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The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? Jame

The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good! The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year? And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.

diseasedyak 2mo ago
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
- fluoridation 2mo ago
  It is, but it's not much consolation if you want to watch True Lies and not Commando.
- DrSiemer 2mo ago
  That only strengthens the example. Their recommendations are usually awful. I'd argue even that is done better on underground services. Plus they'll just show you actually useful metrics, like the IMDB rating.
sensanaty 2mo ago
> but you'll need to work for it To be honest it's never been easier to pirate media. It is, in fact, much easier to pirate media than to find a show or movie you'd like to watch "legally". I have Netflix because I have a family plan with my parents, but I literally never use it in favor of regular ass usenet pirate sites that usually have better UI/UX than any of the streaming services do. Whenever I'm interested in some show or another, I google "Where to watch blah?". You then get greeted with 9000 websites all purporting to tell you which service has blah (the fact that this is even needed is an absurdity). 90% of them say different things to one another, most of them are clearly some hallucinated AI-generated crap created for the purpose of siphoning ad revenue from visitors. You login to whatever streaming service you subscribe to, and there's only 3 seasons out of 9 of blah, and it's the middle 3 seasons to boot (one that comes to mind is Law and Order SVU on Netflix, it only has seasons ~11-18 or something like that). The other seasons are spread across 4 different services. You then go to a different country. The catalogue is completely different, and half the shit you actually wanna watch isn't there. The DRM they use fucks up often, streams get interrupted if you open more than 1 tab at a time, the supposed "4K" resolution they offer with your subscription looks more like 360p, they don't have subtitles in one region when they do in a different one, the audio tracks are horrid more often than not. I throw my hands up in the air, navigate to one of the 9 trillion piracy websites out there, type "blah" in the searchbar, and I'm watching it in 4K after approximately 30 seconds of effort. It has all the nice features like autoplay, all the episodes are in 1 place. Gaben was 1000% right in saying piracy is a service problem, considering I don't even bother pirating games pretty much ever because of how good Steam is. I didn't even have a problem with Netflix back in the day when it was a genuinely good service, and I still pay for Spotify and Tidal, but the TV and Movie industry needs to get a grip on reality.
themanualstates 2mo ago
Disney+ is only available in 1080 without VR in Europe because of licensing issues.

diseasedyak 2mo ago

Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)

fluoridation 2mo ago
It is, but it's not much consolation if you want to watch True Lies and not Commando.
DrSiemer 2mo ago
That only strengthens the example. Their recommendations are usually awful. I'd argue even that is done better on underground services. Plus they'll just show you actually useful metrics, like the IMDB rating.

sensanaty 2mo ago

> but you'll need to work for it To be honest it's never been easier to pirate media. It is, in fact, much easier to pirate media than to find a show or movie you'd like to watch "legally". I have Netflix because I have a family plan with my parents, but I literally never use it in favor of regular ass usenet pirate sites that usually have better UI/UX than any of the streaming services do. Whenever I'm interested in some show or another, I google "Where to watch blah?". You then get greeted with 9000 websites all purporting to tell you which service has blah (the fact that this is even needed is an absurdity). 90% of them say different things to one another, most of them are clearly some hallucinated AI-generated crap created for the purpose of siphoning ad revenue from visitors. You login to whatever streaming service you subscribe to, and there's only 3 seasons out of 9 of blah, and it's the middle 3 seasons to boot (one that comes to mind is Law and Order SVU on Netflix, it only has seasons ~11-18 or something like that). The other seasons are spread across 4 different services. You then go to a different country. The catalogue is completely different, and half the shit you actually wanna watch isn't there. The DRM they use fucks up often, streams get interrupted if you open more than 1 tab at a time, the supposed "4K" resolution they offer with your subscription looks more like 360p, they don't have subtitles in one region when they do in a different one, the audio tracks are horrid more often than not. I throw my hands up in the air, navigate to one of the 9 trillion piracy websites out there, type "blah" in the searchbar, and I'm watching it in 4K after approximately 30 seconds of effort. It has all the nice features like autoplay, all the episodes are in 1 place. Gaben was 1000% right in saying piracy is a service problem, considering I don't even bother pirating games pretty much ever because of how good Steam is. I didn't even have a problem with Netflix back in the day when it was a genuinely good service, and I still pay for Spotify and Tidal, but the TV and Movie industry needs to get a grip on reality.

themanualstates 2mo ago

Disney+ is only available in 1080 without VR in Europe because of licensing issues.