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Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV

145 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

mantap 7y ago
For me this future has already arrived. Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. Asking people to subscribe to multiple streaming services is not just expensive but also crazy inconvenient. By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time.
- neilv 7y ago
  > Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.
  - asdff 7y ago
    My public library even has video streaming for tons of titles
- wmf 7y ago
  I wonder where the idea that Netflix (streaming) should or used to have everything came from.
  - serf 7y ago
    it came from the concept that they sought to replace : in-person rental companies. Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.
    - flukus 7y ago
      > Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.
      - runevault 7y ago
        If the govt was going to nail Disney for anti-trust they wouldn't have let them buy Fox. Disney + was being talked about before the deal was approved.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Blockbuster could stock anything it wanted without the studio’s blessing by just buying DVDs at retail (even though they had special deals with the studio to get reduced prices). Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      It's well past time for there to be a mechanical license for streaming copyrighted video content. This lock down garbage is just that. Copyright is a joke that provides zero benefit to the public, little benefit to the starving artist, and almost all the benefit to the mega corporations. Sonny Bono is a plague on creativity and his law was even worse.
  - jhbadger 7y ago
    In the DVD-by-mail days it really did. Even obscure movies made in communist East Germany! Maybe it still does (I like most people who were early Netflix customers, haven't subscribed to the DVD option in nearly a decade).
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      I'm glad I watched my bucket list of movies from Netflix before they shrank the DVD selection. It seems worse now than that of the local public library.
    - hkmurakami 7y ago
      Friend worked in operations in those days and explained to me how they had 3 levels of storage including "deep" storage. Parallels to data warehousing.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    you're right. netflix never had a comprehensive selection of movies or tv to stream. it seems to have even less now, which must be disappointing for subscribers (I canceled my subscription years ago so I'm just going off what I hear). they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!). frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It had all the DVDs, and for a while the catalog really was expanding into major titles and releases. Everyone assumed that eventually the DVD catalog would be entirely available digitally, but that never happened because of greed.
- mrbonner 7y ago
  I am planning to cancel Netflix depending on how good the contents on Disney Plus is and how much ads it has. I have found myself spending more time looking for things to watch in Netflix comparing to watching them. Recently, I discovered the Roku channel. It has limited selections including decent family titles, too. It has ads but is limited to 1 or 2 15-second ads that are kid-friendly (like Goldfish cracker) when I watched Rango yesterday with my daughter. It’s sad that the promising land of digital streaming platform is deteriorating to what cable has become.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  And Plex is just getting better and better: - Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc - support for many devices and TV players/dongles - unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth) - remote access from any location/country
  - jammygit 7y ago
    According to one of Jaron Lanier's books, the 'musician as a middle class job' has pretty much vanished because of all the piracy and streaming services. Plex is wonderful, but its nice that people can make a good living making the content too.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.
      - jammygit 7y ago
        He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found: > Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01/04/nashville-musical-middle-class-collapses-new-dylans/21236245/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01... > According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir... > At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry > For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees. http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ also relevant for the TV industry: > According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mdesq 7y ago
  I watch Stranger Things and The Office re-runs on business trips. Once The Office is gone I'll be gone as well.
- scarface74 7y ago
  It also doesn’t cost $100 million to make an album.
  - mantap 7y ago
    There's reason to believe that a shared catalog would be more profitable for the non-Netflix streaming services, not less. It's not like it's hard to track who watched whose IP and distribute the revenue appropriately. The current system benefits Netflix who try to convince people to watch Netflix originals and dump everything else. It's not just a competition for subscribers, it's a competition for screen time too. There's a lot of good content on the other streaming services but it's too fragmented to pay for.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Being a third party distributor for other people’s content has never been profitable. Look no further than money losing Spotify. No company wants to be completely dependent on the whims of its suppliers. Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Who cares when the investment was recouped 3x at the box office alone. Hollywood makes money hand over fist at the box office and clammoring about lost DVD sales is clammoring about icing on the cake. Movies like infinity war make several orders of magnitude more money at the box office than home release.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      That’s not true. Movie studios have been making more money from non theatre sources since the 90s.
    - P_I_Staker 7y ago
      Not all movies do well at the box office, there's plenty of flops as well.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  It's more like record labels aren't vertically integrated. Sony used to be, but piracy and the iPod made that less relevant just as streaming became viable. I'm an ex-Spotifier. The story we got was that piracy had disrupted the music industry so much it brought the majors to the bargaining table. This is completely different than the state of movies and TV shows. Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.
  - dahtguy 7y ago
    Which is a total shame, because those labels are the best discovery engines! If you want a great source of new content, that's effectively their full time job. The distribution and content quality of Tiny Engines, Topshelf Records, Polyvinyl is so so much better than anything Spotify will try to algorithm up for me. (typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)
    - asdff 7y ago
      You can still look at those releases and use spotify. No one is forcing you to look at their half baked playlists. Personally, I think the user playlists are the best part of the entire service.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      I can't seem to find it, but in the past year, I read an article on how cheap compilations (could have been Fat Music) were a really effective way to promote bands in that genre. Bands would talk about doing shows, and once they play the song on the compilation CD, everyone sings along.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it. What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?
  - fragsworth 7y ago
    I don't pirate anything, but maybe one reason people do is that getting things spoiled before you watch it can be a serious problem.
  - whermans 7y ago
    The choice is not between Netflix and piracy. I can't speak for the original poster, but for me Netflix' appeal was that I had a wide selection of content available for a single price in a single subscription, making it an attractive competitor to buying and/or renting single movies and series. With the fragmentation of the streaming landscape they have lost that competitive edge, and if it wasn't for the Netflix-exclusive series that justify the monthly price for me, I would probably have cancelled too. A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Personally, I have no qualms avoiding paying 3.99 or whatever to rent a digital file that made its money back thrice over before it left theaters.
    - dwrowe 7y ago
      “You wouldn’t download a car” arguments aside - what is the ethical boundary for “They’ve made enough money - I’m entitled to enjoy it for free” ?
- rolltiide 7y ago
  and this was after 5 years of hearing your friends tell you the same thing right I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely
- blue_devil 7y ago
  Remember the good old days of Netflix when you could rent quality movies on DVDs in addition to streaming? Quality has been going down for years now. I'm intermittently subbed but less and less frequently. Oh well.
- dwild 7y ago
  > By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time. You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play. For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.
- retpirato 7y ago
  I agree multiple services is crazy & inconvenient. that isn't an excuse to do something illegal.
edgarvaldes 7y ago
Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? There is a lot of media, old and new, local and foreign. I don't know if a single provider can give you all the access a person wants for a price that the consumer is willing to pay.
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  http://thepiratebay.org http://thepiratebay.org does. Like the good old days. And the media companies did it to themselves...
  - z3c0 7y ago
    I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing, for some reason.)
    - adjkant 7y ago
      > which I'm doing, for some reason Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.
      - toxik 7y ago
        Let there be friction so the techies can go back to being alone in pirating. It wasn’t an issue until everybody started doing it!
      - nwallin 7y ago
        Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good, but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has been really easy to slip back into pirating. > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix. It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.
ArlenBales 7y ago
One upside to streaming services is how easy they are to cancel and resume. I regularly suspend and resume Netflix, HBO Now, etc. based on what I'm currently watching. It's very easy to do this, especially if the service is paid for using Google Store / Apple Store subscriptions. Compare to the hell you go through trying to contact Comcast and cancel service.
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  I picture a meta-service that manages this. When you click to play a show, it quickly and automatically signs you up for whichever service, and if you haven't watched a show on that service for more than 2 weeks, it cancels your subscription. Presumably the problem would be that streaming sites might not like customers canceling their service 4 or 5 times per year.
  - adjkant 7y ago
    > Presumably the problem would be that streaming sites might not like customers canceling their service 4 or 5 times per year. Maybe they "bundle" to avoid the constant cancelling.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      Sure, bundle, but it would probably be done by a 3rd party aggregator. Hard to imaging competing content providers joining forces, and anyway it could be seen as monopolistic market manipulation. This 3rd part would probably want some clever branding for this. All streaming generally enters the home through a wire, so maybe they call is Wire? Though big wires are often called a cable, so maybe they just call it Cable? :)
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Provided cancelling ends your service at the next billing period you should always cancel immediately rather than wait 2 weeks.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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butterfi 7y ago
Interesting-FF says that nytimes.com is unsafe
- nothis 7y ago
  Not for me?
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  Works for me. Maybe your date/time is off?
- tsukurimashou 7y ago
  browser update, or you're getting MiTM?
  - butterfi 7y ago
    My FF is up to date. I’m on NordVPN, maybe it is a time issue?
seph-reed 7y ago
If braves BAT (Basic Attention Token) thing could ever really take off, it'd make for a nice solution to all of this. Just sort of pitch a penny here or there, and after enough people pitching pennies the content has earned a worthy revenue.
ohiovr 7y ago
Everything is free on channel 4, 6, 10, and uhf
lesinski 7y ago
Netflix has reshaped the whole industry for the better. Netflix by itself at $13 per month is nearly as much content as you'd get in a small cable package in the "old days of TV." Of course, in the future, if you actually tried to watch everything available, you'd be paying for some crazy mega-bundle like the old cable days. Otherwise, things are clearly better as Netflix runs away with streaming and forces the other media companies to compete.
- losteric 7y ago
  Eh... it's turning out that Netflix just introduced a new medium for cable. Now that every content owner is starting their own services, we're losing the thing that made Netflix revolutionary: loads of quality and diverse content under one subscription. Personally, the shows I'm interested in are spread across a half dozen services... and only one or two really warrant full engagement (versus "background entertainment")... so obviously it's back to bittorrent for me.
  - treis 7y ago
    >Eh... it's turning out that Netflix just introduced a new medium for cable. The thing no one really talks about is that cable companies never really made (relatively) that much money. The content producers are the ones that have always made the real money. Most of your bill goes to them. Ultimately, Netflix is just another middle man between you and the content. You still have to pay for wires but now there's another hand taking their share. In the long term they can't be cheaper. The reason it was cheaper was that for a long time they were seen as free additional revenue for content producers. Like someone making a living off of discarded garbage. Eventually the people throwing that stuff away wise up and want their normal cut. We are pretty much there at this point.
  - glaberficken 7y ago
    i'm wondering the same. currently a Netflix subscriber. but back in the day i had a NAS box hitting a preconfigured rss feed with the shows i watched. was pretty convenient and the NAS could stream to every device on my wifi
RIMR 7y ago
A return to the bad old days of cable bundles, coupled with the current average Internet speed, would just bring back the good old days of torrenting.
- NegatioN 7y ago
  This is exactly what I feel I've been driven to this last year. I don't want to have all my media spread around on a tenfold different streaming providers, nor do I want to live with the random removals of offerings that seem to happening more and more where I live. The day I have children I want to be able to share some sort of cultural archive with them, though regular tv might probably be dead by that time, who knows. I've started hosting my own plex server, and using torrents and actual old backups to get the content. The sad part though, is that most of the major torrent sites seem really dead compared to the haydays. What are some good options these days?
  - dudul 7y ago
    I rarely don't find what I'm looking for on TPB.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    I miss TvTorrents. It had hard-to-find shows, and it kept track of who downloaded what, so if there were no active seeders, you could ping some people to seed it so they could earn credits.
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    Fair warning - these sites have some of the obnoxious browser hijacking javascript I have ever seen (and they keep upping the ante every few months) but updating your hosts file to block the ads helps a bit - rarbg and ettv complement what is available on each other and tpb.
nsxwolf 7y ago
I’m feeling nostalgic for the days of paying $2 an episode on iTunes. The future where there’s 10 shows I want to watch and I have to pay for 10 separate $15 monthly services to watch them is almost here and it sucks. I also get to learn 10 different app UIs to watch them, and enjoy constantly logging back into them all whenever whatever box I’m using randomly logs them out.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Why feel nostalgic? You still can.
  - mattmcknight 7y ago
    Too much content exclusive to subscription services.
  - nsxwolf 7y ago
    If I want to watch any of the new Star Trek series I’m going to have to bite the bullet and subscribe to CBS. For starters. Netflix is another given. Do these content channels even release shows on Blu ray and iTunes a year later like they used to?
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Why is that bad thing? Typically individual episodes are $2.99. You can sign in on the app for a month, immediately cancel so you don’t get charged for an additional month and pay $6.
      - nsxwolf 7y ago
        I don't even mind the expense so much. It's the experience. I'd happily pay more just to have TV watching be a pleasure. This whole app experience where you have to pull out your phone and log into some site over and over again when it "forgets", learn multiple UIs, have commercials that mess with you (Choose a commercial to "interact" with for 3 commercials, or choose to watch 6 commercials!) It's just awful. It makes me miss CRTs with rabbit ears and a VHF and UHF dial.
zwayhowder 7y ago
The biggest game changer for me with streaming is I watch less TV. Before streaming I either had to maintain a complex balance with my never large enough DVR or watch shows when the network decided (I'm looking at you Channel 9 in Australia putting Star Trek on at 11pm on Tuesday and Thursday nights). Before that I had VHS, so many VHS. With streaming I watch maybe an hour or two at most, then I stop, confident I can pickup whenever (and increasingly wherever I want). I don't worry about my wife deleting my Star Trek for her Firefly. Unlike DVDs we can catch up on an episode of a shared show while traveling. Though I did get hooked on a Netflix show in the UK that isn't available in Australia, four weeks later I can't even remember the title.
evo_9 7y ago
Glad I kept my torrent/VPN box ready to go. I was happy to pay a small reasonable fee but it’s clear things are just turning into the overpriced nickel-and-dimming shit-show we had not even 10 years back. So yeah I’ll pull what I actually watch and they get nothing again.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring. I checked Netflix, of course not there I should have known better, oh but it knew what I was looking for and showed me knockoffs "related to" what I was actually looking for. Having spent most of my life making fun of knockoffs, that was a bad move Netflix. I checked Amazon Video, hey the movie is there, but not included in my prime subscription, and I can only stream it if I buy the movie for $20, no option to even rent the movie for 48 hours. Okay, thats a non-starter, I know Amazon Video just resyndicates from a shared catalogue of movies so that means every rent-streaming service will have it, but maybe under different pricing. So I checked the unlikely Playstation Store. Not listed Okay at this point I go to Google, because the "where can I stream it" sites have been replaced by a mere addition of a feature on Google where on top of the search results underneath the ratings it shows you where you can stream it. Exhibit A of features masquerading as companies getting replaced quickly by Google. Showed that everyone was charging $20 with no option to rent. Well, I was going to rent it. Other interfaces should have an easy search that shows the availability of a title on multiple streaming services and its price. But after this bar, if you wanted me to stop worrying about who has a license for copyright distribution, thats how you get me to stop worrying about who has a license. The burden has never been on the consumer anyway, we've just been assuming Walmart properly secured the license, and that the person with DVDs on a towel outside doesn't. But we never knew and never had any liability, until we were distributing it ourselves. So fire up the dusty old torrent software and turn off the upload feature. Within 10 minutes I was watching my 4gb H264 1080P version of what I wanted to see.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring. That's sadly most likely the issue. I bet it was a big movie? Most likely they are just keeping the good old traditional schedule. Release at the movie Theater, few months later release for sell, few months later release for rental. They added a few months later a release on streaming platform but that's it... That's absurd that they still do that but I guess waiting a few months isn't the worse to save a few bucks.
Buttons840 7y ago
Startup idea: Make a website where I can push a single button to pay for and activate one month of a streaming service. Make the one month subscription expire at the end of the month automatically (no auto-renew). This way I avoid paying for time during which I watch nothing, and I can easily activate a new month almost instantly.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  One poblem with that idea: Many streaming services are quite shitty, don't allow you to link directly to a show, and don't allow streaming on PC (or don't allow it any higher than standard def), and most people want to watch their TV on TVs, which means your service needs to work with the various services available on the various common streaming hardware. I swear Google Play Movies is the most convoluted difficult to use UI to play video I've ever seen. I bought a show in it once, but I bought the entire series, which shows up in the UI separately from every other season. (So it shows as seasons "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 through 6"). Every time I want to watch an episode, I need to open, go to my library, go to TV shows, pick the show, scroll to the "full series" season, then scroll from episode 1 to the episode I last watched to play it. It's insane that it's that difficult! And knowing how difficult it is I absolutely will never order another show from that ecosystem again.
  - amaccuish 7y ago
    In all fairness, I get the feeling that a lot of Google services are there because Google has to have them. Apple have them. When people buy an Android they want somewhere they can go to get stuff. But for Google, that's it. There's very little extra effort expended to make it nice to use. They've just ticked a box. They offer films. That's it. It'll sit there and gather dust for a few years before Google sees that competitors have moved on, so they go and give their service a face lift. Then another 5 years of nothing.
- ummonk 7y ago
  You can just sign up and immediately cancel to make sure t doesn’t renew at the end of the month.
- 7y ago
gregmac 7y ago
With old TV, you at least had a unified interface - channel numbers or DVR - to access everything. You were also a bit limited with devices - TV of course worked, but being able to use a pc, tablet or phone was only for the few of us savvy enough to run something like mythtv. Removing price and commercials from the discussion, the big benefit streaming brought was a way to overcome the technical limitation that meant there was a broadcast schedule. Instead, you can watch any show at any time. The new services are much worse about several of these. Let's again assume price is a non issue so you subscribe to everything. First, you have annoying problem of remembering which service or app to use for each show. If available on multiple services, you have to remember which one you were watching on so it preserves your place. Second, you also have problems with availability: service x doesn't work on device A, but service y only works on device A. This means switching inputs, or limiting what show you can watch based on what devices you currently have available. There's even more frustrating problems with this, where for example, service x will work on PC, but not with surround sound. Third, you have to use a different user interface and navigation structure for each app. Annoyingly, these will sometimes update and change their UI in radical ways without asking, and these changes won't happen on all devices at the same time, so you have even more interfaces to remember. This reminds me of the old "pirate vs paying customer" infographic [1] where the overall experience is markedly worse for paying customers. I haven't had cable for over a decade, and when I did, it was all PVR'd via mythtv. My tv watching experience has been via mythtv, xbmc, Kodi and Plex. I tolerate Netflix for convenience, and YouTube as a separate app because it's unique. I've tried having other services, but found them too annoying for the reasons I started above - and it didn't help that they all had significantly worse interfaces than Plex and Netflix. [1] https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S
- jessriedel 7y ago
  In general, the fact that UI is tied to content is stupid and probably indicates market failure. It's frustrating that I'm stuck with Spotify's one-size-fits-all UI when the large majority of the monthly payment goes to licensing the music.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
jesbickhart 7y ago
I'm fascinated by this problem: How would consumers navigate a third-party aggregation application? It seems to me there needs to be a free "Kayak"-like service for film & tv discovery. Show me only what I can watch for free (because I already subscribe to my favorite channels). Develop the application on every OS that I watch content (TV, Mobile and Web). Would consumers like navigating a UI similar to Pinterest (boards) or Spotify (playlists) on your TV? It works well for images and music...
- jesbickhart 7y ago
  justwatch and reelgood do this well but need more applications.
- silverfox17 7y ago
  My Roku TV does this - you type in a title, and it will show you what apps provides the movie, the prices for each, etc.
  - jesbickhart 7y ago
    Google does too. I'm talking about discovery - most people don't know what they want to watch when they sit down in front of the TV. I've found myself scrolling for 20-30min sometimes just looking through Netflix, then Prime, then Hulu, then HBO... just to end up watching Friends again..
weq 7y ago
The false dictonomy of "disruption" is laid bare before us. Disrupting an industry, is nothing more then bending the rules with technology as to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Long term, the disrupter needs to protect its userbase, and ends up becoming the monolith that it replaced. History repeating itself is nothing new. Its a cycle every generation goes through.
toupeira 7y ago
I want something like Bandcamp for movies and TV shows. Let me buy and download the damn things in full quality and watch them wherever/whenever/however I want them! Give me RSS/Atom feeds I can subscribe to and integrate into other tools! I'd be more than happy to pay good money for each movie/episode, and would regularly pay more than the suggested price to creators I especially enjoy, like you can do on Bandcamp.
- chwilson 7y ago
  I believe Vimeo used to do something like this - iirc once you bought a movie you could download the original as well. Don't think it moved past a few independent films/series though.
ladyattis 7y ago
For me, I just don't watch as much TV content anymore. It's odd too since I still watch video but not what you would call TV content. Let's Plays, restoration videos, explanation videos, and the like are most of my content these days. Even videos about philosophy and politics (/r/BreadTube is Best Tube, hehehehehehe), so it's not the usual stuff I use to watch like scifi shows or Star Trek on repeat. In a way, I think the whole streaming Balkanization just gave me an excuse to expand beyond the old formats and genres.
gargravarr 7y ago
A while back, I was in this exact situation. I got into The Expanse (which, if you like hard sci-fi, you definitely need to check out, it's superbly made). I have a Netflix subscription, obviously. I devoured the first two seasons on there. Then I discovered that Season 3 onwards would be an Amazon exclusive. Then I discovered that Seasons 1 & 2 had also moved to Amazon. I don't have a Prime subscription any more because I can't justify it (and I don't want to be tempted to buy more useless junk than I already own). I managed to get another free trial long enough to watch Season 3, but not long enough to re-watch the previous two seasons. But when Season 4 comes out, I'm going to be in exactly the same situation as satellite TV - I don't want to watch anything else on Amazon Prime Video, I just want The Expanse. But I'll have to get a Prime subscription if I want to watch it before it comes out on Blu-Ray, and thus everything that comes with it, which to me is just junk. Cord-cutting accomplished exactly nothing. Streaming services copied the exact model of the satellite companies (willingly or not; I'm willing to bet the distributors squeezed the streaming companies just like music publishers, since they're holding all the rights). There is no incentive whatsoever to make a single show available on multiple platforms. This also explains perfectly why piracy will never die. Consumers want access to the content they are interested in. They do NOT want arbitrary complications thrown in their way.
SignalsFromBob 7y ago
Don't forget about your local library. I subscribe to Netflix, but I watch more movies and shows that I get on DVD and bluray from my library than I watch stuff on Netflix.

145 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

For me this future has already arrived. Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. Asking people to subscribe to multiple streaming services is not just expensive but also crazy inconvenient. By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time.

neilv 7y ago
> Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.
- asdff 7y ago
  My public library even has video streaming for tons of titles
wmf 7y ago
I wonder where the idea that Netflix (streaming) should or used to have everything came from.
- serf 7y ago
  it came from the concept that they sought to replace : in-person rental companies. Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.
    - runevault 7y ago
      If the govt was going to nail Disney for anti-trust they wouldn't have let them buy Fox. Disney + was being talked about before the deal was approved.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Blockbuster could stock anything it wanted without the studio’s blessing by just buying DVDs at retail (even though they had special deals with the studio to get reduced prices). Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    It's well past time for there to be a mechanical license for streaming copyrighted video content. This lock down garbage is just that. Copyright is a joke that provides zero benefit to the public, little benefit to the starving artist, and almost all the benefit to the mega corporations. Sonny Bono is a plague on creativity and his law was even worse.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  In the DVD-by-mail days it really did. Even obscure movies made in communist East Germany! Maybe it still does (I like most people who were early Netflix customers, haven't subscribed to the DVD option in nearly a decade).
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I'm glad I watched my bucket list of movies from Netflix before they shrank the DVD selection. It seems worse now than that of the local public library.
  - hkmurakami 7y ago
    Friend worked in operations in those days and explained to me how they had 3 levels of storage including "deep" storage. Parallels to data warehousing.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  you're right. netflix never had a comprehensive selection of movies or tv to stream. it seems to have even less now, which must be disappointing for subscribers (I canceled my subscription years ago so I'm just going off what I hear). they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!). frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.
- asdff 7y ago
  It had all the DVDs, and for a while the catalog really was expanding into major titles and releases. Everyone assumed that eventually the DVD catalog would be entirely available digitally, but that never happened because of greed.
mrbonner 7y ago
I am planning to cancel Netflix depending on how good the contents on Disney Plus is and how much ads it has. I have found myself spending more time looking for things to watch in Netflix comparing to watching them. Recently, I discovered the Roku channel. It has limited selections including decent family titles, too. It has ads but is limited to 1 or 2 15-second ads that are kid-friendly (like Goldfish cracker) when I watched Rango yesterday with my daughter. It’s sad that the promising land of digital streaming platform is deteriorating to what cable has become.
d1zzy 7y ago
And Plex is just getting better and better: - Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc - support for many devices and TV players/dongles - unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth) - remote access from any location/country
- jammygit 7y ago
  According to one of Jaron Lanier's books, the 'musician as a middle class job' has pretty much vanished because of all the piracy and streaming services. Plex is wonderful, but its nice that people can make a good living making the content too.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.
    - jammygit 7y ago
      He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found: > Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01/04/nashville-musical-middle-class-collapses-new-dylans/21236245/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01... > According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir... > At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry > For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees. http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/ also relevant for the TV industry: > According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
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mdesq 7y ago
I watch Stranger Things and The Office re-runs on business trips. Once The Office is gone I'll be gone as well.
scarface74 7y ago
It also doesn’t cost $100 million to make an album.
- mantap 7y ago
  There's reason to believe that a shared catalog would be more profitable for the non-Netflix streaming services, not less. It's not like it's hard to track who watched whose IP and distribute the revenue appropriately. The current system benefits Netflix who try to convince people to watch Netflix originals and dump everything else. It's not just a competition for subscribers, it's a competition for screen time too. There's a lot of good content on the other streaming services but it's too fragmented to pay for.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Being a third party distributor for other people’s content has never been profitable. Look no further than money losing Spotify. No company wants to be completely dependent on the whims of its suppliers. Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.
- asdff 7y ago
  Who cares when the investment was recouped 3x at the box office alone. Hollywood makes money hand over fist at the box office and clammoring about lost DVD sales is clammoring about icing on the cake. Movies like infinity war make several orders of magnitude more money at the box office than home release.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    That’s not true. Movie studios have been making more money from non theatre sources since the 90s.
  - P_I_Staker 7y ago
    Not all movies do well at the box office, there's plenty of flops as well.
dehrmann 7y ago
It's more like record labels aren't vertically integrated. Sony used to be, but piracy and the iPod made that less relevant just as streaming became viable. I'm an ex-Spotifier. The story we got was that piracy had disrupted the music industry so much it brought the majors to the bargaining table. This is completely different than the state of movies and TV shows. Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.
- dahtguy 7y ago
  Which is a total shame, because those labels are the best discovery engines! If you want a great source of new content, that's effectively their full time job. The distribution and content quality of Tiny Engines, Topshelf Records, Polyvinyl is so so much better than anything Spotify will try to algorithm up for me. (typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)
  - asdff 7y ago
    You can still look at those releases and use spotify. No one is forcing you to look at their half baked playlists. Personally, I think the user playlists are the best part of the entire service.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    I can't seem to find it, but in the past year, I read an article on how cheap compilations (could have been Fat Music) were a really effective way to promote bands in that genre. Bands would talk about doing shows, and once they play the song on the compilation CD, everyone sings along.
DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
> Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it. What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?
- fragsworth 7y ago
  I don't pirate anything, but maybe one reason people do is that getting things spoiled before you watch it can be a serious problem.
- whermans 7y ago
  The choice is not between Netflix and piracy. I can't speak for the original poster, but for me Netflix' appeal was that I had a wide selection of content available for a single price in a single subscription, making it an attractive competitor to buying and/or renting single movies and series. With the fragmentation of the streaming landscape they have lost that competitive edge, and if it wasn't for the Netflix-exclusive series that justify the monthly price for me, I would probably have cancelled too. A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.
- asdff 7y ago
  Personally, I have no qualms avoiding paying 3.99 or whatever to rent a digital file that made its money back thrice over before it left theaters.
  - dwrowe 7y ago
    “You wouldn’t download a car” arguments aside - what is the ethical boundary for “They’ve made enough money - I’m entitled to enjoy it for free” ?
rolltiide 7y ago
and this was after 5 years of hearing your friends tell you the same thing right I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely
blue_devil 7y ago
Remember the good old days of Netflix when you could rent quality movies on DVDs in addition to streaming? Quality has been going down for years now. I'm intermittently subbed but less and less frequently. Oh well.
dwild 7y ago
> By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time. You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play. For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.
retpirato 7y ago
I agree multiple services is crazy & inconvenient. that isn't an excuse to do something illegal.

edgarvaldes 7y ago

Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? There is a lot of media, old and new, local and foreign. I don't know if a single provider can give you all the access a person wants for a price that the consumer is willing to pay.

dmitrygr 7y ago
http://thepiratebay.org http://thepiratebay.org does. Like the good old days. And the media companies did it to themselves...
- z3c0 7y ago
  I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing, for some reason.)
  - adjkant 7y ago
    > which I'm doing, for some reason Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.
    - toxik 7y ago
      Let there be friction so the techies can go back to being alone in pirating. It wasn’t an issue until everybody started doing it!
    - nwallin 7y ago
      Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good, but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has been really easy to slip back into pirating. > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix. It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.

ArlenBales 7y ago

One upside to streaming services is how easy they are to cancel and resume. I regularly suspend and resume Netflix, HBO Now, etc. based on what I'm currently watching. It's very easy to do this, especially if the service is paid for using Google Store / Apple Store subscriptions. Compare to the hell you go through trying to contact Comcast and cancel service.

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
I picture a meta-service that manages this. When you click to play a show, it quickly and automatically signs you up for whichever service, and if you haven't watched a show on that service for more than 2 weeks, it cancels your subscription. Presumably the problem would be that streaming sites might not like customers canceling their service 4 or 5 times per year.
- adjkant 7y ago
  > Presumably the problem would be that streaming sites might not like customers canceling their service 4 or 5 times per year. Maybe they "bundle" to avoid the constant cancelling.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Sure, bundle, but it would probably be done by a 3rd party aggregator. Hard to imaging competing content providers joining forces, and anyway it could be seen as monopolistic market manipulation. This 3rd part would probably want some clever branding for this. All streaming generally enters the home through a wire, so maybe they call is Wire? Though big wires are often called a cable, so maybe they just call it Cable? :)
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  Provided cancelling ends your service at the next billing period you should always cancel immediately rather than wait 2 weeks.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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butterfi 7y ago

Interesting-FF says that nytimes.com is unsafe

nothis 7y ago
Not for me?
aloknnikhil 7y ago
Works for me. Maybe your date/time is off?
tsukurimashou 7y ago
browser update, or you're getting MiTM?
- butterfi 7y ago
  My FF is up to date. I’m on NordVPN, maybe it is a time issue?

seph-reed 7y ago

If braves BAT (Basic Attention Token) thing could ever really take off, it'd make for a nice solution to all of this. Just sort of pitch a penny here or there, and after enough people pitching pennies the content has earned a worthy revenue.

ohiovr 7y ago

Everything is free on channel 4, 6, 10, and uhf

lesinski 7y ago

Netflix has reshaped the whole industry for the better. Netflix by itself at $13 per month is nearly as much content as you'd get in a small cable package in the "old days of TV." Of course, in the future, if you actually tried to watch everything available, you'd be paying for some crazy mega-bundle like the old cable days. Otherwise, things are clearly better as Netflix runs away with streaming and forces the other media companies to compete.

losteric 7y ago
Eh... it's turning out that Netflix just introduced a new medium for cable. Now that every content owner is starting their own services, we're losing the thing that made Netflix revolutionary: loads of quality and diverse content under one subscription. Personally, the shows I'm interested in are spread across a half dozen services... and only one or two really warrant full engagement (versus "background entertainment")... so obviously it's back to bittorrent for me.
- treis 7y ago
  >Eh... it's turning out that Netflix just introduced a new medium for cable. The thing no one really talks about is that cable companies never really made (relatively) that much money. The content producers are the ones that have always made the real money. Most of your bill goes to them. Ultimately, Netflix is just another middle man between you and the content. You still have to pay for wires but now there's another hand taking their share. In the long term they can't be cheaper. The reason it was cheaper was that for a long time they were seen as free additional revenue for content producers. Like someone making a living off of discarded garbage. Eventually the people throwing that stuff away wise up and want their normal cut. We are pretty much there at this point.
- glaberficken 7y ago
  i'm wondering the same. currently a Netflix subscriber. but back in the day i had a NAS box hitting a preconfigured rss feed with the shows i watched. was pretty convenient and the NAS could stream to every device on my wifi

RIMR 7y ago

A return to the bad old days of cable bundles, coupled with the current average Internet speed, would just bring back the good old days of torrenting.

NegatioN 7y ago
This is exactly what I feel I've been driven to this last year. I don't want to have all my media spread around on a tenfold different streaming providers, nor do I want to live with the random removals of offerings that seem to happening more and more where I live. The day I have children I want to be able to share some sort of cultural archive with them, though regular tv might probably be dead by that time, who knows. I've started hosting my own plex server, and using torrents and actual old backups to get the content. The sad part though, is that most of the major torrent sites seem really dead compared to the haydays. What are some good options these days?
- dudul 7y ago
  I rarely don't find what I'm looking for on TPB.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I miss TvTorrents. It had hard-to-find shows, and it kept track of who downloaded what, so if there were no active seeders, you could ping some people to seed it so they could earn credits.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  Fair warning - these sites have some of the obnoxious browser hijacking javascript I have ever seen (and they keep upping the ante every few months) but updating your hosts file to block the ads helps a bit - rarbg and ettv complement what is available on each other and tpb.

nsxwolf 7y ago

I’m feeling nostalgic for the days of paying $2 an episode on iTunes. The future where there’s 10 shows I want to watch and I have to pay for 10 separate $15 monthly services to watch them is almost here and it sucks. I also get to learn 10 different app UIs to watch them, and enjoy constantly logging back into them all whenever whatever box I’m using randomly logs them out.

scarface74 7y ago
Why feel nostalgic? You still can.
- mattmcknight 7y ago
  Too much content exclusive to subscription services.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  If I want to watch any of the new Star Trek series I’m going to have to bite the bullet and subscribe to CBS. For starters. Netflix is another given. Do these content channels even release shows on Blu ray and iTunes a year later like they used to?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Why is that bad thing? Typically individual episodes are $2.99. You can sign in on the app for a month, immediately cancel so you don’t get charged for an additional month and pay $6.
    - nsxwolf 7y ago
      I don't even mind the expense so much. It's the experience. I'd happily pay more just to have TV watching be a pleasure. This whole app experience where you have to pull out your phone and log into some site over and over again when it "forgets", learn multiple UIs, have commercials that mess with you (Choose a commercial to "interact" with for 3 commercials, or choose to watch 6 commercials!) It's just awful. It makes me miss CRTs with rabbit ears and a VHF and UHF dial.

zwayhowder 7y ago

The biggest game changer for me with streaming is I watch less TV. Before streaming I either had to maintain a complex balance with my never large enough DVR or watch shows when the network decided (I'm looking at you Channel 9 in Australia putting Star Trek on at 11pm on Tuesday and Thursday nights). Before that I had VHS, so many VHS. With streaming I watch maybe an hour or two at most, then I stop, confident I can pickup whenever (and increasingly wherever I want). I don't worry about my wife deleting my Star Trek for her Firefly. Unlike DVDs we can catch up on an episode of a shared show while traveling. Though I did get hooked on a Netflix show in the UK that isn't available in Australia, four weeks later I can't even remember the title.

evo_9 7y ago

Glad I kept my torrent/VPN box ready to go. I was happy to pay a small reasonable fee but it’s clear things are just turning into the overpriced nickel-and-dimming shit-show we had not even 10 years back. So yeah I’ll pull what I actually watch and they get nothing again.

rolltiide 7y ago
Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring. I checked Netflix, of course not there I should have known better, oh but it knew what I was looking for and showed me knockoffs "related to" what I was actually looking for. Having spent most of my life making fun of knockoffs, that was a bad move Netflix. I checked Amazon Video, hey the movie is there, but not included in my prime subscription, and I can only stream it if I buy the movie for $20, no option to even rent the movie for 48 hours. Okay, thats a non-starter, I know Amazon Video just resyndicates from a shared catalogue of movies so that means every rent-streaming service will have it, but maybe under different pricing. So I checked the unlikely Playstation Store. Not listed Okay at this point I go to Google, because the "where can I stream it" sites have been replaced by a mere addition of a feature on Google where on top of the search results underneath the ratings it shows you where you can stream it. Exhibit A of features masquerading as companies getting replaced quickly by Google. Showed that everyone was charging $20 with no option to rent. Well, I was going to rent it. Other interfaces should have an easy search that shows the availability of a title on multiple streaming services and its price. But after this bar, if you wanted me to stop worrying about who has a license for copyright distribution, thats how you get me to stop worrying about who has a license. The burden has never been on the consumer anyway, we've just been assuming Walmart properly secured the license, and that the person with DVDs on a towel outside doesn't. But we never knew and never had any liability, until we were distributing it ourselves. So fire up the dusty old torrent software and turn off the upload feature. Within 10 minutes I was watching my 4gb H264 1080P version of what I wanted to see.
- dwild 7y ago
  > Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring. That's sadly most likely the issue. I bet it was a big movie? Most likely they are just keeping the good old traditional schedule. Release at the movie Theater, few months later release for sell, few months later release for rental. They added a few months later a release on streaming platform but that's it... That's absurd that they still do that but I guess waiting a few months isn't the worse to save a few bucks.

Buttons840 7y ago

Startup idea: Make a website where I can push a single button to pay for and activate one month of a streaming service. Make the one month subscription expire at the end of the month automatically (no auto-renew). This way I avoid paying for time during which I watch nothing, and I can easily activate a new month almost instantly.

Klathmon 7y ago
One poblem with that idea: Many streaming services are quite shitty, don't allow you to link directly to a show, and don't allow streaming on PC (or don't allow it any higher than standard def), and most people want to watch their TV on TVs, which means your service needs to work with the various services available on the various common streaming hardware. I swear Google Play Movies is the most convoluted difficult to use UI to play video I've ever seen. I bought a show in it once, but I bought the entire series, which shows up in the UI separately from every other season. (So it shows as seasons "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 through 6"). Every time I want to watch an episode, I need to open, go to my library, go to TV shows, pick the show, scroll to the "full series" season, then scroll from episode 1 to the episode I last watched to play it. It's insane that it's that difficult! And knowing how difficult it is I absolutely will never order another show from that ecosystem again.
- amaccuish 7y ago
  In all fairness, I get the feeling that a lot of Google services are there because Google has to have them. Apple have them. When people buy an Android they want somewhere they can go to get stuff. But for Google, that's it. There's very little extra effort expended to make it nice to use. They've just ticked a box. They offer films. That's it. It'll sit there and gather dust for a few years before Google sees that competitors have moved on, so they go and give their service a face lift. Then another 5 years of nothing.
ummonk 7y ago
You can just sign up and immediately cancel to make sure t doesn’t renew at the end of the month.
7y ago

gregmac 7y ago

With old TV, you at least had a unified interface - channel numbers or DVR - to access everything. You were also a bit limited with devices - TV of course worked, but being able to use a pc, tablet or phone was only for the few of us savvy enough to run something like mythtv. Removing price and commercials from the discussion, the big benefit streaming brought was a way to overcome the technical limitation that meant there was a broadcast schedule. Instead, you can watch any show at any time. The new services are much worse about several of these. Let's again assume price is a non issue so you subscribe to everything. First, you have annoying problem of remembering which service or app to use for each show. If available on multiple services, you have to remember which one you were watching on so it preserves your place. Second, you also have problems with availability: service x doesn't work on device A, but service y only works on device A. This means switching inputs, or limiting what show you can watch based on what devices you currently have available. There's even more frustrating problems with this, where for example, service x will work on PC, but not with surround sound. Third, you have to use a different user interface and navigation structure for each app. Annoyingly, these will sometimes update and change their UI in radical ways without asking, and these changes won't happen on all devices at the same time, so you have even more interfaces to remember. This reminds me of the old "pirate vs paying customer" infographic [1] where the overall experience is markedly worse for paying customers. I haven't had cable for over a decade, and when I did, it was all PVR'd via mythtv. My tv watching experience has been via mythtv, xbmc, Kodi and Plex. I tolerate Netflix for convenience, and YouTube as a separate app because it's unique. I've tried having other services, but found them too annoying for the reasons I started above - and it didn't help that they all had significantly worse interfaces than Plex and Netflix. [1] https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S

jessriedel 7y ago
In general, the fact that UI is tied to content is stupid and probably indicates market failure. It's frustrating that I'm stuck with Spotify's one-size-fits-all UI when the large majority of the monthly payment goes to licensing the music.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago

jesbickhart 7y ago

I'm fascinated by this problem: How would consumers navigate a third-party aggregation application? It seems to me there needs to be a free "Kayak"-like service for film & tv discovery. Show me only what I can watch for free (because I already subscribe to my favorite channels). Develop the application on every OS that I watch content (TV, Mobile and Web). Would consumers like navigating a UI similar to Pinterest (boards) or Spotify (playlists) on your TV? It works well for images and music...

jesbickhart 7y ago
justwatch and reelgood do this well but need more applications.
silverfox17 7y ago
My Roku TV does this - you type in a title, and it will show you what apps provides the movie, the prices for each, etc.
- jesbickhart 7y ago
  Google does too. I'm talking about discovery - most people don't know what they want to watch when they sit down in front of the TV. I've found myself scrolling for 20-30min sometimes just looking through Netflix, then Prime, then Hulu, then HBO... just to end up watching Friends again..

weq 7y ago

The false dictonomy of "disruption" is laid bare before us. Disrupting an industry, is nothing more then bending the rules with technology as to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Long term, the disrupter needs to protect its userbase, and ends up becoming the monolith that it replaced. History repeating itself is nothing new. Its a cycle every generation goes through.

toupeira 7y ago

I want something like Bandcamp for movies and TV shows. Let me buy and download the damn things in full quality and watch them wherever/whenever/however I want them! Give me RSS/Atom feeds I can subscribe to and integrate into other tools! I'd be more than happy to pay good money for each movie/episode, and would regularly pay more than the suggested price to creators I especially enjoy, like you can do on Bandcamp.

chwilson 7y ago
I believe Vimeo used to do something like this - iirc once you bought a movie you could download the original as well. Don't think it moved past a few independent films/series though.

ladyattis 7y ago

For me, I just don't watch as much TV content anymore. It's odd too since I still watch video but not what you would call TV content. Let's Plays, restoration videos, explanation videos, and the like are most of my content these days. Even videos about philosophy and politics (/r/BreadTube is Best Tube, hehehehehehe), so it's not the usual stuff I use to watch like scifi shows or Star Trek on repeat. In a way, I think the whole streaming Balkanization just gave me an excuse to expand beyond the old formats and genres.

gargravarr 7y ago

A while back, I was in this exact situation. I got into The Expanse (which, if you like hard sci-fi, you definitely need to check out, it's superbly made). I have a Netflix subscription, obviously. I devoured the first two seasons on there. Then I discovered that Season 3 onwards would be an Amazon exclusive. Then I discovered that Seasons 1 & 2 had also moved to Amazon. I don't have a Prime subscription any more because I can't justify it (and I don't want to be tempted to buy more useless junk than I already own). I managed to get another free trial long enough to watch Season 3, but not long enough to re-watch the previous two seasons. But when Season 4 comes out, I'm going to be in exactly the same situation as satellite TV - I don't want to watch anything else on Amazon Prime Video, I just want The Expanse. But I'll have to get a Prime subscription if I want to watch it before it comes out on Blu-Ray, and thus everything that comes with it, which to me is just junk. Cord-cutting accomplished exactly nothing. Streaming services copied the exact model of the satellite companies (willingly or not; I'm willing to bet the distributors squeezed the streaming companies just like music publishers, since they're holding all the rights). There is no incentive whatsoever to make a single show available on multiple platforms. This also explains perfectly why piracy will never die. Consumers want access to the content they are interested in. They do NOT want arbitrary complications thrown in their way.

SignalsFromBob 7y ago

Don't forget about your local library. I subscribe to Netflix, but I watch more movies and shows that I get on DVD and bluray from my library than I watch stuff on Netflix.