13 ms·

I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspectiv

• sidewndr46 4y ago
  I have a Prime account, but I'll soon be cancelling it I feel. The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added. Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it. Amazon Music would be another great service I'd be willing to pay for, but all the available clients are so buggy it's an impediment to me using it.
  • BrotherBisquick 4y ago
    Far be it from me to shill for Amazon, but I find that I can't go without 2-day shipping. Ebay is fine I guess, but I'd lose my mind if I had to wait a week for something. That makes the $140/yr worth it to me.
  • jrib 4y ago
    yeah, I canceled Prime a few years ago. I reasoned that if I needed the product fast then it would be faster to physically go to target or walmart. And if I didn't need it fast, then the default shipping would be fine. Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.
    • radicalbyte 4y ago
      What do they charge in the US? It costs me 3 EUR / month here in NL which is worth it. Amazon regularly either undercut or price-match other stores and for 36 EUR a year I get enough entertainment from Prime alone. Netflix is 15 EUR / month and I honestly just keep it for the kids + my wife..
      • i_am_jl 4y ago
        In the US Prime Video is $9/month, full Prime is $15/month. I think it's half price for students.
        • brimwats 4y ago
          Student discount is now time limited iirc!
    • ghaff 4y ago
      It doesn't matter as much to me now but when I was traveling a lot some determinism in the shipping time was worth a lot to me. And even now, there's a category of things that I don't need right now but I want soonish and probably won't get to the store for a day or two anyway. It's still a decent value to me overall--especially throwing in video.
    • BirAdam 4y ago
      I just cancelled Prime for the same reason.
  • Liquix 4y ago
    > The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added. eBay sellers also tend to ship promptly, which used to be one of the main reasons to use Amazon/Prime. The latter's shipping speeds have increased by orders of magnitude in some parts of the country over the last couple years. It's not uncommon these days for a Prime order to sit in limbo for 3-4 days before being shipped, while the same order to the same city shipped instantly in 2018.
    • thesuitonym 4y ago
      Interestingly, I haven't had Prime since maybe 2016, and my experience was that Amazon is only capable of two day shipping, but if you don't pay for it, the item just sits on the shelf for three days, then ships.
    • cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Prime delivery was a once a week thing in a remote town in Utah several years ago. On the other hand, my parents live in a rural area in the midwest and frequently get packages next day or two day. I'm guessing the difference is down to distribution centers.
  • bambax 4y ago
    If you can wait, most Amazon products are on Aliexpress for much less, sometimes 50% less, up to 90% for electronic components.
    • cactusplant7374 4y ago
      I return a lot of products bought from Amazon. How is the return policy and cost with Aliexpress?
      • bambax 4y ago
        Never tried it; I don't think it works too well. Amazon is probably better in that case.
      • distances 4y ago
        When do you return Amazon stuff? I have returned online clothes purchases from other stores but I'm pretty sure I've never returned anything I bought from Amazon. Basically because I buy "things" from it, and I end up doing so much research before buying that I'm always happy with the purchase.
        • cactusplant7374 4y ago
          I buy and research multiple products in parallel. You can’t beat my system. Jeff Bezos hates me.
          • bambax 4y ago
            Jeff Bezos loves you, because he makes money each way. It's the third party sellers who are footing the bills. You make think that you're sticking it to the man, but you're actually screwing the little guys.
      • verall 4y ago
        It sucks. In my case I got a dysfunctional cell phone LCD assembly and seller said I could either ship it back (would cost like half the cost I bought it for) or they would refund me 40% of what I paid. The system to contact the seller has technical measures to prevent you from conversing in Chinese even though that is obviously what the seller is most comfortable with. I think it's fine if you're either buying nonelectronics or buying in bulk but I will not use it for purchasing electronics again.
  • patentatt 4y ago
    I dropped Prime for the first time in many years just last month. 2-day shipping is pretty much standard now at Target and Walmart, there was nothing terribly compelling on Prime Video, and I never even used any other services. Why again have I been shoveling ~$12/month in perpetuity to Amazon?
    • freedomben 4y ago
      Prime shipping for me is now a week or two! It's not uncommon to wait 12 days for an order that's Prime from the Amazon warehouse to arrive at my house, and I don't exactly live in a super rural area. It's ludicrous IMHO to pay for prime now when we barely use prime video and super saver shipping wouldn't take much longer than prime.
      • arvindhmani 4y ago
        Whoa, that's unbelievably long if you're a Prime subscriber. I pretty much assumed 2-day shipping was standard for every single Prime member in the US. Do you live elsewhere? And how urban is your area if I may ask (approx. population)?
        • freedomben 4y ago
          Yes, I live in Eastern Idaho, area population about 200,000 people.
  • rileyphone 4y ago
    You can turn off the previews in account settings. Still annoying though.
  • squeaky-clean 4y ago
    > If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it. Actually you cannot. Only Law & Order SVU is available on streaming. The original series and the other spinoffs only have the most recent season available online.
    • buildsjets 4y ago
      Actually, you CAN. It's all over bittorrent, therefore it is available online. Which brings us back to the title question, how many of you are open to piracy again?
  • j45 4y ago
    Prime is still useful outside of the US. EBay shipping feels in that case can be exorbitant.
• SamuelAdams 4y ago
  My household has one streaming service at a time. We have lists (shared reminder lists in iOS) that we make for whenever a friend mentions a good movie - it goes on the Apple TV list, or Disney plus list, etc. then once enough films build up (can take 2-6 months sometimes) we purchase a subscription and watch all those shows for one month.
  • __jem 4y ago
    this sounds economical but also a major chore
    • j33zusjuice 4y ago
      I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.
      • microjim 4y ago
        This implies there is something about """you""" that is inherently lacking rather than the habits currently in your brain and "more discipline" often means """if only I would castigate myself more"""
    • voisin 4y ago
      Seems like it could be an opportunity for a website with all the news shows and movies on each platform. You check off the ones that seem interesting. It tells you what service to subscribe to after you hit a threshold. Not sure if any of the services have affiliate programs for revenue.
      • JamesSwift 4y ago
        Justwatch provides a lot of that and I bet you could automate the rest
    • olex 4y ago
      Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech. Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Video tech for streaming is more or less off the shelf from cloud providers (disclaimer: I work for one). As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition). Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      So why does Paramount+ feel like it was put together by attention-deficit badgers relative to YouTube? Just age of software and years spent on polish? Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).
      • scarface74 4y ago
        I agree. But those are mostly standard UX issues not underlying video streaming issues. But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.
        • shadowgovt 4y ago
          > Chromecast... crappy technology. Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases. ... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone). If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.
• kajaktum 4y ago
  What did people think was going to happen with subscription services? That you get everything you wanted in just one? This was inevitable, I am not quite sure why people were so excited about Netflix. It just meant that we own even less of what we consume. When you brought a disc (or even a digital version of it), you can kind of claim ownership. With subscription services? You can't even morally argue that you own it.
  • 100011_100001 4y ago
    You are missing an important thing. Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price. This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out. That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.
    • hbn 4y ago
      Is that why Netflix killed video stores? I don't know anyone who used it when it had DVD rentals (I don't even know if we had that option in Canada). Myself and most people I know stopped renting videos when we could stream stuff easily.
      • vehemenz 4y ago
        I think you might be an outlier. Netflix DVD rental was huge in the US—can't speak for Canada though. Everyone I know had it.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          Yeah, it was big although it worked better for film than TV. I wish it were still bigger. The fact that so many people seem to think that just renting a physical disk is something weird means that they're really not investing in restocking older films any longer.
      • 100011_100001 4y ago
• 3np 4y ago
  I have just been thinking of how to explain why the audio landscape (podcasts and music) are so wildly different in this sense. While not perfect, you have a way less unreasonable user experience especially in terms of DRM and hostile in software and APIs, and the fragmentation and balkanization is not even close to at the same level. Most people who pay seem content with what they do and complement with free and open (mostly legal save for much on the YouTube). Public warez is spotty outside of that and the toplists. Private trackers are extremely exclusive, insular and inaccessible except for the very dedicated. What's the dominating factor here? IP ownership and legal differences? Market dynamics? Opex costs? Industry corporate cultural differences? Or is it just circumstance that Spotify and Apple Music have been able and willing enough to make it happen while what.cd left a legacy where insular elitism became the norm and video pirates have always been more Tallyho?
  • JohnClark1337 4y ago
    [dead]
  • brimwats 4y ago
    I suspect it's because podcasting historically originated from radio, esp free public and internet radio communities, whereas the film ones originated from major corporations and not like public access TV. The closer thing to that is probably YouTube in it's earlier days
• furyg3 4y ago
  Adding to this is the complex web of region-limited content. Is using a VPN to watch something on Netflix more or less legal than torrenting? What if I want to watch it with subtitles that aren't available in my current region, but are in another? The other day I ended up pirating a program that I only later realized I had streaming access to via one of my streaming subscriptions, because the title was different in different regions... ugh. Unlike in my teenage years I'm happy to support artists with my money (and do!), but it's often a puzzle to figure out what content is on what service and in what region at what price.
  • 4RealFreedom 4y ago
    I didn't realize subtitles were different based on region.
• LarryMullins 4y ago
  > "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch," This is why I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, they all utterly fail at having the movies I want to watch when I want to watch them. These services are mostly for people who want to watch something and don't particularly care what it is. TV as background noise. I expunged that sloppy style of TV watching from my life and I'm never going back to it. The only time I watch something is when I want to watch that thing specifically before I even sat down. And the odds of the streaming services I might have subscribed to having that thing is basically zero.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head with "The content is mediocre at best". This applies to all of the services with one exception for me where I see higher quality content, that's personal preference though so I don't want to get into a debate about one service vs. another. I'm sure others have that one service too. What I will say is there are certain genres or types of content where I just feel like watching that type of content and any of the services will meet that need. Rarely is there a "killer show" that I will pay for a service that hosts it anymore. If I want to watch documentaries about murderers they all have some version of that, or cop shows or home shows or ... you get the idea. Maybe this is age showing and just the nature of how Hollywood constantly regurgitates characters, shows or "franchises" where I feel like I've seen things already when they are brand new.
• barkerja 4y ago
  > I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it That's not true. There are a number of services/products you can simply purchase or rent content without an additional subscription fee.
• dzek69 4y ago
  I pay for Netflix and Prime Video. I pirate stuff when it's somewhere else or when it's not available anywhere (surprisingly that's 50% of cases, but maybe that's just my country). So the spread availability is one of the problems, but not having a chance to watch something legally is another. The same problem is with videogames. Some of them can't be bought anymore (excluding used physical copies on CD/DVD, but that's not something I prefer). Pirating movies is even legal in my coutry - it's legal to download a movie that's already shared - I just can't share it. So at least they can't jail me for this sporadic crime. Do I feel bad? Partially. I'd prefer to pay, I love paying for stuff that's even free (donations), but I don't want to feel like I'm an animal that predators want to lacerate.
• denton-scratch 4y ago
  > It's just absurd. It is. What's needed is some kind of aggregator; a firm that will sublicence content from the major providers, and sell it to consumers. I'm not going to set up a Netflix account to watch one show. Of course, the big content providers won't sublicence; they'll have to be forced to. But I would watch more of their content if I could pay for just what I want to watch, without subscribing to a mess of bundles containing mainly dross content.