Netflix it was the first serious and well-defined online streaming service: I still remember its advent in Italy in the “distant” October 22, 2015, if you think about it, a different era than today, in many sociological aspects that the same entertainment company has helped to create. I recall with a smile the day when I tried the service at the home of a friend, who is the editor-in-chief of this site, Simone Lelli, who showed me a catalog at the time “restricted” but still already quite rich in content.
The contents. Yeah, the ones we take for granted today. We stand as judges, jury and executioners of products that just eight years ago we weren’t even in the slightest able to imagine. I remember exactly what I thought of Netflix a few months after the start of the adventure, I said to myself:
«Damn, these really believe it! They make their own stuff, with their own brand, they invest in the territory (Australia, America, Europe) allowing actors and directors to emerge. And I do my part in all of this, paying for a fantastic service!».
Thanks to Netflix, artists have found space that they would hardly have had a place to Hollywood and many of them landed in the majors thanks to their debut on the (at the time) small emerging platform.
We have therefore come to a crossroads: account sharing yes, account sharing no. It is on this that many are debating today, on the systems that the company is adopting to “defend itself”, after all the market today has changed, the same market that Netflix created and which has seen the birth of different players and in in a certain sense competitors to itself: Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Now TV, Rakuten TV, Chili TVending up with niche players specialized in certain sectors such as Crunchyroll which makes the Japanese animation product its core business.
Today Netflix tells us that to continue share your password with up to others 2 friends we will have to pay €5 per month extra for each connected friend, which would lead the overall cost to be split over 3 ad people a figure which is just over double compared to what has been paid so far (taking into consideration the most expensive account, i.e. the one for around €18.00 per month, which allows access to 4 screens with maximum 4K quality). Discussing with friends and relatives, the general discontent seemed clear to me, made of bogus statements that I do not share in the slightestand my “journalist sense” started to itch, to the point where I wondered: is there really nothing to watch on Netflix? I already knew the answer, but I wanted to sincerely, and off the cuff I wrote in the list that follows all the exclusive contents of the platform that I have seen and which have left something inside me, as a person and as an “insider”:
Stranger Things The Sandman Black Knight Working Outsider Fractured Suburra – The Series Red Sea Diving Diamonds in the Rough Kengan Ashura Spinning out Bestars Record of Ragnarok You McGregor Forever Kakegurui AKA Operation Finale Fubar Selling Sunset The Witcher Bloodline Defense Counsel What/if The last dance Locke and Key Lost in space Ragnarok Altered Carbon Snowpiercer – serie The alienist Bodyguard House of cards Elite Secret city The Crown Spenser Confidental Sense8 True Story Hollywood Disenchantment Peaky Blinders Castlevania Anatomy of a scandal The diamond family Halston Bastard Queen of the chess The night that will never pass The summer we learned to fly The Kominsky method ARCANE Birdbox The discovery Highwayman – the last ambush Bright Monster When The See Us You Don’t know me Squidgame Alice in Borderland The Gray Man The Silent Sea Bojack Horseman Inside Job Tyler Rake Tearing Along the Edges Panama Papers Umbrella Academy Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Academy Award 2023)
And these are just some of the exclusive Netflix content that the system suggests to me and that I actually watched. Actually yes, just trivial stuff (irony). I could spend hours enunciating the results of how these content that we only find Who have in fact changed the way of communicating, of making cinema and, in some cases, caused a social sensation. See for example those Squid Game o Sense8who created so much that they forced their creators to dub it in multiple languages, so much was the demand of the people.
Netflix oggi allowed us to know also the cinematic landscape (in which I also insert the TV Series) by very distant countries from ours: I can define myself (like many of you I imagine) an avid consumer of Korean cinemaand I can do it thanks to the platform.
Beyond all this, the quality of the service must be considered, which today is one of the few that transmits in quality 4K many of its contents, in Dolby Visionand which allows buffering of the episode (to the point that if, for example, I’m on a train and the connection fails, I don’t notice it if it reconnects before the pre-loaded buffering is exhausted).
Third party content being equal, for example, Netflix guarantees a better quality product in generalboth for visual and audio quality, and for me that I am a “fan of graphics” this matters and not a little.
Does it end here? No because new things are always coming (This World Won’t Make Me Bad, Tyler Rake 2, Arnold, One Piece, Black Clover, Cobra Kai VI, Hunt for the Killer, The Cards of the Assassin, to name a few). Experiments with series and films – which don’t always go well, for heaven’s sake – where Netflix seems to be today the only platform with the courage to dareto propose something alternative to the competition which generally prefers to go on the safe side.
Take or leave? For me it takes and with both handsbecause in fact it’s worth it, because if I scroll through that list of contents I realize how many things I’ve seen and will see again and again, including documentary films or documentaries that I haven’t included in that list, but which are still part of a cultural enrichment of the highest level. Takesalso for all that is to come and that I have no intention of getting lost, e takes because quality simply comes at a price, and as long as the service I pay is worthy of the money asked, for me it continues. The reasons for leaving a service are and will always be, for me, others.
