (more people likely to view) than on a mobile device (usually only one person).

The fact that casting is still supported for older Chromecasts only on ad-free plans makes this the likeliest explanation to me. Netflix doesn't want to be paid lower rates on ads that are actually getting shown on the TV.

Advertising is a virus that invades and destroys every ecosystem it can.

Don't build the Torment Netflix? These fundamentally anti-consumer moves are why it's called the Internet of sh**y things.

I have no concern whatsoever whether this is about licensing or just money grubbing. You're making things suck for the paying customer. But to be fair, all the streaming services are chasing the last few drops of blood from the stone trying to stop people from actually watching from two screens they paid for in two different locations and other idiocy. I canceled Netflix a while back. And I only watch prime video through an ad blocker on my PC now. Clearly I must hate freedom.

Given that they block login sharing, I think it's most likely the following scenario:

Friend with a Netflix account comes to your house, casts Netflix to your TV. No need for you to have a Netflix account in that case. Whereas, they want to force you to also have a Netflix account to watch on your TV.

Same, now and then some indie films release on sites like Vimeo where you can buy a DRM-free download, but it's very rare unfortunately.

So Cable TV died decades ago when they first put ads onto the service that was sold on not having any ads, right?

Enshittification is done because it is so reliable. Customers just keep buying, doesn't really seem to matter how poorly you treat them.

Shrinkflation has gone on for decades and there's nothing stopping it from continuing because what are you going to do, not buy 90% of products in the grocery store? Good luck.

The problem is that businesses reach a sort of escape velocity where you can abuse your customer and they either do not react to it or have no other choice. The entire economy has worked to ensure that every consumer experiences trained helplessness when it comes to consuming, because that's more profitable.

Some Blu-Rays have major spoilers in their menu animations, and some have unskippable ads, some of which may contain major spoilers. [0] It's also a criminal offence to create a backup, thanks to the DMCA.

On the plus side, all UHD Blu-Rays are free of region-locking.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26211740

> in the era of the most cutting edge breakthroughs in video

... and what are those?

I don't know that Netflix had much of an option. Once the studios and networks realized how much money they were leaving on the table by not running their own exclusive streaming services, the licensing costs to Netflix blew up or simply became entirely unavailable.

Netflix running their own studio was a reasonable attempt at regaining some exclusivity, even if it's been executed poorly in many cases.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep my subscription as we've hardly used it in months at this point, but I also don't have any other subscriptions any more either, so I'm not exactly a great bellwether.

Did they have a choice? In the beginning the studios gave them access to their catalog for cheap. The studios understandably stopped doing that.